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Fish and Wildlife Spawns New Hope for Salmon

by Mike Layton

A new policy for managing what's left of the once mighty salmon runs that choked rivers of the Northwest has been blessed by the State Fish and Wildlife Commission, but can it survive the special interest waterfalls ahead?

Touted as a last attempt to avoid federal intervention, the plan calls for stiff new controls on land uses in the salmon's environment.

It is probably the route to survival for the salmon - if last month's preliminary approval holds - or the end of the salmon as a significant regional resource if it flops.

Salmon have been a metaphor for something else, a debate among various bickering, elbowing groups versus each other.

Commercial fishermen thought the salmon belonged to them and exploited them with little regard for the future: the teeming millions would last forever. Just like the forests.

As the Northwest filled up with people and more of them experienced the thrill of catching the big, powerful fish and catches declined, sportsmen began challenging commercial fishers.

Never has the fish been seen as something more than a resource, an entity in his own right, the way the Indians saw him.

The new draft Environmental Impact Statement on Wild Salmonid Policy injects a bold declaration of independence and, for the first time in a hundred plus years of debate, a philosophical element. Nothing else has worked; why not try philosophy?

Sideshows to this main event were forestry and agriculture. Loggers felled trees down to stream banks, eliminating cool shade and heating the water beyond the tolerance of eggs and young salmon. Logging debris denuded hillsides and choked streams. Erosion followed and the soil silted over the eggs, smothering them.

Land speculators and small town boosters persuaded politicians and eager engineers in federal agencies that Eastern Washington would "blossom like a rose" if dams spread river water to the arid desert. Hydroelectric power would light cities, towns, farms and factories, cheaply.

And blossom it did. But did anyone wonder, when Woody Guthrie was singing hymns to Columbia River dams, what would happen to the salmon whose migrations were blocked?

Water rights were contests between users, chiefly one group of farmers against another, and their lawyers. Bonneville and other dams drowned quaint Indian fishing spots and the larger public said "too bad" and went its way.

Commercial fishing increased. So did sports angling. Indian tribes began demanding a share of what had been theirs only, and in the 1960s the courts sided with them, to the outrage of the other "users."

Still no one asked the crucial question: who speaks for the salmon, for its existence, its right to a place to spawn and a route to the sea and back, its progeny to spawn once more?

A salmon possessed a resource value equal to a sack of potatoes from the Columbia River drainage.

The new plan, which the commission will vote up or down next month, calls for smaller catches for fishers, and for wider tree buffers along streams, a recommendation already under attack by the timber industry.

Forest debris that once sheltered salmon eggs have now, because of clearcutting, "become destructive mobile battering rams" in the rivers, the statement says.

"Is anyone willing to take a fresh, objective look at selective (uneven age) harvesting (of trees)?" it asks. "Is the issue of spreading each watershed's harvests out more equally from decade to decade still
off the table' in terms of even being considered by Timber, Fish and Wildlife"? That's a reference to a plan of a few years back that was supposed to end all this bickering.

The draft of the new plan calls for cutting back hatchery fish, condemned by many biologists as a threat to wild salmon.

It's an unusual document, far bolder than the normal self-serving state agency report. A dramatic departure from the norm is its acceptance of past failures.

Chief of these was not recognizing wild salmonid as a client, says the document, whose primary author is Bern Shanks, director of the State Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The former Department of Fisheries, says a recommended alternative justification statement, allowed fishing at a level where "we could not prove to someone's satisfaction that unwise use of the resource was occurring.

"We habitually cited benefits to certain user groups as reasons for our (poor) actions. For chinook and coho salmon, we have now failed to provide sustainable surplus fish production to these same groups."

Translated, Shanks is saying that past fisheries officials failed to stand up for what they knew was right in the face of political and economic pressures.

"We know that in order to be successful, the resource must be our exclusive client."

The statement is a veritable salmon textbook. Who, for instance, realized that salmon, in their three or four years at sea growing to be lunkers, store nitrogen which their spawned-out carcasses release into Washington's nitrogen-starved forests?

There are a lot of things we don't know when we think we know everything.

Mike Layton is a staff writer for the Green Pages.

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