COLUMN ONE : Salmon Spawn a New Crisis : Dwindling numbers and fading strength threaten to add the fish to the list of endangered species. But some question if the Northwest will pay the price to save the animals.

And now the salmon . . .

Like the buffalo, the grizzly bear, bald eagle, sea otter, spotted owl and any number of other creatures who found themselves weakened and cornered and staring into the gun barrel of human progress, the time has come to decide the fate of the storied wild salmon here on the West’s greatest river.

Destiny, in the form of the Endangered Species Act, has called for the question, hard as flint and knotty as pine: Has America the will to save these renowned fish of the Columbia River watersheds?

Can it afford to?

Can it afford not to?

From the beginning, salmon have nourished the good life of the Northwest, the very symbol of abundance and vitality, a squirming, red-fleshed crop of plenty straight from the artery of Mother Nature--fish tinged with mystery, steeped in poignancy and delicious when grilled lightly over alder.

But now, perhaps half of the distinct “runs,” or populations, of the wild fish are extinct on the Columbia and its main tributary, the Snake River. Several teeter on the brink, and the rest could be close behind.

Residents of the Northwest are being roused from complacency to the sobering realization that perhaps the environmental challenge of the 1990s is upon them.

“As a civilization we are at a crossroads. We are on the verge of great mass extinctions of species. If we cannot turn it about here in the Northwest with the spotted owl and the salmon, where on Earth will we turn it around?” asked John Osborne, a Spokane physician and outspoken environmentalist.

By many dimensions, this is a challenge to dwarf the noisy battle over saving the spotted owl and its home in the ancient forests.

For one thing, salmon fishing is itself an important economic resource to the region. It has a powerful constituency of sportsmen, commercial fishermen and native Indian tribes as well as naturalists.

Perhaps $1 billion has been spent in the last decade or so to try to save the Columbia River salmon. No one here wears T-shirts mocking the salmon the way they do the owl.

This will not be a matter of wrestling a single industry, even an important one like the timber business, to the mat to save a species.

The Columbia River and its tributaries are the most heavily developed hydroelectric system in the world. The cheap, plentiful and clean electricity--produced by damming water and then funneling it through turbines--and the abundant irrigation water produced along the way form the backbone of the Northwest economy.

Altering or interrupting this intricate, multibillion-dollar system to assist the salmon could have major consequences all over the West--on everything from the price of Washington apples to summer electricity rates in Los Angeles and billions of dollars of commerce in between.

There appears to be hardly any middle ground. The industrial bounty of the river is as critical to the day-to-day life of the region as it is stubbornly irreconcilable with the salmon’s rhythmic journeys--starting in delicate streams as far as 700 miles inland, out to the Pacific and then back again to spawn.

Last year, only two wild Snake River sockeye salmon, previously numbering in the countless thousands, struggled around the dams to try to spawn in Idaho. This summer, only one heroic but doomed fish was counted at a midpoint way station.

“Where are Salmon? Nowhere in Oregon,” said a headline in the Portland Oregonian newspaper last month in the middle of a disappointing fishing season.

In Yellow Pine, Ida., the giant 60- and 70-pound native chinook salmon have declined 90% in the last quarter of a century.

“They used to say you couldn’t drive a team of horses across the river. . . . There were so many fish they would scare the horses,” recalled Don Anderson.

Anderson is the regional fisheries manager for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. He counted only 294 redds, or spawning nests, in the gravel of an important tributary this summer. The number is distressing, Anderson says, considering “half of all the salmon produced in Idaho come from here.”

Overall, the number of salmon returning to spawn in the Columbia watershed has dropped at least 80% from historic averages of 11 million or more. Today, the best estimate is an annual run of 2.5 million fish. And, of the 2.5 million, perhaps only 10% to 20% are wild. The remainder are weaker, more vulnerable hatchery stocks.

