by
Robert T. Lackey
Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences
Oregon State University
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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I believe one of the reasons, and perhaps a major one, is that money is spent and projects are implemented with no defined goal that has consequences. The Elwha dams and Klamath dams came out. In 10 years, what will be the escapements and spawner distributions; are they utilizing the opened habitat? If the goals are not met, then the proponents refund $X to the funding authority. There needs to be definitive results tied to the projects more than just “feel good, we made the environment better”.
Respectfully, I disagree with this comment.
A core idea presented here is that Pacific Salmon recovery has generally failed up to now despite massive investment because it is a wicked policy problem. We may know what actions are required to reverse salmon declines, yet we see they routinely lose out to the competing uses associated with societal values of greater priority. The SRIC is problematic because it perpetuates a delusionally optimistic view that better outcomes may be achieved through actions and policy that are not actually addressing the underlying causes of decline stemming from the societal value trade-offs.
This solution you propose seems to fit perfectly into the prototype of flawed thinking that this article identifies (although maybe to the opposite extreme), and the two examples you picked are actually somewhat exceptional to the problem presented by a SRIC. You appear to reframe the driver of societal values conflict as an accountability problem for restoration practitioners in two recent major dam removal projects in the PNW, as though these dam removal projects were potentially ill-fated without some specific population level recovery targets. In reality, these two projects are among the rare cases where the values conflict was able to resolve in the favor of Salmon since the dam projects had mostly outlived their economic utility.
Placing the onus of rapid population recovery on restoration practitioners and imposing personal financial liability for missing population targets that are inherently linked to processes beyond their control (i.e. ocean conditions, climate, harvest policy, upstream land use, population genetics) seems dangerous and irresponsible given the current political abuse we witness around such mechanisms. Moreover, your ‘solution’ seems likely to guarantee that well-intentioned and competent people stop proposing ambitious projects at all in fear that they won’t meet arbitrary pre-defined targets, functionally reinforcing the symbolic and low-ambition SRIC status quo that Lackey is describing.
I agree, Kevin. That’s why we need multivariate & interdisciplinary thinking. We already know that dam breaching restores at least some migratory spp., & it’s been particularly encouraging in the well-studied Elwha R. Why might not Atl. salmon be recovering well, unlike other fish families, since removal of ME dams? For 1 thing, the Gulf of ME is warming w/ climate change, which is now impacting the Am. lobster fishery:
Swetz, S., M. McMahan, and Z. Miller-Hope. 2026. Climate resilience in the fisheries social–ecological system: capturing opportunities from emerging species in the Gulf of Maine. Fisheries 51: 102–110 (https://academic.oup.com/fisheries/article/51/3/102/8267928).
We gotta factor climate change into everything we do for envir. mgmt. now.
I am placing, or wish to place, the onus of recovery on the managers who are the one’s with the authority to do something. They can change fisheries and they are the only ones who can. State/Federal/Tribal and any extension international.
These projects are sold to the paying public as solutions that will get us towards recovery. Certainly the climate change problems are beyond the short term ability to affect change.
The problem, in my mind, is not just in resource recovery but in may of our major problems like homelessness, mental health, drug use, crime, infrastructure, education, healthcare. We talk a good fight but are will to accept that “well, we did spend money”{ rather than show some results.
This is about as sobering a salmon piece as I have read in a long time. I cannot say that there is much that I would quibble over, and certainly not much that is just factually wrong. As the author argues so analytically, society has spent billions on salmon recovery, and other than the usual photo ops of new culverts, successful fishermen, or the removal of a few obsolete dams, society doesn’t have much to show for all that money. If it was not for salmon hatchery programs, we would have zero or minimal salmon harvest in the lower 48 States. Still, I am not sure how to react. Perhaps I know he is correct, and I have just drunk the Kool-Aid for too long!
