Why try to save wild salmon?

Here are some people's views

By Theresa Novak

For centuries, the muscular fish whose life flashes between woodland streams and ocean depths has embodied the bold health and vitality of the Pacific Northwest. For the past few decades, scientists and average citizens alike have watched as more than 100 of the major West Coast salmon runs have gone extinct. Now, nine of 10 remaining wild runs are threatened. Seven out of 10 salmon swimming in Oregon streams were born in a fish hatchery, not a stream. On Aug. 3, 1998, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that coastal coho would be added to the list of species under protection of the Endangered Species Act. Already listed are fall, spring and summer chinook, sockeye, West Coast coho, West Coast steelhead, Umpqua River sea-run cutthroat trout, Mid-Columbia River summer chinook and Deer Creek summer steelhead.

Middle school students examine an Alsea River salmon with fisheries biologist Carl Schreck. Oregon Trout, a fish conservation group, sponsored the tour.

The state of Oregon has developed its own salmon and watershed recovery plan, which it would like to put into action to save coastal coho, avoiding the strong regulations that would come with a formal federal listing. The matter now is before a federal appeals court, with a ruling likely in 1999.

Yet amid all of the impassioned talk surrounding salmon, many Oregonians are asking a good question: How can salmon be near extinction and still be sold as cat food for 60 cents a can?

They hear reports that the cost of saving salmon could mean higher electricity rates, job losses, crop losses, increased wood prices, more land-use restrictions and limits on personal freedom.

Despite such reports, public opinion polls indicate that Northwesterners favor saving salmon. A poll released in December 1997 by the state's largest newspaper, The Oregonian, indicated that 85 percent of the 514 Oregonians polled think it's important to preserve salmon runs. About 60 percent believe improving salmon runs should be a higher priority than other commercial uses of salmon rivers. About 38 percent are willing to pay $5 or more a month to help salmon.

But when it comes to taking bold steps on behalf of salmon, such as breaching dams, urban and rural Oregonians have different responses:

In the larger cities of Portland and the Mid-Willamette Valley, 41 percent support breaching or removing dams. But in eastern Oregon, where agriculture depends on irrigation and dams, that percentage drops to 29 percent who favor such a move.

Some ask a good question: Wouldn't it make more sense simply to give up the idea of restoring the natural life cycle of salmon and concentrate on improving production of salmon in hatcheries?

Henry Yuen, a fish scientist for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, said that the distinction between wild and hatchery fish is debatable after 50 years of aggressive hatchery rearing and intermingling. He suggests that salmon runs can be restored with genetically selected hatchery fish.

"Hatchery fish have descended from wild fish," Yuen said "They have the diversity within them."

But the problem is that hatchery-supplemented salmon runs also have been declining sharply in the past twenty years. Further, Oregon's Wild Fish Management Policy is based on the assumption that some wild fish runs still remain and should be preserved.

It is not a clear case of either hatchery salmon or wild salmon, said Robin Waples, the director of the conservation biology division for the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

"There is no question that there still are wild salmon populations that have relatively little hatchery influence," Waples said "But it is also true that we've seen hatchery fish almost totally replace natural populations."

The Endangered Species Act requires that wild populations of fish be rescued from the brink of extinction whenever possible. Overshadowing whatever philosophical, scientific, ecological, economic, historic or cultural objections people may have to that idea is a powerful answer:

Knowingly allowing wild salmon runs to go extinct violates federal law.

The 1973 Endangered Species Act requires an all-out recovery effort to save species in trouble from extinction. Once set into motion, a listing under the ESA can have the same effect as it did in 1991, when the listing of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species required changes in forest land management to preserve the old-growth forest habitat of the bird.

Since salmon roam between shallow creeks and the deep oceans, their recovery could mean more changes in human activity everywhere from urban driveways to forests, farms, rivers, coasts and the ocean.

The decline is a concern close to the hearts of many Native Americans in the Northwest. They gave up a great deal to assure that they would always have salmon.

In 1855, the Columbia River tribes signed a treaty giving the U.S. government control of more than 40 million acres of the Northwest in exchange for assurances of their safety, health and continuing access to their traditional salmon fishing areas.

Losing the wild salmon runs will mean a loss of cultural identity, tribal leaders say.

Having watersheds that are able to support salmon means having healthy watersheds and an appealing image for Oregon.

In 1972 when Oregon's former governor, the late Tom McCall, wanted to illustrate the restored health of the Willamette River to a reporter from National Geographic magazine, he showed her salmon spawning in the creek behind the governor's residence in Salem. The media-savvy governor knew that image would illustrate the successful reclamation of the Willamette River better than anything he could say.

Healthy salmon are a sign of a robust, livable business climate as well, according to Duncan Wyse, the executive director of the Oregon Business Council. The group represents the chief executive officers of Oregon's 45 largest companies. Saving the salmon is a practical decision that the CEOs endorsed two years ago.

"(The salmon) are an indicator of the Northwest's biodiversity--its health," Wyse said. Companies locate in the Northwest mainly because it has a reputation as a wholesome place to live and work. Lose the wild salmon, and Oregon's livable reputation is damaged as well. Keeping the salmon is sound business that will take hard-headed management.

"We have to rethink harvest policies both in the ocean and on rivers, so we won't have sole reliance on hatcheries as our strategy (for saving salmon)," Wyse said.

The loss of salmon already has had a significant economic impact, said natural resource economist Hans Radtke. In his 1996 study, Radtke calculated the cost of the salmon decline in the Columbia River Basin compared to the days when catches of 8 million fish were possible.

As of 1996, the decline of fisheries had seen the loss of 25,000 family-wage jobs, according to Radtke. In Columbia River Basin communities, this translated to about $500 million in lost earning power as reflected in closed businesses and people moving elsewhere for work.

In the Klamath Basin in Southern Oregon, which encompasses fisheries in northern California as well, Radtke estimates job losses at more than 1,600 family-wage jobs and economic losses of up to $32 million a year. About 60 percent of those losses were in Oregon.

Ken Currens, a fisheries geneticist for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission in Washington, said losing salmon amounts to losing the reason why the Pacific Northwest is different from places where the green primordial earth has retreated into memory.

"My best reason (for saving salmon) is that they have been part of everything we think of as the Northwest for hundreds of thousands of years," Currens said. "If we value that landscape, if we value all the things that go into that, salmon are really a key part of that picture."

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