This article by Lynda V. Mapes is a reminder of how any emphasis on consumerist veganism as a strategy, or shaming people for their diets, is ineffective and, considering the opportunity cost, actively counter-productive.
First they circle. Then they gasp at the surface of the water. Soon they can’t swim. Then they die.
For decades now, scientists have known something was killing beautiful, adult coho salmon as soon as they hit Seattle’s urban waters, ready to spawn. They had escaped the orcas, the fishermen, traveled thousands of miles, only to be mysteriously killed as soon as they finally reached home.
In a breakthrough paper published in the Dec. 3 issue of Science, a team of researchers revealed the culprit behind the deaths of coho in an estimated 40% of the Puget Sound area — a killer so lethal it takes out 40 to 90% of returning coho to some urban streams before they spawn. It is a killer hidden in plain sight.
Tires.
More specifically, a single chemical, 6PPD-quinone, derived from a preservative that helps tires last longer.
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With 3.1 billion tires globally produced annually for more than 1.4 billion vehicles, tire-wear particles are a daunting pollution problem. The preservative 6PPD appears to be used in all tires, the scientists noted in the most recent paper, and tire-wear particles are likely present in creeks near busy roads across the world.There also is not today a salmon-safe tire on the market, or treatment for tires to make tires salmon-safe. Any vehicle is implicated, whether gasoline-powered or electric, privately owned or transit. If it’s got a tire, and it moves on a road, it’s part of the problem.
It’s not enough to stop eating fish, to convince all of your friends and family to stop eating fish, to boycott or pressure restaurants into no longer selling fish, when the fundamental problem is something like what chemicals are in tires.
But identifying that’s so is only the first step. The much harder work is not to invent a new tire product or developing a new transportation system but developing the empathy for non-human species enough not to kill tens of thousands by side-effect. It’s developing a political system that centers the cultures and defers to Coast Salish peoples who coexisted with the salmon populations sustainably for thousands of years even while including them in their diets.
Fascism is particularly in need of strong opposition, but there’s not much that’s particular to it, and its logic draws from well-established forms of oppression, like settler colonialism and species hierarchies, before intensifying them.
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