Salmon Shell Game

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) voiced concern that the administration was abandoning science and law in favor of "political expediency" and that the new policy would plunge the region "into uncertainty and conflict through protracted litigation." Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) accused the White House of concocting a "recipe for disaster" and ignoring "the scientific experts as well as the citizens whose livelihoods will be affected." And he helped draft a letter of protest, signed by 76 members of Congress, which rebuked the President and his staff for reneging on "repeated statements that they want to use the best science and resources in all natural resource policy decisions."

If, as has been suggested, the White House leaked the policy on purpose to "test the water," it got some compelling results. The public firestorm elicited a NOAA announcement that it would not, as it had promised just two weeks earlier, "propose relisting at least 25 species [sic]." At least not right away.

Crocodile tears gushed from the policy's ghost writers, most notably the Pacific Legal Foundation, which vowed to sue the administration. "We'll let them justify to a judge how they think hundreds of thousands of fish are threatened with extinction," Russell Brooks told the press. Timothy Harris, general counsel of the Building Industry Association of Washington, which is suing NOAA in hope of getting delistings, called the failure to immediately delist "a step backwards" and recycled the old industry and administration untruth that the Endangered Species Act requires hatchery and wild fish to be considered as the "same species."

Still, the strategy of the special interests and the administration was successful and clear. Suddenly it's possible to use hatchery fish to write off habitat, to replace wild water and wild watersheds with concrete raceways. The administration can announce delistings anytime it feels like doing so-which, obviously, won't be before the election. But if there's a second Bush term, the heat will be off, and the administration and its allies will be free to start picking apart trout and salmon habitat.

The likely scenario is that the White House will secretly encourage lawsuits from the Pacific Legal Foundation, then settle in favor of industry or mount token defenses, lose on purpose, and refuse to appeal. That's been its consistent game plan for unraveling other environmental laws-the Clean Water Act, for example. Dr. Robert Paine, of the University of Washington, another member of the Recovery Science Review Panel, explains: "I think that NOAA Fisheries will do as they've said; they're not going to delist some big fraction of these stocks. The implication of that, is it will set into action an increased series of lawsuits by the people who initially pushed the Hogan decision through. . . . Then [the administration] is off the hook in terms of responsibility."

American Rivers' Masonis and Trout Unlimited's Lovell are especially worried about a part of the administration's proposal that the angling community hasn't picked up on-counting resident rainbow trout as steelhead. Already NOAA Fisheries has proposed downlisting the endangered Upper Columbia steelhead whose population, it alleges, "includes resident rainbow trout."

"Our fears turned out to have been well founded," says Masonis about the administration's latest fiction that, just because the DNA happens to look the same to bureaucrats who lack the technology to read it anyway, a rainbow is a rainbow is a steelhead.

"A grape is also a grape," Dr. Robert Behnke of Colorado State University, the world's leading authority on trout, once wrote me in response to Wisconsin's claim that there's no difference between a coaster and a resident brookie. "One species of grape (Vitus vinifera) is used in virtually all wine made in the world-reds, whites, best and worst. The grape-is-a-grape point of view is the most simplistic and would save money for wine drinkers, because the cheapest wines would be the same quality as the most expensive wines. I wouldn't want some of the managers you quote selecting wine for me or, for that matter, being in charge of fisheries programs where subtle genetic differences that may not show up in genetic analysis can be important."

"If there are lots of resident rainbows, the administration assumes they'll just turn into steelhead and replenish the population," says Masonis. "There's potential here, too, to use hatchery fish to escape listings."

Lovell worries about the "enormous implications" for anglers-who may be prevented from fishing for resident rainbows, which no sober scientist would claim require listing-and for all manner of truly imperiled fish and wildlife that may be denied protection simply because, in segments of their range, they sometimes hybridize with close relatives. At risk of being written off, for example, are any number of cutthroat races, which interbreed with rainbows or other cutts.