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If the past few years of salmon fishery crises and closures, first driven by salmon stock collapses in one river then in another, tells us anything it is that every west coast salmon river system makes an important contribution to the salmon populations of the west coast. None can be left behind in our efforts to restore these stocks.
All of these stocks intermingle at sea. This means they are all going to be governed by “weak stock management,” the basic biological principle by which our ability as fishermen to access any of these stocks will always be controlled by the weakest link in the chain – that is, the weakest stock.
Also, all west coast salmon runs are important components of the total biological diversity of these species that has allowed salmon to adapt and persevere through millions of years -- and now through human-caused impacts in the last 150 years. Every part of that biological diversity we lose makes salmon less resilient, more vulnerable, and ultimately brings these stocks closer to extinction.
The Columbia/Snake, the California Central Valley’s Sacramento/San Joaquin and the Klamath Basins are, respectively, the first, second and third most productive salmon river systems in the nation. In fact, even as badly damaged by dams as it is today, the Columbia is still the largest salmon-producing river in the world.
During 2005 and especially 2006, that “weakest link” limiting all other fisheries was the very depressed fall chinook stock in the Klamath River Basin. That collapse led in 2006 to complete closures of ocean salmon fisheries over 700 miles of coastline in Northern California to Central Oregon, a “Declaration of Fishery Failure” by Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez, and a Congressional disaster assistance package of $60.4 million.
This year of 2008, of course, we are in the midst of an even worse stock collapse in the California Central Valley fall chinook populations – a much larger salmon producer historically than the Klamath. As a result, all of California’s and nearly all of Oregon’s ocean salmon fisheries are now closed, and Washington’s severely restricted, under emergency weak stock management measures to prevent any harvest of these highly depressed stocks. Estimates by the three states of the combined economic damages that will ensue are at least $290 million. A $170 emergency disaster assistance package for our 2008 losses is now in Congress. Unfortunately, so far next year looks no better.
Nearly all of these salmon stock collapses can be traced back to either deliberate neglect by the Bush Administration to grapple with these problems, or worse, deliberate tinkering with or ignoring, for purely political reasons, their own scientists’ warnings of potential disaster.
This is why every Bush Administration salmon plan on the west coast in all three major river systems – Sacramento, Columbia and Klamath – have all been thrown out of court as “arbitrary and capricious,” and all three rivers are now being run by federal Court Order.
Frankly, this Administration has utterly failed us. Obviously, fishermen must force the federal and state management agencies who are behind this failure to answer two key questions: (1) What went wrong and why? (2) What are they going to do to fix it? Unfortunately it is ourselves, rather than the parties responsible, who are now paying the price of that failure.
These were the key questions recently asked by a Congressional Oversight Committee, the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans, of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee, during its oversight hearing on salmon fisheries management and the current salmon crisis that was held May 15, 2008 (see http://resourcescommittee.house.gov and go to the hearing archives for copies of that testimony). It is time the Administration was called to account.
Each stock collapse, however, has causes but also has solutions. Here are some of the things fishermen can do over the next few years to help bring these valuable fisheries back.
The Problem: It is no coincidence that the unprecedented collapse of fall chinook salmon adult spawners in the California Central Valley this year (which of course began with impacts on out-migrating juvenile salmon in 2005) corresponds precisely with record-breaking (and now illegal) water diversions from the San Francisco Bay Delta through the State Water Project and Bureau of Reclamation pumps beginning in 2005.
NMFS has repeatedly (and conveniently) been citing “ocean conditions” as the main cause of the collapse of the California and Oregon salmon fishery, despite the precipitous decline of other freshwater species also utilizing the Delta, such as delta and longfin smelt, sturgeon, and striped bass which would not have been affected by ocean conditions. While ocean conditions are surely a factor, much of the damage to these runs was already done by juvenile losses in the Delta well before these fish got to the ocean.
Fishermen, Tribes, conservationists and industry advocates have long been concerned about declining water quality and escalating water exports, well prior to the collapse of the chinook salmon fishery in the California Central Valley. Scientists have noted for several years that the more water that is taken from the Delta, the fewer juvenile salmon survive there. The sustainable level of water withdrawal may be as little as 4.5 million acre-feet.
