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Return to the River
After a failed $3 billion, 17-year, multi-party effort to recover endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest, an independent scientific group made up of fisheries biologists, statisticians, ecologists and geneticists commissioned by the Northwest Power Planning Council is saying that it's time to look to nature, not technology, to restore the country's greatest salmon run.
The panel's recently released report, Return to the River, provides scientific evidence that the decades-long effort to restore Columbia Basin salmon through such technological fixes as fish ladders and barging juveniles downriver past dams may help certain populations, but is not enough to recover salmon. Instead it stresses the importance of restoring habitat throughout the Columbia's 259,000-square-mile watershed in a multi-faceted effort not unlike the one now going on in California. The science panel even raised the prospect of breaching or drawing down dams - a suggestion tantamount to sacrilege in a region whose economy was built on the massive industrial development of this once-wild river.
With the Army Corps facing a 1999 deadline for deciding how dams will be operated to avoid further jeopardy for endangered Snake River salmon, the Columbia Basin may be reaching the same point that the Bay-Delta hit four years ago. Back then, an endangered species stalemate in California's water wars spawned the ambitious effort to balance water supply, demand and environmental restoration underway today.
Tom Jensen, an attorney who handled the Columbia issue for the President's Council on Environmental Quality until leaving for private practice, expects the Clinton administration to launch an ecosystem-wide planning process in the Pacific Northwest similar to California's Bay-Delta effort. "My impression is that in the next short while you're going to see changes announced," says Jensen. "The approach the government is taking in the Columbia Basin is going to break away from the animal to the region. There's nowhere else to go."
The region has been avoiding the hard questions since 1981, when federal legislation created the Northwest Power Planning Council to put salmon recovery on a par with the region's hydroelectric use. Without enough authority to make major changes in the system, the Council improved the quality and professionalism of existing recovery efforts, but was unable to bring survival rates up significantly. Hatchery fish now outnumber wild fish 10-1, and salmon numbers are down to less than one-third of the 16 million that greeted Lewis and Clark in 1805.
The population of wild fish has been dropping for at least a century, keeping pace with the industrialization of the massive river system. Historian Donald Worster called the Columbia a river that died and was reborn as money. The 400 dams constructed in the Columbia watershed built an industrial frontier in the eastern deserts of Pacific Northwest, making possible subsidized electricity, irrigation, and even a barging industry that allowed Lewiston, Idaho to become a major international port, although it lies 1,000 miles inland.
One official counted at least 15 government entities with a stake in the river - from the Bonneville Power Administration to the Nez Perce tribe - and that's not counting barge operators, aluminum producers and drylands farmers. It's a more varied and less urban group than the Bay-Delta players and nobody thinks it will be easy to pull together. But many observers agree that the Return to the River report, which signals a new level of agreement among scientists, may be the first step toward resolving this highly charged conflict between the West's traditional resource-dependent economy and a new sensibility that places a higher value on conservation and recreation.
Crisis is certainly in the air. Despite billions spent on recovery, fish in the Columbia and the rivers that feed it are in worse shape than ever. Every anadromous fish in Idaho, including Snake River sockeye and spring, summer, and fall chinook, which migrate to the sea through the Columbia, is listed as endangered. UpperColumbia steelhead are on the threatened list. Several populations of inland bull trout were recently added to the endangered list and redband trout are proposed for listing. Of more than 400 genetically distinct salmon populations once found in the watershed, only about 200 remain.
Since the 1970s, the Army Corps has been netting hundreds of thousands of juvenile smolts each year and trucking or barging them downriver past dam turbines. Yet the number of salmon returning to spawn is still in the 0.2% range, according to biologist David Cannemula of Idaho's Fish and Game Department. To recover fish, 2-6% of them must return.
"The debates are focusing on real specific, real technical issues," Rick Williams, a population and evolutionary geneticist in Idaho who chaired the independent science panel. "But the bigger questions the region really needs to grapple with still remain. Those are the political questions."
One of the keys to resolving the scientific questions, if not the political ones, may be found in the last healthy fall chinook salmon population on the Upper Columbia River, which spawns in a 51-mile stretch bordering the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington. With the federal government spending more than $1 billion annually since 1989 to clean up the highly-polluted reservation, Hanford Reach, as this undammed section is known, has become an ironic icon, an obscure object of desire, a vision of a lost continent where rivers ran free and salmon outnumbered people. U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has made designation of the Hanford Reach as a wild and scenic river her top environmental priority.
Upstream of the Hanford Reach lies the John Day Dam, which the science panel suggested drawing down. By uncovering at least half of the dam's 77-mile reservoir, biologists could build on the Columbia's healthiest population of salmon. But the John Day plays an important role in supplying energy to California from the Northwest, so there are political and economic problems with this option (Congress recently funded a $250,000 scoping study). Others in the region favor breaching four earthen dams on the Snake River, an option with less complex tradeoffs. Each option is biologically defensible; neither will solve the region's problems alone.
Whatever its future, Hanford, one of the few places on the river that was immune to the good intentions of the Army Corps during the agency's dam-building heydey, may indeed be the region's best model for the "normative river" recommended by the panel in the Return to the River report. Like efforts in California's Central Valley and Delta, restoring the Columbia would entail a combination of enhanced flow regimes and habitat restoration. Like anyone else working on large-scale ecosytem restoration, the independent science panel knows it is unrealistic to aim for a return to the wilderness whitewater faced by Lewis and Clark, when the river's 16 million salmon outnumbered the population of the United States. Officials at the Northwest Power Planning Council say their long-term goal is a river with a healthy population of five million wild fish, twice the current population.
For a copy of the draft version of Return to the River report, contact the Northwest Power Planning Council at (800)222-3355 or on the web at www.nwppc.org
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