by

Robert T. Lackey
Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences
Oregon State University

robert.lackey@oregonstate.edu

Introduction

The United States has spent, and continues to commit, billions of dollars to reverse the decline in the abundance of wild (in contrast to hatchery-origin) salmon and steelhead along the West Coast of North America (California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho).  After spending billions, success, if any, has been limited and rare (Gustafson et al. 2007, Jaeger and Scheuerell, 2023, Bilby et al. 2024, Ford et al. 2025).  How can so much money be spent for so long with such disappointing results?  Perhaps an even more interesting question is why the situation is likely to continue.

The focus here is on 6 anadromous West Coast salmonid species:

• Chinook salmon (also called king salmon), Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
• Coho salmon (also called silver salmon) O. kisutch
• Sockeye salmon (also called red salmon) O. nerka
• Chum salmon (also called dog salmon) O. keta
• Pink salmon (also called humpback salmon) O. gorbuscha
• Steelhead (the anadromous form of rainbow trout) O. mykiss

Although steelhead are classified as trout, I include them when I refer to West Coast “salmon.”

I assert that the lack of West Coast salmon recovery is disappointing, but it is rarely because of a lack of scientific information or understanding.  Rather, it is because the policy problem has been treated simplistically, and with a bureaucratic and legal approach is doomed to fail.  My perspective on the full complement of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, and policy advocates engaged (and usually funded) in some aspect of salmon recovery is partly inspired by President Eisenhower’s famous 1961 speech about the risks of creating a Military Industrial Complex (MIC).  For salmon recovery, I will label the analogous assemblage of individuals and organizations, funded by the multibillion-dollar expenditures from many sources, as the Salmon Recovery Industrial Complex (SRIC).

Currently, SRIC is well funded by a mix of government and private support.  Individuals employed in the SRIC are paid directly, often through contracts or grants, by governments (Federal, State, local, and tribal administrative units and State and private universities), or private parties (advocacy or interest organizations, foundations, professional groups, companies and corporations, and consultancies).  Nominally private funding organizations are often supported by tax-advantaged (i.e., tax-deductible) donations from individuals and organizations.  Such private funding is, therefore, subsidized by taxpayers.  Policy advocacy groups representing many different political perspectives abound, and many have extensive paid scientific, legal, and lobbying staff to advance their goals.  Such advocacy organizations (either by their paid staff or under contract to outside experts) often produce peer-reviewed scientific products that align with their organizations’ policy preferences.

Delusional policy realities and pervasive optimism abound despite sustained multibillion-dollar expenditures and little recovery success.  All this exists, despite a massive, ever-expanding peer-reviewed scientific literature, and, perhaps, partially driven by a pervasive, but unfounded optimism (Figure 1).  For example, based on my personal interactions, it is frequent within the SRIC for individuals to assume some variation of the notion that “if the public and policy makers just understood the science relative to the 200-year decline of West Coast salmon, then the path to restoration would be obvious, and the difficult, but necessary political decisions would be broadly supported.”  To some scientists in the SRIC, this belief leads to the maxim:  “Everyone knows what the salmon recovery goal should be.  We understand the science, now listen to us about what should be done.”  But what is the recovery goal?  Is it to avoid an Endangered Species Act listing, levels which could be a few percent of historic numbers?  Is the goal to sustain runs to support a limited fishery, perhaps a third of the historical (1850s) run size?  Is it to return salmon runs to 100% of historic (1850s) levels?  What role, if any, should hatchery fish play in sustaining or increasing run size?  If the overarching goal is to return wild runs to some historical level, why should any harvest of hatchery-origin salmon be permitted because some wild fish are killed in the process?  Although these questions are central to any recovery program, they are rarely explicitly agreed to by all participants.

Why does the SRIC continue unabated when there is essentially no significant indication of success (i.e., there is little evidence that wild runs are increasing as a result of the SRIC’s actions)?  If the path to salmon recovery is clear, why is it not supported more generally across the political spectrum?  Or, perhaps SRIC is an example of symbolic politics (i.e., the implementation of an aggressive effort to meet a publicly stated policy goal that is unlikely to be successful, but will demonstrate to concerned citizens and, more broadly, the electorate that the problem is being addressed)?  Or, perhaps, it is an example of virtue signaling (i.e., expressing sympathy for a popular policy goal without the expectation of the action making much difference)?

