Salmon Shell Game

Less than a month later, with impeccable timing, someone leaked a one-page summary of the new policy to the Washington Post, which published it on April 28. Industry and agribusiness moguls were ecstatic. Washington Association of Wheat Growers lobbyist Gretchen Borck, for example, opined to Reuters that salmonid extinction had its good points: "I applaud the people that are trying to save species that are endangered. But it might be good that we don't have dinosaurs now. We've gotten oil from the dinosaurs. If we had preserved the dinosaur, we wouldn't have that oil. Hopefully this will get us a breather from environmental lawsuits."

Also celebrating were Indian tribes, among the most rapacious exploiters of salmon and steelhead, regardless of origin. In an interview with the Associated Press, Charles Hudson, spokesman for the Columbia Intertribal Fish Commission, was quoted as saying: "If you talk about other endangered stock-antelope, condor, for example-they've long used trapping, transporting and artificial reproduction to restore them. For some strange reason salmon have not been allowed that flexibility."

But anglers, fisheries biologists (including many at NOAA), environmentalists and commercial fishermen were aghast. Scientists from NOAA's Recovery Science Review Panel vented in a May 24th telephone press conference sponsored by Trout Unlimited. "They [NOAA scientists] had no idea what the policy announcements were going to be," said Dr. Russell Lande, of the University of California at San Diego. "It came as a complete surprise to them and they actually had to send a list of questions to the policy branch."

Dr. Ransom Myers, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, also a panel member, said that if the policy is not withdrawn, "it's only a matter of time before salmon stocks presently listed are delisted and habitat critical for their long-term survival is eliminated."

Conservation groups like American Rivers quickly weighed in. "Hatcheries aren't habitat," said Rob Masonis, the organization's northwest regional director. "When you remove protections for endangered salmon, you also remove key protections for the rivers they inhabit. This could lead to lower water quality and further degradation of streamside forests, and it could hurt communities and businesses that rely on healthy rivers. Hatchery-reared replacements will never substitute for wild salmon runs since the need for hatcheries indicates a broken river ecosystem."

Bill Bakke of the Native Fish Society summed it all up with: "Politics trumps science."

Remarked Kaitlin Lovell of Trout Unlimited: "This policy circumvents the most basic tenets of the Endangered Species Act and effectively lets the federal government off the hook for any responsibility to recover salmon and healthy rivers and streams."

The National Wildlife Federation's Jan Hasselman accused the Bush administration of "deliberately blurring the important distinctions between wild and hatchery-raised salmon [and] trying to loosen safeguards designed to protect salmon habitat and clean water in the Northwest." Glen Spain of Pacific Coast Federation of [commercial] Fishermen's Associations charged NOAA with "trying to redefine reality" and "turning conservation biology on its head."

Newspapers around the country also pummeled the White House. "The Bush administration has now found a novel way around these [Endangered Species Act] inconveniences," editorialized The New York Times. "A new policy on counting fish, its practical effect would be to eliminate the distinction between wild salmon and hatchery salmon, which can be churned out by the millions. This sleight of hand would instantly make wild salmon populations look healthier than they actually are, giving the government a green light to lift legal protections for more than two dozen endangered salmon species as well as the restrictions on commerce that developers and other members of President Bush's constituency find so annoying."

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski, condemned the "bleeding in" of hatchery fish to ESUs and explained that his state was committed not just to more fish but to "water quality, stream banks, and "the general quality of the watershed."