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Article: Freshwater failures: the crises on five continents.
- Article from:
- World Watch
- Article date:
- September 1, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Worldwatch Institute. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Societies have repeatedly misunderstood that their freshwater assets are not simple commodities to be tapped, channeled, or dammed at will, but complex living systems. As a result of that misunderstanding, many of these systems are in deep trouble.
In 1880, a decade before the territory of Washington became a part of the United States, 19,500 tons of salmon and steelhead trout were harvested from the region's most important river, the Columbia. One hundred years later, the harvest was just 50 tons. Fourteen million salmon a year once returned to this watershed to spawn in their ancestral streams; in 1992 only 1.1 million returned, and most of those were born in a ...