Parallel Fish Tales

The federal decision to protect nine varieties of salmon under the Endangered Species Act hit the Pacific Northwest like a bombshell this month. The salmon habitat, covering most of western Washington and Oregon, was reported to be the first listing under the 26-year-old law to cover entire metropolitan areas.Seattle-area critics of the action claimed it would require extreme measures, including construction bans and massive tax increases. Appalled developers said the choice for Seattle would be fish or growth, but not both. Slow-growthers, alarmed by sprawl and a booming population, were ecstatic.

This hyperbole was viewed with some bemusement by officials in California, who have been dealing with the very same issue for years. California already is under a federal order to assist recovery of seven species of salmon covering virtually the entire coast and Central Valley, affecting the greater San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento metropolitan areas, though perhaps not to the same extent as Seattle. The National Marine Fisheries Service was prepared to list three more species this month but deferred that decision until Sept. 1.

California is years from a complete recovery plan. But a major effort is underway in the form of Cal-Fed, the federal-state program to resuscitate the damaged ecology of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. A number of factors led to the unprecedented effort, including the delta’s critical role as a source of domestic water for 16 million Southern Californians and the rich farms of the San Joaquin Valley.

A major impetus, however, was listing of the Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon as an endangered species and the Central Valley steelhead as threatened. If Cal-Fed fails, the Environmental Protection Agency can set water quality standards in the delta to protect the fish. It’s almost certain that such an action would force cutbacks in water exports to homes in Southern California and farms in the San Joaquin Valley.

Cal-Fed has undertaken hundreds of millions of dollars worth of habitat restoration. Ultimately, the effort is expected to cost as much as $8 billion over 20 to 30 years. But officials believe they can reach project goals without water delivery cutbacks or the development restrictions being talked of in the Seattle area.

An even more expansive cleanup program has been underway in the 65,000-square-mile Chesapeake Bay region, including metropolitan Baltimore and Washington, D.C., since 1983. The effort is not driven by the Endangered Species Act. Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania and the federal government launched the plan after pollution severely affected populations of Maryland blue crab, oysters, rockfish and other species. There has been no dramatic improvement so far, and some officials want to toughen the largely voluntary pollution controls.

In the Northwest, no one knows yet what the salmon recovery will require or what it will cost. Residents are likely to find that as the salmon thrives, so does the region, its economy and quality of life.