It would be VERY interesting to see how many wild salmon returned to our rivers this fall if the open ocean slaughter was canceled for the year. That's the only honest, accurate measure of how many adults our rivers can produce. If we allowed them all to spawn and it didn't result in better smolt production numbers, we'd know our rivers were indeed at capacity with the insanely low escapement goals established today. My jaded sense is that those goals are driven much more by economics than biology.

I'm sure commercial fishing isn't the only thing holding them back, but I've lived in this country long enough to know that people's ability to make short term profit from scarce resources always wins out versus making the sacrifices necessary to stabilize the resource before it's gone. There's a reason people are seldom wrong when they tell you to "follow the money."