Have Salmon Endangered Maine?

In 2000, when the last populations of Atlantic salmon in the US were protected under the Endangered Species Act, politicians and industry lobbies warned that the ESA listing would ruin Maine's aquaculture and forest-products industries. But five years later, the sky has yet to fall.]The Endangered Species Act is currently under attack by the Bush administration, which is seeking to neutralize it by fiat (see "Salmon Shell Game," November/December 2004), and by conservative politicians who are trying to gut it legislatively. Leading the charge in Congress is House resources chairman Richard Pombo (R-CA) who proclaims that the law is "broken," has been a "failure," and is used by "radical environmental organizations [to] prohibit legal land uses of nearly every kind."

Such talk infuriates Steve Moyer, Trout Unlimited's federal advocacy coordinator, who helped procure the last reauthorization of the ESA in 1988 when he was a lobbyist for the National Wildlife Federation. "We don't enforce the Clean Water Act aggressively enough," he declares. "We weaken some federal lands laws to cut more forests. We don't bother to update a federal mining law from the 1800's. We don't make the Magnuson Act conserve marine fish. We don't provide adequate funding for federal and state wildlife programs. On and on and on. We put a huge burden on the ESA (30 species of trout and salmon from coast to coast, for example), and then some have the nerve to blame it for being 'broken.'"

But what of the human misery allegedly caused by the ESA? Consider the nation's wild Atlantic salmon-which exist only in Maine. Five years after being listed as endangered, they haven't responded; virtually no species with a multi-year life cycle could in that time frame. But five years is plenty of time for onerous federal regulations to trash a state's economy. Has this happened?

The aquaculture industry, the forest-products industry, the blueberry industry, the property-rights community, and just about every state and federal politician in Maine said it would. Consider some of the pronouncements of then governor Angus King: "It will kill the [aquaculture] industry dead. D-E-A-D, dead." The feds have "betrayed" Maine with "a partial takeover." "They're trifling with people's lives and I resent the hell out of it."

State Rep. Robert Daigle (R-York) likened the ESA listing to a "nuclear bomb." US Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) fretted about "disastrous consequences" including "an end of aquaculture." US Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) warned of "serious implications for the aquaculture, blueberry, cranberry, and forest products industries," and lamented the "cruel irony" of federal intervention after the state had already embarked on its own recovery plan. Jonathan Reisman, president of the Maine Conservation Rights Institute (a wise-use outfit) and associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine-Machias, circulated the following statement over the Internet: "What they're saying to Washington County is, we don't really care about the violent sodomization you're enduring-just turn the other cheek, cooperate with your tormentor, and you'll learn to enjoy it. Personally, I've always thought violent rapists should be executed to protect the community from repetition."

Less than a month after the November 13, 2000 ESA listing, the State of Maine filed suit (unsuccessfully) against the federal government. It was joined by the state Chamber of Commerce, Atlantic Salmon of Maine (an aquaculture venture), Stolt Sea Farm Inc., the Maine Aquaculture Association, the Maine Pulp & Paper Association, the Wild Blueberry Commission, and blueberry growers Jasper Wyman and Sons and Cherryfield Foods.

When the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) first made noises about listing in 1996, then-Sen. William Cohen (R-ME) informed then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt that "the disposition of this [Atlantic salmon] petition will greatly affect my views regarding changes to the Endangered Species Act that might be warranted." Babbitt, who took the threat very seriously, backed a state restoration plan that supposedly would make listing unnecessary. It was a nice try by Babbitt who, during his tenure, single-handedly saved the act, but he underestimated Maine's recalcitrance and torpor.

On December 18, 1997 Interior's USFWS, along with the Department of Commerce's NMFS, approved the state plan, simultaneously withdrawing the proposal to list the salmon of seven Down East Maine rivers. Salmon advocates were less sanguine about the state plan than the sundry bureaucrats and politicians who oozed and gushed about it that day in Augusta. For one thing, it had no funding mechanism. For another, measures were largely voluntary. "It was a plan to avert impacts to business and industry; it wasn't about salmon restoration," says Ed Baum, who retired as the state's salmon restoration coordinator in 2000 after 32 years with the Salmon Commission. Even when Baum worked for the state he dared to tell me this, on the record: "There has never been a serious attempt to restore salmon runs in Maine."

One indication the state plan would fail was in 1999, when Cherryfield Foods asked to dewater the dangerously low Pleasant River. The state ignored its own plan and its own salmon biologists and told the company to go ahead. Another indication was that, right up to listing in November 2000, the state stridently maintained that there were no wild salmon to protect. "It's hard for me to understand how an animal that numbers in the millions can possibly be in danger of extinction," commented then-governor King. "If you carry it too far, everything's an endangered species: I guarantee that a mouse in Waterville, Maine, is different in some ways than a mouse in Watertown, New York."

Even as the governor was venting this kind of gas and wind, his senior salmon biologist, Baum, was confronting him with the truth, calling America's remnant wild salmon a "treasure of national significance." One of the nation's most respected geneticists-Tim King, of the US Geological Survey-had demonstrated for the feds that America's wild Atlantic salmon were indeed unique. As the USFWS and NMFS put it, "The loss of these populations [endemic to the Dennys, East Machias, Machias, Pleasant, Narraguagus, Ducktrap, and Sheepscot rivers and Cove Brook] would restrict the natural range of Atlantic salmon to the region above the 45th parallel and beyond the borders of the United States. . . . The genetic resources of these most southerly stocks are considered vitally important to the species' future survival." It was the best science available, all peer-reviewed.