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| May 09, 2008 |
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Here in the Lower Forty-Eight, and in much of western Canada, natural habitat has almost vanished... Much that civilization demands for its sustenance has had a consequence in the fate of the salmon. There is not much of it left. Of untouched salmon habitat there is almost none. Although salmon once occupied almost every ocean-seeking stream in the Pacific Northwest, the map where salmon go has been shrinking for the last hundred years, sometimes gradually as human forces slowly worsened the habitat, sometimes suddenly when millions of acres of habitat were blocked by dams. Now to see the headwater-to-the-sea habitat where the salmon thrive in abundance, one must go to Alaska. Here in the Lower Forty-eight, and in much of western Canada, it has almost vanished. A century and a half of logging, farming, ranching, mining, damming, road building, and urbanizing activity has taken its toll. Much that civilization demands for its sustenance has had a consequence in the fate of the salmon. The Aboriginal Habitat Only in a handful of small pockets, miniature and isolated ecosystems, can there still be found habitat as it once was. On the Oregon coast, just south of the town of Yachats, is a little untouched watershed, barely eight miles from the headwaters to the ocean. Cummins Creek winds through a narrow, steep-sided valley. There, free from the ax and chainsaw, and now protected under the federal Wilderness Act, trees many feet thick rise to the sky, almost blocking out the sun. Over years, as trees have died, they have fallen or been blown into the creek. Although the creek is small and shallow in many places, even in the low water of summer it is a struggle for humans to walk the streambed. Tree trunks are everywhere in the creek, creating dams over which the water must plunge, digging out pools that could soak a person up to the neck. Gravel bars have built up where the creek slows. The fallen trees push the creek from bank to bank, undercutting, and causing more trees, rootwads and all, to end up in the creek bed. All this adds up to stream "complexity,"a diverse set of stream conditions that create the habitat needed for healthy salmon. In other streams, where the trees have not been allowed to mature and die and end up in the creek, what we see is a far more simplified stream. What most of us now envision as the pristine natural stream, bubbling along at a uniform pace smoothly to the sea, is not what the pioneers saw in many of the Northwest watersheds. Instead, west of the Cascades, they found creeks so choked with trees that in places they could not reach the water for the many layers of criss-crossing trunks over the streambed. On the larger rivers, log jams were common barriers to navigation, which had to be blown up or painstakingly picked apart by men who risked their lives not knowing when the jam would give way. Whether for aesthetics or practicalities, man in the American West has systematically rid both large and small streams of the logs, boulders, and other "debris"that shape the stream and give life to salmon. Abundant beaver built dams on the smaller streams. The ponds behind the dams gave refuge to juvenile salmon from the high currents of winter floods and the warm waters of summer droughts. Now trapped and driven from much of their previous range, beaver once were as ubiquitous in the Northwest as salmon. The simplified stream channels now seen everywhere and which have such dire consequences for salmon are in no small part due to the absence of beaver. Before the effects of man, creeks and streams and rivers moved across their floodplains, changing positions as high water cut new channels and dammed up old ones. Floods spread out into multiple channels, where the over-wintering juvenile salmon could find refuge from the fast water. In summer, these streams, slowed and directed by logs and boulders near the banks, dug deep channels, keeping the water cool throughout the hot days. It was into these conditions that the salmon evolved. They are a product of this particular landscape. Although the salmon were home throughout the Columbia River and Pacific Coast states, from the coastal rain forests to the high deserts, the streams in which they began and ended their lives all shared these attributes. Vegetation along stream banks provided shade and engineered the variety that salmon need during the freshwater phases of their life cycle. The rivers "interacted"with their flood plains by changing channels as flows increased and decreased. Small spawning streams were narrow, deep, and cool, with lots of riffles, pools and gravel bars. In the arid areas east of the Cascades, where fewer firs and pines grow, willows, aspens, locusts, and cottonwoods provided stream complexity. The few places where untouched salmon habitat can be found today are small and precious. In our imagination we expand these places to an entire aboriginal landscape as a conceptual salmon Eden. Anecdotal pioneer stories of salmon, body-to-body across an entire stream channel, are universalized to every Pacific Northwest stream. We imagine the aboriginal landscape as uniformly pure, unsullied and unchanging except for the seasons. Even without humankind's intrusion in the salmon's life zone, however, change is the one constant. In fact, salmon can not live without change. Spawning gravels wash downstream in floods and must be replenished by landslides. Landslides occur most frequently when slopes are bare, such as after the fires that once swept through the fir forests west of the Cascades every few centuries. Afterwards, the salmon suffer as the smaller sediments fill the interstices in the gravels, suffocating the eggs, and silt and mud fill the deep holes in the streambeds where cooler summer waters are present. But with time, the winter rains bring more water to push these fine sediments down the river and into the ocean, scouring the gravels and digging again the deep holes behind a rock or a downed tree trunk brought down by the slide. The watershed heals itself, slowly renewing the tree cover, slowing the progress of sediment into the stream. As the smaller sediments wash away, the