In response to your recent blog post, a transformative change in societal priorities is unlikely. Absent that, how can institutional inertia be modified? Recovery to some historical state of salmon population abundance is performance politics. It seems like a worthy goal that few would oppose, so it’s safe and if I’m in the SRIC I’ll keep my job or funding if I continue on that fruitless path. Maybe even receive a 10% boost in my budget for next year. But, if abundance in general…more adults in the ocean and more adults on the spawning redds…is the goal (forget recovery…which is still undefined, and focus simply on more fish) that is legitimate and something we can influence right now. But, to do so requires breaking through institutional inertia even lacking societal enthusiasm, and that requires a level of selfless bravery heretofore incompatible with the desire for a long institutional career.
I don’t think that the majority of society supports more than museum populations of wild salmon and strong hatchery runs. A fish is a fish is a fish and we want cheap electricity, flood protected homes, wood and fiber for homes, food for eating, and so on. We want cheap pollack, herring and anchovy, and so on. We don ‘t want to be inconvenienced. So, we will support nibbling on the edges, spending some money, and so on.
But I also agree that speaking truth to power is career limiting.
I can certainly attest that speaking truth to power is career-limiting for my latest job, in not promoting at during the last quarter-century. But that doesn’t mean having no influence on fish-mgmt. thinking, as these 2 coming papers of my colleagues & I try to dispel thru holistic thinking, which is something that present envir. mgrs. have trouble w/:
Hughes, R.M., J.R. Karr, R.L. Vadas, Jr., and D. Heiken. 2026. Conservation of natural resources on federal lands: review of three Pacific Northwest initiatives. Water Biology and Security [online], in press.
Michael, J.H. Jr., B.J. Clemens, R.L. Vadas, Jr., and R. Branstetter. 2026. A case for holistic threat management for anadromous fishes of the West Coast of North America. Intended for Fishes [online].
So I don’t totally agree w/ Bob L. that science isn’t the problem, given lack of multifactorial thinking that is taxing the brains of our “leaders”. We do need brave scientists speaking out when things go wrong, even if it’s by publishing as an indie scientist like I’ve been doing since the pandemic. Yes, you won’t have many friends, but I can live w/ that.
I like to play devil’s advocate to the devil’s advocate, so will do so here. Is there a better spending of $ than on salmon recovery, or would you prefer that we just let wild runs be extirpated & perhaps spend the $ on other things like recreational drugs? At least people care about salmon recovery, although that’s tough to accomplish as the human population keeps expanding. It does provide many jobs to keep us fish biologists “off the streets”. What’s not offered here is a potential solution to the problems we face.
I concur with Bob Lackey because his salmon recovery industrial complex (SRIC) model is well-suited to our Maine Atlantic salmon recovery program. It is a reality check that most advocates are reluctant to face regarding our recovery efforts in Maine.
We see very low or modest returns, and if it were not for the Federal hatchery at Green Lake producing smolts for the Penobscot River, we would not see much return. Many of my very good friends and fellow scientists feel really positive about dam removal and advocating for such. Yes, we see other diadramous fish benefiting, but not much for Atlantic salmon. Good publications abound, but reality has yet to be acknowledged.
Bob Lackey never fails to remind us of the many difficult facets of salmon recovery. This is a good read that informs better solutions. I recall philosopher Wendell Berry’s proclamation that “we have an ‘environmental crisis’ because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, God-given world.” Phil Pister and I used this thought as a springboard in our article titled Lifestyles and Ethical Values to Sustain Salmon and Ourselves, which appeared in another of Bob Lackey’s thought-provoking projects titled Salmon 2100: the Future of Wild Pacific Salmon, published in 2006. Restoring wild salmon is a wickedly-difficult task yet wild salmon and wild rivers continue to inspire new generations to conservation. That alone provides hope.
Hi Bob,
Even at 96 years of age, do I detect an implicit notion of a complex of cumulative stresses of the activities of global humanity on the natural necessities of salmonids with a particular focus on salmonids of the Pacific Coast of North America?
