WALLLA WALLA, Wash. – Salmon populations have been impacted by pollution, stream degradation and overfishing. Those topics can be difficult to talk about when you don’t also bring up some of the solutions, especially when kids are involved.
The Return to the River Salmon Festival gives organizations a chance to get the community, and more specifically kids, interested in the different solutions to human-caused problems impacting salmon populations.
With booths giving kids hands-on ways to see and experiment with what’s going on at a much bigger scale.
The release of the salmon itself gives kids a way to connect with what they’re talking about according to the Assistant Director for the Water & Environmental Center at Walla Walla Community College.
“Give them an opportunity to have a little intimate moment with their fish in their little container and they can name them – just again create that little heartfelt connection to the critter and then they can, you know, put it on the slide and watch it go off into the stream,” he said.
Releasing more salmon into the population is just one-way that groups are trying to maintain and heal the ecosystem. Something Wenix Red Elk with the Umatilla Confederated Tribes says helps all the key species maintain balance.
“When the salmon come back you have an increase in fertilization as they break down in the water. They’re fertilizing the plants that are there. The habitat that’s there,” she said.
Other groups were focused on the water side of trying to help people understand more efficient ways to use water for agriculture and showing how planting more local species can help rivers sustain the ecosystem around them.
