A History of the Northwest Salmon Crisis
Introduction:
The
management and allocation of salmon in the Northwest, and more recently, the
recovery of salmon runs has always been a political problem. The struggle over
who got to catch the few remaining salmon in a given fishery pitted groups,
regions, and even countries against one another. The salmon blame game has now
entered a new phase where each group or region or country is trying to shift as
much of the cost of salmon recovery away from themselves and onto another
group. Contrary to special interest public relations, everyone is and has been
responsible for the decline in salmon runs, everyone in the Northwest who uses
electricity, who uses paper, who eats Northwest farm products, who works in
Northwest industry. What wild salmon need to survive is not hard to figure out:
they need habitat to reproduce, and they need enough adults returning from the
sea to produce the next generation of salmon. We have made the commitment under
the Endangered Species Act not to let salmon go the way of the passenger
pigeon, but no one seems to know how to get a handle on salmon recovery, and
politicians are notoriously bad at saying no to their constituents. Salmon
occupy diverse human habitats, they support a large fishing and hatchery
industry, not to mention their attendant government
bureaucra-cies;
they
penetetrate most of the Northwest landscape and
economy. It has been said that salmon recovery would make the spotted owl
struggle of the 1980s look like a picnic. We need to find an equitable solution
to the salmon problem. Every region involved in the salmon crisis is going to
have to do something positive to contribute to their recovery. We need to learn
how to solve complex, multi-jurisdictional
prob-lems,
because there are even larger, more complicated problems on the horizon:
climate change, the next energy crisis, the collapse of marine ecosystems,
population and poverty. We spoke with Joseph Taylor III, professor of
environmental history at
Iowa
State
University
,
and author of
Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest
Fisheries Crisis, which won the George Perkins Marsh award for best book in
environ-mental history in
1999.
Download complete article in pdf: