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It was early morning the day before Easter, and I was heading up Highway 1 toward Fort Bragg, California. Coming around a bend, there across the Mendocino Bay high on a bank was the Mendocino Presbyterian Church in this quaintly New England style village perched along California’s north coast. I thought back to the last time I had been in there; it was nearly nine years ago, in early May of ’98, where we gathered for Nat Bingham’s memorial service.
The sight of the picturesque old church reminded me of that memorial and the days leading up to. But it didn’t take that to remind me of Nat. Nat’s hard work on behalf of the fisheries is legendary, including the long hours he’d put in – most of it ashore in the last eight years of his life – wearing out Toyota pick-ups traveling to some remote watershed for a restoration project, or traveling the California Central Valley talking to farmers between meeting with legislators and agency heads in Sacramento or Washington, DC. At the end of his life he was worn out and unfortunately he never got time to recharge. His wife Kathy’s sudden death, the efforts by California Fish & Game and NMFS to off him from the Pacific Council because he was not a “team player,” (a team that ultimately served up some colossal fishery failures) and sheer exhaustion plus an old heart problem finally did him in.
What was really remarkable about Nat, however, was not just his dedication to the resource and the fisheries that he left, setting an example for us to follow, but also his remarkable vision and foresight. It seems that many of the issues we’re now engaged in, many that seem to us remarkably new, Nat was thinking about twenty and thirty years ago.
It was about 25 years ago when PCFFA was asked to lobby Congress for Army Corps of Engineers funding to build an outer breakwater for Noyo Harbor at Fort Bragg. The harbor entrance there can be treacherous in a storm, and it was felt that a breakwater in the outer harbor could make passage, particularly in winter, much safer. Describing it to Nat, he just about exploded. This was not typical for him; Nat was patient and soft-spoken and his outburst caught me off guard.
“That’s just plain stupid!” or words to that effect, he declared.
I was dumbfounded. Noyo was his home port, and I thought for sure he wanted the entrance to be safer. It turned out he wanted the harbor entrance safer, too, but his idea on how to do it was unlike anything I had ever heard before.
He explained that rock or concrete breakwaters, such as envisioned by the Corps, simply fought the waves. A better way, he said, was to absorb the energy from the waves. I asked how that would be done. He said that rather than rock the outer area, lines of buoys could be set up to break the motion of the waves, absorbing the energy through the up-and-down motion of the buoys. The buoys, each anchored to the seafloor, could then have generators attached to convert the wave energy directly to electricity.
Nat then went on to explain that it would not even be necessary to run power lines to the shore. That really piqued by curiosity. What about the electricity, I wanted to know. He proposed it be used for converting ocean water to hydrogen. The hydrogen would then be used to power fishing boats. When I heard that, all I could think about was the Hindenburg and its fiery end on a tower in New Jersey. However, the hydrogen (according to Nat) could be safely stored in a type of hydrate form as ballast in any displacement vessel and heated to draw it out for power. The best thing, he said, was that the byproduct – the exhaust – is just water vapor. That he said would be important in the future.
He was already thinking through the conversion of existing gasoline and diesel engines to hydrogen. I also think part of what was in the back of his mind was how to free up energy from the control by the large oil companies and utilities. Nat was after all a New Englander. He was thrifty, and having to pay big oil companies for the only fuel available that he thought was also destroying the planet bothered him no end. His solution was to liberate a clean source of energy.
A quarter century ago his idea was intriguing, but seemed a little far-fetched. I did ask a few engineering friends about the concept. They admitted it was feasible, but I don’t think they took it too seriously since they were content with the technology at the time.
Today, I just prepared testimony to give to a Congressional hearing about wave energy. There is already a trial program in Scotland and various utilities and speculators are rushing to claim ocean waters off Washington, Oregon and Northern California to exploit wave energy, along with offshore wind and even ocean current generation. Wave energy is now being touted for its potential as a renewable energy source as we scurry to reduce mankind’s carbon footprint, hoping to minimize damage from some of the more dire predictions for the impacts of global warming.
