@thanatokephaloides

          Many of the streams (rivers) of NorthEastern Oregon were mined as part of the California Gold Rush.

          Some day, I hope, those will get the protection this legislation specifies for the rivers of SouthWestern Oregon. But first we will need to remove a few dams in the Columbia River watershed. That will be a bit of a fight. My dad often spoke of Celilo Falls (aka Wyam), I was too young, I never got to see Celilo Falls. The earlier dredging and the later damming are killing my river.

          I, along with some others, have divested from Bonneville Power Administration's generators in favor of Wind and Solar as energy sources.

Some questions arise from the newspaper letter you cite. What was the writer dredging for? How deep was he dredging and for how long and how far along the streambed? Obviously, the dredging was fairly mild, as the fish were still able to breathe while eating the yummies that the dredge dragged up.

The proposed ban, on the other hand, is on dredge mining, which usually dredges much deeper than is apparently being done in the writer's case. Mining dredging often puts enough debris in the water to kill fish for miles downstream, both in amount and chemistry. You're not going to have little fishies eating little yummies brought up by a typical commercial mine dredge. The fish are going to be fleeing the effluent cloud as fast as they can swim. The disrupted debris will strangle them otherwise.

I smell a strong odor of "apples versus oranges" here.

And I am familiar with hydraulic dredge mining. You DO. NOT. want to be in the river downstream from such an operation, be you a fish or a human. And a gold pan is one thing; a gold dredge-and-sluice is entirely another.

When scientists request a dredge-mining ban on a given stream or river, chances are they are better informed than someone opposing the ban with nothing else besides personal anecdotes. We ought to listen to them. And to those in places like the Animas River drainage, where mining pollution has rendered the river nearly devoid of fish:

The Gold King Mine was abandoned in 1923, Prior to the spill, the Upper Animas water basin had already become devoid of fish, because of the adverse environmental impacts of regional mines such as Gold King, when contaminants entered the water system. Other plant and animal species were also adversely affected in the watershed before the Gold King Mine breach.

source

Mining's track record with fish isn't all that hot. And we know that from amassed data, not just an occasional anecdote.

@dystopian

          Yep, and hatcheries are a poor response to our incessant meddling. Fish ladders have never been as good as the "engineering" would suggest.

          The truth is, a well regulated river is like a well regulated heart beat ··· an indicator of imminent death.

As a professional fish monger I must comment...

When I siphon the shiat out of the gravel in the bottom of the aquarium lots of potential food items are presented and of course the fish take advantage of that. It doesn't mean that cleaning the gravel is bad. But if the siphoning/dredging was for instance where the salmon eggs fell into the gravel, it could not be so good. Silted areas can also go anoxic quickly. Not to mention chemical pollutants being introduced from mining ops. When I am at water and want to see which species of fish are present, I stir a little substrate up. For some reason we have treated our water resources as a sewers. I hear some salmon are really in trouble.