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Anadromous freshwater, and estuarine fisheries all over the US have been decimated, depleted, or driven to extinction by the following factors:
1)factory farming for meat, especially poultry and hogs, which produce tremendous amounts of pollution from manure that runs off into streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and estuaries, eventually comprising a large portion of the nutrient suffocation responsible for "dead zones" like the one presently found in the Gulf Of Mexico.
2) the long-term neglect of the public works in the USA that has led to under-funded, outdated, and over-capacity municipal sewage treatment facilities becoming the #1 point-site polluters in the country today (Hawaii's Wakkiki Beach was closed to swimming due to sewage pollution for more than week last year- did you know that?) The most recent American Society of Civil Engineers reports have given this country a D- in water treatment for several years in succession. How much longer until it flunks?
http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=103
3) massive irrigation projects, particularly on the West Coast, often for water-hungry crops like alfalfa for animal feed, or even non-food crops like cotton (along with the looming "ethanol" con game), that starve the riverine ecosystems of water and deplete the aquifers and the springs.
Plentiful fish runs in clean rivers are like free protein- all that's required is to maintain sufficient habitat, and to harvest the fish when they run upriver, in quantities sufficient to allow healthy and sustainable spawning populations of salmon, steelhead trout, shad, striped bass, perch, herring...and estuaries full of crabs, clams, oysters, and shellfish.
But the money power now lies with the factory farms, and massive petrochemical agribusiness irrigated plantations, and cotton, and sugar cane- along with bought and paid-for politicians who mortgage the future in the name of "lower taxes" while the country falls apart...what next, a cholera epidemic?
