pimpinshrimp

I never said hatcheries don't have a role in mitigating habitat impacts that are beyond all hope of repair. Hatcheries can manufacture juvenile salmon seemingly at will. They just do a piss poor job of producing returning adults. Incidents like this one illustrate clearly the perils of putting all our eggs in one basket (or should that be one hatchery?).... we can get burned in a big way.

Although he overstated the magnitude of its historic salmonid returns (it's a little closer to 16 million) CDSeattle is absolutely correct in his assessment of the Columbia as a broken ecosystem. What's alarming is despite all the billion$ and techno-fixes we have invested in terms of artificial propagation, we can't hold a candle to what this salmon superhighway was once able to produce when the habitat was intact. With the singular exception of URB kings spawning in the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia, the grand dame's wild fish populations continue to steadily decline. All our "restoration" efforts and billion$ have done nothing to reverse this trend. Instead all we have manged to accomplish in the past century is to substitute them with an inferior replacement, and in numbers that are but a fraction of historic productivity. Hence my "dangerous conceit" remark.

While the Columbia may be past the point of no return, I look forward to the day when the Elwha River is returned to its free-flowing state, and miles of prime spawning habitat are made available to its wild salmon. One day, she will no longer have to rely on a hatchery to sustain her bounty... and neither will we.