I don’t know if there will be suitable locations along the coast to create dual-purpose facilities – as both breakwaters and wave generation operations – but there is now ample interest in wave energy by itself. Even if these types of facilities do not pan out as navigational improvements, the power generated by wave energy operations could definitely contribute to the renewable sources we need as replacements for hydropower from the dams we want to take down, or to power desalination plants that potentially could reduce demand for water from west coast salmon streams.
A big challenge for fishermen, of course, with any development of offshore renewable energy – whether from wave, wind or current – will be to make sure such operations do not create navigation hazards, nor preclude access to fishing grounds. The promise is not without its problems. I never thought to ask Nat that, but I sure he would have had a solution.
As for hydrogen as a fuel, it no longer is seen as the explosive gas that destroyed German dirigibles. What is happening, however, as I think Nat feared, is that its development has been deliberately slowed down enough by governments to give the big oil companies time to seize it as their own, monopolizing production and distribution, much of it through the burning of other fossil fuels.
It’ll be hard not to think about Nat as actions accelerate on the development of offshore renewable energy sources and fishermen are called on to reduce the carbon footprint (displacement might be a better word) of their vessels.
One of the few other times I ever saw Nat become agitated was when the discussion came up about mass marking of hatchery fish. “That’s antiquated, 1950’s technologies,” Nat ranted, “the agencies are more concerned about taking care of their friends making the tagging machines than good management.” What brought this idea about was Nat’s work with the Winter-Run Captive Broodstock Program and what had been learned from it.
In 1991, less than two years after the Sacramento winter-run chinook became the first Pacific salmon to be listed under the Endangered Species Act, the run size had fallen to 191 returning spawners. This was down from 400 just two years before and returns of 120,000 as late as 1969. Nat was determined this run would not go extinct “on our watch” and was convinced the agencies would just blame the fishermen and wipe their hands of this unique run unless something was done to save them. So he put together the Winter-Run Captive Broodstock Program.
Watching the U.S. Fish & Wildlife’s captive broodstock program for the condor, Nat reasoned the same could be done for these salmon to prevent their extinction. A group consisting of the two federal fishery agencies, California Fish & Game, Sea Grant, the University of California (Bodega Marine Laboratory), California Academy of Sciences, as well as the Chair of the California Water Commission was put together by Nat.
One of the by-products of the captive broodstock program was the development at UC’s Bodega Laboratory of a library of genetic markers for winter-run. This was subsequently expanded to cover other salmon runs and proved invaluable in the hatchery setting. Clearly identifying the fish by their genetic markers allowed careful protection of genetic diversity and prevented the hybridization of a year class of winter-run, as well as determining the run’s presence in its migration through the Delta -- signaling when pumping would be curtailed. Nat also coupled this gene conservation effort with an aggressive habitat and river flows restoration program. As a result of his work the winter-run chinook stocks made it through this genetic bottleneck and today are the one Pacific salmon stock that is strongly recovering, with spawner numbers today up to nearly 20,000. This is one of the major success stories of the Endangered Species Act.
Nat reasoned that marking fish with a fin clip and the insertion of a coded wire tag made little sense once the inherent “bar codes” on the fish – the genetic markers – had been identified. With genetic stock identification, or GSI, every fish – hatchery and natural spawning both – is already marked, not just a small fraction of the run as is typical of the production from a hatchery. With GSI, a quick snip of genetic material could be taken from the fish – they didn’t even have to be killed – and analyzed in a lab within 24 hours to tell what river system the fish had originally come from.
This was far different from today’s practice, where heads of marked fish are taken, frozen and then sometime each winter the freezers are ceremoniously opened and the process begins of digging out the tags to provide managers the information for the next season. What Nat was proposing was a one-day turn around on information, not a one-year turn around.
What he envisioned eventually, something he believed would be possible with technological advances, was the day when fishermen would have a wand, almost like those at the check-out counter, that they could use to pass along a fish for its “bar code,” relaying real-time data on to a computer to fish managers on what stocks were present where and, perhaps, even telling fishermen what fish they could keep and which ones to release.