gravels first become home to the species, such as coho, able to make use of a stream without strong riffles and deep pools. Over time, as the stream becomes more complex, other salmon species come in, such as steelhead, able to use more of this diverse habitat. Even without man, natural change was so constant that no more than a third of the zone west of the Coast Range, for example, was likely to have been "prime"salmon habitat at any one time. The rest of the landscape was in recovery from a major disturbance or in need of disturbance in order to begin anew the conditions that would produce salmon. Not every stream teemed with salmon, only those that were at the right stage between major disturbances. A third or more of all streams may have had no salmon at all. The notion that every stream west of the Cascades was filled with salmon, even before the arrival of Indians, is simply untrue. But there were enough streams with abundant runs of salmon to give early Northwesterners the impression that the fish resource was unending. Circle of Life As adults, they are swimming machines. Their shape is streamlined. Their profile evokes only images of strength. Their size and their shape tell instantly that they are pelagic roamers, like the tuna and other species that cover vast distances in the ocean. Steelhead, in particular, which lay their eggs in the highest parts of the watershed, where the river currents are the strongest, are emblems of power. Ask a recreational fisherman what drives him to stand in ice water for hours working the riffles of a steelhead stream, and he will tell you of the thrill of the strike, the battle a twenty pound steelhead can give when its trip to the spawning gravel has been interrupted by hook and line. Different species and runs of salmon take advantage of the different conditions presented by the Northwest's rivers. Almost all salmon spawn in fall to early winter and hatch out in winter or spring. Some salmon, such as chum and pinks, use the estuary and the low reaches of creeks close to salt water to spawn and rear as juveniles. Most other salmon make a long upstream journey to reach spawning gravel, timing their run to the likelihood there will be water in the stream where they will spawn. Salmon moving upstream to spawn cannot move into a creek that has low flows or high temperatures during the summer and early fall. Some streams, like the Willamette River at Oregon City, have cascades or waterfalls that have flow enough for salmon to pass only during the spring. Others lack enough cool summer pools to hold spring-migrating fish until fall spawning and are populated only with fall and winter run fish. The spring chinook moves into the rivers during the high spring and early summer flows. Not spawning until fall, and often ascending into high reaches of the watershed, it has high fat reserves to give it stamina. Having swum through thousands of miles of ocean and struggled upstream in fresh water for sometimes hundreds of miles, this most driven of animals reaches the river of its birth. Then it stops, and waits. It finds a deep hole or a spring-fed pool in the stream where cool water remains throughout the heat of summer. Against the slight current in these holes, the salmon swims slowly in place. For months at a time, the fish is still, rarely moving more than a few feet from this chosen place, conserving energy. One can see them crowded together in these holes, their dark gray backs parallel to the current, like a flight of zeppelins, until a disturbance, a shadow, spooks them into dispersal, only to return within minutes one-by-one to their vigil. During this time, their bodies are changing, from trophy athletes to reproductive engines. They shun even the slim sustenance these small creeks afford fish this large, while their flesh decays, their energy slowly being consumed to produce eggs in females and fighting equipment for the mating competition in males. An adult female salmon may have over 20% of her body mass taken up by eggs by the time she spawns. Anadromy Anadromy, ascending rivers from the sea for breeding, is one reason humans are fascinated with salmon. It is salmon's great adaptive tool, achieved through very complex physiological changes to keep internal electrolytic balance as the fish moves from freshwater with a salt content less than its own body to the ocean with a salt content that is greater, and then back again. By laying eggs in freshwater and maturing at sea, salmon take advantage of the best that both habitats have to offer. The secure gravels of freshwater allow salmon to reproduce with fewer, but larger, eggs that are more likely to survive. Emerging fry can find the kinds of food they need and be protected from the predators that abound in the ocean. Some salmon species may spend more than a year maturing in fresh water before venturing to the ocean. There, the salmon's diet radically changes from small insects and other invertebrates to a predatory diet of smaller fish. This access to a tremendous food supply at a time when salmon are mature enough to handle larger prey has a profound effect. A salmon which in fresh water may have taken a year to grow to six inches in length and barely over an ounce in weight will grow rapidly once it reaches the ocean. After the first summer, it will likely be a fifteen inch fish. Salmon species take advantage of the wide range of ocean habitats, just as the different varieties of salmon take advantage of almost all the riverine habitat at one time or another. Some Pacific salmon roam over thousands of miles of ocean, leaving the Columbia River, for example, and ranging to the Gulf of Alaska and out to the fringe of the Aleutians before beginning the journey back to the stream of their birth. Others, such as Oregon coastal coho, seem to spend much of their adult lives within a few hundred miles of the stream from which they entered the ocean. In a curious take on anadromy, one and a half year old steelhead, which enter the ocean in the spring from the Rogue River in Oregon, return to the river in the fall as "half pounders"to spend the winter in fresh water and return to the ocean in the spring. It is not known why the Rogue steelhead, alone of all salmonids, do this, perhaps to avoid predators.
