Grandpa,

Thanks for posting Billy Frank’s statement. I have great respect and admiration for Billy although I don’t share his confidence in salmon restoration. Billy has been at the center of the fish wars more than most of the rest of us combined, and he understands that politics are a major influence with whatever happens in the fish world, and he’s learned to play the politics of the game well. That shared strategy for recovery that he refers to doesn’t mean the same thing to all the influential players involved. It’s a “shared” strategy to maintain the status quo of development, population, and economic growth. It’s a strategy to recovery some chinook populations and not others. It’s a strategy to permit 10 to 50 habitat degradation actions for every 1 habitat restoration action. It’s a strategy to hearts and minds of fish advocates and the votes of politicians to fund salmon recovery, and innumerable “recovery” actions, without ever recovering them. Society says it wants to recover salmon. But society lacks the will to recover salmon. Recovering wild salmon requires giving up too much of what nearly every citizen wants: single occupant vehicles on uncongested roads, a 5-acre hobby farm in the suburbs with a salmon stream running through it, impermeable surfaces on a high % of his property, flood protection, federally subsidized irrigation water, cheap electricity, and cheap disposal of tons of waste per citizen per year, to name a few.

That sounds grim, so here’s what I believe is the upside. I believe recovery is possible for many salmon and steelhead populations. That recovery is and will always be limited to the capacity and productivity of the habitat. That productivity and capacity will not support significant harvests of wild chinook or steelhead. It could support some harvest, but not at the level I envision these folks imagining. In my opinion, achieving significant harvestable levels of chinook and steelhead would require scaling Washington state’s human population back to about 2.6 million people, or at least to the level of environmental impact that a population that size would have. I believe that because that is about what our state’s population was the last time we actually had significant sustainable harvests of wild chinook and steelhead.

I’m all for recovery. Recovery is our long-term fishery savings account. And it will benefit harvests, although probably in a small way. If we desire significant numbers of salmon and steelhead to harvest, then we have to find a way to make hatchery production compatible with recovery of wild salmon and steelhead. I think it’s possible, but it will require more sacrifice than we really want to make to maintain our environment, and it will limit us to less hatchery production than we would really prefer. But I think it’s possible.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.