In August 2004, federal scientists charged with reviewing the new federal water plan (nick-named “OCAP,” for “Operating Criteria and Plan”) to increase pumping to 8 million acre feet concluded that doing so would illegally jeopardize ESA-protected salmon runs throughout the Sacramento River system. This would have brought this plan to a halt.
However, after apparent political interference from as high as the White House, NMFS political appointees later over-ruled their own scientists and released a final opinion in October 2004 that concluded that the project’s operations plan would not harm listed salmon and steelhead species – just the opposite of what their own scientists had concluded, and in fact the opposite of what their own data showed.
With this NMFS signoff, in 2005 the Bureau of Reclamation began pumping at these new rates to fill agricultural canals throughout the Central Valley as well as pump new record amounts of water through the State Water Project to ever-thirstier Southern California. While already stressed, this is when the Bay Delta ecosystem began to collapse in earnest.
PCFFA and many other organizations, represented by the environmental litigation firm Earthjustice, challenged this obviously politically-driven flip-flop decision in federal Court. On April 16th, U.S. Federal District Court Judge Oliver Wanger ruled that NMFS’s full 180-degree reversal and subsequent approval of the OCAP water plan (rejecting their own scientists’ recommendations) was “inconsistent” with NMFS’ own evidence that additional pumping from the Delta would be harmful to ESA-listed salmon and steelhead that migrate through as juveniles, and he threw the OCAP plan out as both legally insufficient as well as “arbitrary and capricious.”
That ruling came on the very heels of the April 10th California and Oregon PFMC salmon fishing closure, in which excessive water diversions allowed under this same OCAP water plan have been implicated as one of the causes of the Central Valley salmon collapse.
Judge Wanger noted that NMFS itself found that current Delta water export operations kill as many as 42% of the juvenile ESA-listed winter-run chinook population and that proposed additional water diversions under the plan would lead to the loss of enough spring-run chinook salmon and steelhead to drive these populations’ to extinction. Simultaneously, NMFS claimed in its final findings that the projected water operations would not affect the chinook salmon and steelhead populations. In his ruling, Judge Wanger called the two findings “morbid… inconsistent, if not irreconcilable” and “the diametric opposite” of each other.
Nonetheless, the agencies continued (and continue still) to implement the current water plan without a new opinion being written. This has resulted in record water diversions from the Delta that precisely coincide with the current fisheries collapse.
The case is PCFFA et al. vs. Guiterriez, US Dist. Court of California, Eastern District, Case No. 1:06-CV-00245-OWW-GSA. A 16 April 2008 press release about the decision can be found on EarthJustice’s website, www.earthjustice.org/news/press/2008/judge-tosses-biological-opinion-for-salmon-and-steelhead-in-california.html.
There are also serious and continuing water pollution problems throughout the Sacramento Bay Delta, largely because agricultural pollution has been exempt from state regulation for the past 20 years – a special exemption that should come to an end. There were also serious failures in some of the Central Valley hatchery practices that could have contributed to these losses.
Are “adverse ocean conditions” partly to blame? Absolutely! But it is far to ready an excuse to use these natural ocean variations we have no control over, but which the fish evolved over millions of years to cope with, as an excuse to do nothing about the additional and unnecessary stresses on this already naturally stressed system caused by excessive human-caused water diversions and rampant unregulated pollution – things we caused and can therefore change.
The Solutions: The game plan for restoring salmon to the Central Valley includes: (1) putting more water back into the river to protect salmon, and capping future diversions at levels that allow salmon to thrive; (2) cleaning up the massive agricultural pollution problems in the Bay Delta that California has so far ignored; (3) resuming a discontinued but previously highly successful program of net pen acclimatization for hatchery fish instead of just dumping them into the bay unprepared; (4) restoring the Bay Delta ecosystem these fish depend upon for their survival as juveniles.
PCFFA has a “Ten Point Plan” for bringing back the salmon to the California Central Valley posted on its Home Page at www.pcffa.org, then click on the link to the 2008 Salmon Disaster information page. There are also charts and graphs there documenting the years of excessive water diversions in the Central Valley -- and much more information about the current salmon crisis as well as what you can do to help prevent such disasters in the future.
