The Dam Drama Behind Wild Salmon Recovery Plans: Assessing the Inadequacies of the Endangered Specie
- Tree of Knowledge Research
- Jan 13, 2014
- 3 min read
Salmon in the Pacific Northwest are an invaluable economic resource to the world, a historically praised icon for people living in the region, and are in danger of extinction like many other species.
This thread will be updated in several parts with research on salmon, the Endangered Species Act, and the Columbia River Basin -- research I continue to update regularly. My goal is to help inform you about the complexity of environmental issues that are interconnected with salmon in the Pacific Northwest -- and to urge you to be part of the solution.
PART 1 - INTRODUCTION
Roughly a century and a half ago and prior to European settlement, upwards of ten million wild salmon swam up the Columbia River to spawn at the streams and tributaries of their births each year.[1] Today, this remarkable fish run referred to as the silver tide has lost its magnetism as less than ten thousand salmon now return to the Columbia River Basin each season.[2] Over the years, wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States have suffered continuous decline for a variety of reasons including the overharvest of wild salmon for food, the pollution of essential habitat, and the fragmentation of habitat by development and population growth. Still, the greatest cause of this rapid decline is not pollution or over-fishing, but the construction and maintenance of dams on watersheds that wild salmon rely on for spawning. In the mid-1900s, Canada and the United States entered an agreement known as the Columbia River Treaty to construct four dams in the upper Columbia River Basin for flood control and power benefits.[3] By 1975, eleven dams stood on the main stem and today more than 400 dams block river flows of the Columbia River Basin.[4] According to historian and naturalist William Dietrich, 106 wild salmon stocks have become extinct since the construction of these dams.[5] The Columbia River Basin is only one example of a regional crisis of wild salmon population decline; however, salmon populations have decreased drastically throughout all of the Pacific Northwest including Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. The United States alone is home to two million dams of various sizes.[6]
As a result of this drastic decline in the wild salmon population, the National Marine Fisheries Service (“NMFS”) has classified a number of salmon populations as endangered and others as threatened, granting wild salmon protection under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”). Congress passed the ESA in order to protect and promote the recovery of jeopardized species and the ecosystems upon which these species depend.[7] This Act requires the NMFS to create Recovery Plans for the conservation and survival of listed species, such as wild salmon populations.[8] Despite this mandated objective to protect these species of fish, the Recovery Plans created for wild salmon have failed to both stop the continual decline of wild salmon populations and restore the wild salmons’ ecosystems. Still, even if the Recovery Plan for salmon was effective, because the ESA only mandates the creation of these plans and not their actual implementation, no guarantee exists that any Recovery Plan would fix the problem. Overall, the ESA has fallen short from recovering listed wild salmon. This is due to the Act’s failure to enforce Recovery Plans under its present authority and the persistence of dam operations. This paper will begin by highlighting some of the major factors preventing wild salmon populations from recovering to sustainable levels. Then, this paper will discuss the ESA’s role in wild salmon management, bringing to light why the half-baked Recovery Plans created to date have been ineffective at recovering wild salmon to self-sustaining levels. Finally, solutions will be presented that will require the ESA to incorporate better methods of wild salmon management, which focus on the recovery of wild salmon and how this recovery can be achieved in harmony with society and nature.
To read about the importance of Wild Salmon on various facets of human's everyday life and on the ecosystems in and around coastal waterways, click here.
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[1] Ken Olsen, Fishing for a Future, 44 Nat’l Wildlife 46, 46 (2006).
[2] Id.
[3] Barbara Cosens, Transboundary River Governance in the Face of Uncertainty: Resilience Theory and the Columbia River Treaty, 30 J. Land Resources & Envtl. L. 229, 244 (2010).
[4] Bill Lang, Columbia River, Center For Columbia River History (Oct. 5, 2012, 10:04 A.M.), http://www.ccrh.org/river/history.htm.
[5] William Dietrich, Salmon: an Environmental Tragedy in Two Acts, 88 Am. Sci. 267, 267 (2000).
[6] Dam Good News for Fish and Riverside Communities, Nat’l Oceanic & Atmospheric Admin. (Oct. 14, 2012, 11:02 A.M.), http://www.noaa.gov/features/resources/dam.html. [7] Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531(b), 1532(3) (1994). [8] Id. at 1531(b).
