[August 4, 2008 / No. 1350]

Salmon Recovery and Oxymoronic Projects

This week I am writing about salmon recovery again, and it occurs to me that were that effort not so obscenely expensive, it could best be looked at as a self-perpetuating exercise in bureaucratic carnival sideshow comedy. Comedy, yes, but not all that humorous.

Salmon recovery itself is, as I have suggested in this space for years, a contradiction in terms--an oxymoron combining the Greek terms for sharp and dull in one word.

For example, salmon recovery funds have been used to build "recovery" facilities along the Columbia to enhance Indian subtractive salmon fishing. It is a measure of what one might see as a doubled oxymoron that the facility I once visited had never even been used.

There are two salmon topics I am writing about in the column this week. One is the presentation at PNUCC's July meeting by people from the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority (CBFWA). The other is about the causation hullabaloo over the spike in the numbers of sockeye adult returns.

CBFWA is the trade association of four state and two federal fish & wildlife agencies, and eleven tribal dittos. The title of the presentation was CBFWA "on Managing Fish and Wildlife." I kept waiting for something worth writing down. I finally wrote just two words: "busy work."

Endless meetings and consultations. The upshot of much of this busy-ness was a publication handed out at the meeting. I have worked around printing for much of my professional life, and the full-color coated stock report was by far and away the fanciest piece of bureaucrat artwork I have ever seen--and I am sure by far the most expensive. Titled, "Status of the Fish and Wildlife Resources in the Columbia River Basin 2006," it ran 142 colorful pages.

Next, as noted in recent Clearing Ups and NW Fishletters, the sockeye have come back in large numbers. It was the plight of the sockeye that traditionally spawned in Idaho's Stanley Basin that triggered the first regional Endangered Species Act petition and made the matter of salmon recovery a lot more oxymoronic than it had been.

The Fish Passage Center quickly contended that the good news returns to the Columbia and Snake (quoting Bill Rudolph in Clearing Up ) were "mainly due to court-ordered spill at federal dams and high flows when juveniles migrated in 2006."

But wait a minute. "In the recent past," (quoting Bill again) "NOAA Fisheries scientists have found little to no relationship between inriver juvenile survivals and smolt-to adult returns, but strong correlation between ocean conditions and adult returns (CU No. 1306 [2/14])."

We are faced again with the situation where the favored population recovery projects of fish agency folks are the ones they can implement even if (recovery oxymoron) the primary population control is in the ocean and well beyond any land habitat or riverine project capability.

I don't mean to suggest that the salmon problem is simple--far from it. In the area where I now live and work near the Columbia estuary, the current combat seems to have moved away from denouncing hydroelectric villainy and into conflict between sports and commercial fisheries. Both have important economic roles in Washington and Oregon communities.

I am not sure what role funding could play in mitigating this conflict. I am sure that hatcheries must play an important role. Washington's first salmon hatchery went into operation in 1897 some ten miles southeast of Long Beach in Chinook. It is still in operation 111 years later.

Putting money into this lower Columbia combat does not recommend itself intuitively. But the need to reduce the money dumped into upstream salmon recovery is clear indeed. The 2007 BPA fish bill showed an expenditure of $716 million. The total since 1978 is now $9.4 billion. An instructive summary of costs can be seen in NW Fishletter No. 247, for May 28 of this year (access at newsdata.com).

How to approach cost reductions takes some digging, and I plan to get an editorial shovel and go to work in a future column on saving salmon bucks. Ideas where and how to break ground will as always be most welcome [Cyrus Noë].