Pogo was right

My new report “Nowhere to Hide: Salmon Versus People in the 21st Century” was released today by the B.C. Pacific Salmon Forum. I reviewed all the published science I could find on the threats to wild Pacific salmon and decided there was an elephant in the living room here: human population growth in the Pacific Northwest.

This isn’t a new idea, and I didn’t think of it first, but salmon commentators and hand-wringers have been pretty good about ignoring it in favour of pointing the finger at other culprits. But in the final analysis I think Pogo, the long-running comic strip character created by Walt Kelly, was right when he said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

And this was way back in 1971.







The illustration is a 1971 Earth Day poster written and illustrated by the American cartoonist and commentator Walt Kelly.