Overview - Sport Fishing

Hatcheries! That's it! We're wiping them out at unprecedented rates? So what! We'll just mass produce them like beer bottle caps. They'll always be here and we can keep helping ourselves to whatever we want without worry or responsibility. It works for Coors, it can work for us too. This is the piece of the True Cross we've been looking for!

But of course, this doesn't keep the usual property rights, timber, and fillet-and-release sporting lobbies from loudly insisting on Salvation-By Hatchery. At times, defense of the Hatchery religion even approaches confrontational hysteria, as is demonstrated by Jim Buchal, a Portland, OR based lawyer who represents timber, hydropower, and property rights interests. In addition to his lobbying efforts, Buchal is also the author of "The Great Salmon Hoax". First published in 1999, this has been the seminal work behind Far-Right fisheries pseudoscience and the doctrinal Bible for the interests Buchal represents. In this sense, it serves the same purpose for these groups that anti-evolutionary literature does for Biblical literalists. This page links much of the science that demonstrates the need for wild salmon populations. The 1996 National Research Council book "Upstream" spends a fair amount of time on it and is a great place to start. Other papers presented give specific case studies of hatchery impacts on genetic diversity as well.

The issue is now more important than ever, as the ascendancy of the Bush Administration has given control of the White House and large portions of Congress to lawmakers to the Far-Right, who naturally are more interested in the pseudoscience needed by their benefactors. Unless science is allowed to have the final word, the future of salmon and steelhead will be bleak indeed.

There is no reason why commercial fishing cannot continue to be the valuable and tradition-rich industry that is has been for centuries. However, in the absence of foresight and reasonable restraint on the part of many in the industry, and the various national and international government agencies which oversee them, it now overharvests most global fisheries and threatens the very survival of many fish stocks—and many commercial fishermen, politicians, and industry representatives have been stridently unwilling to acknowledge these threats. Commercial fishing often has impacts that go far beyond the mere harvesting of targeted fish. In addition to bycatch, fishing methods such as otter trawling frequently inflict lasting damage on marine habitats that can impact their fecundity and threaten the existence of the species they support. Overharvest, driven by short-term economic considerations is also a major factor in declining fish populations.

Despite shrill protests to the contrary by commercial fishing interests (and a few sportsmen's groups who want their own harvest quotas protected), general overharvesting is still the largest factor in fisheries declines worldwide. This is particularly true of groundfish populations. I have personally witnessed entire stocks of Puget Sound rockfish wiped out, never to return, right here in my home state of Washington. In at least one case near my childhood summer cabin, I observed this to happen literally in one single afternoon. In the mid to late 70's, just about the time I finished high school, a fishing boat came into a bay in Saratoga Passage near my home on the west side of Camano Island and netted a rockfish hole I had been fishing since early childhood. The entire population was taken in one afternoon. To this day, as far as I can determine even after 25 years, that hole never again produced another rockfish for me or anyone else.

Thoughtless overharvesting like this raises many questions—of values as well as science. Fisheries suffer in large part because of the differing values of those who use the resource. No doubt, the individuals who cleaned out the rockfish hole near my childhood home were happy with the short-term profits they made the following week. If challenged, they would undoubtedly say they were "just doing my job" or "just trying to feed my family". But while no one would fault them for doing either, the question of their responsibility for the impacts of their actions on others still remains, as does the future of the very profession by which they claim to feed their families.

Indeed, since the day of that overharvest, many others just like it have been practiced around the world by others with many of the same rationalizations, and today fisheries worldwide and the economies that depend on them are suffering. Including the groundfish fishery in Washington State and the rockfish hole these thoughtless people cleaned out. And we haven't even mentioned yet the loss to humanity of the gift of bountiful fisheries, the lessons they have to teach, and all the joy they bring to those who seek them—my best childhood memories are of time on the water with my dad catching salmon and steelhead... and rockfish! Whether commercial, and some sportfishermen are willing to admit it our not, there are consequences for short-term greed, self-centeredness, and a defiant unwillingness to assume responsibility for conservation—consequences for all of us.