I know from experience that the thinking in the 70s was just that, a fish was a fish and they were reasonably interchangeable. Research has proven that wrong.

What i think most folks don't get, or don't want to get, is that our ability to exploit fish (and other naturally-produced resources) exceeds the ability of the system to produce them.

For argument's sake, let's say that the only thing holding down Chinook recovery in PS is habitat. But, in order to maximize our rate of recovery we simultaneously close all fisheries on Chinook and fully fund all the habitat restoration so that in 4 years we have fully "restored" habitat. How many Chinook will that fully functional habitat produce? We have that number. How many can we all catch? We have that number too. Is that catch number of purely wild fish as large as the mixed, primarily hatchery number we have today?

On one PS river, the goal of the tribe there was an annual harvest of 20K hatchery Chinook. Personally, I believe that at ecosystem-based goals, wild fish could support this but who would put 200K Chinook on the grounds? Anyway, the "best" models suggest a much lower sustainable harvest of wild fish.

If we want to insist on killing a lot of fish, and living in the PNW, and letting the human population grow, then hatchery production is the only viable answer.

And we haven't even talked about the fact that the North Pacific, right now, can't support the Chinook and coho going out there.