CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY group trying to maximize its own benefits, oftentimes at the expense of others’ benefits, economic or cultural. The concept of multiple-resource management, ecological planning, or basinwide watershed planning have not entered into our everyday decision making. The fishery agencies came closest to operating with these concepts, since the whole watershed is needed to produce a fishery. They have failed to the extent that politics shapes biological decisions and to the degree that the hatchery has displaced natural salmon production. Less than 50 percent of the Columbia River system that was once available to the salmon is still in production, and that which remains is producing below its potential. As the salmon and steelhead runs decline, arguments for protecting streams become weaker. There is a constant struggle to prevent damage to streams from road construction, logging, over- grazing, urban development and toxic sprays, but when the fish are no longer using the streams, those who want to protect streams have less influence and power. Competition becomes more intense when a resource is in short supply. Increasing the salmon resources of the Columbia Basin will help to solve some of the intense user-group wars now being waged on the river and at sea. Wilderness has taught us to practice restraint in the way we treat the land; we are asked to go lightly out of respect for the land. The same is true for the management of a river like the Columbia. Its complex interrelated problems require that we all share its bounty and its shortages; certainly we must all share in the conservation of the resources that support our way of life. Mr. Chip Greening, executive director of the Public Power Council, recently spoke out against fish protection language in the pending Northwest Power Bill. His statement illustrates the kind of thinking the fish are up against. While conceding that fish runs on the Columbia face the danger of extinction, Mr. Greening warned that the Northwest also faces a power shortage by the mid-1980s. He called for a “ transition period” in which fisheries preservation would be phased in (slowly) even if it were at the risk of some runs. “ It would be possible,” Greening said, “ for the fish to re-establish themselves once they’ve been run off the Columbia.” It is fashionable to make statements like that today, for there is a growing lack of support for environmental quality. As a consequence, when state fish and game agencies take issue with positions such as Mr. Greening supports, or become too active in their attempt to protect the salmon streams, development-oriented legislators have a habit of attacking budgets and redefining the laws that game agencies operated under. A shell-shocked department of fish and game without public support will back down on issues that they think might cause them trouble. Since they are the only state agency that stands between development and preserving fish and game habitat, the public is then the loser. It is groups like the Indian Tribes and a few under-funded environmental organizations that have to do all the fighting for the resource. The pressures to eliminate the salmon resource in the Colurhbia Basin are very diverse and intense. Bureaucratic inertia, provincialism, a misinformed public, and a singular lack of imagination are contributing to the decline. User-group wars focus on the “ other guy” catching the fish and never prepare the various fishermen to face the larger problems of water shortage, passage problems, and . habitat loss. New coalitions need to be formed among people that use water, rivers and fish, if the problems of the salmon — especially the natural runs of salmon in the Columbia — are to be solved. The Indian tribes that have treaty fishing rights are the last to get a chance to fish, and they sit in the middle of a vastly altered river. They, and the salmon, are facing the same fate, for as the salmon die, so does the Indian culture. The Indian’s religious and cultural tie to the salmon puts him in a unique role with regard to the preservation of the salmon. He has a spiritual reason for seeing that the salmon runs become abundant and a commercial investment once again. Because the treaty rights exist, the federal government is obligated to protect the fish, which are the foundation of the Indian fishing rights. The treaty fishing rights, however, are only as secure as the salmon runs, and they are being studied for endangered status. It remains to be seen if the Indian Tribes are able to become politically unified enough to make an important difference in current salmon and river management problems. The four Indian tribes that have fishing rights on the Columbia River have formed their own fishery agency, the Columbia River InterTribal Fish Commission. They have hired biologists to work with on- and off-reservation Indians, offering technical assistance to them while protecting the upriver runs of salmon which the Indians depend on. The Indians can give the salmon back its future and, for their own sake, they must. 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