In the early 1950s as an undergraduate student at Queen’s University in Ontario I took courses in: conservation with Fairfield Osborn’s “Our Plundered Planet” published in 1948 as a text; and in thermodynamics with an emphasis on its laws and the concept of entropy with its Second Law. In the late 1950s as a graduate student at Cornell University in New York State I took courses: in oceanography and limnography/limnology with notice of the work of Roger Revelle; and in sociological human demography. In retrospect I now muse that particular epistemic contents of those four plus other compatible courses and relevant readings came together rather vaguely in my thinking as a notion of the adverse effects of cumulative human stress, CHS, on the health of the complex of living beings on our planet.
In his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” did Paul Ehrlich in effect sketch the complex dynamics of what I denote as CHS as having internal feedback dynamics something like a military bomb? Part of a complex process in a physical-chemical military bomb that might be timed in split-seconds could have an analogous process in a biological-ecological population bomb that might be timed in decades. In retrospect I now posit that Ehrlich may have had a sense of the empiric reality of CHS with the ‘population bomb’ as a plausible feature of the dynamics of the actual CHS as it has emerged all around us.
In any case, for more than seven decades I have focussed on humanity’s cumulative stress on our natural habitat at levels of natural self-organization from local to global. Fish and fisheries have served me as indicative indicators of aquatic ecosystemic health. I acted on opportunities to collaborate with colleagues in some five United Nations agencies and numerous global scientific non-governmental organizational allies with respect to understanding and describing features of CHS to limit its harm to ‘humanity’.
Practically, an early major step has been to constrain the practice of ruthless non-sustainable exploitive development with its egregious harmfulness. An improvement could involve a transition to ruthful sustainable sharing development. With a perpetually-growing human population no version of the latter state would prevent ultimate catastrophe related to entropy. I posit that Roger Revelle and Paul Ehrlich had such awareness decades ago.
With climate heating and spatial shifting of human densities on our planet, the cumulative stress on surviving salmonids will likely intensify throughout the remaining range of salmonids, — into higher latitudes and altitudes. Strong emphasis on sustainability of further developments may reduce the harmfulness of the expanding and intensifying human cumulative stress somewhat, temporarily.
I detect a hopeful glimmer in the prospect that female humans the world over will achieve empowerment to decide on the number and arrival of their offspring and most will opt for few or perhaps no offspring among the rights of free persons. Would this be a helpful policy toward achieving sustainable salmonid fisheries anywhere in the world?
Henry Regier
Yes, reduced resource use & offspring would help the world & thus fisheries, but I don’t see it as being enough to bring us below the earth’s carrying capacity for humans. Hence, another, more deadly pandemic will prob. be what keeps us in check. But for now, let’s do a better job of dealing w/ cumulative impacts for envir. benefits.
Speaking from the Canadian perspective, the system of “salmon recovery” is a complex arrangement heavily steeped in historical archetypes and legacy agencies managing a simplified view of the system through a production/harvest lens. The simplification is a natural reaction to wicked problems that effectively narrows the stakeholder group down to three (commercial, recreational fishers and First Nations) and the management task down to one – managing the gap between harvest and expected escapement (targets set by DFO and subject to the declining baseline syndrome). The management tools are also constrained to only four (and failing miserably) since the early 20th Century – Hatcheries, Harvest Management, Habitat Restoration and scientific inquiry. This overall simplification of the system drives hatchery production and the need for scientific inquiry with one output being ‘funding for the salmon saving industry’. Whether salmon populations are going up or down, hatcheries are the solution. If going up ‘Keep up the Good Work’ is the rallying cry. If going down? “We need more hatcheries”. But of course, decisions must be based on the ‘latest science’ – and once again, regardless of the outcomes – $$ pour in. When populations drop, we must study the reasons, when they rise? We must determine through science what’s working! More science! More hatcheries! DFO manages the ‘gap’ in the zero sum game. Fisheries management, not fish. No distinction between wild and hatchery salmon (in Canada only a small % of hatchery fish are marked as such) creating an illusion of abundance that fosters trust in management agencies and – hatcheries! As Dr. Lackey points out, society needs to decide if we’re interested in salmon, or wild salmon. Wild salmon are the true barometer of our ecosystems, and provide ecosystem services not just for humans but for all of nature. After all, most of BC’s coastal ecosystems were built on the backs of wild salmon. I know where my vote would go. But most of my fishing friends would likely opt for artificial production – esp given the price of salmon these days! Wholesale reform of the management system is the only hope, and even at that I don’t see a successful path to wild salmon recovery. At least not to anything approaching the former abundance. We’ve blown this.
