Salmon Disaster: Fish Out Of Water
by Jon Keller

“Photograph above shows commercial salmon trollers rafted out 10 deep shot in 1982 in Fort Bragg’s Noyo Harbor. This photograph was taken at a time when the fleet was probably about as healthy and robust as ever. At the time there were approximately 4,000 trolling licenses fishing salmon in California waters.” —John McManus John McManus photo

The Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC) voted on April 10th to cancel the 2008 salmon season from Cape Falcon, Oregon to the Mexican border—a stretch of coastline from northern Oregon through all of California. With Chinook (king) salmon returns in California’s Central Valley at an all time low, Council Chairman Don Hansen said, “This is a disaster for West Coast salmon fisheries, under any standard.”
The Sacramento River, which empties into San Francisco Bay, is the heart of the Chinook salmon fishery. As recently as 2002, 775,000 fall-run Chinook were counted in the Sacramento River delta. But this year, a meager 50,000 to 60,000 returns were estimated.

“The status of Sacramento fall Chinook has suddenly collapsed to an unprecedented low level,” said Hansen.

According to the PFMC, the projected loss for commercial fishermen is roughly $21 million in ex-vessel revenue. The New York Times estimated the direct economic impact surrounding the Sacramento River fishery to be $150 million. Dick Pool of the American Sportfishermen’s Association estimated the overall impact to be $16.5 billion.

On May 1st, under the authority of the Magnusen Stevens Act, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez declared the West coast salmon fishery a commercial fishery failure. Two weeks later, the U.S. House and Senate passed the $307 billion farm bill. Within the farm bill was a $170 million dollar relief fund for Oregon, California, Washington and Idaho salmon fishing communities.

President Bush vetoed the bill, citing fiscal responsibility as his major concern. The House and Senate overturned Bush’s veto.

What happened to the salmon?
In this age of conservation and modern science, with reams of data, mystifying amounts of regulators and regulations, how can Chinook salmon disappear? Spawning has gone down over 90% in six years, despite the heavy-handed management practices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and its subsidiaries, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the PFMC. Even sport fishermen are being stranded land-side. How could such a high-dollar, high-profile fishery as the king salmon crash?

According to the Department of Commerce (of whom NOAA is a subsidiary), “NOAA scientists suggest that changes in ocean conditions, including unfavorable shifts in ocean temperature and food sources for juvenile salmon, likely caused poor survival of salmon that would have comprised this year’s fishery.” NOAA went on to cite freshwater habitat as another cause.

“This photo was taken in 2006 when commercial salmon fishing was shut for most of the coast, most of that year, due to collapsed Klamath River salmon stocks. The bad conditions in 2006 were caused by the Bush administration (US Bureau of Reclamation with approval of NMFS) diverting too much of the Klamath River water to upstream farmers leaving a shallow warm river deadly to juvenile salmon. The most recent collapse was caused by the same federal agencies, in concert with the state of California, diverting too much of the Sacramento and San Joaquin delta water to farm and urban interest to the south, along with poor ocean conditions experienced in 2005.” —John McManus—John McManus John McManus photo

Not everyone agrees with the emphasis that NOAA puts on the ocean conditions. Some fishermen and conservationists say that the salmon have been in trouble for years and the causes are no mystery: It is freshwater habitat—there’s simply not enough water left in the rivers, and too many dams. With the arid west’s heavy dependence on irrigation, and the large population centers using so much water, it is no surprise that the rivers are drained, and the salmon fingerlings are pulled into the massive turbines. The California Aqueduct alone, which begins at the Sacramento River, can pull as much as 10,670 cubic feet of water per second from the river delta.

John McManus, of the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said that 2005 was a record water-pumping year on the Sacramento River, with 6.4 million acre-feet of water removed from the river. Those 2005 fingerlings were to be this year’s salmon run.

“This [the fishery disaster declaration] will buy the fleet a little valuable time,” said Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), “but the federal and state agencies must take advantage of that time to address the real problems in the California Bay Delta that are killing the fish – massive overdraft of water, unregulated agricultural pollution problems and poor hatchery management practices – that have been the final burden on a naturally variable ocean system.”

On May 15th, Roger Thomas, of the Golden Gate Fishermen’s Association, and Dick Pool, of the American Sportfishing Association, testified at the House Resources Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans Oversight Hearing. The hearing, they said in their report, “was to examine what is wrong with the biological opinions that NMFS has been issuing on salmon.”

There were two panels at the hearing: On one was Roger McGinnis, the NMFS Southwest Regional Director, and three other witnesses. The other panel included Thomas and Pool, a commercial fisherman and a salmon processor, respectively.

In their report, Thomas and Pool said: “In spite of the court’s recent decision [to reject the NMFS’s salmon science] and most independent biologists’ opinions that the pumps were a primary cause of the collapse, Mr. McGinnis took the easy way out and said, ‘Therefore the cause of the decline is consistent with the poor ocean conditions hypothesis.’ A further disappointment was that Mr. McGinnis did not provide a timetable for a new delta biological opinion.”

According to Dr. Peter Moyle of the University of California, “Thus blaming ‘ocean conditions’ for salmon declines is a lot like blaming the iceberg for sinking the Titanic, while ignoring the many human errors that put the ship on course for the fatal collision.”

A study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showed that of 200 tagged salmon smolts released, only four reached the Golden Gate.

“Blaming the primary cause of this catastrophe on ocean conditions stinks of rotten politics from top to bottom. We need straight talk and help from the fishery agencies, not weak excuses,” said Thomas.

But these agencies—Gutierrez’s Department of Commerce and its charges, NOAA and NMFS—are also the agencies that have invested so much in the future of finfish aquaculture. It makes little sense for an agency with absolute confidence in aquaculture to invest in wild stocks. Why deal with West Coast water politics when 90% of salmon bought in the U.S. are already raised on farms, in easily managed environs? Why fight everyone from corporate farmers to the city of Los Angeles for water?

The answer is obvious to conservationists and fishermen and some Indian tribes, who have fought with politicians and corporations for decades over the west’s limited water supplies. To many, salmon runs are still more important than green lawns and swimming pools in the desert.

Commercial fishermen are now teaming up with conservationists and sportfishermen and tribal leaders in a desperate attempt to keep the west’s salmon out of the turbines and in the end, out of the pens that the Atlantic salmon has been resigned to.