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In our squandering of one major American fishery resource 

 after another, destruction of virgin forests has played a major 

 role. Beginning over 250 years ago, people cleared the East 

 Coast forests. Together with overfishing, river damming, and 

 pollution, this eradicated our Atlantic salmon by about the year 

 1900. Massive artificial breeding and stocking in the late 1800s 

 failed to save that magnificent fishery, and recent high-tech 

 hatchery programs on somewhat rehabilitated streams have failed 

 to recreate a significant Atlantic salmon fishery. 



We took the Midwest's timber, otherwise abused streams and 

 lakes there, and devastated that region's fisheries. The once- 

 thriving Michigan grayling dwindled as logging pushed across that 

 state, and, by 1932, it vanished. The native Great Lakes fish 

 community, much of which spawned in pre-logging streams, largely 

 disappeared by 1945 or 1950. In it's place is a grotesque 

 assortment of exotics — fishes that don't belong and don't 

 function properly there. They don't behave themselves, so to 

 speak. Now we have to put up with them and make the best of it. 



The virtual extirpation of beaver, followed by overgrazing, 

 environmentally abusive hard-rock mining practices, excessive 

 logging, and irrigation diversion, radically changed watersheds 

 and streams in the interior West, annihilating many stocks of 

 cutthroat trout, that region's primary native salmonid. Hatchery 

 programs made the situation worse by genetic disruption and by 



