There's a lotta' meat to chew on in those two short paragraphs C'man. We've spent over a billion state dollars and a lot more federal dollars on habitat improvement since the ESA listings. As if dollars spent somehow translates into species recovery. We pat ourselves on the back for all those habitat improvement and fish passage restorations achieved, which despite the cost, is barely a drop in the bucket in contrast to the magnitude of habitat degradation we did, and amazingly (to me) still do. While at NMFS I had the astonishing (again, to me) conversation with managers who did not perceive any issue with using the number of ESA Section 7 consultations completed as a yardstick to measure progress toward recovery, instead of, as I proposed, the delta change in abundance (increase in numbers of listed fish in listed populations). Ergo, completed consultations = participation trophies in the form of "atta' boys (and girls)" and annual bonuses and awards and even promotions.

I'd like to think it's as simple as having not done enough (we haven't) to reverse declining trends, but my stronger feeling is that we have long since set the stage that governs productivity so that the declines we have and are presently witnessing are mostly beyond our control. I think a long-lived species like the SRKWs really drives that home, at least for me. I think we've made perturbations to the ocean since WWII that are greater than we have the capacity to counter.