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The Salmon 2100 conference held on 25 January 2006 was to be a small conference, mostly a gathering of about 100 “salmon wonks” from the Pacific Northwest, California and BC for an Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored meeting in Portland to discuss where we’re going with salmon protection and recovery efforts in the Northwest. Some press was expected, but nothing really earth shattering was anticipated out of yet another one of the many salmon conclaves held over the course of the past three decades.
However, Salmon 2100 managed to gain the attention of the White House, and it decided to send no less than their chief environmental policy person -- the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), James L. Connaughton -- to give a keynote address. Some puzzled over why the White House would bother sending anyone except from the Northwest NMFS office to a conference that most likely would not be friendly, given the Bush Administration’s extremely poor record and numerous court reversals on its salmon policies to date.
But then, 2006 is an election year and there is a political base that must be looked after. A lot of dam-bashing and calls for stronger protections of salmon watersheds would not sit well with the likes of major Republican donor corporations such as Weyerhauser or Boeing, nor folks in eastern Washington, Idaho, eastern Oregon and northeastern California where there are many “red” Congressional districts filled with people who will never understand the need for wild salmon protections when people can raise them in a fish farm.
So the White House decision was made to go to the conference, even though it meant facing a largely hostile crowd and some scathing editorials. Connaughton could at least steal the press from the conference and help shore up the Administration’s political base in the region for the November Congressional elections.
So what exactly did Connaughton say to the Salmon 2100 conference on January 25th about the Bush Administration’s new salmon policy direction? We’re not going to reprint his comments in their entirety here (his full speech is available on the PCFFA website, along with some press clippings and local editorials about the policy, are at: www.pcffa.org/ConnaughtonStatement01-25-06.pdf and at www.pcffa.org/ConnaughtonStatementPress.pdf), but the following are some of the key points he made and the reason it raised the hackles of so many in the fishing community, including commercial and sport industry groups, the Tribes, scientists and conservation groups that have worked for many years to protect and recover Pacific salmon. His key statements are as follows:
“I am announcing two important, new objectives for advancing the recovery effort: ending outdated hatchery programs and stopping harvest levels and practices that impede recovery of wild, endangered and threatened salmon, “ he told Salmon 2100. “The reason is simple. We cannot improperly hatch, and we cannot carelessly catch, the wild salmon back to recovery. To achieve these objectives, we will employ a comprehensive and collaborative process that will add to our investments in habitat restoration and hydropower operations, including our recently enhanced collaboration for the Federal Columbia River Power System.”
He then went on to say we must:
“....dramatically improve our harvest levels… Almost in spite of our investments in habitat and hydropower, we still allow ourselves the luxury of eating threatened and endangered salmon that may be needed for recovery. Although I recognize the complexity and broader equities of the matter, something still seems curiously out of synch here. These are salmon on the list of Threatened Species under the Endangered Species Act."
“This is the same ESA that:
- shuts down a timber sale because it might not leave enough trees for owl nests
- shuts off water to an irrigation canal because it might trap a fish
- regulates shrimp fisheries to reduce accidental capture of turtles
- and delays or redesigns numerous projects that will harm or harass a listed species.
“However in the Columbia River, the Snake River Fall Chinook gives about half of its returning adult population to us. Most of the fish taken (60% of the total) are taken in the ocean – from as far away as southeastern Alaska and Canada to the coastal waters of Oregon, Washington. The rest are taken in the Columbia River for tribal uses and by other fishermen.
“If it makes sense to spend $75 million in additional spill from the hydro system to create the prospect of survival of a handful of returning adult Snake River chinook, then we need to be equally diligent about examining the prospect of additional benefits with respect to harvest limits and harvest practices.
“We have in years past taken steps to reduce the amount of threatened and endangered salmon we catch, but we are still catching them at levels that warrant reassessment. This is a paradox for an administration committed to end overfishing, and we are going to resolve it.”
There you have the crux of it. In essence, instead of taking a long hard look at the impacts of Columbia River and other dams, and instead of working to reverse decades of destruction of stream habitat and dewatering of rivers that are by far the most devastating causes of salmon declines, the Bush Administration has instead decided to work to close hatcheries and shut down more salmon fishing.
Connaughton conveniently failed to mention, however, that current highly restricted fishery levels on ESA-listed fish are legally and biologically consistent with the protection and recovery of those stocks pursuant to a “Programmatic Incidental Take Statement,” and that decision has never been successfully challenged in court.
