I think that identifying the problem usually gets us a fair bit down the road to solving it, but that's not the case here. The "solution", of course, would be to send about 2/3 of the people in Pugetropolis back to wherever they came from, tear out 3/4 of the pavement, and quickly grow a few million acres of old growth timber...yanking out a handful of dams wouldn't hurt, either.

SInce it's not so likely that will happen, I can say that the overall solution is a societal one...not a biological one. It would require a change in mindset of the people of the PNW to do more than just pay lip service to habitat protection and restoration. Right now the best we get on habitat is a promise to slow down the destruction, which just delays the inevitable.

We as a society have the technology and ability to stop destroying the environment that salmon and steelhead depend on, and not only that, but we have the ability to start restoring some of what has been destroyed.

All of that, however, takes money and political will, and most people, no matter what they say in opinion polls or in op-eds, aren't willing to part with anything to get salmon recovery.

The approach has to be holistic...fixing habitat while harvesting all the fish doesn't help...there are no fish to use the fixed habitat. Stopping harvest where it can be stopped won't do a damn thing if there isn't habitat for the fish to spawn in when they arrive at the rivers. Fish and habitat can only go so far if there isn't any water in the river, and the remaining water is too warm, too low, or too full of pollutants to be useful.

Sometimes I think that the whole "grass roots" recovery efforts are, at best, just delaying the inevitable, and not delaying it by much, either.

I don't think actual salmon recovery is impossible, but I do think it will take a lot of hard work and significant changes in perspective and mind set not just of fish managers and politicians, but of the regular folks that live around here, too.

Fish on...

Todd