As a recovering advocate of the SRIC, I wholeheartedly agree with Bob’s thesis. I’ve now become an agnostic of that religion, maybe moving toward atheism, after 4 decades of involvement. Removing the human perturbations of the habitat (e.g., better water, road, forest management) seems far more long-lasting than the artificial manipulation of the stream habitat. California has been zealous in throwing money at the SRIC, with little post-project or program assessment. Spending the grant program’s full funding allocation is the definition of success. Lawfare has been one main driver, along with appeasement of certain segments of voters. Climate change is the “nature bats last” dictum in full force. But the Blame Game continues in the courts and in the regulations. I still love to watch the dwindling (natural) Chinook and coho spawners come up my river 170 miles from the ocean, and hope my two grandkids will have that chance too.
In response to Brad & Phyllis, it’s dogmatic to say that SRIC hasn’t worked, b/c what keeps changing is human-population growth in the Pac. NW, such that we’re dealing w/ a “Red Queen” situation; running just to stay in the same place. W/o SRIC, we would’ve seen more run & perhaps salmon-spp. extirpations, particularly in the Pac. SW.
Yes, hatcheries can provide fishing opps. that we otherwise wouldn’t have, but let’s keep that to brood-stocking, which is more conducive to salmon recovery. Having once observed anglers following the trout-stocking truck to the So. Fk. Roanoke R. in VA, a coolwater stream that wasn’t meant for brown & rainbow trout, I’d rather not see that (very artificial practice) become std. in our neck of the woods.
So let’s not give up on salmon recovery just like we don’t give up on human persistence, even though both may not be immortal. Of course, if we humans do make ourselves extinct w/ all the dumb things we do – including getting rid of our food-support systems like farmlands & oceanic productivity – maybe we’ll someday end up in a Soylent Green situation. People do want to enjoy real nature, not just canned crap.
Professor Lackey’s blog provides a crucial, clear-minded analysis of what he aptly terms the “Salmon Recovery Industrial Complex” (SRIC). His work forces us to confront an inconvenient truth: our current policy trajectory is immensely expensive, yet demonstrably failing.
Based on Professor Lackey’s analysis, broader literature, and direct field observations, for me three critical realities emerge that hopefully would lead to a more productive discourse.
It’s time to get real.
We must acknowledge that restoring wild salmon runs to historically harvestable levels is largely a lost cause. Decades of heavily funded restoration experiments have yielded negligible returns. Furthermore, after more than a century of hatchery fish straying and passing on their “hatchery genes” by spawning on natural gravel, the definition of “wild” is questionable at best.
While isolated exceptions exist—such as the Rogue River’s self-sustaining fall Chinook, which benefit from a remote, Wild and Scenic-designated spawning habitat—these are anomalies. Even on the Rogue, upstream dams block historical spawning grounds for Coho, spring Chinook, and steelhead, rendering artificial supplementation mandatory to sustain the fishery. For major dammed systems like the Columbia and Sacramento River basins, the landscape has been irreversibly altered.
Large river systems are no longer ecologically capable of sustaining significant wild salmon populations. Fish ladders and bypass systems mitigate some damage, but they cannot replicate a free-flowing river.
