YES WE CAN restore coho salmon

Here's a very nice success story in restoring coho salmon in Northern California.

Watershed restoration is succeeding in the Garcia River, a formerly-degraded forest river in heavily-logged Mendocino County. How do we know it's working? Coho salmon seem to be expanding their range and moving into new areas where they haven't been seen in decades.

Conservation groups are leading the way, buying land and managing it for ecosystem health. The Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Fund are working together, logging carefully, with an eye towards proving that logging can be done in a way that is compatible with healthy rivers and fish.

This reinforces an important, even critical point. There is logging done wrong and logging done right. Just like there is fishing done wrong and fishing done right. There is nothing wrong with logging and fishing done right. Some people make the mistake of thinking we need to ban all logging and fishing because too much logging and fishing is done wrong. Banning logging and fishing would be conservation done wrong, because of a lack of vision. Thanks to the Conservation Fund and Nature Conservancy for proving this point.

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