Steelhead, alone among the big West Coast salmon, can return to the ocean. Although most steelhead die in spawning, the species is capable of returning to spawn several times. Battered and worn out after the trip upriver, a steelhead can still return to the sea, restore its health and return to the stream in following years to lay and fertilize its eggs. However, dying after spawning allows most salmonids to take advantage of all their body mass to get to the spawning grounds and leave large numbers of healthy fertilized eggs and, consequently, produce greater numbers of adults. They need not hold anything in reserve for a return trip to salt water. The steelhead may be at an evolutionary disadvantage by retaining the capacity to spawn again. Dying after spawning also allows the carcasses of the spawned-out salmon to play a critical role in the ecosystem. The small creeks and streams where the salmon spawn are often quite devoid of nutrients. In a most distinct example of the circle of life, young salmon feed directly on the dead carcasses as well as on the other organisms that find food in the dead adults. When carcasses are present they may account for well over half the nutrition received by maturing juveniles. Vegetation along salmon streams also depends on dead salmon for vital nutrients that otherwise are not present. This role of spawned-out salmon is believed to be so important, in fact, that carcasses from salmon that have been spawned in the hatchery are now being placed in some streams where lack of nutrients inhibits the growth of the emerging salmon fry. The Salmon and Northwesterners Most of the habitat available in the Pacific Northwest and not closed off by dams has been degraded in slow increments. A valley farmer cannot efficiently use his bottom land due to the stream meandering through it. He fills in the curves and pushes the channel against one hillside, thereby speeding the current and eliminating the winter alcoves young salmon and steelhead need to survive. A culvert on a logging road plugs up with debris in a heavy rain, sending a concentrated flood of water over the road, starting a slope failure and a debris avalanche filling the river with silt. A homeowner, realizing a dream of living next to a river, cuts all the brush and trees obscuring his view and plants a lawn down to the water's edge. A potato farmer, wanting to take advantage of the sandy soils and intense sun of the Snake River plain, withdraws the equivalent of six feet of rain from the river to put on his acreage each summer. No single action like these was enough to cause any noticeable harm to the salmon. Each new habitat alteration seemed small at the time compared to the abundant numbers of salmon and the collective other effects of civilization. However, incremental damage has been a calamity for salmon habitat. Disturbance levels on a much wider scale than provided by nature have left little habitat that is ideal for salmon. It is tempting to cast blame, as many do, on corporate greed and a purposeful lack of concern for the environment as cause for the salmon's decline. But most of the damage has not been done willfully. Even the Columbia River dams, each one dooming more salmon than any other cause, were built with the idea that all the losses could be made up through artificial propagation in hatcheries. Of course, without the damming of the Columbia River and the logging of the forests and the development of agriculture, there would be no civilization of consequence in the Pacific Northwest to mourn the loss of the salmon. Even the most vocal salmon-saving environmentalist lives in a wood frame house, eats Idaho potatoes, and pays an electric bill still barely two-thirds of the national average. The beneficiaries of Northwest civilization have not intended to kill the salmon, nor have all of their agents, the timber companies, the farmers and the hydroelectric system owners. They all thought that the increment of damage they did to the ecosystem could be absorbed or compensated for through hatcheries. Now that the consequences of these incremental decisions are evident, the tenor of public debate on ecosystem management is changing. When our distant ancestors no longer invested objects and animals with spiritual value, they were able to see themselves as detached from nature. No longer bound up in a web of spiritual relationships with the natural world, they were then free to see in terms of cause and effect, to view the world "objectively." They began to think of the natural world as there to serve humankind's ends rather than humans serving the numinous purposes of the natural world. They believed that the quality of life could be influenced by human action and was not solely at the caprice of the gods. This detachment from nature is so intricately interwoven with our culture that it is difficult to find terms to describe natural phenomena that do not encompass our objectification of the natural world. The study of nature, which for many people originates in a sense of the contribution that nature makes to a person's sense of place in the world, marches quickly away from these personal values as soon as one delves very deeply in the disciplines. Latin taxonomy and inter-relationships according to objective laws leave no room for notions of how nature affects our subjective experience as humans. Despite the rational creation of an objective world on which our civilization has been built, we have still not lost our attachment to the earth. Our lives reflect the tension - often starkly felt - between our modern rationality and our primitive relationship with the natural world. We go out into nature to seek spiritual renewal. Although man is the most gregarious of animals, we harbor a belief that cities are unnatural and unhealthy. We surround ourselves with plants and flowers, both indoors and out, as much as we do with human art. We send our children to summer camp, in the belief that encountering nature will prepare them better for the rigors of adulthood. We bring animals into the household, even though many of them - fish, birds, hamsters, snakes - interact very little with their human keepers. In the dark of winter, we cut down a tree and bring it inside the house and decorate it with lights.
