Sea Lion Season Ends

When I first went out to Oregon City to look for sea lions, I didn’t know much about the issue. Now I’ve seen the lions at both Willamette Falls and the Bonneville Dam. I’ve done a lot more research and I’ve thought it over carefully.

I now totally oppose the killing of sea lions at Bonneville Dam, and I’m pissed that the authorities are now seeking permission to kill sea lions at Willamette Falls as well.

The spring Chinook salmon season is over, now, and the sea lions have gone off to their coastal mating grounds (except for the 12 that were killed.) The issue won’t come up again until next spring, when more sea lions will be killed. That’s despite the fact that, according to the Oregonian, the killing of sea lions at Bonneville failed to reduce the number of salmon being killed by the sea lions.

In other words, culling doesn’t work. Or in other words, it would only work if they killed ALL the sea lions at the dam.

Forty years ago, that’s what they would have done. Until the late 1960s, there was a bounty on sea lion heads in Oregon. And that’s an important backdrop to this story.

Back then, they thought that removing predators would increase the number of salmon, just as fishermen in Japan slaughter dolphins, thinking that it will increase the number of fish they catch.

We now know that removing top predators from a food chain in bad for the entire ecosystem. But this plan to kill sea lions isn’t intended to protect the ecosystem. It’s intended to protect fishermen — and that in only a short-sighted, short-term way.

The influence of the sport fishing lobby has often been good for the environment, but here I feel they’ve totally lost their heads. There needs to be a long term goal of increasing the numbers of wild salmon, not preserving individual fishery salmon so that they can be caught on lines instead of eaten by sea lions.

Vengeance should have no place in this equation. Neither should a certain bizarre and outdated way of describing these animals as if they were people — bad people.

The Oregon City News, for instance, quotes Oregon House Speaker Dave Hunt (D-Clackamas):

“The sea lions grab the fish right out of the water and take a bite out of them in plain view before they throw them away,” he said. “Fundamentally, they’re bullies.”

Over and over again, the sea lions are portrayed as interlopers, gluttonous, belligerent, obese creatures who don’t play by the rules. Actually they’re just doing what they’ve always done, or at least, what they always did, before we nearly wiped them out, just a few decades ago.

Photo: A flyer posted on the bulletin board at Bonneville Dam

Road Trip: Bend

Busch is the official beer of litterbugs everywhere. Along country roads and scenic viewpoints and the high water marks of beaches, cans of Busch certainly aren't the only garbage, but look around and you'll see what I mean. That glinting silver in the sagebrush or seaweed or ferns? It's almost always Busch. This photo was taken in the lava rocks at the base of Mount Bachelor near Bend, Oregon.

Drink Review: The Atomic Cocktail

So I finally got around to making an Atomic Cocktail, and it was disgusting.

The Atomic Cocktail was invented in the 1950s in Las Vegas, when nuclear explosions at the nearby Nevada Proving Ground were being promoted as a tourist attraction. This was a drink specifically designed to toast the mushroom cloud, so it should be the favorite drink of this blog.

Unfortunately, if appropriately, it tastes like rocket fuel. The drink starts out traitorously with vodka, which is mixed with an equal part brandy and a splash of sherry. Shake, strain, top with Champagne. It’s sharp, aggressive, and mean, and you start to feel a buzz almost immediately.

I don’t recommend it, although I do recommend its predecessor, this 1945 song by Slim Gaillard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6492gMX0tAY

(presented here with a weird and excellent montage of atomic memorabilia.)

As Slim says, “Take one sip, you won’t need any more.”

The Oregon LNG project is a dead end

Photo: The Skipanon Peninsula, proposed site of the Oregon LNG terminal, Oct. 2009

I have decided to remove the Oregon LNG liquefied natural gas terminal from my list of looming environmental disasters. It’s still a terrible idea, but I just don’t see any way that it’s really going to happen.

Some of my reasons:

1. The bankruptcy of Bradwood Landing LNG. You might think the loss of its biggest rival would be good news for Oregon LNG, but like Bradwood, Oregon LNG is backed by investment bankers, and they like a good, safe investments. When an almost identical project goes bankrupt, red lights start flashing.

2. In the May election, three non-incumbents were elected to the five-person Clatsop County Board of Commissioners, and all three are opposed to LNG, including one candidate who was a high-profile anti-LNG activist before running.

3. Peter Hansen is an ass. Hansen is the CEO of the project as well as its main spokesperson (which looks kind of sketchy right there), and he’s managed to piss off pretty much everyone. He’s also stopped speaking to the Daily Astorian.

4. Oregon LNG still doesn’t have it’s FERC certificate, and the Bush era of rubber stamping these things is over.

5. Oregon LNG relies on an extremely controversial pipeline that will be causing headaches for years to come. I just don’t think it has the legs to weather both local opposition to the terminal and something like 200 separate eminent domain court battles.

6. The anti-LNG coalition is focused, experienced and emboldened.

For these reasons I have decided to stop obsessing on Astoria politics and instead to dedicate my neurotic energy to the oil spill in the Gulf.

Road Trip: Las Vegas

Although not as popular as the sexy sailor-and-siren review at the Treasure Island Casino, the Atomic Testing Museum draws a fair number of Las Vegas tourists. We took a cab from the ridiculously opulent entrance of the Venetian, past the gondolas and the campanile and the winged lion, and pretty soon we were on a godforsaken, dusty stretch of Flamingo Road.

In the parking lot of the Atomic Museum, you feel like you’re really in the desert.

The Nevada Proving Ground (now known as the Nevada Test Site) is about 65 miles away, to the northwest. The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian, documents the various stages of atomic testing in Nevada, first above and then below ground.

During the above-ground tests, which lasted from 1951 until 1963, the mushroom clouds were visible from Vegas, and were actually a tourist attraction.

Las Vegas began billing itself as Atomic City. At the Sky Room in the Desert Inn, tourists drank Atomic Cocktails and took in panoramic views of the desert and the nuclear explosions in the distance.

The Atomic Testing Museum does a good job of merging the pop culture aspects of the atomic age with the science, the military history and the spectacle of the Bomb. A big disappointment is that photography is not allowed — I can’t remember all the stuff in the glass case dedicated to products branded with rockets and explosions. The candy Atomic Fire Balls was one of them.

There’s a recreation of a 1950s living room, with a mannequin family and nuclear safety films playing on the vintage TV. Nearby are slides of all the tests done on mannequins in the desert, with before and after photos.

There are big pieces of equipment, video displays, and interactive bits like a Geiger counter and a set of half-life projections that are compared with how long the planned containment systems will last (example: the former 30,000 years; the latter, 100 years).

The museum is a manageable size and has a great gift shop.

The main event is a 10-minute film in a small theater about the history of the testing site. The film is fairly balanced, although several talking heads claim that America’s nuclear weapons program was necessary because it ended the Cold War. (Really? I thought that was the Cold War.) The overall impact of the film is chilling.

As it ended, there was a strange silence in the room. “Should we clap?” asked my friend.

Among other things, the film touched on the Downwinders, the residents in the path of fallout from the tests whose communities had high cancer rates in the years to follow. Several people from the testing program said that they felt terrible about it, they didn’t know the effects could be so deadly and far-reaching.

But this is Las Vegas. It’s pretty easy to believe that they were deluding themselves all along.

Cocktail Recipe: The Atomic Cocktail

1 ½ ounces vodka

1 ½ ounces brandy

1 teaspoon sherry

1 ½ ounces dry Champagne

Shake first three ingredients with ice and strain into a martini glass. Top with Champagne. (This is the original Las Vegas recipe, I haven’t tried it myself yet.)