Preston and Salmo, thanks for the reply to my question. I'm always interested in Skagit fish, it's my home river.

It looks like The Pacific Legal Foundation WWW.pacificlegal.org is taking full advantage of the situation. The last years drought has made apparent the conflict between salmon and all the industrial uses of our rivers. Last spring was a reality check for how shallow the public interest in salmon recovery really is. The prevailing opinion on the local radio talk shows I occasionally listen to was that with rising power bills and rolling blackouts, no one cares much about recovering wild salmon runs anymore, hatchery salmon will do just fine. After all, we have record runs of them. No mention of record kills of outgoing smolts. Given all this and a sympathetic federal adminisration, the PLF is making real progress on kicking what little salmon protections we have in the teeth.

The history on the decline of salmon in the Pcific Northwest has shown that there has always been protests of activities that destroy salmon all the way back to the 1800's. It has also shown that those protests where run over by the more powerfull interests that have little reguard for salmon runs. I found a list of the groups that have been granted the right to appeal the Hogan ruling.Oregon Natural Resources Council, Pacific Rivers Council, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Association, Institute for Fisheries Resources, Audubon Society of Portland, Coast Range Association, Siskiyou Regional Education Project, and the Sierra Club, represented in court by Earthjustice. I don't see any sport fishing group on this list. I would very much like to see a powerfull sportfishing group that was dedicated to a sportfishing economy in the PNW and one that was standing up to assaults on salmon conservartion and protection, but there aren't any. Like RT said, maybe it will take something like this to get a sportfishing group...... na nevermind. Since there isn't the perfect group to fight this action and I can't stand by and do nothing I will be sending earthjustice a check. I'll also be writing letters to every politician in the book. I just don't want to be looking back at these times as the good old days when we had some fish to fight over with the commercials and indians. Maybe it's inevitable that wild salmon will be reduced to reminents of what they were and I doubt if any fishing will be allowed on what will be left, but I'm not going to sit back and do nothing.


The only thing we have learned from history is we learn nothing from history.