A lot of efforts to protect endangered species get framed as jobs vs. the environment. With salmon, that's not the case. Instead it's a matter of different sectors of the economy at odds with each other. (Those sectors, as it happens, include traditional Native America n economies and cultural practices.) And for a long, long time, salmon - and the tribes - have been on the short end of the stick.
Salmon are anadromous fish, which means their life history requires an entire freshwater watershed, in addition to time spent in the ocean maturing to adulthood. Adults return to their birthplace in the headwaters to spawn, where the young hatch. They make their way downstream, undergoing a major physiological change to transition from fresh water to salt water in a life stage known as smolt, spent in estuaries. They are vulnerable to environmental damage (logging, dreding, filling, dams, toxins, siltation) at any point in their life history, anywhere in the watershed.
And in larger rivers like the Columbia (or the Sacramento or the Klamath)
dams like Bonneville and Grand Coulee caused precipitous drops in salmon spawning runs. The good news is that there were more chinook salmon pass upstream at Bonneville in this year's run than there have been since the Army Corps of Engineers built it in the 1930s.
Salmon proponents point to a spillover program, following a 2006 court order. Skeptics (aka dam proponents, who have their own agendas) put some predictable spin on it:
On Sept. 24, the number of spawning chinook salmon passing the Bonneville Dam reached the 1 million mark for the first time since 1938. Dam proponents point to safer turbines and improved habitat, but many biologists credit the increased spillovers. A new river management plan, however, may allow dam operators to cut back on future spillovers. At the same time, the record-breaking fish numbers have emboldened calls to remove chinook from the endangered species list.
It's good to keep in mind that the majority of salmon research in the Columbia basin is administered by the BPA, directly or indirectly.
DeHart believes that, through its funding decisions, the BPA rewards scientists whose conclusions tend to absolve the dams, and punishes those whose work might disagree. She worries that the threat of punitive budget cuts has created what she calls a conspiracy of silence. "I can't tell you how many times I've been on the phone or in a meeting and another scientist tells me ‘I can't say that,' or ‘I've been told I can't talk about that.' People are even afraid to write anything down," she says. She recommends a new funding mechanism, one entirely independent of the BPA's budget-making process.
Nice to know that
not everyone's against the fish, even if Bush-era appointees stacked the deck.
The implementation of court-ordered spill in 2005 played a significant role in improved fish passage conditions in 2006, and is being credited with contributing to increased projections for this year's salmon returns. However, even with these improved river operations, the decline of some Snake River stocks is expected to continue.
...
Like last year's order, today's order calls for increased spill over federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers during the crucial spring and salmon downstream migration periods. Without such additional spill measures, higher numbers of young salmon would have to be removed from the river and siphoned through a series of tubes into trucks and barges, only to be driven hundreds of miles downstream -- a costly federal practice that has failed to reverse the decline of salmon populations in the Columbia and Snake rivers.
The presiding federal judge,
James A. Redden, was nominated to the bench by President Jimmy Carter. Last year, after resigning from the long-running case, he raised some eyebrows over a
career retrospective interview with Idaho Public Radio:
“I think we need to take those dams down….,” James A. Redden said during an interview with reporter Aaron Kunz for Idaho Public Television that was excerpted this week by Earthfix.opb.org.
He also defends the spillover decisions.
During the interview Redden also said that fish survival statistics has shown that the spilling of water at hydro projects in spring and in summer for fish passage, as mandated by the court in recent years, “has been very helpful.”
The federal judge, who has for nearly 10 years held federal feet to the fire over Columbia-Snake river basin salmon protection efforts, said in interview excerpts released this week that he is perplexed that lower Snake dam breaching has been dismissed as a recovery tool.
Redden, born in 1929, is nearing retirement. Time will tell what happens going forward with a new judge presiding. With these new, improved fish counts at Bonneville, calls for closing down the recovery programs are gaining traction in some quarters. If there's evidence of progress on the recovery front, there's a certain twisted logic which argues that the mitigation measures that made the recovery possible are unnecessary and should be abandoned.
So much for the old saying: If it works, don't fix it