Since 2001, however, the Administration has proposed nothing but cutbacks on salmon fisheries while ignoring all of the other many, and in some instances far more important, factors affecting the fish. The Administration’s appointments to some key posts, such as the NMFS (yes, it's NMFS, not "NOAA Fisheries") Northwest Regional Director, made it clear that folks from entities long hostile to salmon recovery (e.g., BPA and the timber industry) were being put in charge. That was followed by a string of illegal and unsupportable biological opinions for the operations of the Columbia/Snake hydropower system, the Klamath Basin and the California Central Valley that have been found repeatedly by federal judges to be arbitrary and capricious as well as wholly inadequate for the protection and recovery of ESA-listed salmon.
On the Columbia for example, several state fish and game departments (Oregon, Washington and Idaho) have assessed the impact of harvest versus dams, and concluded that all fishing related mortalities combined (i.e., all sport, commercial and Tribal harvests together) total out at about 5 percent of all human-induced mortality for salmon and steelhead across all stocks on average, compared with up to 80 percent mortality associated with Columbia River dam operations. The other 15 percent is due to habitat loss. You’d never have known that, however, from listening to Connaughton, or later statements made by Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig, citing harvest impacts of up to “60 percent or more,” numbers that are either being cited wholly out of context or are simply made up.
Connaughton also got his Columbia River salmon numbers wrong, citing major improvements in returns he claimed as due to the Bush Administration salmon plan for the river. In fact, after a short upturn the adult return numbers have declined sharply for the two past years, with this year projected to be even lower.
But remember, this is the same Administration that completely ditched the Clinton Administration’s 2000 Columbia River Biological Opinion, which concluded that the impacts of dams could not be ignored in any recovery scheme, and that dam decommissioning in the Lower Snake River may have to be seriously considered if all other non-breach options fail. This rejection was not surprising, in retrospect, because one of President Bush’s major campaign pledges to his eastern Washington supporters was that he would never permit (in spite of any science to the contrary) Columbia/Snake river dams to be removed.
Later, the Bush Administration’s own substitute Columbia River salmon recovery plan, released in November 2004, attempted to reclassify Columbia and Snake River dams as “part of the environmental baseline,” treating them as though they were just like giant boulders dropped there by Ice Age glaciers instead of constructions by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This was just a legal ruse to allow the Administration to completely ignore the impacts of dams on salmon entirely, but to go after harvest and other impacts exclusively. The Administration also tried to jettison the “recovery standard” for its Biological Opinion, by claiming that it had no legal obligation to actually promote recovery through its actions, only to keep extinction from happening more rapidly.
Naturally, PCFFA and many other sport and commercial fishing groups and the Tribes challenged that bit of slight-of-hand, and won handily in U.S. Federal District Court on May 2005. The Administration has been under court order and strict court supervision ever since, as it desperately tries to construct a legal and biologically sound salmon plan.
The last time the impacts of the dams as compared to harvest impacts was legitimately studied, therefore, was way back in the NMFS 2000 Columbia River Biological Opinion (BiOp), under the Clinton Administration. Below are some NMFS direct quotes from the NMFS 2000 Columbia River BiOp on harvest reforms and the relative impacts of harvest on salmon recovery:
“...further reductions in harvest may benefit some species, such as Snake River fall chinook or Snake River steelhead, but [ ] such additional reductions, even if achieved, will not help recover listed species.” (9-143. Emphasis added.)
“For most of the listed ESUs, opportunities to improve survival through additional harvest reductions are limited because they are not affected, or are affected only minimally, by today’s much reduced fisheries.” (9-144) “Impacts on those ESUs that are still affected by harvest occur in fisheries targeting healthy and abundant stocks, particularly hatchery stocks. Even for the ESUs affected by these incidental harvests, impacts have already been greatly reduced in recent years in response to declining abundance of non-listed as well as listed species. As a result, even the complete elimination of all remaining fisheries would yield only limited benefits for many of the ESUs.” (Id. Emphasis added).
In other words, all the conservation benefit that can realistically be squeezed from restricting harvests on Columbia River stocks already has been, and even total closure would achieve far less conservation benefit than is ultimately required for recovery. Ultimately, with only about 5 percent of the total of all human impacts on Columbia River federally protected stocks coming from harvest, the Administration cannot realistically expect to get from near extinction to recovery of these stocks without addressing and greatly reducing the 80 percent impacts of the Columbia and Snake River dams.
