Walls

As human beings, we like to build, create and redesign, most of which started to be tools for survival and walls for protection. We’ve built better tools and higher walls to protect and separate ourselves from what’s outside. A good example of this would be the Iwaboki Sluice that the locals of Kushiro built to protect themselves from further flooding that may come in the future.  

 
By building a gate, this does not only prevent water from flowing through but it also prevents other species from passing and swimming back into the river to lay eggs. Without the fishes, other animals that rely on the river for food are also affected. Originally, black bears catch salmon during a salmon run and brings the salmon to the mountains where it eats. It then throws away the leftover bones back into the river. The bones then decay and become nutrients for the river. This cycle is cut off because of the wall people built. 

Instead of letting the river flow naturally as it should be, people built an artificially straight river instead simply to let the water reach the oceans faster. This may have solved the problem of fishes not being able to swim back to their homes but we saw it as an opportunity to easily catch the fishes that go through the river for our own consumption. 

And so what do we do? 

  
We built more walls. We built a wall that blocks only the salmons so we could catch them all easily. By doing this, we have changed the ecosystem of the river since no more salmon gets to lay their eggs there and baby salmons don’t get to live and grow up in a natural environment.

  
This practice has brought about a reduction of salmon harvested throughout the years. And so we then tried to artificially fertilize eggs and release the salmon ourselves into the sea. I think these are all mediocre solutions to our real problem. All of these would not have happened in the first place if we hadn’t built so many walls to separate ourselves.