As Wild Salmon Fade, Northwest Losing a Symbol

With a growing sense of shame, if not surrender, the Pacific Northwest is watching its wild salmon dwindle into extinction.

This year, the federal government will impose the strictest fishing limits in history, and it may go so far as to ban a salmon harvest in the ocean north of Ft. Bragg, Calif.

But no one expects even extreme steps like this to bring the salmon back. That would require the Northwest to change the way it lives, or to have change imposed upon it.

Otherwise the wild salmon, the red-fleshed symbol of bountiful life in the Northwest, are likely to disappear except for “museum” or “cameo” runs in isolated areas, experts predict. And this could happen in just a decade.

“We are at the brink, and we’re looking down into the abyss,” said Geoff Pampush, executive director of Oregon Trout, an environmental and sporting organization that is among those sounding the alarm.

The decline of the wild salmon can be told as a dense story of modern hydroelectric economics, overlapping governmental jurisdictions and foundations of growth and commerce 150 years in the making. Or it can be expressed in stark simplicity: too many people with too little regard for what seemed, and may still seem to some, to be a resource without end.

In historic terms, scientists guess that 100 million salmon a year once emerged from the rivers along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington. Today, these fish are extinct in Southern California, and the remainder of the region produces perhaps 15 million a year--most of them from hatcheries.

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Looked at another way, 107 separate stocks of salmon have already become extinct in the Pacific states, and 89 others are “at high risk of extinction,” according to Seattle-based Save Our Wild Salmon, a coalition representing environmental and fishing groups.

Stocks, or runs, of salmon are those of a single species that emerge from the same freshwater spawning grounds, travel to the ocean together and return to spawn again at the same time.

That means there can be hundreds of separate stocks, which the government typically regards as genetically distinctive creatures under the Endangered Species Act, even though there are only five actual species of salmon in the Pacific: chinook, sockeye, coho, pink and chum. Closely related and also suffering in the region are anadromous steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trout.

The decline of the Northwest salmon was decades in the making. By 1990, it had become a crisis the public could not ignore.

Four years ago, the first stock was listed on the endangered species list: a winter run of chinook on the Sacramento River. Then came runs of chinook and sockeye from the Columbia-Snake river systems.

Since then, the plight of the fish has worsened.

Commercial and sport fishing seasons have been reduced along much of the coast, leaving fishing communities in the same economic distress as the logging towns of the region.

And the federal Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet Tuesday in Burlingame, Calif., to contemplate the ultimate step: A complete ban on ocean salmon fishing for 1994 in Washington, Oregon and Northern California to 35 miles south of Ft. Bragg. At the very least, the council has signaled that it will allow less salmon fishing than ever before.

State officials typically follow the council’s lead when it comes to fishing in state waters and rivers.

Still, government regulators acknowledged in this month’s Fishery Council newsletter: “These strict harvest reductions may stop the decline . . . but they will do little to restore abundant stocks.”

The fishing restrictions result chiefly from a precipitous decline in coho stocks from coastal streams. These coho numbered up to 400,000 in 1990, but only 74,000 now. The National Marine Fisheries Service will decide this summer whether to add some or all of these stocks to the endangered species list.

The good news is that Sacramento River autumn-run chinook are robust enough to sustain fishing below Ft. Bragg for 1994.

To the north, the causes of the salmon decline are as simple to describe as they seem almost imponderably difficult to fix:

* Degradation of spawning streams that lace through the Northwest from the coast to 1,000 miles inland. Roads, development, agriculture, logging all share the blame.

* Dams and water diversions, particularly on the mighty Columbia River system, which today resembles less a river than a series of connected bathtubs.

* The worst possible combination of natural phenomenon: eight years of below-normal rainfall and sustained El Nino ocean conditions, which seem to reduce the availability of food for migrating salmon.

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A favorable turn of nature could prevent a complete collapse of the coastal coho population for now. But virtually every credible source acknowledges that without a significant change in the way of life here, the Northwest will forfeit its bounty of wild salmon.

“The question is: Are we willing to adapt to the demands of biology?” said Tim Stearns, coordinator for Save Our Wild Salmon. “From the day white settlers first came, they have adapted the Northwest to their needs. Now, are we willing to adapt to the needs of the Northwest?”