The Problem: The Klamath Basin has two major problems that are currently limiting its salmon production: (1) four nearly obsolete fish-killing dams that block more than 300 stream miles of once-productive habitat, as well as create serious water quality problems for fish below the dams, and; (2) a greatly over-appropriated water system that starves the lower river of much needed flows.
The Solutions: After several back-to-back water and fisheries crises culminating in the widespread Klamath-driven fisheries closure of 2006, a stakeholder group including multiple interests and agencies, including PCFFA, have now hammered out a potential compromise that would put between 130,000 and 230,000 acre-feet more water in the river and ultimately lead to the removal of the four fish-killing Klamath hydropower dams (Iron Gate Dam, Copco Dams 1 & 2 and the J.C. Boyles Dam) by as early as 2015.
Either of these two actions would make an enormous difference to lower river salmon runs, but combined they will go a long way toward restoring the Klamath toward its historic production levels. Both would be combined with an aggressive 50-year river restoration effort as well.
Final negotiations with PacifiCorp to remove these dams are still ongoing, but if these negotiations are successful, many of the Klamath’s multiple problems could be resolved to the benefit of its fisheries.
The first part of that potential Settlement Agreement (the water reforms and stream restoration portion) is available in draft for public comments at: www.edsheets.com/Klamathdocs.html.
PacifiCorp’s current 50-year license has now expired. This represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for restoring this once-great river. The next relicensing opportunity will not come until at least 2058.
Even if PacifiCorp does not come to the table, the Klamath Dams should ultimately be taken down regardless. PCFFA, the Klamath Basin Tribes and many others are working to make this happen, with or without a settlement.
The Problem: In past years, serious declines of Columbia and Snake River salmon stocks drove their own ocean salmon fisheries restrictions and closures as far south as Monterey, CA and well into Southeast Alaska. Both Washington and Alaska fisheries, and fisheries well down into Northern California, are affected by these Columbia-origin runs. So is the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the U.S. and Canada. The fact that the U.S. has reneged on nearly all its Columbia River salmon restoration obligations under that Treaty has the Canadians very unhappy with the losses to their own fisheries this has entailed.
Building the four lower Snake River dams was a huge mistake. The vast majority of fisheries biologists now say the only sure way to return the many ESA-listed salmon stocks within the Snake River (the Columbia’s largest tributary) back to relative good health is to bypass the four lower Snake River dams (Lower Granite, Little Goose, Lower Monumental and Ice Harbor dams).
More to the point, state fisheries managements have been saying that the Lower Snake River dams were going to create a fisheries disaster since at least 1949, when these dams were first proposed:
“Another serious threat to the Columbia river fishery is the proposed construction by the U.S. Army Engineers of Ice Harbor and three other dams on the lower Snake river between Pasco., Wash., and Lewiston, Idaho, to provide slackwater navigation and a relatively minor block of power. The development would remove part of the cost of waterborne shipping from the shipper and place it on the taxpayer, jeopardizing more than one-half of the Columbia river salmon production in exchange for 148 miles of subsidized barge route.... This policy of water development, the department maintains, is not in the best interest of the over-all economy of the state. Salmon must be protected from the type of unilateral thinking that would harm one industry to benefit another.... Loss of the Snake River fish production would be so serious that the department has consistently opposed the four-phase lower dam program that would begin with Ice Harbor dam near Pasco.”
-- From the State of Washington Department of Fisheries Annual Report for 1949.
Unfortunately, that is precisely what has happened and is happening today. Every salmon and steelhead stock in the Snake River not already extinct is now federally protected under the ESA.
The dams have always been the real problem in the Snake River. Yet after spending several billion dollars to avoid and ignore the real issue of the impacts of the dams, ESA-listed salmon runs in the Columbia/Snake Rivers are no better off today than they were 20 years ago. If insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then the Bush Administration’s salmon policies on the Columbia are clearly out of touch with reality.
There have been four separate Columbia/Snake River salmon plans since 1992. Never once have restoration goals in any of these plans yet been met in the Snake River. One plan expired in its own, and three others were thrown out of court as “arbitrary and capricious.”