My goals here are to propose answers to two questions:  (1) why did the billions spent by the SRIC not successfully recover salmon runs, and (2) why is it likely that this expenditure will continue, with the same outcome?

This policy case study is not new, and the basic facts about the overall salmon recovery failures are well documented (Nehlsen et al  1991;  Gustafson et al 2007; Waldman and Quinn  2022;   Quinn 2018, 2025).  Further, the choices that have been made about West Coast salmon since the mid-1800s are fundamentally similar to those in other 3 places where salmon originally occurred (i.e., the Asian Far East, Western and Northern Europe, and Eastern North America).  Lack of scientific understanding was rarely the primary cause.  The general pattern of decline nearly always followed a well-established inverse correlation:  as the number of people and their associated activities increased, the size of salmon runs decreased.

Although not well documented, the current West Coast salmon decline arguably began in the early 1800s in what is now Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia (at the time, called the Oregon Territory) with conflicts between Great Britain and the United States over the lucrative beaver fur market.  The British Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) tried to keep American beaver trappers from moving northward into what is now British Columbia by implementing a policy of aggressively trapping all beaver inhabiting the Columbia River Basin and the surrounding area.  This created a large “fur desert,” an area largely devoid of beaver.  The hope was that American beaver trappers would shun these areas of disputed sovereignty.  With the demise of the beaver population, the ubiquitous beaver dams soon disappeared.  At the time, the effect on salmon runs was unknown and not a concern to the HBC, but it was likely ecologically significant because beaver dams generally benefit some salmon species.  Politically, the beaver eradication plan worked as intended.  The American fur trappers avoided areas where beaver populations had been eliminated or much reduced.

The subsequent (1848) discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, Coloma, California with the ensuing influx of gold miners, soon followed by widespread West Coast mining activities, accelerated the decline of salmon.  This decline is generally well known and documented (Lackey et al 2006).  Beyond California, in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the salmon decline began in the 1860s with extensive mining, logging, agriculture, and dam construction.  By the late 1800s, even the Columbia River Basin — once home to legendary runs — had lost most of its salmon.  The decline in salmon runs was obvious, and hatchery programs, initiated in the 1870s, became the primary approach to sustain the West Coast salmon runs.  Supplemental stocking from hatcheries has long been employed to sustain or increase declining runs (and harvests) (Courter et al. 2023; Harrison et al. 2026). Even with hatchery supplementation, over decades and centuries, wild salmon runs dwindled to very low numbers, as they are now.  Today, most salmon in West Coast streams and rivers are the progeny of parents who spawned in hatcheries, and the existing recreational, commercial, and tribal harvest is principally supported by hatcheries.

The West Coast salmon decline followed the pattern that previously played out in (1) the Asian Far East at least a thousand years ago, (2) Europe starting 500 years ago, and (3) eastern North America starting in the 1600s.  At its core, the pattern is that when human populations (and the associated economic activities) expanded and landscapes transformed, salmon runs diminished.

Salmon consumers, unfamiliar with the West Coast’s current salmon status (i.e., many current runs have been extirpated while the remaining runs are at single-digit levels of the 1850s run sizes), may wonder how salmon can be available year-round in their local retail market, yet are now a remnant of their former abundance in West Coast streams and rivers.  The much-reduced size of the runs is obscured for them because (1) pen-raised salmon, usually grown in marine environments (British Columbia, Chile, Norway), are readily available year-round in the retail market, and (2) wild Pacific salmon are abundant elsewhere, especially in Alaska and the Russian Far East, and these harvests also support the West Coast retail market.

It is indeed ironic that retail salmon are available year-round on the West Coast, yet the local current runs are shadows of their former levels, and many are listed as either threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.  Today, roughly 80% of salmon in the region are hatchery-origin.  While hatchery salmon releases support most fishing, they complicate recovery by masking declines and potentially introducing genetic and ecological risks to wild stocks (Lackey et al. 2006;  Harrison et al.  2026).

