Put on your Home Alone face

The Grand Canyon is endangered! The dams above and below it have allowed trout, that alien species, to live there. Salt cedar and other "alien" plants have moved in. The sand bars and beachs are eroding. $200 million has been spent on studies of how to save the canyon.

four of the canyon's eight native fish species have disappeared, and the prospects for a fifth, the endangered humpback chub, are grim. The chub is being hurt by a number of factors, primarily the cold water, which hampers reproduction, and the Asian tapeworm, a non-native parasite that is killing the fish.

Oh, NOOOO! Not the humpbacked chub!

Everywhere else the Wildlife Resources agencies are fighting chubs, killing whole lakes full of fish to get rid of them.

What I want to ask these guys is why they want to fight nature's adaptations to changing circumstances. They haven't got a chance in hell of breaching either the Hoover dam or the Glen Canyon dam. Human beings change things, just as every other living organism does. Sometimes they make it harder for other species, often for pretty stupid reasons, but consensus and democracy still rule the day, for better or for worse, and all the environmental sob stories in the world won't save species who can't adapt. That's how it has always been. That's what Grand Canyon is demonstrating.

One of the odd facts in the story is that "The sandy shorelines are washing away. And once-buried Indian archaeological sites are slipping into the river." We should preserve the ruins of primitive man, but destroy the artifacts of modern man? If these sites were buried, what were we learning from them? Maybe it's a good thing that they emerged, and that we can study them. If the sand is washing away, what are the salt cedar trees growing in? How is restoring the old muddy torrents going to deal with the tapeworm now infecting the chubs? The whole issue is one big tail chase with no solutions. The environmental idolizing of a changing ecosystem makes no sense, except for fundraising.