Salmon Shell Game

"NOAA Fisheries doesn't have the genetics for almost 99 percent of these wild fish," Lovell says. "So when it applies [the new ESU criteria] it uses a whole bunch of 'proxies'-what kind of brood stock did you use, have you been using the same hatchery population, what are your release strategies; are your fish coming back at different times than wild fish?"

Last February more than 60 scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and 19 recipients of the National Medal of Science (awarded by the President), provided irrefutable evidence that this salmon shell game is merely business as usual for the Bush administration. The scientists' report, entitled "Scientific Integrity in Policy Making: An Investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science," charges the administration with "distorting scientific data and suppressing scientific analysis in numerous policy areas, including environmental protection" and "repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise." One of many examples offered by the scientists was the suppression of an EPA study revealing the dangers of eating mercury-contaminated fish, this at a time when the administration was pushing a major revision of the Clean Air Act that would permit certain coal-fired power plants and refineries to increase pollution. [See "Anglers and Air Pollution," March 2004.]

The Orwellian transformation of hatchery salmonids into "wild" ones is odd policy if, as Mr. Bush and his people profess, they are committed to fish and fishing. While the president isn't into trout or salmon, he has rhapsodized about the joys of going bassing with Ray Scott and bluefishing in his father's cigarette boat. The vice president gushes about fly-fishing for trout in Wyoming. And Bush's interior secretary, Gale Norton-James Watt's old protégé at the Mountain States Legal Foundation-offers the following: "Fly fishing conjures images of grace, to be sure, but its mastery requires patience and commitment. Less well known, however, and deserving of far greater recognition, is the vital role fly fishers have played and continue to play in conservation in the United States."

Norton, an accomplished abuser of science herself, at least has it right about fly fishers. But she might have added this, perhaps in a note to Trout Unlimited and its allies: "The most vital part of that vital role has been to expose and hold accountable elected officials who sacrifice, for short-term profit, wild salmonids and the water and land that sustains them."