Not to pick an argument with you, but I wouldn't lay much blame on fishing. I'm not saying that over-fishing has not occurred at times, but it isn't the proximate cause of decline. That is because over-fishing can be cured by reducing fishing. And we have done that. Steelhead, like all salmonids, are very resilient fish. Diminished numbers can and do rebound quickly when the limiting factor is removed or corrected.

The thing that doesn't fix quickly is damaged and destroyed habitat. Fish simply cannot increase in numbers beyond the productivity and capacity of their habitat. Hooten covers so well in his book about the horizon to horizon clear cutting on Vancouver Island that exposed steep, unstable soils (sound familiar?) to heavy rains that produced record floods, that in some rivers, scoured out the gravel down to bedrock. And bedrock is not very productive for aquatic life.

He wrote about biologists sampling and tagging adult steelhead on the Englishman River, which is a small stream. They beach seined 126 adult steelhead in one pool to tag. The entire run in that river is probably less than 126 steelhead these days. The damage to watersheds is huge, and possibly irreversible in some, if not many, cases.