For people in the Pacific Northwest, this connection with nature seems particularly keen. While every region and every state has its scenic beauties, people of the Pacific Northwest take environmental quality more seriously than people almost anywhere else in the country. Although most of the people of the region live in cities, the opportunity for recreation outside the cities is highly valued. If there is a litmus test for most Northwest politicians, it is in being in favor of high environmental quality. The Pacific Northwest does not provide the greatest of scenic spectaculars. The coast is stunning but not as much as Big Sur or Point Reyes in California. The mountains are high, but only Mt. Rainier rivals the Alaskan high peaks or the Sierra Nevada in splendor. Mt. Hood is the highest point in Oregon and complements the Portland skyline, but every other western state has a taller peak. The region's deserts are small and not very dramatic. What may be attractive here is the balance that can be experienced: among mountains, deserts, seashores, and green agricultural valleys. Balance between work and recreation. Balance among the seasons. Balance between the civilization of Portland and Seattle and the nature that abounds outside the urban areas. The economic value of the Pacific Northwest's commercial and recreational salmon industries is now negligible when compared with agriculture, timber, silicon chips, computer software, and sports apparel. There is now almost no commercial harvest on Columbia River salmon stocks and it is very much reduced on Oregon and Washington coastal stocks. The Puget Sound fishery is still active, but nothing like what it was in the past. In fact, the federal government will soon evaluate Puget Sound salmon stocks to decide which qualify for threatened or endangered status. What salmon fishery remains in many areas is exclusively Indian under treaties with the United States or is undertaken by individual sport fishers. The economic value of commercial and recreational fishing cannot justify the money now being spent on restoring Pacific Northwest salmon. The support for salmon recovery comes not just from fishing interests but from the public at large. Even people who do not fish for or eat salmon have become vocal in support of spending public money for salmon protection and recovery. The public feels some kinship with these fish that goes beyond what can be analyzed in terms of self-interest. The public wants to stay connected to the wild heritage from which American civilization was born. The salmon are emblematic of the role of natural forces in the lives of Pacific Northwesterners. To have this spectacular wild creature in our midst means we can maintain the connection to the wild that is within us. Take salmon away, and Pacific Northwesterners lose claim to being able to live within a natural environment. To lose the salmon is to confess that civilization is all-encompassing, that the only nature that can survive is that which is complementary to man's economic impulses, that humankind's connection to the earth must necessarily be sacrificed to the rationality of making maximum use of society's tangible assets, including those provided by nature. Salmon have achieved a new importance of human concern in the Pacific Northwest, not so much for their commercial, recreational, or even scientific value, as from a sense many people have of the spirit of the salmon. Here is an animal which can only be regarded as beautiful in human terms. It has the sleek clean lines of a modern sculpture and is the color of polished silver. It roams the far oceans. It will swim upstream sometimes for over a thousand miles, leaping cascades and waterfalls, to reach the place where it was born. It will fight for a mate and engage in a ritualistic courtship. To reproduce, it will brutalize its physical self and then make the ultimate sacrifice, its flesh providing nourishment for the continuation of the circle of life. Courage, steadfastness, beauty, strength, sacrifice - these are all human ideals. How could we not identify with these qualities? Is it folly to expect that the wild salmon, any more than the grizzly bear and the cougar, can co-exist with an expanding urban populace? It has been said that there are more deer in America than when the Pilgrims landed, because rural homesteads and large-lot suburbs create good habitat and provide freedom from predators. But are the salmon compatible with human development? The evidence is conflicting. Salmon are one of the most resilient and adaptable creatures alive. Despite their instinct to return to their natal stream to spawn, they have enough inclination to stray that they manage to repopulate areas after natural (and even human-induced) disasters have wiped out all habitat for a period of time. After the forty or so Missoula floods of the Pleistocene, that periodically sent walls of water up to a thousand feet high down the Columbia River Gorge and covered the site of Portland with hundreds of feet of water, the salmon somehow recolonized the entire reformed Columbia River basin in the evolutionary blink of an eye of ten thousand years. After Mount St. Helens sent a torrent of hot mud down the Toutle River and into the Cowlitz in 1980, salmon and steelhead quickly came back to spawn and reproduce. The Pacific Northwest is the most geologically active region in the contiguous United States. The surface of the land is some of the newest on earth, yet the salmon were able to adapt and survive and occupy almost all the available habitat. What we do not know is twofold: how much habitat degradation salmon can take and still survive through generations and what it takes to restore the habitat that has been damaged (beyond removing all works of man and returning in a century or two). We have never been successful in restoring self-sustaining runs of salmon to a watershed from which they were extirpated. It is not known how much of this difficulty is due to our never having restored a damaged watershed sufficiently to allow salmon to return, as against the unique genetic characteristics of the stocks of salmon in each watershed that cannot be replaced. The Columbia River:Ecosystem in Crisis The Columbia River once was the jewel in the crown of salmon-producing rivers, with consistent annual returns of 10 to 15 million fish, almost all of which were valuable species like chinook (king), coho (silver), sockeye (red) and steelhead. When the commercial salmon fishing industry began in earnest on the Columbia in the 1870's, its focus was almost exclusively on the spring/summer chinook, valued for its abundance and the flavor its fat reserves give its flesh. Over two million spring/summer chinook were harvested from the Columbia at the fishery's peak in the 1880's. Only when the spring/summer chinook harvest began to decline due to overfishing in the 1890's, did the industry turn to the "lesser"stocks and species, such as fall chinook and sockeye. Since the heyday of the Columbia River salmon fishery, ecosystem changes have prevented the return of such abundance, even though the salmon fishery is now tightly regulated to ensure against overfishing. Dams are believed to be the principal cause of the salmon's decline, having transformed the once mighty Columbia and Snake Rivers into a series of lakes from the headwaters to tidewater with only a few short stretches of free-flowing water remaining. With the completion of Grand