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The Bush administration has never been comfortable with the Endangered Species Act, which requires habitat protection when a declining species fails to recover. In the case of the Pacific salmon, the administration may have found a way out of its responsibility. As illogical as it sounds, it goes like this: If wild salmon numbers aren't large enough to justify lifting federal protection, then the government will start counting salmon raised in hatcheries and released into the rivers.
Admittedly, protection of wild salmon has proved to be an intractable problem. Several species of wild Pacific salmon are threatened with extinction, not only from overfishing but because of destruction of salmon habitat on rivers in the Northwest. Dams, in particular, have taken their toll, blocking the way of salmon trying to return to their spawning grounds far inland.
Rather than addressing the problem by breaching some of the dams, the government has embarked on an expensive (and mostly ineffective) effort to stock the rivers with salmon raised in hatcheries. At a cost of $700-million a year, the government trucks hatchery salmon around the dams and dumps them into the river.
Survival rates have not been good, nor has it helped wild salmon rebound. Yet the practice has given the Bush administration a way to avoid the difficult decisions required by the Endangered Species Act. "We need to look at both wild and hatchery fish before deciding whether to list a species for protection," Bob Lohn, Northwest regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, told the Washington Post.
In other words, the government will soon count hatchery salmon along with wild salmon, then declare victory.
The new policy, which will be published this summer, runs counter to a scientific report requested by the government but later ignored. "We know biologically that hatchery supplements are no substitute for wild fish," said Robert Paine, a leading salmon ecologist who contributed to the report.
The Bush administrations is unlikely to let science get in the way of expediency in the phony fish count, however.