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INTRODUCTION A Durable Crisis Pacific Salmon have mattered for millennia, but the bond between humans and fish has changed radically over time. Huge runs once sustained aboriginal societies and later enriched industrial and sports fisheries, but now their scarcity threatens lives and economies. Salmon are still revered and coveted by some, but others fear and dismiss them. For many people salmon hold little cultural or economic relevance except as their interests conflict with water and land use policies. Pacific northwesterners have seen sport and commercial fishing seasons dwindle from nine months to zero days; Indians have to purchase Alaska salmon because local runs are protected by the Endangered Species Act; industrialists pay higher electricity bills; irrigators water fewer acres; loggers cut fewer trees; ranchers graze farther from streams; and urbanites ration water. Since 1981, when Congress made the Bonneville Power Administration give salmon equal consideration when managing Columbia River dams, the region has invested three billion dollars to save these fish, and the only thing everyone can agree upon is that the effort has largely failed.1 This is the modem "salmon crisis," but its roots extend to the earliest days of settlement. Pacific northwesterners have been prophesying the imminent demise of salmon for 125 years. As early as 1875, the Portland Morning Oregonian worried about the "almost total extinction of salmon in our waters." U.S. Fish Commissioner Marshall McDonald warned Oregon 's governor in 1893 about "the disastrous outlook for the future of the salmon fisheries of the Columbia." Throughout these years pundits spoke of killing the goose that laid golden eggs and compared declining runs to the vanishing buffalo. In 1939 fishery biologist Willis Rich anticipated the rapid "extermination ofa large part ofthe remaining runs ofboth Chinooks and bluebacks," and more recently biologists have declared repeatedly that 3 A DURABLE CRISIS salmon are at a "crossroads." One can read these alarms like Alfred E. Neuman and see their authors as so many Chicken Littles. But the toll of declining and extinct runs contradicts such dismissals. These protests in fact contain subde and surprising lessons.2 The litany ofjeremiads reveals not only the magnitude of the problem but also the fickle character of social memory. Nothing suggests the size of former salmon runs more than the length of time it took them to collapse. The sheer loss is stunning to contemplate, yet the urgency that has gripped the many Cassandras suggests a second insight we must consider. Alarmists have usually portrayed salmon decline in immediate terms because the problem appeared as novel to speaker and audience in, for example, 1991 as it did in 1939, 1907, or 1877- Collapsing runs seemed like an event, but this excruciatingly long disaster was actually a process. The inability to see decline as a process, let alone a complicated process, has everything to do with natural resource politics) The essence of the salmon crisis is the struggle to define and solve a complicated environmental and social problem, but resolution has been elusive because participants have little in common. How people respond to declining runs depends on who they are, where they live, what they do for a living, and how they think it happened. How people remember the past, and the stories they tell about that past, are inextricably linked to identity and interest. Fishers and fish culturists who want more salmon criticize dams and changes in hatchery policies; anglers and environmentalists who covet wild fish and scenery charge resource users with destroying habitat; smelters, irrigators, bargers, and dam agencies who depend on the industrialized river blame trollers, netters, and Indians for overfishing; Indians who value salmon for subsistence and spirituality accuse governments ofconspiring to deprive them; and almost everyone blames seals, sea lions, birds, and ocean conditions for consuming too manyyoung salmon. What these explanations have in common is that all are simple stories which deflect blame onto other groups or activities. The persistence of simple stories about the past has been an obstacle to restoring salmon runs. For a century and a quarter northwesterners have tried in vain to save salmon. Their failure, however, has stemmed less from ignorance or insincerity than from asking the wrong questions ofthe wrong histories. Many have wanted and do want to save salmon, but few have been willing to accept responsibility and bear the costs ofrecovery. Instead, they have tried to reframe history to indict rival users of fish, water, and land, and to shift the burden onto less powerful groups. Advocates simplified the...

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