The Scientific and Policy Context

Salmon are resilient animals.  In fact, no species of Pacific salmon faces extinction, but many local populations (i.e., stocks, runs, distinct population segments, or evolutionarily significant segments) are gone, and hundreds more are at risk (Gustafson et al. 2007, Ford et al. 2025).  Of the over a thousand geographically distinct populations in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho that existed before the early 1800s, nearly 30% are extinct, and most surviving runs are less than 5% of historical numbers.  The causes — habitat alteration, dams, irrigation, harvest, climatic changes, competition with non-native fish species, interactions with hatchery-origin salmon, and many others — are well-documented in a massive peer-reviewed scientific literature (Quinn 2018, 2025).  What remains contested is the relative importance of these factors and, more fundamentally, the willingness of society to make the trade-offs necessary for recovery.  The stark reality is that, despite billions of dollars invested and decades of scientific effort, the recovery of wild salmon remains elusive.

It is important to reiterate that the geographic scope of this article is limited to the West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho), and, indirectly, the North Pacific Ocean to the extent that salmon originating from those four States use the marine environment during their life cycles.  Especially in the far north (adjacent to Alaska and the Russian Far East), the North Pacific Ocean is warming, and this correlates with important ecological changes.  For historical context, the overall salmon abundance in the North Pacific is higher now than at least since the 1970s.  Whatever ecological conditions or human interventions are driving the change (e.g., warmer temperatures, industrial-scale major increases in stocking from Alaska, Japanese, and Russian hatcheries, or others) have primarily benefited pink and chum salmon (Connors et al. 2025).

This two-century, persistent, and predictable West Coast salmon decline raises two fundamental policy questions:  (1) What precisely does society wish to recover? and (2) Why have recovery efforts nearly always failed their publicly stated goals?  I will argue here that the answer lies not in inadequate science or bad actors,  but a suite of policy realities that capture the interplay of ecological constraints, societal priorities, individual (personal) preferences, and a failure to incorporate overall policy realities into recovery goal setting.  Even in those few cases where runs have greatly increased (at least temporarily), it is rarely linked clearly to specific SRIC recovery efforts.

Scientific information is useful, even necessary, to unraveling the causes of the long-term decline of West Coast salmon, but unraveling the policy context is essential to selecting a salmon recovery program that would actually work.  Here are the core policy realities that have, and will, drive (and constrain) any West Coast salmon recovery program.  It is within these policy realities that provide the explanations of (1) why past SRIC recovery efforts have predominantly not succeeded, and (2) which policy changes must happen if wild salmon recovery is to be achieved.

Reality 1:  Salmon Recovery Is a Wicked Policy Problem with Zero-sum Tendencies

From the political science perspective, sustaining (or increasing) the size of salmon runs is a classic “wicked” policy challenge.  A wicked policy problem is intractable, has no definitive solution, involves multiple stakeholders, and is characterized by uncertainty, conflicting values, and interdependent causes (Termeer et al. 2019).  The salmon recovery case study meets all these criteria.  Additionally, the SRIC operates in a political environment where any proposed efficacious (for salmon recovery) policy choice results in unmistakable (and vocal) policy losers (a zero-sum feature).  Predicting with high confidence the economic and political consequences of many recovery policy choices is problematic, and this uncertainty skews policy-makers away from bold changes that have uncertain outcomes.  For those employed in the SRIC, but without a sense of the overall policy context, the sense of a possible “win-win” policy choice sounds tantalizing.  However, it is an unachievable target that becomes apparent after routine policy analysis.  In short, there are always policy winners and losers in salmon recovery policy, but pitching the win-win is certainly tempting.  An old policy cliché is especially apropos for the SRIC:  “Policy making is all about picking winners and losers.”

