.... telling it like it is!

https://www.dukesseafood.com/blog/open-letter-to-president-trump/

If he doesn't reduce that letter down to a twitterable size and tweet it, the prez ain't never gonna see it.

There's an even better letter to Judge Michael Simon. Too lazy to type it out from print form, so waiting to get it in a PDF or WORD file.

Hmmm, seems Duke missed an opportunity to support selective harvest on the CR to protect those currently ESA listed wild salmonids. How convenient.

Well, here it is...

October 13, 2017

Honorable Michael Simon
Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse, Room 1327
1000 Southwest Third Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97204-2944

In re: Salmon Restoration

Dear Judge Simon:

I write to you as a restaurant owner operator in the Puget Sound region. My son John and I own and operate Duke’s Chowder House. We have been serving salmon to our guests for 45 years. Almost every salmon we have served has come from Alaska where the salmon fisheries are sustainable. We would have loved to have been able to serve salmon from the Columbia River and other rivers in the Northwest but it just wasn’t responsible to do so. There hasn’t been sustainable salmon in Washington, Oregon and California for decades, maybe for more than 100 years.

That’s why I am writing to you. You have asked for public comment on what to do about restoring wild salmon in the Columbia Basin. You have told the three government agencies in charge of creating a plan to listen to the public and present an Environmental Impact Statement that will respect the Endangered Species Act and seriously restore wild salmon. You have rejected the most recent plan of the government which is the fourth rejection by the court during the last few years. The government just doesn’t seem to want to get this right. I’m no scientist but I can tell when something smells fishy. And the government’s effort to date smells very fishy.

So, why are salmon so unimportant to the government? Why would they be unwilling to listen to scientists who have stated the obvious, salmon are disappearing and have been disappearing for 200 years. Why can’t the government realize that 90% of the salmon that used to come up the Snake River disappeared after the four lower Snake River Dams were built in the 70s? Why can’t the government see that the four lower dams contribute a negligible amount of electricity to the Northwest? And why is hydroelectric power more important than salmon anyway?

None of the government’s actions are supportable. There used to be 10 - 16 million wild salmon that would come up the Columbia River every year. Now there is only 400,000 - 500,000 wild salmon making the trek. Why does the government ignore these facts?

Most of our guests are unaware that salmon are an endangered species. The gradual erosion of this important resource has lulled the public to sleep over many generations for as many as 200 years. Each generation experienced a small reduction so what could be the problem? It’s no wonder that there is so little understanding of this issue. But those of us that are aware realize that the accumulation of losses add up to an enormous problem. When I explain to our guests the facts about the loss of salmon, they are shocked. Most of our population is similarly unaware of the problem. I bring this up for your consideration because, if the population were informed, our elected representatives would have no choice in passing legislation - the dams would come down in a nanosecond.

This is not like a spotted owl. We don’t eat spotted owls. Not to diminish the importance of other endangered species, salmon are additionally and particularly important as a food source. I hope and pray that you will force the government to put a plan together that truly restores wild salmon in the Columbia Basin. It’s the right thing to do.

Sustainably yours,

Duke Moscrip

He left out the part about subsidizing the dams for barge shipping.
Another example of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5...+2015.Final.pdf


http://www.snakeriverdams.com

The most discouraging part of the ongoing hydro "salmon war" is how even the court seems powerless to make these federal agencies comply with ESA.

When the ridiculous 2000 BiOp was first rejected way back in 2003, I was so excited to discover that a sitting federal judge was finally willing to hold these clowns accountable to ESA for the benefit of CR salmon recovery.

http://www.cbbulletin.com/414468.aspx

So here we sit at the close of 2017 with a new judge presiding over this case (they finally wore the first guy down) .... STILL waiting for definitive federal action. When does all the heel dragging finally come to an end?

Even the court-ordered spill that helped boost many runs over the past decade (thank you, Judge Redden!) is currently under fire.

Does the current Judge just continue to reject plan after plan? When does it FINALLY end? To be effective, there's got to be a drop-dead date included with the rejection ruling. If they can't comply by that date, then the court takes over Columbia/Snake hydro management by invoking the key missing pieces that have caused all previous BiOp's to pass muster.