True wild recovery would require dismantling the dams. Since we are unwilling to give up flood control and cheap power generation, continuing to promote “wild recovery” in these basins is disingenuous. We must stop funding a noble but structurally impossible objective and instead redefine what we want these heavily modified rivers to achieve.
The Realistic Harsh Binary Choice
I’ve never been one to abandon a good concept prematurely but If billions of dollars in habitat restoration haven’t produced significant results yet, we really need to move on. That leaves us with a stark, pragmatic choice regarding dammed and urbanized rivers:
• Let Nature Take Its Course – Cease expensive, ineffective habitat restoration and hatchery mitigation, allowing nature to take its course and permitting other, more adaptable species to fill the vacant ecological niches.
• Bear the Expense of Making Salmon Runs Look More Like They Used To – Commit fully to intensive hatchery supplementation to maximize harvest and ecological nutrient cycling, accepting that the birth cycle of the salmon and steelhead happened in a hatchery not on gravel.
While the latter path challenges traditional ecological dogma regarding the absolute preservation of wild genetics, recent research offers a nuance: properly managed integrated broodstock programs demonstrate that the offspring of naturally spawning hatchery-origin salmon can adapt to wild fitness within a generation. Given the alternative of extirpation, this genetic trade-off is a compromise worth debating.
Moving Beyond Emotional and Religious Ecology
Finally, to shift public discourse, we must decouple salmon management from what Professor Lackey has previously identified as “religious ecology”—the injection of absolute moral values into biophysical issues.
A prominent example of this is the flawed conflation of salmon mitigation with the stocking of catchable-sized hatchery trout in urban waterways. The latter may evoke images of localized, highly artificial angling that most of us find distasteful AND it has nothing to do with West Coast Salmon and Steelhead hatcheries. Salmon smolt production is entirely distinct. These fish are released as juveniles, navigate a complex migration to the ocean, and transform marine forage into high-quality protein and fat. When they return as mature adults, they feed human communities, sustain marine and terrestrial mammals, and deliver vital marine-derived nutrients back into the freshwater ecosystems. This is quite different from the image of greedy urban anglers chasing hatchery trucks.
I don’t believe we can afford to throw good money after bad on a policy framework designed for an idealized past. The public discourse needs to center on a realistic question: Are we willing to bear the financial cost of intensive hatchery supplementation to maintain abundant, harvestable runs at the expense of absolute genetic purity, or do we step back and let these altered environments transition to other species?
Acknowledging this binary choice is not a defeat; it is the first step toward honest, effective management of our West Coast rivers.
Well Bill, let’s see; let’s simply violate the fed. ESA & let Pac.-salmonid spp. go extinct; I do suggest you apply for the Trump admin. for an “envir.” job, quite gangster. Likewise, why should we bother to protect our own health, as we’re gonna eventually die anyway? Yes, I’m getting existentialist here, as you’ve gone beyond what Bob L. (as devil’s advocate) wrote about. I simply don’t believe in giving up, b/c we (as environmentally oriented citizens & scientists) have more pride than that.
If you go to the Olympic Peninsula, you’ll see many wild runs of salmonids like I get to do. And w/ the dev’t of other alt. energies (e.g., marine- & river-hydrokinetic devices) besides hydropower dams, we should be able to reduce anadromous-fish impacts, which might include breaching the lower Snake R. dams (Michael et al. 2026) & shuttling headwater-Chinook runs past Sacramento R. dams, the latter the likely cause of bull trout extirpation in CA (Vadas 2003).
Finally, ME politician Angus Young lost a bet that native genes of Atl. salmon were gone when they got ESA-listed a quarter century ago; that’s when Young had to jump into the icy Penobscot R. as penance. Native genes often prevail via natural selection, as non-brood stocked hatchery fish are maladapted to the natural env’t (Michael et al. 2026). Although I have fished w/ family for hatchery steelhead in the Cowlitz R., I’d much rather be fishing for naturalized-salmon runs like I got to do in the Penobscot R. headwaters (Vadas and Vadas 2005), finding more success again (including also for native brook trout below a cold trib. there) after my dad & I wrote that article. My last such trip (somewhat before the pandemic) was almost surreal as I saw an osprey (nesting nearby), as well as a family each of mergansers & river otters that I shared the river w/, as I caught several wild salmonids by fly fishing. That’s a non-canned experience of communing w/ nature!