On May 5th, the Bush Administration, under Court Order to rewrite its prior failed plan, offered a fifth salmon “recovery plan” that like those already thrown out of court also ignores impacts of the dams, refuses to even consider dam removal as an option, and is also likely to fail in court, leaving the Columbia River power system once again likely to be managed by Court Order for years to come. This Administration’s only back up plan seems to be to leave their mess to their successors.
In the meantime, poor salmon returns in the Columbia continue to drive salmon fishery closures well into Oregon, in Washington and north to Southeast Alaska.
The Solutions: The ESA-listed stocks in the Snake River, which once produced more than 50% of the basin’s estimated 10 to14 million adult salmon each year, will never recover with the four lower Snake River dams in place. Though they are much bigger dams than in the Klamath, they are also the least valuable of all the federal dams for power production, and the only major benefit they provide – and one that can be readily and cost-effectively replaced – is transport for grains and other products up and down the river – through only by virtue of huge taxpayer-funded subsidies.
We have written a lot about the need to remove the four lower Snake River dams in past issues of Fishermen’s News (see for instance: “A Salmon Extinction Plan for the Columbia” (Dec. ’07), at: www.pcffa.org/fn-dec07.htm; “Proposed Columbia Salmon Plan Protects Dams, Imperils Salmon” (Oct. ’04) at: www.pcffa.org/fn-oct04.htm; and “Why the Columbia Matters to Fishermen” (July ’04) at: www.pcffa.org/fn-jul04.htm). Our position has not changed, nor has the science.
Trying the same failed programs over and over cannot work. There has to be another way. In fact, there is a bill now in Congress (H.R. 1507 – the “Salmon Economic Analysis and Policy Act”) that has been languishing since March 2007 that would provide for independent detailed studies to find alternatives to the current gridlock. President Bush would likely veto it. This bill should be reintroduced, get a hearing and be passed as soon as possible under the next Administration.
And ultimately, unless something better and more cost effective to save these salmon runs materializes, the biologically best, as well as most cost-effective, option clearly is to remove the lower Snake River dams and replace their power through other renewable energy sources. This is the platform of groups such as Save Our Wild Salmon (www.wildsalmon.org) that many fishing organizations, including PCFFA, support and have joined.
The Problem: The final key to restored west coast salmon stocks are all the relatively smaller but still vitally important coastal streams and rivers that produce all our other coastal salmon. Yet salmon habitat in many of these coastal streams and rivers is still seriously degraded, and as a consequence many of these coastal runs are now so depressed that they have had to be ESA-listed just to keep them alive long enough for well-meaning recovery efforts to take place.
Most of our coastal watersheds have been over-logged, over-grazed, poisoned by old mining operations, blocked by small and largely unnecessary dams, or over-developed in a number of ways, differing river by river.
The Solutions: Some of the things we have been and need to continue doing to help recover those coastal streams include:
(1) Removing Fish-Filling Dams Wherever Necessary. As an example, the Savage Rapids Dam on Oregon’s Rogue River, which currently blocks a $5 million salmon fishery, is now scheduled for removal in early 2009. Lawsuits led by WaterWatch of Oregon, in which PCFFA was a co-plaintiff, as well as years of negotiations, are now bearing fruit. PCFFA also has played a role in the removal of fish-blocking dams in the California Central Valley, and is working to remove several more coastal dams that block important salmon runs.
(2) Mobilizing And Better Funding State And Local Restoration Efforts. State-based stream restoration programs like the “Oregon Plan for Salmon and Steelhead” and the “Recovery Strategy for California Coho Salmon” are good efforts, and also help mobilize local watershed councils and similar local groups and landowners in these efforts. All these programs can be effective, but all are currently under-funded.
(3) Putting More And Better Quality Water Back In Coastal Rivers. Rural areas often face water over-appropriation problems for their key salmon streams. Only now is California facing up to the need for minimum instream water flow requirements through a recently passed California bill (AB 2121, at Stats. 2004, ch. 943, Sec. 3) codified as Cal. Water Code Sec. 1259.4. This process of designating which water diversions are too much for fish to tolerate, and limiting those diversions to keep more water instream, should continue and be expanded to the rest of California.
