Funny thing about natural resource management is that it gets more costly as the resource becomes more scarce, leading to more situations that require more careful (well-staffed) management. In the end, mountains of money will be spent on lip service while we continue to ignore the fact that's always been right in our face: we can't harvest our way to recovery.

I read an article last night that said Pacific Ocean hypoxia events, which occurred rarely in the 20th century, have occurred annually on the West Coast since 2002. That points to an increasingly hostile ocean, and it seems no matter what we do on our end, the ocean has the most to say about how many fish survive to adulthood in a given year. I think we see proof on occasion (in years where the ocean is friendly and the fisheries managers underestimate the runs) that our habitat can still produce a lot of wild salmon under the right conditions, but a hostile ocean can erase even the most successful of spawns. Is there anything we can really do to fix ocean conditions?

Between us killing everything we (think) we can, year after year, increasing pressure to protect other salmon-dependent species, and oceans that are changing in ways detrimental to salmon, the chances that any management tweaks a WDFW Director suggests makes a positive difference seem pretty poor.