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The Obama administration has released its long-anticipated plan to save salmon in the Columbia River Basin. Federal Judge James Redden rejected an earlier version of the plan, called a biological opinion, submitted by the Bush administration last year. Some environmental groups like Save Our Wild Salmon hoped the Obama administration would make a sharp departure from the Bush administration, as it has in other natural resource issues. But the environmental group says Obama's salmon plan is "flawed" and calls its differences from the Bush plan "minor" and "cosmetic." The group favors breaching Snake River dams among other actions to ensure salmon recovery [pdf].
Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that submitted the plan, told reporters in a conference call this morning that she is satisfied that this new biological opinion addresses Judge Redden's concerns and does protect salmon. She said [pdf] that the plan is both "biologically and legally sound" and based on the "best available scientific information." The plan puts dam breaching on the table, but only if other measures do not work.
Are you concered about the survival of Columbia River salmon? Do you fish for or eat wild salmon? Are you willing to pay more for hydropower to compensate for fish saving measures? Do you think the Obama adminstration's plan will protect salmon?
Photo credit: mrjorgen / Creative Commons
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What is high particle transport?
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Dear OregonSean,
High partical transport is when you have a high number of particals transported downstream. It can be a mixture of both water and sediments. Sediments generally add more friction to the mixture and thus create more erosion as they move, adding more particals to the flow. The flow of streams and rivers around Mt. St. Helens shortly after the eruption in 1980 are examples of extremely high partical transport.
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"Are you concerned about the survival of Columbia River salmon?"
In a sense they are a metaphor for us, if we can't save them from us can we save ourselves from our self destructive economic policies?
So yes, I am concerned.
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"Do you fish for or eat wild salmon?"
I used to. I quit both in order to try and save them.
Farmed fish taste like crap compared to the real thing, so I just don't eat salmon any more.
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Also, farmed fish, at least those in the ocean, take up habitat and generate huge amounts of bacteria which are concentrated as they enter the water system.
Salmon is good for you though, and historically, everyone who lived here ate some sort of salmon, whether it be fresh or cured.
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It's interesting to speculate on why removing the damns is in question. How does the energy produced or the cost of removing them compare with the economic benefit a robust fishing industry would produce?
It seems that salmon are not going to go instinct anytime soon and that things are moving in the right direction, but I don't understand all of the factors contributing to the long term plan.
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Waiting for counts to reach 20% of historical norms before doing something is like waiting for 80% of your house to burn down before calling the fire department. According to the fish passage center the historical counts were 12+ million, 100% wild fish and now the percent wild returns are far less than 20% of that number. How many light bulbs would we all have to unscrew to equal the electricity produced by the lower four Snake dams? You can still get water out of the river for agriculture without the dams. It's time to move away from inferior hatchery fish and dam preservation. Wild should be the way forward.
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...that ANYTHING even proposed by the Bush Administration - which was an unmitigated DISASTER for the environment and for anything based on science - is allowed to stand is beyond comprehension. The entire Bush proposal should have been junked, and a plan designed from scratch, based on fact and science. I am deeply disappointed.
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Adding more monitoring and studies continues NOAA and the BPA's roll in studying the most studied extinctions in history. This plan has a flawed jeopardy standard, it degrades river conditions that were asked for by fishery managers and orderd by Judge Redden. The triggers? Look at breaching when it is too late?
The most effective measure to begin to mitigate for hydro measures is spill. To back down on the measure most needed by fish is unthinkable by a science agency in charge of recovery. Those who depend on fish are outraged by this more than anything else.
Sad to say, it looks like listed Snake River Salmon will not notice change from the last election.
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It should be harder to purchase lawn chemicals than to purchase spray paint. Purchase of spray paint in Portland now requires store operators to unlock a cage to access spray paint and requires purchasers to provide positive identification.
Furthermore, in his final judgement in 2004, Federal judge Coughenour listed 38 chemicals with impact on salmon and required "Salmon Hazard" warnings to be issued to all purchasers of seven different pesticides. These warnings are never issued in Portland and were apparently thrown away by participating stores.
Enforcement of existing laws and rulings would go a long way to helping the Salmon
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Bruce S calls the Columbia River a system. This is consistent with the BPA view, which treats the river like a power plant with fish in it rather than a river with power on it. As for steelhead doing better in barges, one of the largest returns of steelhead returned this year. When this years adults outmigrated, there was one of the lowest percentage of barged steelhead in recent history. That just doesn't square up with his assertions that steelhead do better in barges.
As to the cost of the BPA/NOAA settlement. It is a great deal of money that does good things for fish below the Snake, but very very little for the actual listed fish. If we are talking about what it costs to save the listed fish, then the settlement appears to be a bad deal for the ratepayers, because it doesn't address the fundamental hydro mortalities.