Reality 2:  The SRIC Funding Model Encourages a Public Optimism Bias

A near-universal “optimism bias” emanating from the SRIC creates unrealistic public expectations about what level of salmon recovery likely will be achieved by the billions being spent.  In part, optimism is prevalent because most SRIC funding is “soft money,” and it must be regularly “sold” for it to continue, and funders are more likely to financially support programs that imply success.  Also, because SRIC funding is a mix of taxpayer and nominally private sources (i.e., many private funders provide money that is subsidized by being classified as a tax-advantaged, tax-deductible, or tax-favored donation), it is important to wrap funding pitches in optimism because even private funding is partially subsidized by taxpayers.  Unsurprisingly and for different reasons, this competition for funding creates an understandable incentive for scientists, managers, administrators, and policy makers to convey policy optimism, even when evidence and experience suggest otherwise.  Such bureaucratic optimism is characteristic of many programs that rely on competitive funding.  For the SRIC, the result is a proliferation of narrowly focused studies and sophisticated technical debates (i.e., about hatchery and wild fish genetics, dam passage efficiency, likely climate change impacts, pesticide effects, competition and predation impacts, and many others) that, while generally well-intentioned and often scientifically rigorous, rarely address the overarching question:  what level of wild salmon recovery is ecologically, politically, and economically feasible?

Reality 3:  The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) Encourages Lawfare

ESA has been the dominant policy driver of West Coast salmon policy and management for four decades. For salmon recovery, some critics of the status quo assert that ESA has fostered “lawfare” (i.e., suing, or the threat of suing, to achieve desired salmon policy objectives) rather than supporting recovery programs that might actually work (Figure 2).  They may point to the fact that the cost of some construction and development is inflated for no demonstrable improvement in salmon runs.  Conversely, ESA supporters typically argue that the law is the only tool available that has any chance of being effective.  Also, for some advocacy organizations, it has proved to be a powerful weapon in their arsenal.  In direct response to such lawsuits (or the threat of lawsuits), the SRIC’s overall budget has increased significantly.  Return on Investment (ROI) analysis of Columbia River Basin expenditures, for example, has indicated that billions of dollars are now spent annually by the SRIC to comply with salmon ESA-compliance issues, but salmon runs have rarely improved  (Franks and Lackey,  2015;  Jaeger and Scheuerell  2023;  Ford et al. 2025).  Beyond the substantial economic cost, ESA enforcement continues to create seeming policy paradoxes:  (1) ESA-listed salmon are still routinely harvested under government approval;  (2) hatchery supplementation, mandated by other legislation to sustain fishing, is often challenged by ESA lawsuits as putting wild salmon at genetic risk;  (3) unlike most other ESA-listed “species,” no biological salmon species is at risk of extinction because ESA enforcement treats “populations” as “species”;   (4) it is now typical along the West Coast for most salmon in a particular run (of one species) to be of hatchery origin rather than the offspring of salmon that spawned naturally in a stream;  and (5) most salmon in the retail market are raised in net pens and are not derived from natural spawning or the product of hatcheries, thus there are abundant salmon available in grocery stores and restaurants.

Reality 4:  Competing Policy Priorities Circumscribe the Realistic Salmon Recovery Choices

Unlike a few other ESA-listed species (e.g., wolves and grizzlies), no one has ever sought to eradicate salmon, but sustaining or increasing salmon runs competes with a diverse and sizable set of individual and collective personal priorities.  For example, people also want (1) low-cost and desirable food, (2) abundant, reliable, and cheap energy, and (3) an economy that creates and sustains high-paying jobs.  For salmon, adequate water of sufficient quality is an ecological necessity.  For food production, farmers need water, and often in large amounts, which reduces the amount or quality of water available for salmon.  For energy needs, baseload production in many high- and medium-income countries is generated by hydro power (which is detrimental for salmon).  As for high-paying jobs, energy production and national wealth are highly correlated:  the more energy produced, the higher a country’s GDP (not an advantageous political landscape for salmon recovery advocates).   As for providing salmon for the retail market, there is high demand.  The market, however, is not supplied by free-living salmon, but by aquaculture (mainly net-pens in marine, near-shore environments).  In California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, in spite of the poor state of West Coast runs, salmon in the retail market are available year-round.

Reality 5:  Competition for Water and Watersheds Is Fierce and Highly Litigious

As it is for many ecological policy challenges, competition for water (as well as watersheds) is often a defining flashpoint in salmon policy.  In the western United States, competing demands — for agriculture, municipal use, forest products, industry, artificial intelligence data centers, and energy — usually mean wild salmon advocates are competing for an essential commodity (of which the water itself is only part) that many other policy advocates also value highly.  For example, the recent removal of several relatively large West Coast dams, such as the two on the Elwha River (Washington) and four on the Klamath River (California/Oregon border, involved structures that were no longer economically viable as electricity producers, afforded minimal flood protection, and supplied a relatively small number of farmers with irrigation water (Figure 3).  Had these six dams generated substantially more electricity at lower cost, provided greater flood protection, or supplied irrigation water to politically powerful farmers, then it is likely that there would have been insufficient political support for their removal.