Coulee dam in 1941, a dam too high for effective fish ladders, the giant "June hog"spring chinook - often reaching one hundred pounds - were closed out of their spawning grounds and shortly died out. Only the northwest coast of North America has produced a freshwater fish of this size in such abundance. With the finishing of each new dam in the Columbia, major areas of habitat were altered for the salmon in a matter of weeks. In the era between 1938 with the completion of Bonneville Dam and 1975 when Lower Granite Dam was finished on the Snake, almost the entire mainstem of the Snake and Columbia Rivers was turned into flat water. In the Snake, only the Hells Canyon area is free-flowing, protected by its inaccessibility until the 1970's and then preserved when the environmental movement came to the fore to lobby for federal protection under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. In the Columbia, only the Hanford Reach in central Washington remains dam-free, protected by its proximity to the most secret military land in the nation during the Cold War era, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. There is still major spawning activity in these free-flowing stretches, particularly in the Hanford Reach, where a run of forty thousand fall chinook finds a place to spawn. But even the Hanford Reach is threatened by nearby agricultural development and by the long-term lack of new gravel finding its way into the river due to the upstream dams. Originally, it was thought that fish ladders for adults migrating upstream would be enough to ensure that salmon could get to the habitat that was left. Hatcheries, primarily in the lower Columbia below Bonneville Dam, were expected to compensate for the habitat lost due to dams like Grand Coulee and Hells Canyon, which were too high for any practicable fish ladder. The fish and wildlife management agencies signed off on the dams with the expectation that the effects of the dams would be mitigated by the construction of fish ladders and hatcheries. Paralleling the string of dams on the river are now dozens of salmon hatcheries that pour smolts into the river each year. Since the time when the dam and hatchery strategies were implemented in the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's, this approach has been rendered obsolete. It has become clear that none of the technological fixes, starting with providing passage for adults moving upstream and including hatcheries, has been successful in maintaining the salmon runs of the Columbia. On average, only about a million salmon, 80% of them hatchery fish, return to the Columbia each year, less than 10% of historic abundance. Furthermore, three quarters of the original 200 Columbia River natural salmon stocks are either extinct or in decline. Only three stocks (Hanford Reach fall chinook, Lewis River fall chinook, and Wenatchee Lake sockeye) are currently at or above two-thirds of their historic abundance. It is now known that downstream passage in the Columbia is more perilous for the juvenile migrants to the ocean than upstream passage is for the returning adults. In the early years of the hydrosystem, before storage dams in the headwaters saved the spring snowmelt for generating electricity in the fall and before extra turbines were installed to capture higher than average flows, smolts migrating downstream in the spring rode a high natural flow over dams through the spillways. When enough generators were installed for most spring flow to go through the turbines, 15% of the juvenile fish were killed by the turbines at each dam. With the mortality associated with passing through the flatwater reservoirs, upstream smolts by the time they had reached below Bonneville Dam, suffered 75% to 90% mortality. The solution devised by the salmon engineers was to build more hatcheries to pump out more salmon smolts, particularly in the Snake Basin, after construction of the four Lower Snake dams ending in 1975. Now 200 million hatchery-reared smolts head downstream each spring. Although in some areas hatcheries have successfully produced abundant fish for harvest, particularly in good ocean conditions, this accomplishment has come with a price. Hatcheries are successful only with heavy doses of antibiotic and other drugs and slow manipulation of genetics over generations to breed in characteristics of fish that survive well as juveniles in a crowded captive environment. These are not necessarily the attributes that contribute to the long-term resilience of fish that must migrate downstream, survive in the ocean and then make their way over dams back to the hatchery. Despite the occasional successes of the massive hatchery program, hatcheries have been unable to replace the numbers of salmon lost to dams and habitat destruction. The truly successful artificial production programs have been in Canada, Chile, and Norway, where salmon are raised in pens through their whole life cycle and harvested directly without ever having been released in the wild. As a result of this success, world prices for salmon have plummeted, and there is no shortage of these fish for human consumption. Fewer fish and lower prices have been a double blow to the Northwest salmon fishing industry. When even hatchery fish failed to return in abundance, the Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for the dams, tried two new ideas: first, capturing as many downstream migrants as possible and barging them to below Bonneville Dam, and second, putting partial screens over the turbine intakes (the hydraulics are too strong to permit full coverage) to bypass the smolts still in the river around the turbines. These are expensive and often ineffective options that require the design of one-of-a-kind equipment to be installed and operated under water. When fish ladders, hatcheries, barging, and screening failed to halt the decline of Columbia River salmon, fish managers in the mid-1990's recommended releasing the spring runoff instead of holding it behind storage dams for generating electricity in the fall and winter. In addition, a high percentage, over 50% of the nighttime flow at some dams, was ordered to be spilled over the dam instead of passing through the fish-killing power turbines. The cost of all this hardware, in addition to the power losses from changing the flow regime of the river and spilling large quantities over the dams, is over $400 million a year and rising. Nevertheless, the success of these measures is doubtful. Analysis of the results to date indicates that at best they will prevent the weak stocks from declining further; recovery may depend upon more drastic measures. Wild Fish Even if the hatchery program worked to produce abundant salmon, the public has come to place value on wild fish. The new force behind the struggle to save wild fish has many sources. Hatcheries need infusions of wild fish to ensure against genetic inbreeding. Recreational fishers believe that wild fish provide a better fight when hooked. Gourmets claim hatchery fish have a distinct and weaker flavor. Hatchery fish are believed to compete for food with wild fish in the stream and estuary and can infect other fish with hatchery bred diseases. Not all hatchery salmon are harvested or return to the hatchery; some stray into the rivers and spawn with wild fish, raising concerns about genetic contamination of the wild fish, particularly when the hatchery fish originate from stocks of a faraway river basin.