One must conclude, therefore, that the White House’s new “salmon policy” is just a political move intended to divert attention away from its massive and increasingly embarrassing salmon recovery policy failures in the Columbia River by finding a new scapegoat, in this case fishermen.
Yet blaming fishermen for Columbia River salmon declines is just another way to blame the victim. Fishing-dependent communities have been economically devastated by salmon declines in the Columbia as well as elsewhere. We have been the principal victims of past federal dam-building and current dam mismanagement that continues to blunder along under this Administration.
In fact, fishing-dependent communities are being victimized here in at least three ways: (1) first the declines were allowed to happen in the first place, resulting in inevitable losses of as much as 80 percent of our historic fishing opportunities (and among lower Columbia gill-netters, more like 95 percent); (2) years of federal foot-dragging and denial in response to political pressure from those who profit from the status quo, resulting in ineffective half-measures, illegal plans and massive waste; (3) now, the Bush Administration’s new policy to blame us for the very fishery losses caused primarily by decades of federal dam mismanagement.
As we write this, the Klamath River salmon escapement this year is once again projected to remain at near-record or record lows, just as it was last year. But make no mistake, this year’s plunge is a direct result of a massive adult fish kill that occurred in the Klamath River during the fall of 2002 in which at least 79,000 adult fall chinook pre-spawners (and hundreds of ESA-listed coho) died needlessly in the river before they could even get to their spawning grounds. This massive disaster was called the worst adult fish kill in west coast history. Those otherwise healthy pre-spawners never made it upstream, never laid their eggs, and represent the loss of more than half of the year-class for that entire year. The missing 2003 juvenile progeny of all those dead fish in fall of 2002 would have driven this year’s harvests.
It is no secret that the ongoing Klamath fisheries disaster (both last year and this year) was caused by federal Klamath water mismanagement. The federal Bureau of Reclamation controls all the water that comes down the Klamath River from Iron Gate Dam. In 2002, following the dictates of a disastrous Bush Administration Klamath water plan that has since been ruled illegal, the Bureau artificially reduced their total flows in the Klamath mainstem far below normal, even during a drought. When the fall chinook run came in that fall of 2002, it faced a river reduced to a heated trickle, severe crowding, poor dissolved oxygen levels and ideal conditions for the spread of pathogens. It was the “perfect storm” of event for a massive fish kill, and that is precisely what the Bureau got.
Two separate scientific reviews of the causes of that 2002 fall fish kill concluded that it was primarily caused by the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s near dewatering of the Klamath River during late summer 2002 irrigation season.
The Klamath water decisions of 2002 were entirely political, and were opposed even by NMFS’s own scientists, one of whom later sought whistleblower protection under federal law. At the highest levels of the Bush Administration, it was decided to feed as much water as possible to placate Bureau-dependent upper basin irrigators who went short by a third during a record drought in 2001. Even though the drought continued, and the Bureau was repeatedly warned of the dangers, the Bush Administration made the deliberate decision to short the river at the expense of the fisheries.
Last year we faced closures driven by a spring 2002 juvenile fish kill of several hundred thousands, caused for the same reasons – too little water. However, this year we face the full brunt of the massive Klamath adult fish kill that occurred in fall of 2002, and the closures are likely to be even worse. Ocean salmon fishing communities face widespread salmon fishery closures and severe restrictions throughout 2006 from as far south as Monterey, CA, and as far north as nearly to the Columbia River – more than 600 miles of coastline.
During 2005, economic losses in California and Oregon’s salmon fisheries could have been as much as $100 million, prompting 37 Members of Congress to petition Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez for a declaration of disaster (see: www.pcffa.org/SalmonDisasterLetter.pdf). The Administration has still not acted on our disaster request, nor acknowledged in any way that its own actions were its cause. This year is looking even worse, and for the same reasons.
Yet the White House’s new policy would blame fishermen for these collapses, not federal water policies. One more year of in-river juvenile losses, one more year of below-floor returns, would trigger an “over-fishing” investigation by the Pacific Fisheries Management Council. However, “over-fishing” is now defined as three year straight declines for any reason, even reasons over which fisheries managers have no control, such as water flows in the river. In other words, fishermen will be blamed under this new policy, regardless of whether the declines were caused by harvests or by other factors totally outside the control of the fishing industry – even the federal government’s water policies.
