“ We have come a long way in a very few years for having loved the salmon to death. ” KILLING THEM SOFTLY By Bill Bakke Few of us look at it or even spend much time by it or upon it. The Columbia River flows by silently, a grey flood of water, a massive stream in winter or a blue, sky-reflecting mirror in summer. Yet this river has been the home of salmon and trout for thousands of years and the center, the beating heart, of Indian culture in the Northwest. The Indian and the salmon were linked in time, but we have inherited this ancient river and the land it flows from only recently. We reach back to the mythologies of Europe to understand our culture without realizing another cultural heritage exists here. We are largely detached from this land because we have not been limited by it or had to cope with it; we overcame it. We came and. like the Indian animal god, coyote, we are the changers. We have transformed this land and the river to meet our needs, and in so doing we have overlooked and in many ways have destroyed the cultural, birthdefining mythologies that make the Columbia River the source of spiritual and physical nourishment. As we have reshaped this land we have come to realize that its bountiful resources are not infinite. Bonneville Dam was originally designed without fishways. An engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers said, at the time Bonneville was built, that the Corps could not babysit the salmon. In 1978 an ex-director of Washington State Department of Fisheries, now representing the Public Utility District dams on the mid-Columbia, said in a public hearing, that, “we can’t love the salmon to death.” Perhaps we have not loved them enough. In the late 1800s the nonIndian commercial fishery harvested 30 million pounds of salmon annually from the Columbia River. Today, these same salmon stocks which supported this early commercial fishery, the spring and summer chinook, are being reviewed for possible inclusion on the List of Threatened and Endangered Species. We have come a long way in a very few years for having loved the salmon to death. As we lose the salmon runs, we change the life styles and economies of the people living in the Columbia River Basin. As the salmon resource fails, the competition between the user groups becomes bitter and angry as they fight over the few remaining fish. And while they fight each other, the development interests in the Basin have a free hand. Grand Coulee Dam blocked 1,000 miles of spawning and rearing habitat. These were some of the largest chinook in the river, and the commercial salmon fishery greatly benefited from their presence. But there has never been any compensation for that loss. even though 30 years have passed since its construction. Twenty years have elapsed since the salmon run was killed off at Brownlee Dam on the Snake River. The young salmon migrating to the sea in the spring encounter as many as eight dams on their way downriver. It has been determined that a 15 percent loss occurs at each project, yet these losses remain uncompensated. The Columbia River is operated for power production by Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and, in the spring, when the juvenile salmon are descending the river toward the sea, the flows may not exist to move the salmon through the reservoirs, and during low flows many are consumed in hungry turbines. Even though the Army Corps of Engineers is transporting salmon and steelhead around the dams by truck and barge, the fishery agencies want the river to do the transporting, and . that requires adequate flows at the right time to move the salmon seaward. In 1974 there wasn’t enough water, and the juvenile salmon moving down out of the Snake River system sustained a 95 percent mortality at the dams. It has also been found that delay in their seaward migration can cause them not to adapt to salt water; the delay is a function of low flows and dead water in the reservoirs. Only 50 percent of the Columbia River Basin, which was once available for salmon production, is now accessible to them, and what remains is largely degraded so that the salmon habitat is producing less than its potential. Our rivers are like our farm lands, for they are a fertile, foodproducing resource. It is accepted that we protect farm lands with landuse planning, but we continue to lose our salmon rivers because fish production has not been considered important enough when decisions are made to log watersheds, to build hydroelectric dams, or when we take water from our streams to irrigate agricultural land. Yet, if considered, the economic value of salmon is comparable to other resource yields. For example, the Forest Service found that the timber yield value of the Clackamas watershed is worth $14 million, while the fishery yield value is worth $13 million annually. Clearly, the fishery is worth considering, but when fish are not a direct concern of an agency, they are easily overlooked. This is true in federal and state governments. It’s incredible how the work of one agency is undone by a sister agency. The loss of our salmon resource is a very complex problem caught up in heated political struggles and biological shortcuts. The traditional spokesmen for the salmon have been the biologists, and they have been notoriously unsuccessful; partly because they are too careful, they are not good 4
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz