Dan Daley:  

Seems I've spent more time going to school, than anything else. For what? Well, its kind of complicated, but by the time I finished graduate school I was in Idaho. I was offered a job on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, not too far from Yellowstone National Park. It seems they think a lot of their salmon runs out here, but they have a hard time keeping them off the Endangered Species List. So they needed somebody who wasn't so familiar with local customs that he would know that they weren't about to stop fishing for salmon. Because somebody that naive would likely think that he or she could actually do something about getting salmon off the Endangered Species List. They were right. I tried, along with a lot of other people who were probably just as naive as me, but Its been about thirty years now and salmon are still Endangered. They're still fishing for them, too. Somewhere near the middle of those thirty years, I moved to Southwest Washington State, not far from Portland, OR. That's where the Columbia River flows just prior to reaching the ocean. Its an even better place to grapple with the salmon problem, since the Columbia was the most productive salmon habitat in the U.S. So, naturally, it had the most fishing pressure on it. Plus, it has a series of Federal Dams blocking the salmon trying to swim upriver to spawn. If that's not enough, it is conveniently located right in the middle of all the parties interested in maintaining their fishing rights so they can continue to harvest Endangered salmon. This is considered West Coast, and there's one thing about the West Coast, or at least this part of the West Coast, that sets it apart from Chicago, or the East Coast, for that matter: people never seem to argue out here. That's not to say they don't feel strongly about anything. They just never seem to show it. They never seem to change their mind, either. They just keep going about doing like they were doing, just like you never even talked to them about doing something different, or about there being another way to think about something. Then, one day, blam!, you get hit with a law suit seemingly out of the blue. But its from those same people you talked to back when; the people who smiled, and even nodded their heads. You thought they were maybe agreeing with you, but at least they weren't down right opposed. Not according to the law suit. They hate your guts according to the law suit. And if you think they're going to stop fishing for salmon just because you say its the one sure way to save the salmon, you got another thing coming. Becaus...Expand for more