Vadas, R.L. Jr. 2003. Ecohydrologic and macrohabitat assessment of California coastal and bay streams: southern limiting factors for imperiled aquatic vertebrates (abstract and presentation). Page 20 in A. Brinson and seven coeditors. Abstracts for the International IFIM Users’ Workshop. Colorado State University, Office of Conference Services. Fort Collins, CO (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321137435).
Vadas, R.L. Jr., and R.L. Vadas, Sr. 2005. The West Branch of the Penobscot River, Maine, is overrated for fishing. Trout 47(4): 11 (full article formerly under the ‘Trout Magazine’ blog and since published during 2008 in The Fishing Line [Trout Unlimited, Olympia Chapter] 202: 6-7 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331997972).
Bob – Wow, now I see why you were so unhappy with Professor Lackey’s ten commandments. Must have hit close to home. And throwing tRump’s name into the discussion is the exact emotional response that we need to avoid in these fact based discussions about policy decisions.
The rest of your examples fit well into the well meaning but dogmatically flawed arguments of the Native Fish Society and their ilk who would love to see river museums of a few wild fish caught on the fly, only to rising fish and gently released just like they saw in A River Runs Through It. Of course there are places for those who live close or can afford to go to that have wild runs of salmon and steelhead and we should do our best to preserve those so that hatchery supplementation is not needed. The major river systems like the Columbia and Sacramento and many others visited by many more people, do not fall into that category. Thank you for listing the exceptions, but that’s not what we are talking about here.
As someone who in the post Silicon Valley chapter of my life takes anglers into beautiful areas of the national forest for a chance at battling big Rogue spring chinook, I am hard pressed to think of even one client who would describe the experience as “canned”. After waking before dawn, running up the river in a jet boat into the national forest and waiting patiently for a bite, they dutifully release the wild springers and are delighted to take home big, healthy, fat filled hatchery springers. I guess I just can’t wrap my head around someone getting less enjoyment out of catching a fish that left the hatchery raceway a several centimeters long and returned 4 years later as a fat 25 lb. adult instead of one that was spawned on gravel. I certainly haven’t observed that reaction.
And…all those things that you saw while fishing for your “non-canned” experience fish, we did too in addition to a pair of ospreys chasing a bald eagle away from their nest, a juvenile black bear recently out of hibernation wandering around the gravel bar trying figure out where the smell of breakfast cooking on the boat was coming from, families of geese through the whole nesting cycle from guarding eggs to tiny goslings to many fewer but nearly adult juveniles and all the other wonders of nature. It’s all a wonderful wilderness experience regardless of where the smolt were born and raised.
And, one last thing. To be intellectually honest, the “Native genes often prevail via natural selection” argument cuts both ways. It can also be used as an argument for increased hatchery production. If stray returning hatchery fish are less fit, their genes won’t be passed on for very long.
I loved the story of Don Quixote. I admired his passion to right wrongs, but it is also a cautionary tale of someone who had too much pride to give up a doomed quest. When it comes to any of the dammed river systems, I stand by my assertion that we really do have a binary choice.
Pretty much spot on Bill. And to expand beyond salmon and natural resources we need to demand results for money spent. How much is spent on education, infrastructure, homelessness, mental health, and a myriad of needs we underfund.
I do think there are areas, like the Olympic Peninsula with the National Park, that purely wild salmonids can be managed for. But they are few and far between. As you noted, unless dams in anadromous zone are removed, there will never be meaningful recovery of wild anadromous fish.
The big kicker that nobody seems willing to talk about is Treaty Tribes with a legal right to dead fish in the boat. We can’t, I don’t believe, legally destroy their fisheries.
