Foriegn Fish?

The goal that I had in mind for my research project was to provide credible information organized in a way that would lead the reader to conclude that the likelihood, or even possibility ,of a truly indigenous population of greenback cutthroat existing today to be zero. This was and is a very ambitious goal. In all actuality I never really thought that I could or would use information that is already out there to come to different conclusions than the professionals that devote huge amounts of time and energy to the study of this fish. I suppose that at best what I achieved was to bring into question the technical or scientific definition of "indigenous" in relation to the greenback cutthroat trout. The definition, according to Merriam-Webster online, is as follows "produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment." If we follow this trail of semantics we next must call into question the word "natural," and that is not a trail I am interested in going down when it comes to researching the state fish of Colorado. So again I am back at the initial hypothesis that the greenback probably does exist in this one small section of stream outside of Colorado Springs, regardless of weather or not it is the exact fish that existed in this state before the arrival of westerners. I feel that even though my paper did trend in the direction of semantic scrutiny ultimately, I was still able to learn a good amount about a subject that I already knew about, and also to raise some intriguing questions pertaining to the history of this species. At the very least I related an interesting story that I am confident is not unique only to the greenback. The real meat of my argument is really that human intervention, weather it's considered natural or not, is irreversible. This might seem an obvious argument when one looks around at all the evidence of lasting environmental impact from humans, but the way that we continue to interact with our environment so carelessly seems to suggest that we don't believe that we are responsible for the changes that we affect.