End of the Line

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REPLACING THE LOSSES?
Smolts raised in hatcheries don't seem to develop defenses they need in the wild, giving gulls and other fish-eating birds a field day.

Not surprisingly, salmon have returned in fewer and fewer numbers to a river that, after five million years of annual migrations, began looking startlingly unfamiliar. An estimated 16 million salmon were spawning in the Columbia and its tributaries when Lewis and Clark arrived in 1802. Only 300,000 wild salmon and steelhead return to the Columbia basin today, and that number is dwindling. Recent studies estimate 90 percent or more of human-inflicted mortality comes from the dams and the reservoirs behind them.

Last October the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) released a draft proposal to save four threatened or endangered salmon runs in Idaho's Snake River, the Columbia's major tributary. These are some of the toughest salmon in the system, swimming 900 miles upstream to an elevation of 6,500 feet and fording eight monolithic dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers. The plan called for eliminating fishermen like Kent Martin from the Lower Columbia by 2002 and for continued study of the dam problem.

"We have some of the best salmonid biologists in the nation here," Martin says. "You sit down and have a cup of coffee with them and for most there is this impotent rage that comes over them because of what's being done to this system. Because what's running this system is politics, not biology."

Bob Eaton knows a thing or two about the politics of power. As executive director of Salmon For All, he represents some 800 commercial fishermen and processors on the Lower Columbia. An enormous chinook salmon, steely gray with mouth agape, hangs on his office wall at the port of Astoria, Oregon. Tankers and grain ships glide by his office window, waiting their turn to enter Portland's ship channel.

"To talk about the Columbia River is really inaccurate," says Eaton. "We don't have a river anymore. We have a series of ponds, bathtubs. We've created an environment for anadromous fish that stresses them terribly." Four years ago Eaton represented commercial fishermen at the so-called Salmon Summit, an attempt by Senator Mark Hatfield (D-OR) to bring together industry, agriculture, and fishing interests to forge a regional solution to the declining runs. But instead of contributing to a constructive discussion on saving salmon, Eaton says, the state fisheries managers were immediately blasted by the dam interests for not doing their jobs. This broadside was launched despite the fact that one of the threatened runs, the summer Chinook, has been off-limits to fishermen since 1964.

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