With 14 dams on the 1,240-mile Columbia and 55 others on its tributaries, including the 1,040-mile Snake, this is hardly a river at all any more, but rather a chain of lakes built through 100 years of backbreaking effort. Except at the mouth, only 44 miles of the main Columbia runs free in the United States today.

Seventy percent of the Northwest’s electric power comes from the river--12,000 megawatts--plus seasonal surges that are sent as surplus to California and Arizona. Great dams named Bonneville and Grand Coulee help keep electric rates in the Northwest 40% below the national average without air pollution or radioactivity.

Much of the region’s industrial development, including the power-gulping aluminum industry, has built up around this low-cost electricity. And irrigation water diverted off the river has transformed the deserts of Oregon, Washington and Idaho into vast farmland.

It’s easy to see the kind of angst brewing over the thought of disrupting the “business” of the river for any reason, including the salmon.

Yet, virtually everyone realizes change is necessary and probably not optional.

The Shoshone-Bannock Indian tribes and Oregon Trout, a conservationist organization, forced the issue this year, reluctantly filing petitions seeking federal government protection for five wild salmon runs, or distinct groups of fish, under the Endangered Species Act. These are the Snake River sockeye, the lower Columbia River coho, and the summer, fall and spring Columbia chinook.

Although there is some disagreement about the definition of a specific run of fish, it is estimated that there are some 200 such separate stocks of salmon remaining in the river. Another 220 stocks have died out in the last century of river development, according to Oregon Trout.

It will be a year before the National Marine Fisheries Service finishes its review and decides whether to list the five runs of fish as threatened or, the more serious step, as endangered. Then it could take up to another year to devise a protection and recovery plan for the salmon.

All involved agree that seeking intervention under the Endangered Species Act is a drastic step. As the fight over listing the spotted owl in Northwest forests attests, the forces set in motion under the act can have uncontainable and, some would say, single-minded consequences.

No one in this region wants to repeat the brawl over the owl. Loggers and environmentalists were polarized from the start in that one. In the case of the salmon, the stakes are so high that few can bear the thought of relinquishing their futures to a court or Congress.

Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.) summoned virtually every interested party to the negotiating table this autumn, and he hired the professional services of The Mediation Institute of Woodland Hills, Calif., to try to design a plan to save the fish. The idea is for this group to be ready to offer its proposal just as soon as the salmon are listed as threatened.

“This will define our future for generations to come,” Hatfield said.

The group held its first meeting recently in Portland, Ore., amid tentative expressions of hope, and some undercurrents of suspicion.

The chief suspicion: The Hatfield group will inevitably come to the conclusion that the wild salmon cannot be saved without catastrophic economic consequences.

“I fear its purpose is to compile the documentation for an end-run to amend the Endangered Species Act--that the economic consequences are just too great and the act has to be changed,” said Craig J. Gehrke of the Idaho Wilderness Society in Boise.

The countervailing hope: Much is known about the salmon and what the fish need, and widespread consensus exists to save them.

“There is a lot of fear of the dark,” said Al Wright, who represents utility companies of the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee. “But I am optimistic there is a way to help these weak stocks in a manner that doesn’t tear everyone’s economy apart.”

The flow of water is the crux of the problem--for fish, for electricity users and for farmers dependent on irrigation.

The fish hatch in fresh water, usually small, gravel-bottom tributaries. Some species, however, choose riverbeds or lakes. The young fish, called smolts, then are flushed by current downriver into the ocean, where they live and grow for two or more years.

Then, in one of nature’s most theatrical displays, the mature salmon return up the rivers of their births to spawn again and die.

Dams impede their progress in both directions, although fish ladders--a series of ascending pools--can provide an upstream passageway on all but the highest dams. Downstream is the problem for the smolts. The still water of reservoirs simply moves too slowly to flush them downstream. They end up maturing in fresh water and then cannot adapt to salt water.

One stopgap effort now in use to assist the salmon illustrates just how tenuously the fish are clinging to life: The Army Corps of Engineers transports ocean-bound smolt around the dams using trucks or barges to assist in their progress to the Pacific.

