The thing I find particularly annoying about the new hatchery on the Elwha is that it represents the effective squandering of the best opportunity this region has ever seen (and will likely ever see) to find out whether wild fish can increase their numbers if left to their own devices. The fact that it is costing so much, at a time when tax dollars should be getting spent on much more socially responsible things, is another punch in the gut.

As for the overall decline in salmon and steelead populations, I believe all the standard culprits play significant roles, and in order to achieve anything close to full recovery of native stocks, I believe all will eventually (and as soon as possible) need to be addressed. I have personally tended to point at wild harvest reform as the thing we should tackle first, because it seems to me that it is the only thing we can immediately and completely affect. Habitat restoration, while it does need to happen in most systems, faces far too many obstacles (mostly financial, which is the kiss of death for any goodwill effort to undo damage humans have done) to be sufficiently effective in the short term. Hatcheries (the existing ones), while some of us may question their validity, support the vast majority of commercial fisheries and sport fisheries alike, so any change there will be a long-term goal at best. Hydroelectric dams are clearly a major problem, but they aren't going anywhere before humans find better sources of electricity than hydropower. Lest we forget, there are very strong political barriers blocking removal of those dams as well.

Basically, the way I see it is that undoing the environmental damage we have done will take far too long and cost far too much money to be considered a realistic short-term solution. Again, all those things need to be addressed (and we should start taking every opportunity that becomes available to do so immediately), but it seems foolish to me to invest all of one's hope in the tremendous amount of human and financial sacrifice that would be required to fix habitat, remove dams, and reform hatcheries in any reasonable length of time. People are far too closely-married to their lifestyles to allow for the sort of sacrifices that would need to be made to fix these things quickly.

All this leaves me with the opinion that harvest reform, while it's not a be all end all, is the most immediately effective thing we can do to increase salmon populations. Of course, true harvest reform requires that EVERYBODY reduces the number of fish they harvest, and NOBODY seems to want to give up any of what they have. That, in a nutshell, is why I am becoming increasingly pessimistic that meaningful recovery will ever happen. Most people are just too damned greedy, selfish, and short-sighted to get on board with anything that requires personal sacrifice.