Ah, but Rich, about that habitat....

Fish cannot get above impassible dams and culverts. Unlike your rivers in Alaska, every one in Washington has dams, culverts, or both on either their mainstems or tributaries that prevent fish from using the habitat above them. The Elwha, for example, do you think that only hatchery/harvest is what prevents historic populations from repopulating that river to it's former abundance. Of course not, I know, but that is what habitat loss means.

Alaska also does not have mega-ports that have filled 98% of the historic saltmarsh and intertidal area around them. Rivers systems like the Puyallup, Green, and Snohomish can never recover their former fish populations, as there is no estuary left for outmigrating juvenile salmon to adapt from fresh to salt water. What little habitat is there is horribly contaminated and polluted, and fish rearing there eat food full of some of the most toxic carcinogens known to man. Some survive but most perish as a result.

Finally, Alaska does not have half of it's shoreline covered by bulkheads and urban development, and the rest polluted by untreated stormwater and failing septic systems, like the state of Washington and particularly Putrid Sound does, with the attendant loss of baitfish spawning beds and primary productivity from eelgrass beds. Our few baby salmon that get to be large enough to start chasing baitfish can't find very many because they have little spawning habitat also.

It's a 3 legged stool, harvest/hatcheries/habitat, cut one let off and you fall down, cut them all short and you can't reach the table. It is all of these problems that could be solved real simply....if Washington was not the most densly populated state west of the Mississippi, and was instead populated as densly as Alaska.... I know, lets extripate 98% of the humans in Washington - how about all those that either don't fish or that snag go first?