Reality 6:  The Regional Human Population Trajectory Is a Major Policy Constraint

Because the West Coast is a “fill-in” region in demographic terminology, the size of the future human population is particularly difficult to predict.  Regardless, the demands of the human population are a major factor limiting recovery options.  For example, the current population of California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho is approximately 54 million.  Although birthrates have declined markedly in many countries to much less than the   ̴2.1 per female needed for population stability, the West Coast population is growing relatively rapidly, mostly from new residents from within the U.S., as well as immigration.  Without the typical age profile (i.e., “skewed old”) of most regions of the world, the West Coast will assuredly grow at least by half, from the current 53 million to 80 million by 2100, possibly many more.  Regardless of the actual West Coast population at the end of this century, the residents will collectively require housing, schools, roads, airports, mass transit, energy production, reliable electrical grids, food, and recreational opportunities — demands that translate (for salmon) into less or suboptimal habitat, poorer quality water, competition for water with energy intensive computer farms to support artificial intelligence computer programs, agriculture growing and processing operations, and others.  Yet, in most salmon policy analyses and discussions, the additional human population effect on salmon runs is rarely explicitly considered in recovery strategies.  Rather, it is often treated as an unstated policy constraint, and, if considered, is buried in ambiguous wording and rarely noticed, much less discussed.

Reality 7: Cheap, Abundant, and Reliable Energy is a Competing Salmon Recovery Priority

Worldwide, energy use (especially electricity) is positively correlated with the standard of living.  There are no high-income, low-energy-use countries.  For energy production, the West Coast has many large, high-gradient rivers, the requisite for a large hydroelectric facility.  Hydro generation is reliable, relatively cheap, and overall, an ideal source of baseload power.  Irregular or intermittent energy sources (primarily solar and wind) must have sufficient baseload power generation (or battery storage) to offset their intermittent nature.  In regions where it is viable, hydropower has proven to be a reliable (and relatively cheap) source of baseload electricity.  Conversely, there is a well-known downside:  those people prioritizing anadromous fish runs are policy losers when rivers were dammed.  From a scientific perspective, there is no “right” balance between baseload power production, irrigation water, flood control, data center operations, or recovering salmon runs.  Rather, it is an excellent example of the previously stated assertion that “Policy making is all about picking winners and losers.”

Reality 8: Floods Produce Anxiety and a Demand for Flood Protection

Floods have been feared by people for millennia, and much of the West Coast is exceedingly flood-prone.  For example, in the winter of 1861-62, the entire California Central Valley, the Klamath River and its tributaries, the lower Columbia River and its tributaries, and many others experienced catastrophic floods.  Not surprisingly, flood control has long been a political priority on the West Coast.  The ability to decrease flood risk has increased markedly since 1861 with the increasing capability to build large, reliable dams that partially regulate flows.  However, dams block or at least hinder migrating salmon (both those returning to freshwater to spawn and those leaving freshwater nursery areas for the sea).  Nor are the lakes created behind the dams helpful to sustaining salmon abundance.  Fishways of many designs are successful to varying degrees, but a free-flowing river is nearly always superior for salmon returning to freshwater or leaving freshwater for the ocean.  Other flood control activities (i.e., channelization, filling flood-prone areas, bank armoring, levee construction, etc.) further alter the landscape upon which salmon are dependent.  Despite most people’s inherent political support for sustaining salmon runs, this support does not often override the desire to avoid future floods. 