As someone who has worked in that SRIC, and once thought I was making a difference…
We have the data. We have countless papers holding otoliths and scales we have literally never gone through at multiple USFWS offices. We have other data in rolls and reams showing us that the fish aren’t doing what we purportedly intend for them to be doing regardless of what we’ve spent on them.
It could be that we simply haven’t had enough time to pass to really see what the outcomes of conservation actions are. It could be that hatchery fish are causing problems, as contended by multiple sources. There’s a lot of ‘coulds’ out there.
The factors that haven’t changed insofar that we can prove them, are that we haven’t seen a return on the fish listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act, and we seem to think that throwing money at the problem will make it go away, somehow. Human populations in the Columbia River Basin continue to grow, as do the needs for power, infrastructure, and other things not horribly favorable to salmonids. 10 billion plus dollars later invested in conservation and recovery actions in spite of the massive changed in the Basin… we have seen virtually no change. What exactly has the SRIC accomplished?
Dr. Lackey’s post here I find is helpful in that he breaks down what is wrong with the current system of recovery and does not spare the elements involved. This kind of unflinching perspective is exactly the kind of hard look we need to be taking to gauge whether or not we are as invested as we appear to be in Basin salmonid recovery. Now that we are 30 plus years post listing for some runs, asking ourselves what exactly we are doing wrong when we haven’t seen the results we anticipated is healthy, and helpful to salmon recovery… or, it is for the folks genuinely interested in seeing flourishing runs. I am not so sure someone in the SRIC would agree as it means changes that might just cut off the funding.
On the other hand. I am hearing rumbles as recently as last week of ‘God Squad’ involvement in the Basin. There are many things I can be sure of, but that does not seem to me like a particularly productive agency involvement.
What everyone here is focusing on is salmon in the boat as the only valuable metric. But riparian restoration also benefits other aquatic & floodplain biota that include amphibians, helps keep waters clean for drinking & swimming (Hughes et al. 2026), & provides relaxing places for people to enjoy nature non-consumptively (Michael et al. 2026). So to some extent, this blog is a “straw man”, for which I’m seeing several “blind people around the elephant”. Although dam breaching back East benefits non-salmonid, diadromous fishes more than Atl. salmon, that’s still a good thing. I prefer to see the glass “half full” here; ecosystem mgmt. isn’t perfect.
One of the major things we have not done is reduce the marine mixed stock fisheries for salmonids and their food. We are betting on improving habitat will produce more fish to recruit to the ocean but won’y cut back on harvest.
Another problem we have is a blind faith in models. I recall that when Springers in good numbers were passed above Mud Mountain Dam and the disappeared. The models told them where they would go top spawn but they didn’t go there. We need to invest more in studying, and then applying, information on the whole life history and the ecosystem.
I think this is an excellent discussion. It would be good (but difficult) to give an approximate quantification of the costs of SRIC relative to the overall regional non-SRIC economy.
I think another important consideration is that total restoration is not likely given the impacts Euro-Americans have imposed on the watershed, as you point out. In that case, a somewhat more realistic, but still very challenging, goal might be to protect against further damage to these stocks, while also facilitating any possible recovery. I think that was my focus as a SRIC employee. While not a hatchery fan, I recognize some ecological and cultural and economic values can be provided by thoughtful hatchery management. The industrial-agricultural impact on the watersheds and waters that have supported salmon is enormous. How does the economic impact on the watersheds (as well as marine impacts of economic activity) compare to the SRIC funding? You clearly address these in the remainder (after p. 3).
Excellent discussion of what should be the goal(s) of salmon recovery efforts on p. 3.
In discussion on p. 3 about lack of success, there should perhaps be some discussion of avoiding further decline as a measure of success in light (or shadow) of all the stresses imposed on salmon and their habitat.
I think this ms is a must read for all of us. Thanks for a great analysis that will undoubtedly lead to considerable discussion and reflection and, hopefully, guidance.