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How would a 2 year stop on all fishing for the columbia and its tributaries help the salmon replenish there dwindling population. And if we want to keep the fish alive at the damns we need to start killing off the seals that feast on the salmon.
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That comment about lowering the water behind the dam to increase stream flow reminded me that I have long wondered what is the estimated time until those dams are filled with silt?
When that time comes it will have the same effect as lowering the pool behind the dams.
Then the dams will have less usefullness for generating energy.
And if and when they are breached what is the plan to deal with all that silt?
So. What is the estimated useful life of those dams? Decades? Centuries?
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Does the Obama Plan consider wild and hatchery fish to be equivalent as far as meeting recovery standards?
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If dams are the major cause of fish mortality, what causes the most damage? Long passage through the reserviors, or the turbines themselves?
How long does it take a smolt to reach the ocean from above the 8 dams?
How long would it take without the dams?
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There is no "adequate potential for recovery" in the Endangered Species Act. The Act talks only about "recovery". The Agency's wording seems to rely on future actions that could take advantage of that potential -- the chance to recover in the future; nothing now.
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One of the endangered species is the Snake River Fall Chinook.
More than 80% of this species historical spawing habitat has been removed by Snake river dams by turning the river into a series of lakes.
How does plan address this issue -- does it provide more spawning habitat?
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All the people who think dams should be removed, must also believe that all fishing should be stopped as well, right? If these fish are truly in danger lets stop killing them and eating them.
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No, let's remove the dams so we can go back to killing and eating the salmon. Nature made them a healthy natural food source, nature was right and the dam builders were wrong.
Dams have been removed in the northeast and the fish have been coming back, we can learn that lesson too.
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Interesting to hear Bruce Suzomoto defending NOAA's plan. His own background as a scientist is in fish farming and hatcheries. He's also worked for a public utility and for Bonneville. He was brought onboard NOAA's ark by his former boss at Bonneville, Bob Lohn, who was appointed to the position by Bush's Commerce Secretary Don Evans.
Under Lohn's direction, NOAA took in more than $80 million for salmon science and recovery from the Bonneville Power Administration. Another huge chunk of NOAA's budget comes from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Under a law called the Economy Act, feds are required to contract with other agencies if it is more efficient or cheaper to do so, but the huge sums of cash BPA doles out for science allows them to exercise undue influence over research, including the science that went into this biological opinion.
As a measure of the BPA's influence in the region, it's also worth pointing out that the job of director NOAA-Fisheries' Northwest Region, the position formerly held by Lohn, is the only one of the agency's six regions around the country that is a political appointment. Team Obama hasn't figured out yet who will replace Lohn. Bet you a January power bill that it'll be someone more like Suzumoto and less like Mike Carrier.
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The purpose of the Endangered Species Act was to protect species and the habitats on which they depend. In other words, salmon are only part of the story; and their declining numbers or endangered status is only an indicator that something is seriously wrong with the ecosystem. Plans that are overly focused on the number of any given species lead to "one more fish" as a measure of success and conveniently ignore habitat metrics.
We need to fix the habitat from natal streams to the ocean and back again, beginning with those parts that are doing the most damage -- the long, warm, quiet reserviors coupled with fish killing turbines.
Fix the habitat and fish will take care of the rest.
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I agree that we need to fix the habitat, but the biggest habitat problem facing the endangered salmon isnt the long warm reservoirs, its an ocean & river filled with nets & hooks. Harvest takes something like 30% of the Snake river salmon, much of that in the ocean. Talking about removing dams while leaving gillnets in the river in just plain nuts. Don't believe me, explain why the coastal rivers arent overflowing with fish. Explain the listing of the Lake Ozette sockeye.
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20,000,000 naturally producing wild fish reduced to 3,000,000 hatchery and wild fish. I recently found a Corps of Engineers graph online that showed the historic returns of Salmon to the Columbia River all the way back to the early, white pioneer days. This graph clearly demonstrates the precipitous drop in salmon populations that was brought on by the development of our ability to preserve salmon in a can and ship its protein around the world.
If one reads up on the impact of commercial fishing, or looks at any of the graphs that follow the rise and fall of the salmon cannery business on the lower Columbia River, it is easy to see why the Salmon was in great jeopardy long before a single yard of concrete was placed at Bonneville. At one point there were literally tens of thousands of gill nets and pen nets and salmon wheels on the Columbia. Every little sidestream in the Columbia basin had been dammed for physical hydropower to mill lumber or later to mill grain; long before electrical generation. The graph also steepens noteably at the point in time when first pesticides, and then herbicides, were introduced to farming in the region.