Nat suffered considerable frustration from fishery agencies who resisted moving from the old coded-wire tag system to embracing modern GSI technology. Only last year, thanks in part to Dr. Michael Banks, now with Oregon State University but who was at the Bodega Lab working with Nat in the mid-90’s, GSI is finally starting to move ahead. OSU and the Oregon Salmon Commission (to be joined this year by the California Salmon Council) and a geneticist from NMFS’ Santa Cruz laboratory are working to make sure GSI will finally be considered prominently in the future management of salmon (see “Scientific Advancements Could Revolutionize Fishery Management: Can DNA-Based Sampling Help Beleaguered West Coast Salmon Fishermen?” in the September 2006 FN at: www.pcffa.org/fn-sep06.htm).
When we look back on the development of GSI for fishery management, it will be hard not to think of Nat’s vision, the delay in moving ahead with it because of internal agency resistance, and Nat’s persistence in helping make it happen.
I also think of Nat every time we approach a dam removal project. When most of us assumed that all we could do is dream about taking dams out, Nat was working to make it a reality. He, along with author Marc Reisner, worked for years with some of the more progressive watershed conservancies for the removal of several small but deadly dams on tributaries in the Upper Sacramento basin. Between them they showed us that it was possible.
For several years before his untimely death, Nat was very busy in his efforts aimed at removing a series of antiquated old hydro dams on Battle Creek, whose confluence with the Sacramento is 30 miles downstream of Redding, CA. This stream, with its deep canyons and cold flows in the middle of summer, could provide the “home stream” for the winter-run chinook, whose passage to their natal streams has now been blocked by the construction of Shasta Dam.
Nat was gradually progressing with this effort at the time of his death. Since then, however, CALFED, the Bureau of Reclamation, a corporate environmental group and others have all gotten their snouts into the process and little has happened since 1998 except that the price tag has skyrocketed as the number of dams slated for removal has plunged. In a sense, I’m glad Nat isn’t around to see this travesty. On the other hand, were he still with us, these dams might now be gone.
It’s also too bad Nat is not around to continue his work on the Klamath. This is a project he really would have loved, and his leadership would have been invaluable. Much of the salmon habitat restoration work done through the Klamath Basin Restoration Task Force for the past 20 years was spearheaded by Nat, who sat on the Task Force himself for many years, and chaired it for several of those years. Indeed, the Task Force itself was Nat’s idea, and he helped write it into law.
It would have also been fun to watch him take on the Bush Administration, which in another basin has asserted that Columbia River dams are natural structures. Nat’s training as a geologist and his grasp of history would have provided unparalleled entertainment watching this gentle, kind soul slice up the likes of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and NMFS’s Northwest Region in debates.
It’s hard not to think of Nat. Sitting in on yet-another state effort to deal with the Delta and its diversions, I remember some of Nat’s work, searching the Library of Congress for early maps showing where the Sacramento from the north and the San Joaquin from the south merged and flowed west to San Francisco Bay, examining the hydrology and shallow water habitats of that system to better understand how it worked and what changes would be needed to make it a full functioning estuary again.
Religious folks like to ponder the question of what would Jesus do. In these mind-numbing meetings on the Delta and in other agency-sponsored conclaves, I always wonder what Nat would do.
Looking across the Mendocino Bay at the old Presbyterian Church, the local NPR station was playing a scratchy 1928 recording by some long-forgotten choir of “Let the Light Shine on Me.” At the conclusion of Nat’s memorial we all sang, “Will the Circle be Unbroken,” but during the service itself the choir sang “Speak Out” which may have been from the old Quaker saying “Speak truth to power” -- which Nat did regularly, and which was the motto for PCFFA’s old printed “blue bullet” newsletter, the PCFFA Friday, for many years.
Few have Nat’s vision. That and his hard work and gentleness were what made him so special. But we can also learn, as that basically shy man did, to speak out. And we can remember his vision and work to carry it out. We didn’t sing “Let the Light shine on me” that day in May of ‘98, but I think the refrain from it, “let the light from the lighthouse shine on me” will stay in my memory as we try to implement Nat’s vision and to do the hard work to make sure the bright future Nat saw for our industry comes to pass.
Zeke Grader is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), and served in that capacity for many years while Nat Bingham was PCFFA’s President. PCFFA is the west coast’s largest organization of commercial fishing families, and Zeke Grader can be reached via PCFFA’s San Francisco Office at: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370, by phone to (415)561-5080 x 224, and by email to: fish4ifr@aol.com. PCFFA’s web site is at: www.pcffa.org.