Forty to fifty years ago, when dam building in the Pacific Northwest was receiving the strongest political support, it was inconceivable that the American public would seek to restore wolves into national parks or urge expenditure of government money to protect grizzly bears. These creatures were almost universally reviled as dangerous predators. We as a people shared then a belief that technology would deliver answers that were superior to nature. Physicians touted infant formula as superior nutrition to mothers' breast milk. We believed that synthetic fibers would soon produce better clothing than the old options of cotton, wool, and silk. Just as we could produce better livestock and poultry, technology surely could produce a better salmon than the ones that had to depend on nature for survival. Now, we comprehend more of the complex balance of natural processes and our own role in nature. We understand how difficult it is to produce a product, live or synthetic, that duplicates, let alone is superior, to the qualities that have been developed through eons of evolutionary change. Our irrational side, too, is at work, making connection with the wild creature that has such a remarkable life history. We appreciate the value of wildness and we seek to preserve it. The federal Endangered Species Act reflects this public value placed on preservation of our natural heritage. In 1991, the federal government placed three stocks of Snake River salmon on the threatened and endangered species list. One of these stocks, the Redfish Lake sockeye, which travels nine hundred miles over eight dams to central Idaho, is so diminished that in recent years sometimes only one adult fish has returned. Like the California condor, the only possible strategy for saving Redfish Lake sockeye has been to put it in a captive breeding program to try to raise enough fish to safely release in the wild. The natural salmon ecosystem in the Columbia Basin has been so radically altered by the dams that scientists cannot agree on the root causes of the salmon's decline. Is it problems in the reservoirs: too much time to be eaten by predators, or not enough food, or too little flow to get them to the ocean in time? Is it problems in passing the dams? Do the fish bypass systems cause more problems than they solve? Does the barging system cause too much stress to the fish? Do they lose the imprinting of the route home by being carried downstream? Or have the dams, with their unnatural flow regimes and capturing of nutrients and sediments, altered even the condition of the estuary and the ocean at the river mouth to the point where fish are vulnerable to starvation and predators? Is it even possible that poor ocean feeding conditions are responsible for all the recent decline, and everything that is being done at the dams will be enough to restore the fish once ocean conditions turn around? Or are we witnessing a simultaneous but unrelated collapse of both hatchery populations, for unknown reasons, and wild fish due to loss of habitat? These are difficult questions to answer, because there are so many variables to analyze in an ecosystem as complicated as the Columbia River. It is not possible to follow a six-inch fish for very far in the river and not at all in the ocean because of the limitations of even state-of-the-art miniature electronic tracking devices. It is almost impossible to see what is causing a young salmon to die. Some scientists are postulating that the Columbia River problems are so intractable that only the breaching of some dams can save the salmon. Does the Pacific Northwest love the salmon so much that it would unbuild some of the prized Columbia River hydropower system? While it may seem doubtful that the political will would be present for such a radical step, this option is being discussed as being more and more necessary if the Columbia River salmon are to be rescued. Things Look Different on the Oregon Coast On the ocean coasts of the Pacific Northwest, salmon runs have declined almost as much as on the Columbia, to the point where several stocks have been considered for threatened or endangered species listing by the federal government. Here it is not dams that have decimated the salmon runs but a combination of over-harvest of adult fish and the destruction of freshwater habitat. One example is the coho salmon of the Oregon coast. Coho hatch in the winter and then spend over a year in fresh water, using side channels, beaver ponds, and flooded fields for refuge from the high water. During summer drought, they look for the coolest water in the stream, often in the holes below obstructions in the mainstem of the river, where a spring might support a colony of young salmon. In their second spring they migrate to the ocean, generally holding closer to shore and to their home river than the far-ranging chinook. Their tendency to migrate in shallow water near shore makes them particularly easy to catch in hook-and-line ocean fisheries. For decades, coho were the staple of the charter boat and commercial fishery operating out of Oregon coastal ports, with sometimes 90% of the returning adults allowed to be caught. In their second fall at sea, coho return to their natal stream, searching for clean gravel in low gradient creeks. (Steelhead use the gravels in the higher gradient areas closer to the headwaters. Chinook usually spawn in the mainstem river.) Because juvenile coho stay in freshwater so long and use so much of the available habitat, they are vulnerable to any degree of habitat destruction taking place in the watershed. A winter flood will blast them out to sea and a premature death, unless the stream has enough complexity to provide calm water refuges from high flows. Sedimentation that fills in the deep holes will make it harder for the fish to find cool water in the hot summer. Removal of bank vegetation will cut off at the source the beginning of the food chain on which the salmon depend. There were once as many as 1.4 million wild adult coho returning to the Oregon coastal streams each year. By the mid-1990's, fewer than 100,000 were returning, sometimes