Your question is a good one. I believe the answer is that instead of protecting the infinitely renewable salmon resources with which the PNW was blessed, policy folks and fish managers for the last 150 years have focused on protecting fisheries (harvest) as their primary goal... regardless of what happened to the wild fish and the places they called home. Every possible convolution has been concocted to enable the ongoing harvest to persist to the maximum extent possible. And chief among these is perpetuating the illusion of abundance thru artificial propagation. As long as society continued to see totes full of commercially-caught salmon, limits of salmon hanging from trophy racks at the dock, and creeks teeming with hatchery-produced salmon... well, "Problem? What problem?" The relentless and progressive assault on salmon habitat wrought by human encroachment could be conveniently ignored.

Even with everything we know today about salmon ecology, for every project attempting to restore habitat, there's at least at least 10 others degrading or destroying it somewhere else. In my own back yard, the last bastion of wild salmon production from entirely within Western Washington, construction of a new a dam is being actively pursued on the Chehalis River. Bottom line the enemy of wild-produced salmon is US!

It's really only been in the last 20-30 years that ESA has re-directed the focus toward the health of wild fish populations and the places they call home. And yeah, paying for the abuses of the past hurts. It hurts ALL of us.

I can sympathize with the perspective that fishing itself is NOT the highest proximate cause of ongoing depletion of PS chinook at this stage of the game, specifically as it pertains to Stillaguamish. Stopping all fishing for Stilly kings by itself cannot correct the inability of wild Stilly kings to replace themselves thru natural recruitment.

But know this... neither does continuing to kill them at whatever rate NOAA/PFMC/NOF decides is acceptable. Continuing to fish on the stock only accelerates the extinction trajectory. Dead fish don't spawn and can't contribute to recovery.... whether they die at our hands or those of Mother Nature.