Salmon survival

With due respect to Gov. Angus King and his many accomplishments, I’m puzzled by his attitude toward one of nature’s most magnificent creatures, the Atlantic salmon.

For him to say there are millions of salmon in aquaculture pens off the Maine coast, therefore, there is no need to list the migrated salmon in our rivers as endangered, is as uninformed as it is misleading. Perhaps he should have checked first with the state’s fishery scientists about the genetic differences between salmon that migrate thousands of miles back to their river of origin, and salmon that spend their entire lives in sea pens to be sold commercially.

King is now resorting to the usual scare tactics many politicians and corporate leaders seem to resort to when confronted with having to clean up their act. A disaster for the state, people will lose jobs and there will be an unfriendly business environment or, as, in the case of the aquaculture industry, the threat to move to Chile.

It’s time to cool the doomsday rhetoric. Remember the paper industry threatening to move south if they were required to stop polluting our rivers? You’ll note they are still here.

The listing of the spotted owl as endangered was supposed to bring economic disaster to the West Coast timber industries — just the opposite occurred.

We are the only state in the country with distinct populations of migrating Atlantic salmon to our rivers, and now they are facing extinction. Is that the kind of legacy we want to leave future generations?

Instead of sowing the seeds of adversarial disaster and misinformation, what if, this time, the federal government, the state, industry, local organizations, clubs and individuals all worked together for a common cause. It might even become a habit and produce surprising results for our state. Arthur Taylor Lincoln