If NMFS fully pursues the new White House policy of closing down fisheries wherever they “may impede recovery” or may lead to “over-fishing” as newly defined, the Klamath River-based fisheries (and under weak stock management, all fisheries in which Klamath stocks intermingle, which is most of them south of the Columbia) could all be closed down a very long time. Meanwhile, the federal government refuses to even admit, much less fix, the far more fundamental water over-allocation reasons for the Klamath River collapse.
There are many ESA-listed salmon stocks in the California Bay-Delta and in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system, and all fishing impacts are carefully analyzed and controlled with protections for those stocks in mind. Whether there will be more restrictions because of the new White House policy depends on what the White House actually means by “stopping harvest levels and practices that impede recovery of wild, endangered and threatened salmon,” and how stringent these restrictions might ultimately be.
However, just as in the Klamath, these ESA-listed stocks are seriously depleted not because of fishing, but because of lost habitat blocked by dams, nearly or completely dewatered river systems (like the San Joaquin – think Friant Dam), and massive water diversions from the Bay-Delta through the Central Valley Project and through the state water system south to Los Angeles. Today, so much fresh water has been diverted from the natural stream system that brackish salt water sometimes backs up all the way to Sacramento.
Recently the entire Bay-Delta ecosystem has suffered widespread ecological collapse. It is only a matter of time before this problem, which many suspect results from massive water diversions, spreads to the salmon food chain, causing collapses of many recovering ESA-listed stocks.
When that happens, under the White House’s new policy to close down fisheries, many fisheries may be closed down in an ultimately futile attempt to offset these looming system-wide ecosystem-driven collapses. Yet the true causes of these declines will be in federal water diversion policies that have drained far too much fresh water from an already water-starved system.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been trying to renew dozens of 30-year water contracts allowing yet more water diversions from the Bay-Delta, based on a NMFS Biological Opinion that has also been challenged in court and been found conspicuously short of legally legitimate.
Most recently, in the Central Valley River system, a NMFS official (since promoted) overruled his own scientists, apparently allowing the Bureau of Reclamation to then rewrite the NMFS biological opinion, finding “no jeopardy” for salmon survival for a project that would divert large amounts of water from the San Francisco Bay/Delta, which is already running a deficit of freshwater inflow needed to maintain estuarine function of some 1.6 million acre-feet annually.
Since that BiOp was issued, the Department of Commerce's Inspector General has found NMFS failed to follow its own procedures for the preparation of that "no jeopardy" BiOp and just in late January 2006, an independent science panel found the BiOp based on faulty science.
The new White House policy also attacks the documented problems some hatcheries create when they interfere with wild stock survival. Here, however, Connaughton failed to mention the many changes that have already been made in hatchery operations over the past decade to make them more compatible with natural fish production.
Many of the very hatchery “reforms” he proposes have been underway for over a decade, and where there are indeed problems of this sort, solutions are being crafted. Many other hatchery programs have proven to be well run.
Furthermore, many hatcheries are simply mitigation hatcheries promised fishermen by law (such as the Mitchell Act for Columbia River hatcheries) as direct compensation for the loss of spawning and rearing habitat now blocked by impassable dams. If the Administration wants to renege on that decades-old deal they had better be ready to take out the dams as the alternative.
Moreover, the Administration has failed to adequately defend itself against the strategy of some of the radical right groups seeking to count hatchery fish for purposes of delisting wild stocks. Indeed, that strategy for using hatchery fish for delisting was devised by the very timber industry lobbyist who was later named NOAA Special Counsel to supervise salmon protections. Having failed to be able to use hatchery fish to delist endangered wild stocks, it is little wonder the Bush Administration is now seeking to close hatcheries.
In fact, looking closely at the “new policy” on hatcheries, there is nothing new there at all. It was simply Connaughton explicitly outlining Bush Administration policy that had implicitly been in place since 2001. The Administration has simply come out of the closet and fessed up to its real intentions – keep dams and water diversions off the table, close down hatcheries and scapegoat fishermen for the decline of their resource.
West coast salmon fisheries are already the most thoroughly scrutinized in the world. What little take is allowed of ESA listed species is only that which will not impair the survival or recovery of the fish.
The problem is, the fish we don’t catch have to have rivers to go back to. And that’s where we see a severe case of anal-cranial inversion within this Administration (and some members of Congress) as exemplified by Mr. Connaughton’s speech.
We've seen total closures of many salmon fisheries and the runs have still continued to decline because of the total lack of political will, leadership and competence among those with trusteeship responsibilities for this public resource to address the problems in-river. Getting rid of fishermen, as the Administration proposes, will not save the fish, it just eliminates their strongest advocates.