Reality 9:  Many People Place a High Value on Harvesting Salmon Beyond Their Food Value

For the foreseeable future, net pen production in Europe, North America, and South America will provide sufficient salmon for the retail market.  However, for the West Coast, sustaining a substantial salmon harvest (recreational, commercial, and tribal fishing) without hatcheries is unrealistic.  Most remaining runs of wild salmon in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho are at a fraction of their 1850s run levels and will not sustainably support substantial fishing pressure.  Juvenile salmon releases from hatcheries currently number in the many billions, and these fish (as returning adults) provide most of the West Coast salmon fishing opportunities.  Perhaps, as some argue, continuing to rely on hatcheries dooms any future recovery of wild salmon runs, but others observe that wild salmon are currently such a small percentage of most West Coast runs that they could not support sustained harvests.  For those who value harvest (recreational, commercial, and tribal) on the West Coast, there is no other realistic near-term option to sustaining fishable run sizes except hatcheries.

Reality 10:  Lack of Trust in the Impartiality of SRIC Scientists Constrains Their Policy Impact

Scientific information should be an important component of salmon debates, but “facts” are only a part of policy disagreements because most such conflict is over competing values.  The scientific enterprise comprises individuals who nowadays are highly partisan in their political leanings (Motta 2018,  Ross et al. 2018).  In some cases, scientific information used in policy debates is little more than policy advocacy masquerading as relevant science.  Such normative science is used to covertly advocate for a particular and predetermined policy preference.  Perhaps not surprisingly, it is typical for every policy advocate or advocacy organization in salmon policy deliberations to offer science that implicitly supports their particular policy inclination.  Conversely, rather than demand policy neutrality, some policy makers appear to encourage scientists to “tell us what we should do,” even though the core of most salmon policy debate hinges not on scientifically-driven, but on value-driven policy preferences.  If scientists are to play a helpful role in such policy debates (and they should), policy makers must trust in their impartiality.  Ultimately, scientists must be trusted, or their input will be categorized as simply another advocacy pitch and categorized accordingly.

Implications and Conclusion

The lack of West Coast salmon recovery was not caused primarily by ignorance, much less can it be ascribed to a lack of sound scientific understanding.  Rather, it is a reflection of the failure to describe openly the mix of evolving, uncertain, competing, politically divisive, and often mutually exclusive policy choices.  Every potential policy choice has its own set of policy winners and losers, and in most cases, “paying off” the losers has not led to a stable political compromise.  Future salmon recovery strategies that ignore this policy reality are destined to fail, as they have for at least the past two centuries.  Technical fixes (fish ladders, hatcheries, habitat restoration) cannot overcome core policy drivers such as the ecological effects of human population growth, market and personal economic choices, lifestyle preferences, and individual choices about a host of decisions.  Such realities should be clearly explained to policy makers, the public, and other interested parties, even if it is reasonably certain that the political dynamic will only support the current, failed recovery strategy.

Meaningful salmon recovery requires transformative changes that are politically unsettling to many:  (1) revising ESA to enable strategic prioritization as is typically allowed for policy tradeoffs as occurs for most public issues, (2) confronting unpleasant ecological realities such as the fact that many aquatic environments are now better suited for the now thriving nonnative fish species, as West Coast salmon slowly decline to remnant runs), (3) finding a better way for the public to weigh in on balancing the various water demands such as weighing the importance of sustaining baseload power generation vs. restoring wild salmon runs, and (4) accepting that nearly everything that humans value directly competes with restoring salmon runs (e.g., reducing the risk of floods almost always adversely affects salmon runs).  Such policy changes entail major costs — economic, political, and cultural — that society has historically been unwilling to bear.  In other words, along with the political winners, there will be political losers:  for the losers, they know they will be losers, and they most likely must be accommodated to create a viable, stable political compromise.

Considering the remainder of this century and absent transformative change in society’s priorities, salmon recovery efforts will continue as largely symbolic gestures:  expensive but politically useful, tangible but largely ineffective.  Perhaps these expenditures will continue to successfully serve as “guilt money,” a collective salve (and political cover) for the discomfort of ecological loss.  If the policy goal is genuine recovery to anything approaching fishable runs, candor about trade-offs is imperative, and the legal constraints caused by ESA need to be explicitly addressed.  Otherwise, scientists, policy makers, and the public must confront the uncomfortable and ongoing truth:  returning wild salmon to “fishable” abundance is ecologically and theoretically possible, but only if society is willing to make currently unpopular choices that fundamentally alter how people live.  To imply that wild salmon recovery can be done otherwise is to perpetuate a delusional reality.

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