And herein lies the great fallacy. Hatcheries are justified, time and time again, as a means of "recovering" threatened or endangered stocks. The reality is that hatcheries essentially introduce new, competing stocks that further hamper the recovery process for the stock they attempt to recover by altering the gene pool and reducing spawning productivity. The science on this issue seems clear: Unless we can effectively remove the vast majority of a hatchery run from a system before they have an opportunity to spawn with the native stock, hatchery fish are a detriment to very stocks they were implemented to recover. Indeed, the wild fish we claim to be protecting have ended up supplementing the harvestable catch, which I believe is very nearly the opposite of what we have advertised as the purpose of hatcheries.

Perhaps its time to be more honest about what hatcheries really do, which is not all bad, from the perspective of anyone who likes or depends on catching fish. As Fish-Culture said, hatcheries produce harvestable fish where few or none would exist otherwise. For sportsmen, that creates fishing opportunity. For commercial fishermen, that provides a livelihood. For a constantly growing population of hungry consumers, that brings fish to market. Given the current state of the vast majority of salmon and steelhead spawning habitat, hatcheries have become essential to meeting these demands.

Once we're clear on why we need hatcheries, ideally, we should be able to find better ways to operate hatcheries and minimize their impacts on their host environments. But who's going to pay for hatchery reform, you ask? Good question, but it would be very encouraging to at least see new hatcheries being built with that goal in mind. Does anybody know if any lessons learned from older hatcheries were applied to the design for the new hatchery on the Elwha?

When presented the notion that Mother Nature will do a better job of recovering a wild fish run than humans could ever do, some of us are quick to point out a few of mankind's great achievements, claiming those as evidence that we can, in fact, outshine Mother Nature. The fallacy here is that the things mankind has created are artificial, and in most cases will, sooner or later, end up a further detriment to the natural environment (ever seen pictures of the gyre of floating garbage, twice the size of Texas, in the middle of the Pacific?). Mother Nature gave us a perfect, balanced habitat that provided everything we needed to survive. When given an honest chance (an all too rare occurrence), natural environments have proved to be amazingly resilient. There would seem to be little question that "Mother" knows best when it comes to all things natural.

As regards Snyder Creek (sorry for taking so long to get here), it seems to have been the closest thing to a successful broodstock program that we have seen to date, and while I have doubts about the overall impact on the wild fish, I think it's a shame that the results weren't mearsured more effectively in the current location before a decision was made to move a similar program to another system. Hopefully, the new program, if it is implemented, will be monitored closely to see if it has merit as a recovery tool. We could use some good news in that arena.