Have Salmon Endangered Maine?

"After listing, all the fighting became moot," says Baum. "There's much more cooperation among the state fisheries agencies [Inland Fish and Wildlife, Marine Resources, and the Salmon Commission]. During most of my career the commission would have to get a permit from IFW to stock salmon; and there were often rivers that were off limits. Also, IFW was stocking browns, rainbows and splake and other species in the salmon rivers and never consulting with us."

The Atlantic Salmon Federation's Goode agrees. "A year after listing you started to see a lot of collaborative projects between industry and the NGO community," he says. "For example, three big aquaculture companies got together with ASF and TU, and we designed an effective new containment management system at every site."

With help from Senators Snowe and Collins, now ardent salmon advocates, federal money is pouring into the state, and, as a result, more state and private funds are becoming available. Some of this money is funding the work of local watershed councils, now heavily invested in salmon recovery; they're controlling non-point pollution and siltation, reporting violations, buying land, and otherwise protecting habitat. According to Salmon Commission director, Pat Keliher, there are now about 28 biologists working on Atlantic salmon; before listing there were about seven. The newly moneyed commission is gearing up for a massive liming project on the Dennys River, which has been blighted by acid rain. About three quarters of the riparian habitat on that river had been unprotected; now the state has locked up about 60 percent of that. "We have every major stakeholder, including the entire state Congressional delegation, in the harness working together," says TU's Steve Moyer.

For political, not scientific, reasons there was no listing for the genetically unique salmon of Maine's Penobscot River-America's biggest Atlantic salmon river and one that sustains more fish than all Down East streams combined. Nor was there a listing for the salmon of the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers. Yet the ESA will benefit all these runs. The second part of the National Academy of Sciences study-an inadvertant result of the ESA in that it was ordered up by Maine politicians panicked by the alleged threat of listing-was released in December 2003. It recommended dam removal-a no-brainer for anyone who knows salmon; but most politicians don't know salmon. "To have the NAS say this has been hugely beneficial," says the Natural Resources Council of Maine's Laura Rose Day, who directs an environmental coalition called Penobscot Partners.

Beneficial indeed. Last June representatives of Pennsylvania Power and Light Corporation (owner of the most hurtful dams on the Penobscot), the Penobscot Indian Nation, the State of Maine, Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the USFWS, American Rivers, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, Maine Audubon, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and TU signed an agreement that will open 500 miles of river habitat to easy access for salmon and 10 other species of migratory fish. Under the agreement PPL will get to increase generation at six dams once it sells three dams on the lower river-Veazie, Great Works and Howland dams-to the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. Veazie and Great Works will be removed; Howland will be by-passed by a large channel; and improved fish-passage will be installed at four other dams.

Even the Bush administration likes the idea. At the final agreement in June 2004 there wasn't going to be a press conference. But when US Interior Secretary Gale Norton heard this she demanded one, then joined Maine governor John Baldacci and other state and federal dignitaries on the banks of the Penobscot. "Today," she declared, offering an eloquent (albeit inadvertent) defense of the ESA, "it seems perfectly plausible that executives of a power company that owns dams on the river, environmentalists and sportsmen who have tried to get the dams torn down, the governor of Maine, representatives of state and federal agencies responsible for the fish in the river, and members of a Native American tribe that has fished the river for 10,000 years are all working together."