as low as 53,000, scattered over dozens of streams. These low numbers were abetted by the record string of El Niņo ocean events that turned the ocean into a sterile feeding ground for young salmon and brought heavy predators of salmon, such as mackerel, into the warmer waters. In 1995, the federal government proposed listing the Oregon coastal coho, as well as all the California stocks of coho, as threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). While listing a species gives the government in the form of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) power to control most activities that threaten the species, rarely has that authority been used on private property. In the columbia Basin, the Snake River chinook and sockeye have been listed since 1991, but NMFS has not taken any enforcement actions against private property owners, contenting itself with requiring other federal agencies - like the Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service - to do within their authorities what they can to preserve the species. With the Forest Service implementing its own salmon saving plan that has reduced Northwest timber harvest dramatically, NMFS has concentrated on getting the Corps and the Bonneville Power Administration to reduce the impacts of hydropower on migrating salmon in the Columbia and Snake. Timber cutting, road-building, illegal water diversions, and cattle breaking down the streambanks and destroying riparian vegetation have persisted on private lands along Snake River tributaries without NMFS raising an objection. Nevertheless, in Oregon coastal coho habitat, where over half of the land is privately owned, the thought of federal listing of a species raises a specter. Theoretically, once a listing has been made, NMFS has the authority to consider any activity which harms salmon to be a "taking"of the species, prohibited under the ESA. Furthermore, NMFS has hinted that it might use a little known provision of the ESA, section 4(d), which allows the federal government general authority to pass rules for the conservation of listed species. NMFS could use a 4(d) rule to give the federal government the unprecedented authority to regulate directly activity on private land, even without proof that a taking has occurred. While Oregonians have become accustomed to state land-use laws, federal controls would likely not contain the local input that has allowed the state program to receive at least grudging acceptance in rural areas. The proposed federal listing of coho raised an alarm among many coastal zone landowners. The poor state of coastal coho stocks in Oregon and the proposed federal threatened species listing prompted Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber to initiate an ambitious coho restoration plan. Coho recovery and other salmon restoration plans had been started at many other times in the past as the salmon decline had become evident, all with poor results. Kitzhaber, however, was determined to make a difference by comprehensively addressing all the causes of the coho's decline and bringing the full authority of state government to bear on the problems. He challenged each state agency to develop measures it could implement to assist salmon recovery. He asked habitat landowners to make sacrifices to restore conditions salmon needed in the watershed. The timber industry joined the effort by agreeing to tax themselves $13 million as part of the Governor's $30 million biennial salmon restoration budget. Timber company landowners also volunteered a decade long $130 million program to retire and rework logging roads on their lands, so that the roads would contribute less sediment to the streams and have less risk of catastrophic landslide. The result of Kitzhaber's effort was a 2700 page document that caused the federal government to decide in April, 1997, not to list most Oregon coastal coho as a threatened species.
Most government programs begin with an effort organized at the political center - usually either a state capital or Washington, D.C. Someone identifies the problem and has an idea for how the problem could be addressed through a government program. Program design takes place at the center, which may include some pilot efforts in localities, with high levels of central attention. With the results of the pilot program, designers scale up the effort and deploy it, delegating it to local agencies with elaborate central oversight or using personnel from the central agency itself. Recent salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest have recognized that this model of program organization is inappropriate for a problem this complex. Salmon populations are low because of myriad circumstances that are often different from one small watershed to another, or from the top of one watershed to the bottom. Identification of the problems and their solutions on each stream reach cannot come out of Olympia, Salem or Washington, D.C. The salmon recovery effort must be primarily local. Beginning in the early 1990's, citizens in a few areas tired of the environmental conflict that had shattered their communities for the last decade. The battles over federal forest policy that reached an apex with the lawsuits over protection of the northern spotted owl separated neighbor from neighbor all over the rural Northwest. In the Applegate Valley in southwestern Oregon, a few citizens felt that the loss of community was too high a price to pay for the environmental conflict, and they began a semi-organized dialogue in order to foster mutual understanding of each side's point of view. What they discovered was that people in the valley shared values about the environment that differed only around some very specific conflicts, such as federal timber policy. There was community agreement about many issues, particularly about the need to protect timber and farm land from development and to restore the watershed so that it would once again support healthy populations of salmon. They began what has become known as the Applegate Partnership to work on solving the problems on which they can agree.