Usually it’s fairly easy to use the adage of “follow the money “ to understand how things get done, for example, logging companies getting the forest service to build logging roads or big oil using political clout to open up drilling leases. With the Snake River Dams, I’m having a hard time seeing how the economic interests involved have enough economic/political capital to perpetuate this drain on taxpayers and rate payers supporting this absurd subsidy and also denying the region all the benefits that healthier salmon runs would bring for as long as they have.
It must be Ike the resistance to taking the Elwa Dams out. I never understood why that took so long either.

To sorta play Devil's Advocate here, but it might give some insight.

We have never, to my knowledge, removed a dam on a major river and had the salmon runs recover. Certainly, it takes time. That is why Elwha has got vastly exceed recovery goals. I think the delay is actually caused by fear on both sides. The pro-dam fears it will work, the anti's that it won't.

On the Columbia, you cannot "restore" Columbia River wild salmon unless all the dams come out. Period. Restore the undammed tributaries and you still lose juveniles and adults in the reservoirs. Which are anti- anadromous salmonid habitat.

I realize that Idaho gets screwed because they have reasonable habitat and no fish for it.

In taking a holistic look at things, the Columbia Watershed provides food, power, and transportation through that system. Take out the dams and where will that be replaced? We are adding humans to the world and they need that stuff. Not just for here. BPA sells a lot of the power out of state.

Because we are more comfortable, I guess, looking at a narrow issue and saying "this one can go" but ignoring the bigger picture it is easy to get bogged down.

Besides, it won't be in the too far distant future that a pipeline runs 1000-1500 south from the Big C carrying freshwater to the masses who will have the votes to do it.

"According to the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is required to submit a plan to restore Wild Salmon runs in the Columbia River."

Well there's the fatal flaw. President Clump and his band of Looney Tunes could give 2 sh!ts about the ESA or what it says.... in fact if it were entirely up to the Cheeto in Chief it would be gone entirely.

Even if you don’t consider any positive results in salmon recovery by removing the dams, just maintaining them for navigation and power generation makes no economic sense. I don’t understand the economics or politics driving their preservation.

From the LSRD Study


“ In English, this means that for every dollar spent on the dams to maintain the possibility of navigation on the LSR, farmers and businesses in the region only see a benefit of 43 cents.

Put another way, if rather than pouring the same amount of money into the dams, the COE would pay the entire extra cost for the various farmers and businesses to ship by rail instead of barge, the COE would have $10.2 million left over to refund to American taxpayers.

Put still another way, if a banker looked at a proposal for a new business with a BCR of .43:1, that banker would not fund it. Alternately, if this were a private business whose BCR had declined to .43 the business owner would shut it down.”

And this doesn’t include the hundreds of millions spent on salmon mitigation.

I'll add this to the mix. Stop the mixed stock, species interceptions offshore (Ex: trawl take of ESA listed salmon in the pollock drags).

Yep. Harvest adults when you know their stock.

And how many plans were submitted (and rejected by the Court) under the prior administration? And don't even think about flaming me - I refused to vote for either one of them........

This is a bipartisan issue. neither party wants to fix it.

My point is holding the gov accountable for the ESA guidelines as written is a laughable defense... esp under the current administration.

What does ESA say about catch n kill gillnets?

It says nothing. It allows for "take". Gillnet, purse seine, beach seine, troll, recreational it doesn't matter. The Feds allow X to die and it doesn't matter how they get that way.

Our fishes are dying from multiple cuts.

The accumulation of impacts is not just from passage at the dams. Essential Fish Habitat includes waters and substrate necessary to fish for spawning, breeding, feeding or
growth to maturity.

Feeding in the altered estuary is different than historical levels. So on the way North the smaller salmon need to feed on the smaller food sources longer. Making them more inclined to be encountered in the shrimp, hake, pollock, etc... trawl fisheries. These fisheries also remove the food available for the growth of the larger fishes.

I believe earlier this year there were 9,000 tons of pollock roe sold at the Seattle auction.

The first purpose of ESA, as written into the law, is the preservation and restoration of the ecosystem on which the species depend. We seem to get so wrapped up in killing the "right" amount that we don't really deal with the ecosystem as a whole.

In the current political climate we often see deflection, wherein we get a Tweet that bios people's blood while, hidden from view, something else is done.

As Slab alludes, we look at the Columbia Dams, fulminate over them, and completely miss/ignore the rape of the food pyramid. We scream about predators and ignore ocean plastics. Such deflection ensures nothing meaningful gets done.

I get what you are saying. The trouble is there are so many problems it is overwhelming when you look at the list and so many of them seem to be baked into the system. Where do you start?