The listing of salmon as threatened and endangered finally forced Northwest residents to acknowledge the problem. Years of political and social struggle over forests and northern spotted owls has left this region keenly aware of what happens when old ways of resource management come into conflict with modern preservation laws.

But the magnitude of change necessary to revitalize the salmon is so staggering as to test not just the region, but the nation. Even the optimists have their doubts.

“Some of these stocks we can save, and some are doubtful,” said Ted Bottiger, chairman of the multi-state Northwest Power Planning Council. The government agency was created to watch over the complicated hydroelectric power system of the Northwest, and it is the first to bring forth a plan to rebuild salmon stocks on the Columbia River.

Already, more water is being allocated in the system for salmon, meaning a reduction in peak-time power generation and an overall hike in hydroelectric rates. Electricity is cheaper here than anywhere else in America, but even modest increases upset the regional economy.

Aluminum producers colonized the area because of its abundant, dirt-cheap electricity. Now the industry has begun layoffs and blames the rising rates--and by implication, the salmon.

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Tens of thousands of other Northwest residents are being asked to change as well: farmers to change the way they irrigate, loggers to change the way they cut watersheds and silt streams, cities to change the way they zone for subdivisions and growth. And scientists can identify hundreds of millions of dollars in needed repairs to the natural landscape--for instance, the relocation of road culverts that now block 30,000 miles of river tributaries.

As it is, the regional Bonneville Power Administration says it spends more than $200 million a year on hatcheries and other projects to try to keep the salmon going against the mighty concrete impoundments of the Columbia, the most heavily dammed major river in the United States.

Not just dams but the torpid waters behind them work against these migratory fish. How can the young swim downstream if there is no stream? If they do not reach salt water when their body clocks change them into ocean fish, they die. Today, tens of thousands of smolt are loaded into tanks and barged down the river.

Environmentalists and fishing enthusiasts say the process is absurd and unsatisfactory. More water must be released on the schedule of the salmon, not according to electricity demands, they argue. Some go further and insist that the only way to save Columbia River salmon is to pull down some of the great dams.

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Irrigators, shipping lines, the aluminum industry and other river users recently signaled that they were tired of being on the defensive. They struck back with an argument that may prove to be the weakest link in the preservationists’ cause: There is no shortage of salmon for the dinner table. Even as the wild fish decline, farmed salmon from Norway, Chile and the United States keep markets around the world plentifully stocked.

“Only in the Pacific Northwest can you buy an endangered species for $2 per pound,” said a recent newspaper ad from the Columbia River Alliance, a group of river users based in Portland, Ore.

The alliance is lobbying for an end to large-scale net fishing in the river. For their part, these netters have joined with environmentalists in blaming the dams and river users for the decline of the salmon.

“I’m pessimistic,” said fish scientist and consultant Jim Lichatowich of Sequim, Wash. “Some people are still in denial and understandably worried about the short-term consequences this is having on them. I don’t see the long-term focus needed for salmon recovery.”

Perhaps that will come later this summer. The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to finalize its recovery plan for Columbia River salmon. Federal regulators have broad powers to protect endangered species, but there is only scant hope here that the government will offer enough to satisfy the environmentalists without asking too much of the river industries.

From the Northwest’s experience with owls and forests, such a recovery plan is more likely to send all sides rushing to the federal courts, Congress and the Clinton Administration.

Last Monday in Portland, U.S. District Judge Malcolm Marsh ruled that 1993 federal approval of hydroelectric operations on the river failed to adequately protect salmon under the Endangered Species Act.

Apart from the court action, the Administration last month proposed a stopgap reduction of logging, grazing and development within 300 feet of salmon streams on all federal lands in the region.

In a statement, the Administration said its goal was “to reverse the degradation of anadromous fish habitat on Forest Service and (other federally) administered lands in order to avoid the need for more listings under the Endangered Species Act.”

And another battleground is likely to erupt. Native Americans along the river have treaty rights that they believe entitle them to a harvestable abundance of salmon. In the past, federal courts have shown a willingness to hold the government accountable for these native rights no matter the high cost to non-native immigrants.

“One lesson whites learned from the natives when we came here--salmon are the Northwest,” said Sierra Club Regional Director Bill Arthur. “No other animal weaves our culture, our economy and our environment like the salmon.”