New book lists potential strategies including one by
Albany’s Ben Stout
By Mark Floyd
September 2, 2006
CORVALLIS — A new book of essays by more than 30 salmon scientists, policy analysts and wild-salmon on ways to save runs of wild salmon has been published by the American Fisheries Society.
Some of the prescriptions are
certain to raise a few eyebrows.
The book is an outgrowth of the three-year Salmon 2100 Project, a joint
effort between Oregon State University and the Environmental Protection
Agency laboratory in Corvallis.
The project drew a variety of ideas. Most of the participants say something
drastic is needed to save wild salmon because of population increase,
habitat loss, climate change and other factors.
Benjamin B. Stout of Albany, one of the authors, in the course of an 18-page
chapter, argues in summary that salmon should be managed as salmon, not as
wild fish and hatchery fish as has been the practice.
“We must stop clinging to the false dichotomy between wild and hatchery
salmon,” Stout writes. “Hatcheries can be a positive factor in assuring
the long-term health of the species.”
This is just one of many suggestions for saving wild salmon offered by the
participants of the Salmon 2100 project.
The participants were unanimous in their opinions that present efforts and
policies to preserve wild salmon runs would fail. Yet they all felt that
wild salmon could be saved — with the right prescriptions.
“Some of the policy options are radical and surely would be difficult to
implement, especially those requiring changes in the Endangered Species
Act,” said Robert T. Lackey, a senior fisheries biologist with EPA and one
of the three project leaders. “But it is important to remember that there
are policy options that have a good chance of restoring wild salmon runs to
significant, sustainable levels through 2100 and beyond.”
OSU sociologists Denise Lach and Sally Duncan helped lead the project with
Lackey, who also is a courtesy professor in OSU’s Department of Fisheries
and Wildlife.
A proposal by James Buchal, a Portland attorney, suggests curtailing fishing
and putting more resources into hatchery production to boost the number of
salmon, then providing incentives for agencies and others to meet
sustainability goals.
John H. Michael Jr., a fisheries biologist from Olympia, Wash., represents a
group of participants advocating a “triage” approach, where watersheds
are managed for a specific purpose, not conflicting goals of sustainable
fish, energy and agriculture.
“In specific areas where the emphasis is electrical generation,
irrigation, domestic water supply and high-density human habitation, the
result is the functional extinction of some fish stocks,” he writes.
“Specific populations will have to be allowed to become extinct in order
to ensure that sufficient money, effort and political will is applied to
stocks that have a better chance at long-term survival.”
One of the essays, by James T. Martin, former fisheries chief with the
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and salmon adviser to then-Gov. John
Kitzhaber, suggests that current efforts are spread too thin and that salmon
restoration should focus more on higher-elevation streams. He says we should
write off those rivers and creeks where the chances of success are
impossibly high and focus society’s efforts on those waterways where
salmon have at least a chance to survive through 2100.
Ernest Brannon, a professor emeritus from the University of Idaho, suggests
the only practical, cost-effective answer to saving salmon is engineering
— specifically, creating artificial streams to replace lost habitat.
Copies of the Salmon 2100 book are available from the American Fisheries
Society. Information is available at: http://www.fisheries.org/html/publications/catbooks/x55050C.shtml