A couple of retired Oregon State Police officers with long experience in enforcing fishing regulations have been encouraging the ODFW to change commercial gill net procedures in the Columbia because of widespread cheating by these commercial fishermen in the river. But alas they are still fishing in the deep of the night when what could be a powerful army of observers (sport fishermen) are asleep in their beds; And, no onboard count need be kept as they retrieve their catch so any number of fish can be spirited away in the dark of night by other faster boats and quickly on their way to Tokyo or Atlanta in boxes of dry ice.
And why is it against Federal law for the State of Oregon to impose greater restrictions on the sale and use of pesticides and herbicides than federal law requires. Because the pesticide industry lobbied congress to prevent Oregon from creating its own rules.
Oregon has long led the nation in environmental law. It is time for us to take another step in that same direction.
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The real problem here isn't the dams, its that salmon taste good. During the Clinton administration over 200 scientists wrote that the Snake River dams needed to be removed to save the salmon. In the press release they stated there used to be 4 million wild Snake river salmon and they had declined 90% since the Snake River dams were put in & there were only 10,000 left. If you crunch the numbers you find that of the total decline in wild Snake River Salmon, 97% ocurred before before the Snake River dams were put in, & by roughly another 3% after their construction. Still the "environmental groups" would have you believe that the only way to save this fish is to remove the 4 dams that "devistated" the runs. Never a mention of what happened to the first 97% of the runs.
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Chinook and Coho also spawn right in the Mainstem.
But here are a couple of other places that Fall Chinook and Coho should be spawning today that they aren't.
In the Columbia Slough and its tributaries in North and Northeast Portland. I know old timers that caught Steelhead there as recently as the 1940's. The Big Pipe project is working on this but it will never really recover the Samonids until the surface water itself; from the north and northeast neighborhoods, and all of the commercial user's properties, is also made habitable; as in clean and cold and shaded and disrupted by structure.
Also, in all of the little tributaries across what is now downtown Portland. In some communities there have been major efforts to daylight such tributaries which were buried in the past because they were overtaken by sewage. Many of the original sewer trunks lay in the pathways of historic wateways. But now, for the most part, the sewage and storm water have once again been separated and this means that we are now running what could be beautiful fish filled tributaries under shaded watercourse throughout the city, instead, under several feet of concrete below ground.
There are many other places throughout the metro region where salmon could easily spawn, but for the urban runoff and pollution in those streams.
The concrete bottom line is that Salmon need Cold Clean Water and Gravel, and Shade to Spawn. The returning fish have long ago eaten their last meal in the Salt by the time they arrive but the new smolts will need breakfast lunch and dinner insects and euphasids every step of the way and that means at least a little ecosystem along the way because they are also going to need some shade (think Alder). It is like growing tomatoes, You can grow them in a bucket if it is the right size, and you can provide every single nutrient; but it is a lot easier to grow them in an able patch of ground as part of a larger garden.
I like to imagine the best possible outcome of every opportunity before I start into action. If we provide a perfect environment within our Metro area for the Salmon we will be providing something much greater to each other as humans along the way. They were here long before us and it would be good to keep that in mind.
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I am concerned about the survival of Columbia River salmon. Salmon are wonderful creatures and tasty too. I am willing to pay more for hydro power measures that save fish as I've cut my use of electricity drastically. I don't think plans concocted by people and compromised by politics take into full account the complexity of the problem. I quickly glanced the following report which talks about salmon decline in terms of "negative ocean conditions". The dams are only one factor affecting salmon most likely. I trust Jane Lubchenco' s insight as an expert but I'm concerned that we're running out of time.
http://www.cbr.washington.edu/papers/jim/victoria.html
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Haven't read the article completely but folks were wrestling with the issue of what to do about salmon in 1947 too.
http://www.ccrh.org/comm/umatilla/primary/threaten.htm
We implement technology and rush about frantically trying to figure out how to solve the problems technology exacerbates -- after the fact.
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I don't think that we are running out of time for saving the salmon. There are some groups that certainly claim this, that we have to do more every year to "save the salmon". However, the returning runs are large & while in-river harvest rates were below 10% in the late 1990's. they are currently up over 30% on many runs. If the salmon populations are truely declining, why are we more than tripling harvest. The problem is largely perception & political.
For example we've finally gotten permission to kill sealions that are eating salmon below Bonneville dam. The same year there was an agreement made with the tribes that they could harvest more salmon in good years. Guess what, the increase in allowable harvest is almost exactly the amount that is gained by killing off a bunch of sealions.
The electric ratepayers of the PNW are spending over $700million/year to improve salmon survival, but any gains made are met with increased harvest quotas. The salmon can't recover if we eat them instead of letting them spawn
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Comments are now closed.
Decreasing high partical transport and increasing habitat will help salmon populations grow.