A Grass-Roots Effort to Save Salmon in Oregon : Environment: Fishermen rebuild habitat, restore streams. Protection could hinge on local solutions.

Weekday mornings at 7, a dozen salmon fishermen who have spent their lives on the ocean gather at a small storefront office on the Charleston waterfront.

Instead of going to sea in their small boats to troll for coho salmon, they climb into their battered cars and pickup trucks and drive inland. There they rebuild the streams that are the source of the coastal fish runs that once were their livelihood.

They work for the Coos River Watershed Assn., one of the growing number of grass-roots operations working to save salmon. The groups are controlled by local people and financed by a patchwork of state and federal grants.

This could be the future of the Endangered Species Act.

“The notion that the federal government is going to come riding in on a white charger and say, ‘Trust us, we know what we are doing,’ I think that era is passing,” said Brian Gorman, spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency that has ultimate responsibility for saving salmon from extinction.

From salmon in the Northwest to woodpeckers in Georgia, conflicts between humans and wildlife have generated an upwelling of support for changing the Endangered Species Act to make people count more.

Many of the objections come from those who fear the government will cost them money by limiting what they can do on their land. In reaction, Congress has been cutting funds for scientific research and environmental programs, weakening the roles of agencies that manage natural resources.

The emphasis on local solutions and voluntary participation appears to fit into the bill being drafted by Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R-Idaho). As chairman of the subcommittee on drinking water, fisheries and wildlife, he plays a major role in the reform effort.

“That’s the sort of activity Sen. Kempthorne hopes to promote and encourage in his Endangered Species Act reform,” said spokesman Mark Snider. “Get the federal government out of telling them what to do and not get to the crisis stage of a listing where the federal government imposes some sort of a solution.”

The move to focus coho restoration efforts on watershed groups came out of a summit on coastal salmon declines held in 1992 by then-Gov. Barbara Roberts. The meeting brought together fishermen, timber owners, biologists, farmers and bureaucrats.

The Coos and Coquille watershed associations received the first money from the Legislature in 1993 because they were seen as the best places in Oregon to save coho.

Coho salmon were once the bread and butter of the Oregon commercial fishing fleet. Unlike other species of salmon, coho spend more time in freshwater and spawn higher in the headwaters of streams, making them more vulnerable to environmental degradation.

Watershed associations, which exist across the country, are a natural framework for a new approach to managing natural resources, said Mary Lou Soscia, program manager for the Oregon watershed health program.

“The old way of doing business was people at offices wrote plans and went out and said, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ ” said Soscia. “We continued to see a major decline in natural resources. The new way of doing business is people sit down at a community level. The government works in partnership with the community.”

There are still plenty of hard feelings around these timbered hills over the heavy hand of the federal government forcing logging cutbacks on federal as well as private land to save the northern spotted owl from extinction.

Local people calling the shots and voluntary participation appeal to Jim Clarke, chief forester on Weyerhaeuser Co.’s 60,000-acre Millicoma Tree Farm, as well as Chuck Leibelt, owner of 35 acres of pasture along the Coquille River.

Though he carries bitter memories of the federal government telling him what to do to protect spotted owls, Clarke is a member of the Coquille Watershed Assn. and has opened Weyerhaeuser’s land to habitat-restoration crews as well as working projects into his budget.

Weyerhaeuser, the nation’s largest timber company, has made an even greater commitment, dedicating $6 million over the next five years to survey watersheds on its lands throughout Oregon and Washington.

Clarke said Weyerhaeuser has a bottom-line incentive to restoring the damage its logging roads and timber harvests have caused to salmon streams. The company wants to be recognized by its stockholders as a good steward of the land.

The next watershed over on the Coquille, Leibelt is wary of the government as well. But he welcomed a crew from the Coquille Watershed Assn. after he was approached by project manager Paul Merz, a salmon fisherman he has known for years.

“I take a real hard look at any government program before I jump into it,” said Leibelt. “Had it not been for knowing Paul as long as I have, I’d have been a little hesitant.”

As much as he likes the local focus of coho restoration, Clarke said it easily could falter for lack of money. No one particularly wants to foot the bill and the future of state and federal financing is uncertain.