To the editor:

Our wild salmon are a unique resource. The eastern U.S. has none any more—thanks to industrial development and a general lack of forethought (things that we should be concerned about here, too). Our salmon don’t just create jobs and bring tourist dollars; they also give us a great food source, and they help make Alaska what it is. Many of us choose to live here precisely because this is still a place (almost unique these days) that can sustain wild salmon streams, not just factories, mines, cities and suburbs. The threat of ruining all that is real. Even places like Northern New Jersey, not so long ago, had forests and clear streams, with abundant fish and game. Do we want to suffer their fate, too? It happens easily. Why should we not make the protection of salmon habitat a priority? If we don’t, it will be whittled away bit by bit, a stream here, a stream there, a mine here, a road there. All that “development” will come with promises that it will be done “responsibly.” Yet there will be no way to restore the habitat when those promises turn out to be insufficient, or when they are simply broken due to lack of oversight and enforcement. Once their habitat is impacted past a certain point, the salmon are gone, and they won’t come back. We need to be very careful to keep that from happening, even if it’s inconvenient for someone, or keeps some project from making money in the short term. Proposition 1 is a step in the right direction.

Phil Somervell,

Palmer