EELS DIE AS DAM OWNERS STAND AND WATCH

I taped my latest cable TV show today that runs on eight stations in Maine. My show today featured Ed Friedman, chairman of the Friends of Merrymeeting Bay (FOMM), a local environmental group fighting to stop the killing of eels and other fish as they try to navigate Maine's rivers.

Most of the dam owners in Maine, controlled by big corporations, won't spend the money to put in technologies like ladders and other devices to help the eels from being destroyed in the turbines inside the dams. These greedy corporate entities, who use the public rivers for profit without paying "rent" for use of the public waterway, could care less about the consequences of their dams. FOMM has been appealing to the state Department of Environmental Regulation and the governor for a long time but the state government is pretty much under the control of these same greedy corporations. Ed calls it the Department of Economic Regulation.

So the FOMM has gone into court to try to get the judicial system to help with this problem but that door is increasingly closed and locked shut as well. In the meantime, as the eel population diminishes, people fail to see the link to the declining fish populations in the ocean - the eels are a source of food for the larger fish. It's all connected.

Ed says that the 3rd and 6th grade kids get it right away. But the big time boys, the corporate types and the politicians they own, can't see it because they are blinded by their love for the almightly dollar. Or as the Native Americans called it, the green frog skin. The white man is sick and is killing his mother earth.

(Click on the link in the headline above to watch the entire show.)