The most drastic solution is to allot more water for the salmon’s seasonal downstream passage. Because there is no reliable surplus water on the Columbia, somebody would have to reduce their share, and this would have immediate implications for power users and Northwest farmers.

“There’s a war going to go on: Who will run the river?” said Bill Bakke, the executive director of Oregon Trout.

Residents of the Northwest can look south for a first peek at precedent. A winter run of chinook salmon on the Sacramento River was listed as endangered this year by both federal and California officials. Among other things, this resulted in an order to halt generating turbines at Shasta Dam for two months.

It has been the poor luck of some salmon to require large water flows when people in the Northwest do not need such flows to generate electricity, principally in summer. Oddly, this has benefited California to some extent, allowing power generated in the hot months to be sent south as surplus at relatively low rates.

Beyond water flows, a crash effort to save the salmon raises other economically significant and politically unsettling possibilities.

Surely, it is thought, federal authorities will move to curtail fishing, both sport and commercial.

“We’re the easiest target,” said Bob Eaton, director of an association of Columbia River gill-netters, Salmon for All. Eaton says that endangered species protection for the five small stocks could have much larger implications for other salmon fishing because endangered fish cannot be distinguished from some other salmon on the high seas.

“This could affect fishing from Northern California to southern Alaska,” Eaton said. Commercial salmon on the West Coast come from spawning rivers that begin north of San Francisco and run all the way through British Columbia and Alaska.

Other industries and endeavors also are likely to get bruised with an elbow or two as they are moved aside to save the salmon.

Logging, mining and cattle grazing may be called upon to reduce activities that disrupt the protective cover of vegetation on the surface of mountains. Once the ground is stripped clear, rains come and wash mud into the gravel streams, clogging the nooks and crannies that salmon eggs need for protection.

This is the second time the Northwest has found itself on the brink of crisis over the salmon. In 1979, a petition similar to this year’s was filed seeking protection for Columbia River salmon. Congress stepped in and prevented an endangered species listing by passing the Northwest Power Act, creating a multistate council to chart a balanced future for the river.

This council, entirely apart from the 1990 endangered species petitions, is now in the third year of an ambitious study of ways to double the overall salmon population in the river.

Scientists working on the project have discarded the hope of any big or quick fix. Instead, they have undertaken an encyclopedic review of each stream and basin, each dam and hatchery. They have suggested everything from restoring certain stream beds to altering cattle-grazing practices on select hillsides to rewriting conventional fishing rules and instituting a large-scale program of installing fish screens on those remaining turbines and diversion channels where young salmon are swept to their deaths.

These kinds of incremental improvements almost certainly will be part of any plan instituted by federal authorities under the power of the Endangered Species Act.

In some cases, however, the costs could be huge. River developers add up their expenses for these very kinds of efforts at $1 billion over the last decade or so. If that amount cannot stop the slide of the wild salmon toward extinction, they ask, what might it cost?

Salmon hatcheries have been advanced as the solution for a century.

Up until now, that is. Today, biologists and environmentalists seem to be winning the argument that modern mass-production hatchery practices are part of the problem. In simplest terms, they produce fish without the genetic diversity and strength to survive in the unpredictable conditions of the wild.

During some cycles, hatchery fish find favorable circumstances and thrive. But then a small change in temperature, food supply or some other unknown factor all but wipes out a hatchery stock. These fish also are dangerously vulnerable to disease.

“They’ve been managing these fish as if natural selection and Darwin never existed,” said Oregon Trout’s Bakke. “If we’re going to maintain the seed source for the salmon of the future, we’re going to have to guarantee the survival of the wild salmon.”

Researcher Doug Conner contributed to this story.

NORTHWEST SALMON SPAWNING GROUNDS 1. Adult salmon migrate from the ocean into freshwater rivers. 2. They swim upstream to lay eggs and the die. 3. Once hatched, the young salmon depend on the river flow to push them back out to salt water, where they mature.