The tide may be turning for salmon
In the battle over salmon recovery, it's no longer about inconveniencing humans.
By Paul VanDevelder, PAUL VANDEVELDER, author of "Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the Trial That Forged a Nation," is at work on a new book, "Savages and Scoundrels," for Yale University Press.
February 4, 2007
AS THE little hand on the extinction clock for salmon on the West Coast ticks toward zero hour — 2017, according to fisheries biologists — battle-weary parties in the almost 20-year-old dispute over how to rescue the fish now agree on one thing. With fish counts bumping historic lows, the entire West Coast salmon fishing industry shut down in 2006 to preserve dwindling stocks, and the price of wild salmon soaring to $30 a pound, the human contest over the salmon's survival has reached its endgame.
Since the Snake River coho salmon were declared extinct in the late 1980s, the players in the "salmon wars" have remained remarkably constant. State governments, fisheries biologists, Indian tribes, conservation groups and fishermen have all backed salmon recovery. In addition to generating billions of dollars in revenue in communities from Central California to the Canadian border, salmonids are the coastal ecosystem's "keystone" species on which more than 500 others — wolves, bears, chipmunks, otters and fish eagles, to name some — depend for their survival. Remove the salmon, say marine biologists, and the whole system collapses.
On the other side of the salmon wars are the hydropower and aluminum industries, commercial irrigators, inland wheat farmers and barge operators, whose livelihoods depend on cheap power, cheap water and cheap transportation made possible by dams on the Columbia, Snake and Klamath rivers. On balance, the latter interests have had the upper hand.
Despite important victories in court for advocates of salmon recovery, fish counts on these rivers have continued to fall. But in June, there were signs that the tide of the battle may be shifting. Setting a deadline of this July, U.S. District Judge James A. Redden gave the federal government one last chance to produce a recovery plan that would meet its legal responsibilities under the Endangered Species Act.
Struggling to contain his ire, Redden told reporters that the government's previous three efforts — two put forth by the Clinton administration, one by the Bush administration — to rescue salmon had been "made sick" by political quarreling. In the 15 years since the National Marine Fisheries Service and the government began writing "biological opinions" that would serve as the scientific foundation of strategies to save the salmon, legislative and judicial squabbling and stalling had brought 13 salmon stocks to the brink of extinction.