And this, perhaps, is the real intent of this Administration. Ultimately, this “new policy” is more than just a way to divert political attention from the many salmon policy failures of this Administration. The new policy also appears to be specifically targeted retribution against strong fishing industry advocates such as PCFFA, as well as our sportfishing industry counterparts such as the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association (NSIA), for their audacity in taking the Administration on over its multiple salmon policy failures and repeatedly beating them in court.
It is also clearly aimed at creating a wedge issue between (and among) fish harvesters and other fish conservationists. There have been lawsuits lately from a couple of salmon conservation groups citing over-harvest of some federally protected stocks, such as in the Puget Sound. Other conservation groups (and some fishing groups) have complained of “excessive” Columbia Tribal harvests, potentially driving another wedge between otherwise natural allies who should be working together on Columbia River salmon restoration reforms. And of course, the perpetual in-fighting between the sport and commercial divisions of the fishing industry over diminishing numbers of salmon has become increasingly bitter.
If nothing else, attacks on us all should show us the importance of ending these disputes and pulling together. A number of Administration allies (including several powerful members of Congress) are now marching to the same “blame the fishermen” drum beat. A continuing wave of negative anti-fishing media Op-Eds and articles are hitting the fishing industry throughout the west coast, particularly (and unfairly) blaming fishermen for Columbia fish declines as well as problems elsewhere. A recent lawsuit by Idaho irrigator groups, for instance, also seeks complete closure of all Columbia River-based fisheries all the way to Southeast Alaska as their “defense” (i.e., retribution) to a PCFFA-led lawsuit over the future of the Snake River dams.
Two separate Congressional hearings have recently been held in the Northwest on just this issue, with a strong “blame the fishermen” theme to both events. A good counter-answer, outlining with hard data the true impacts of harvests versus dams in the Columbia, was prepared for one of those hearings by the Washington Trollers Association (WTA). For a copy of the WTA White Paper on harvest impacts, see the PCFFA web site at www.pcffa.org/SalmonHarvestCaseStudy.pdf, or contact Debbie Saul, the new Executive Director for the Washington Trollers Association at: dsaul@centurytel.net.
The best defense is to keep presenting the true facts. All harvest impacts combined pale in comparison to the massive juvenile mortalities created by the Columbia River dams. All harvest impacts combined are only a fraction of the fish killed in rivers with too little water.
PCFFA’s view is that we have nothing to fear from such reviews, either of harvests or of hatcheries. Everything that feasibly can be done should be done to minimize the incidental impacts harvests (which today are always targeted on hatchery fish) might have on depressed ESA-listed stocks. The truth is, for the most part everything possible has already been done, and what little impact still exists is very small.
Likewise, everything that can be done to better manage hatcheries should also be done. If fisheries managers can do better, let’s find out how and make the necessary changes. In fact, most of these reforms have been in progress for over a decade.
In the meantime, we must never forget that, compared to harvests, many other impacts (including dewatering of rivers, building fish-killing dams and destruction of salmon-bearing watersheds) are far more destructive and far more irreversible, and represent far more danger for the future of fisheries because their effects are mostly invisible. These should be our real targets, not our potential allies in these battles. If we as salmon advocates and salmon-dependent communities do not defend our salmon fisheries, including the watersheds and rivers these fish need to survive, who will?
And finally, we must also never let these issues divide our alliances with natural allies among the Tribes, with salmon conservation groups, and yes, with key sportfishing groups who are also being targeted just as much as we are by this new policy, nor let these “wedge issues” affect our common efforts to reach our common goals – restored and abundant salmon fisheries for everyone, and for all future generations.
For the full text of the Connaughton speech as well as selections from the press reaction to the new White House policy on salmon restoration, see the top of the PCFFA web site at: www.pcffa.org/ConnaughtonStatement01-25-06.pdf.
William F. “Zeke” Grader, Jr., is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), the west coast’s largest organization of commercial fishermen and fishing families. Glen Spain is PCFFA Northwest Regional Director as well as the Director of the Institute for Fisheries Resources' Salmon Protection Program. PCFFA can be reached at Southwest Regional Office: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370 USA, (415)561-5080; Northwest Regional Office: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370 USA, (541)689-2000. PCFFA’s email address is: fish1ifr@aol.com and its web site is at: www.pcffa.org.
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