"Everything... in the photograph -- trees, bushes, all the animals and plants in the forest and the water -- contains ocean nutrients from salmon." -- Carl Safina. © Save Our Wild Salmon
In the last 6 months, tens of thousands of people across the country, nearly 100 members of Congress, three former Northwest governors, hundreds of local and national businesses (including Wend Magazine), thousands of scientists from around the country have called on the Obama administration to end 20 years of legal and political deadlock and save wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest. In the LA Times over the weekend, MacArthur Genius Award Winner Carl Safina takes his best shot to urge the administration to do better:
Two months ago, in a swift trick no one saw coming, the Obama administration embraced the Bush administration’s failed salmon plan for an even more important watershed, the Columbia/Snake River system. The Columbia and its tributaries formerly produced more salmon than anywhere else on Earth, but the once-mighty rivers now have 13 salmon stocks in danger of extinction…
The fundamental problem with the plan is that its goal seems to be to maintain endangered salmon in an endangered state rather than revitalizing them. The administration appears unmotivated to restore salmon abundance and their role in the ecology and economy. Here’s what gives the administration’s game away: The one salmon species that is already at levels low enough to trigger additional action in the new plan has been exempted from the new triggers.
Jane Lubchenco, the administration’s point person for oceans and salmon, insists that “the actions in the plan will prevent further declines.” But keeping salmon in a coma and on life support does not heal them, nor help the other species, including people, that depend on them. The likeliest outcome of a salmon strategy based on just avoiding extinction will be extinction — and not only of salmon.
Removing four federal dams on the Snake River would open 3,000 miles of healthy streams in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho for Snake River salmon. © Matt Leidecker
A wiser strategy would focus on restoring salmon’s workhorse role for people and ecosystems. In the Columbia Basin, it would include removing four federal dams on the Snake River, which would open 3,000 miles of healthy streams above the present dams for three salmon species and double the spawning habitat for a fourth.
The Obama administration missed its first chance to hit the “reset” button on Pacific Northwest salmon strategy. But it’s not too late to reconsider. It should embrace salmon abundance as the beating heart of the Pacific Northwest — the flow of energy that connects and sustains people, fishing towns, bears, wolves, orcas, forests and the rivers and seas we all love and use.
"Star" -- Puget Sound's most recent addition to it's resident Orca whale population. © Howard Garrett
There’s another photograph I saw recently. Taken just two months ago where Puget Sound meets the Pacific, it shows a new orca calf emerging from the water atop its mother’s back. The scientists from the Center for Whale Research who track orcas named her Star, hoping she will guide another seemingly intelligent mammal — us — to restore the salmon abundance she will need to become a mother herself 13 years from now. May she inspire the Obama administration to think again.