Lack of stream structure, lack of shade, wasteful water withdrawal, silt from logging roads, contamination from farm chemicals or livestock, road culverts which block salmon's access to spawning streams, livestock in the streams, erosion from gravel pits, erosion from agriculture lands, etc., all cause conditions inhospitable to salmon. No one of these problems usually ruins a salmon stream by itself, but together they make most watersheds far less hospitable to salmon than they could be. No state-run program could identify all these problems, let alone organize the effort to address each one. That is the strength of the watershed association, which draws up a plan identifying the factors which limit salmon production in the watershed and the general approach to how each will be addressed. Then, its watershed board will meet to decide how the funds at the association's disposal will be spent. While it is desirable to spend the dollars first where the most good for salmon will result, that project may not be possible, due to lack of matching funds or an unwilling landowner. The associations make their choices based upon decisions about which projects will best use the resources available at the time (fencing materials, labor, heavy equipment, etc.), which projects will bring in a landowner likely to influence others, and which projects create synergy when combined with others. Many rural landowners in the West are suspicious of any efforts made on behalf of the environment. They do not like government personnel or "do-gooders"on their land, scrutinizing and potentially criticizing their operations. It often takes a great deal of persuading to bring a landowner to the point of cooperating in a habitat restoration project. It is the genius of the watershed restoration effort that it is local people talking to local people that brings about cooperation. Out-of-work fishermen employed by the watershed association recruit ranchers and dairymen to allow fence-building projects on their land to keep cattle out of streams. There is no passion as great as that of the converted, and one cooperating farmer or rancher is often the best advocate for bringing other landowners into the program. The Oregon salmon recovery plan relies heavily on these local watershed restoration efforts. There is scientific dispute as to how much these efforts can contribute to salmon recovery, particularly while much logging, farming and land development goes on as before. However, what may be the most significant positive result for salmon from these local efforts may be the development of community ownership of their salmon resource, not in a property sense but in a political sense. Local community members have decided that salmon are important to them, and they are willing to work and sacrifice for their preservation and restoration. They will exert peer pressure on landowners who do not take care of habitat. They will work with other authorities at the state and federal level to bring the best capabilities of each level of government to bear on the problems. If it turns out that the present effort does not bring about salmon recovery, the local people will look for other solutions that will. In the past, the environmental debate has been presented primarily as a struggle between urban values, backed by the federal and some state governments, and rural values, reflected in the action of local people and local governments. The hostility of local communities to the federal actions on timber lands to protect the northern spotted owl is the classic example of this division. That dichotomy, in the face of the decline of the salmon, has proven false. Local people have shown they want to restore the salmon stocks that they believe are a community asset. It has been the state and federal governments that have been late in understanding the strength of this local sentiment and have had to learn a new way of relating to private landowners. Providing technical and financial assistance to local efforts and then getting out of the way has been more productive than the old methods of imposing a new regulatory scheme on hostile local people. Whither Salmon? It is easy to be pessimistic about the future of Pacific Northwest salmon. Decimated by dams and injured habitat, the once resilient wild salmon face decline and even extinction in many areas. The mild climate and open spaces of the Pacific Northwest, as well as its reputation for community spirit, are attracting population at a faster rate than all but a few areas of the United States. Human beings over centuries have tended to prefer the same habitat as the salmon. The bottoms of valleys along the rivers and streams were the first areas settled and are still preferred areas for agriculture and urban development. The strategies used for preservation of other species like the spotted owl, the wolf, and the grizzly bear - setting aside tracts of undeveloped land remote from most human settlement - will not work to preserve the salmon. The destruction of the salmon is taking place literally right in Northwesterners' backyards. The engine of Pacific Northwest economic development - the Columbia River hydropower system - is at the heart of the most difficult salmon problem. This most prized engineering masterpiece has come at the expense of once magnificent salmon runs that nourished generations of aboriginal settlers and then enriched the Europeans who succeeded them. On top of all that Indians have sacrificed, the loss to their culture from the death of the salmon is incalculable. That this animal which ranged the far oceans and then came a thousand miles upstream to reproduce is now on the edge of extinction is an almost unthinkable injury to the spirit of both Indians and non-Indians alike. Whether anything can be done to rescue the many depressed Columbia River wild salmon stocks is an open question, even with removal of some of the dams. Outside of the Columbia Basin, there is more hope. We can identify and control the causes for the salmon decline without having to make billion dollar gambles, as on the Columbia. Harvest reductions, hatchery reforms, and habitat conservation and restoration are likely to have a positive effect on salmon numbers. The largest remaining question is whether the human populace can accept the limitations on incremental damage to habitat, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time compared to the economic benefits. When local people value salmon as a community asset, there is reason for optimism that they will make the right choices. Salmon have been as much a part of the Pacific Northwest as the tall, dense forests and snow-capped volcanoes. The people of the Northwest value the connection to nature that life here can afford them, including the contact still with wildness - untouched wilderness, rivers foaming with rapids, and almost all the wildlife species that were here when the Europeans arrived. The salmon is at the heart of this Pacific Northwest wild heritage. If we let the wild salmon slide into extinction, something of the unique spiritual quality of this landscape will go with them.
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