When the Bush administration
announced plans to close ocean fishing ofchinook salmon along 700
miles of Southern Oregon and Northern Californiacoastline, many
people in my hometown sneered their approval.
With the
exception of a brief, limited and most probably token fishing
season last summer, Idaho’s upper Salmon River basin has been
closed to salmon anglers since 1978. Residents of these most-inland
reaches of salmon have long felt maligned and ignored by downriver
anglers who have continued to reap the cultural and economic
benefits of the dwindling runs.
For decades, agencies and
individuals have worked to improve the inland salmon population?s
chances of survival, at no small cost. Ranchers and loggers in my
part of Idaho have shouldered much of the blame, with allegations
that the salmon would thrive if only the water was cleaner. As a
result, the timber industry exited the area a decade ago, and
ranchers have spent millions changing irrigation practices and
fencing to keep cows out of streams and rivers. Local hatcheries
rear millions of juvenile salmon, but only a tiny fraction of those
have made the approximately 1,800-mile round-trip to the ocean and
back since the eighth dam was constructed on the Columbia River
system in 1975.
So, I can’t fault my neighbors who say:
If we can’t fish, nobody along the way should be able to, either.
But our community should know better than most that when
people lose their connection with this majestic, incredible
creature, they stop caring about the survival of the species. When
Oregon Congressman David Wu says the people of the Pacific
Northwest will lose their way of life if salmon fishing is banned,
we know he is not exaggerating. Chinook season on the Upper Salmon
used to be a tradition here as deeply rooted as autumn elk hunts.
People from throughout the Inland Northwest would venture to
Stanley, Challis and Salmon with their families to catch chinook
weighing 20 or 30 pounds each.
Today, local school
children on a field trip to a fish hatchery can?t fathom that the
huge shadows swimming in concrete tanks belong in the narrow river
that runs through the middle of their remote mountain towns. So
when Wu tells a group of commercial and sport fishermen in Oregon
that he is going to take a dump truck full of dead salmon to the
steps of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration
regional office in August, I say, we in Central Idaho should go
along for the long, stinky ride.
When we see and touch
— or even smell — these fish, we acknowledge their
existence. When no one fishes for the salmon, they become
invisible.
This is exactly what the hydropower industry
wants. If we would all just accept that migrating salmon and
massive concrete dams are incompatible, they could stop this
profit-gobbling business of fish recovery and get on with churning
out electricity. If no one is making a living from harvesting fish,
or preparing a meal from fresh-caught salmon, or watching the
chinook spawn in a river they have returned to for centuries, then
who cares?
While Rep. Wu rallies behind the customs and
symbolism the salmon represent in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho Sen.
Larry Craig has been making headlines for trying to abolish the
Fish Passage Center, a small group of scientists tasked with
counting salmon and then telling us how many salmon are in the
river. Craig?s antics remind the sparsely populated interior that
its senator is fighting for the culture of electricity.
Those who talk salmon recovery like to describe the combined
effects of the so-called four H?s — habitat, hatcheries,
harvest and hydropower. But the reality, according to academics
such as Keith Petersen who wrote the fascinating River of
Life, Channel of Death, is that the eight dams in the
Columbia River system account for 95 percent of fish mortality.
While fishermen in Florence, Ore., will now lose their boats
because of harvest restrictions, and ranchers in Central Idaho
could lose their livelihoods in the name of habitat improvement,
both are being sacrificed to solve less than 5 percent of the
problem.
I support David Wu and his guerrilla-theater
plan to get in the faces of federal fishery managers. But what if
both ends of the Columbia River system, and everyone in between,
tossed a rotting salmon morsel on anyone who turned up their
hot-water heater too high? No serious scientist or observant
layperson believes sport or commercial fishermen are the reason for
the species? decades-long dance with extinction. Millions of
Westerners addicted to cheap electricity bear that burden.
Gina Knudson is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
She writes in Salmon, Idaho.
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