Oregon, on the other hand, already has a pretty good instream flow designation process, but the list is terribly backlogged, many more streams should receive these designations, and when instream flows are designated, they are always the most junior water rights – of little use when a basin has already been over-appropriated.
(4) Changing Land And Water Use Laws To Be Fish-Friendly. A lot of the time we do need to “do something” for a damaged watershed to recover, but often we only need to stop doing the things that are the cause of its problems in the first place.
Excessive logging in fragile riparian areas, for instance, should be strictly limited to restoration thinning, and logging practices in all three west coast salmon states – California, Oregon and Washington – still need to be substantially reformed in order to protect fragile streams on private lands. No states forestry rules, according to recent scientific peer reviews, are really adequate to prevent more salmon extinctions.
Alaska has its own problems with curtailing poorly planned logging on the Tongass National Forest, and with problematical mining and oil extraction practices that could seriously undermine their so-far pretty well protected salmon runs.
Agricultural-based water pollution is also a real problem in California and Oregon for many salmon streams. California, though it technically has the power to regulate these pollutants, mostly does not regulate where they are the worst. Agricultural pollution is still categorically exempt from clean water laws in the State of Oregon, an archaic exemption that should be eliminated. California law exempted logging practices from its clean water laws until only recently, when it was changed by the legislature.
All in all, we know pretty well what salmon and other economically or biologically important fish species need and what harms them. Instead of ignoring these impacts, we often simply need to change those common but often unnecessary land and water uses that damage these resources. And sometimes we just need to not do anything but leave a place wild, free of human influences.
In many quarters there is still an ongoing debate on how to target our always limited restoration resources to the best effect. This debate is scientifically healthy, but some people will always use this concern as merely a rationale to deliberately create “salmon sacrifice zones” where it is judged that the costs of salmon restoration are “simply too high” -- as compared, of course, to the speculative personal profits developers and their and their buddies could otherwise extract, leaving the environmental messes for others.
This is the same thinking that has brought us to our current crisis. It is, unfortunately, a false approach. In fact, we have already likely lost too much salmon habitat, and we may already be faced with at least some additional salmon extictions regardless of our best efforts. We are already at the limit. We just cannot afford to lose any more.
Remember also that as recently as 1988, the northern California and Northwest salmon fishing industry created more than $1.25 billion/year in economic benefits, supporting more than 62,000 family wage jobs (Economic Imperative of Protecting Riverine Habitat in the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Rivers Council (Jan. 1992)). And this was in 1988, after all three of these major river systems had already lost most of their productivity.
Thus the total potential economic benefit of restored and abundant salmon runs, not to mention healthy west coast river systems generally, is actually many billions of dollars more. Salmon restoration is an investment, not a cost – and it is a biologically self-reproducing and sustainable investment that, used wisely, will return billions of dollars in social and economic benefits annually forever.
But time is truly of the essence for salmon. Maps and records show that hundreds of once-abundant salmon runs are already extinct in northern California and the Northwest, and that the majority (for some stocks the vast majority) of all salmon habitat has already been lost, inaccessable or made uninhabitable. The salmon “canary in the mineshaft” is already gasping for breath.
If salmon are to survive another 100 years, according to Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon (American Fisheries Society, 2006), we must change the way we as humans do things. We must both “protect the best” habitat as well as “restore the rest.”
Just like in the emergency medical treatment of an injured patient, we must first keep the patient breathing, then stop the bleeding and keep the patient on life support – so that over a longer time he or she can be healed. Healing injured watersheds is no different. But first and foremost is the principle to “Do No Harm.” In other words, first we have to stop the destructive practices that are driving our salmon runs to extinction, then let our watersheds heal.
The multiple environmental crises the whole world is facing are reflected in the crisis salmon are also facing. Both come from the same causes – us! Thus, in the process of protecting and restoring west coast salmon habitat, we will also find out that we have contributed significantly to the solution to the current world-wide environmental problem – at least in our region – and in the process created a much more sustainable society as well as a viable future for our industry.
Glen Spain is the Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), the west coast’s largest organization of commercial fishing families, and has been working for more than 21 years on west coast salmon protection and restoration issues. The PCFFA Northwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, by email to: fish1ifr@aol.com or by phone to (541)689-2000. PCFFA’s web site is at: www.pcffa.org.
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