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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Salmon Debate: Key Players Harvey Morrison Pushing For Big Changes At Dams

David Clinton and Harvey Morrison are fascinated by Snake River salmon. They each have spent many hours studying the endangered fish and the reasons for its decline.

They’ve come to very different conclusions.

Clinton is a power company executive and business coalition chairman. He believes the region’s hydropower system is being singled out unfairly as the culprit that’s driving the salmon to extinction.

Morrison is a Sierra Club activist and represents an environmental coalition. He’s convinced that dam operations are the main reason the fish are going extinct.

He says there’s ample evidence for making major changes in the hydropower system.

Although the Spokane River lost its salmon to dams nearly a century ago, both Morrison and Clinton hope people will take an interest in the issue.

Here’s a look at their positions and the organizations on both sides:

Harvey Morrison knelt on the riverbank and peered down at the sockeye drifting in the water. The fish was as long as his arm and was worn out from its upstream journey to spawn.

“It sounds corny. We had eye contact,” recalled the Spokane sportsman. “I’ve killed a lot of salmon, but I’ve never had one look at me before.”

Even before that experience last November along a coastal river, Morrison was taking a closer look at the wild salmon that are disappearing from the Columbia River basin.

Now 52, the construction company manager has emerged as the Spokane-area “salmon spokesman” for conservationists.

He and two of his three children are volunteer activists with the Sierra Club, part of the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition.

That means speaking up for Snake River reservoir drawdowns and other drastic changes in the federal hydropower system.

It’s a reasonable approach, Morrison said, to drop the water level in reservoirs each spring. That would speed up migration of endangered Snake River chinook and sockeye, he says, and help them survive their two-way journey past eight dams.

He says hydropower interests are misleading people by claiming there’s not enough scientific evidence to support drawdowns.

“Common sense tells you if you can give fish a remnant of what was taken away from them - flowing water - they’ll make the most of it.”

For 20 years, Morrison was among fishermen who figured that hatcheries would churn out enough salmon and steelhead trout to replace the dwindling wild fish. But the hatcheries probably make things worse, he says now. They produce fish that compete with the wild salmon for food, yet don’t have the instincts needed to survive in the wild themselves.

Nor, Morrison adds, has it helped to barge fish around the dams. He’s outraged that a fortune is being spent each year on what he considers to be fruitless tactics such as that.

Spokane sportsmen sued the federal government in the 1970s to stop construction of Lower Granite Dam near Clarkston, Wash. Although the suit failed, it may have helped to prevent a ninth dam from being built upstream near Asotin, Wash.

Morrison knows that most Inland Northwest residents don’t get worked up about dwindling salmon runs.

“Spokane just doesn’t seem to be a really environmental town,” lamented Amy Morrison, Harvey Morrison’s 29-year-old daughter.

Like her brother, Scott, Amy Morrison studied science in college and spread her activist wings in the Peace Corps. She helped create the Greater Ecosystem Alliance, a Bellingham, Wash.-based group, but wasn’t especially interested in salmon until she returned to Spokane in 1993.

That’s when the Morrisons attended a Sierra Club seminar about salmon.

“That was the first time I came to understand the biology, the incredible journey they make. Right after that, my dad, brother and I went fishing on the Wind River.”

They didn’t catch any fish in that Western Washington river. But they caught salmon fever, watching chinook leap up a waterfall.

They came back and formed the Sierra Club Salmon Action Committee.

Who belongs?

“You’re looking at it,” said Scott Morrison with a grin, as he sat in the family living room.

Scott, 27, doesn’t think that changing hydropower operations will cost the region a lot of jobs. He imagines the revival of sport and commercial fishing.

“It’s the morally right thing, it’s the ecologically right thing, and it’s the economically right thing,” Scott Morrison said. “Unfortunately, it’s not the politically acceptable thing.”

The Morrisons want people to talk to politicians, to convince them of the need to save the salmon. They’re putting together a slide presentation and a display for the Big Horn sportsmen’s show later this month. They’re involved with an upcoming endangered species conference.

Morrison, a vice president with Bouten Construction, also is helping plan a Cheney Cowles Museum exhibit about dams. He itches to talk to business groups, service clubs, anyone who will listen.

“It started out as a meeting one night a week,” he said. His wife, Diane, laughed at that. Her husband had just attended five salmon-related meetings in two days.

Like his dad, Scott Morrison finds the cause contagiously interesting.

“It’s a responsibility,” he said of the family’s involvement. “Maybe it’s a curse.”

MEMO: See story about David Clinton under the headline: The salmon debate: key players \ Harvey Morrison pushing for big changes at dams

See sidebar that ran with this story under the headline: Salmon restoration

See story about David Clinton under the headline: The salmon debate: key players \ Harvey Morrison pushing for big changes at dams

See sidebar that ran with this story under the headline: Salmon restoration