Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery

Chapter 5. Beyond the Crossroads: First Steps Toward Salmon Recovery

145 Chapter 5—Beyond the Crossroads: First Steps Toward Salmon Recovery All attempts to manage are attempts to tell a story about how the land ought to be, and by definition all these stories are simpler than the world itself. —Nancy Langston1 For dangers are being produced by industry, externalized by economies, individualized by the legal system, legitimized by natural sciences and made to appear harmless by politics. —Ulrich Beck2 Someone once asked me: Why is it so hard to change fish factories and reduce the problems they create for wild salmon? The real problem is not the fish factories, it is the story that guides how hatcheries are used. The story creates the demand for fish factories, elevates their importance, and excuses their failures. That is the key message from the first four chapters of this book, and incorporating that message into your understanding of the salmon’s problem is the first step beyond the crossroads. During the last twenty-five years of my career, I committed a lot of time to the study of the assumptions and beliefs that underlie salmon management, but I didn’t discover their importance and their relationship to the salmon’s status on my own. For that, I am indebted to two remarkable fisheries scientists. Over several months, Dr. Charles Warren3 and his colleague Dr. William Liss and I met regularly over lunch to discuss natural resource management. Quite often 146 Salmon, People, and Place we talked about the importance of the story or, to use their terminology, the conceptual foundation. At the time, they were professors in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University and I was the assistant chief of fisheries at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). Charles and Bill approached the discussions from a theoretical perspective, while I wanted to know how those theories could be applied to salmon management. I brought several questions to the meetings—unanswered questions that I had acquired during my tenure at ODFW. For example: With so many individuals within the department concerned about the fate of wild salmon, why do activities detrimental to the wild salmon persist? Why didn’t agency staff take full advantage of the opportunity to protect wild salmon when the first wild fish policy was adopted in 1978? Why were high harvest rates maintained in the face of evidence that escapement of wild coho salmon was declining to dangerously low levels? In spite of growing evidence of problems, why did fish culturists continue to ignore the effects of their operations on wild salmon? Why was habitat protection given rhetorical rather than real emphasis? Through their patient explanations, Charles and Bill helped me understand the source of salmon management’s detrimental actions and why they diverge from the agencies’ laudable goals. The meetings took place long before I read about John Livingston’s environmental iceberg. They prepared me to see the value in that metaphor and helped me understand the story’s pivotal, but hidden, role in salmon management. Charles and Bill motivated me to first study and understand the existing story and then to try to change it. Looking back on that time I can see that I was pretty naïve about how easy it would be to make those changes. I tried to take a quiet, low-key approach using probing questions about specific activities or programs. Quite often the response was a puzzled look. Some responses were defensive—“You are not being loyal to the agency” or “Why are you trying to expose our dirty laundry?” My favorite was being called un-American and lacking in patriotism because I kept asking questions about the performance of fish factories and the need to hold them accountable to improve their performance. Hatcheries apparently rank right up there with mom and apple pie as sacred symbols of America. A few years after leaving ODFW, I was appointed to the Independent Science Group, later renamed the Independent Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of eleven senior scientists and managers charged with examining the scientific basis for the massive salmon restoration program in the Columbia River. Bill Chapter 5—Beyond the Crossroads: First Steps Toward Salmon Recovery 147 Liss was already on the panel and, while the whole panel supported an analysis of the program’s conceptual foundation, three members—Jack Stanford, Rick Williams, and Phil Mundy—besides Bill and I were strong advocates for...