Let’S Save Both Salmon, Economy

Puget Sound urban dwellers have found it easy, until now, to support salmon-saving proposals that would devastate other portions of the state.

Then last week, the federal government listed several Western Washington salmon runs as endangered. Suddenly, we’re all in this together. And we will all discover the cost and flaws of radical solutions like dam removal, development bans and logging shutdowns.

Soon, West Siders will begin to insist on saving their suburbs, their freeways, their factories, their private timber harvests, their landscape-paving growth - and salmon, too.

Out here in Eastern Washington, we sympathize. We appreciate salmon, and we also appreciate hydroelectric dams, reservoir recreation, logging, wheat farming and the inland barging that keeps grain growers afloat.

Can salmon runs coexist with the modern world? The radical remedies raise a concern that the answer is no. Other remedies are simply silly, like Gov. Gary Locke’s plan for a bossy new Olympia salmon-saving bureacracy that would pump out studies and regulations such as restrictions on private wells - even in areas like Spokane County where salmon haven’t swam the rivers since Grand Coulee Dam’s completion 58 years ago.

There is another approach circulating in the Legislature this year, one that seeks cooperation at the grass roots where salmon spawn, stream by stream.

The Legislature could provide habitat improvement grants for spawning streams, utilizing existing, trusted local entities like conservation districts. Instead of spending money on arbitrary, one-size-fits-all rules from a remote power center, scientists with state funding could tailor habitat improvements to each locale.

There is reason for optimism. Recent data show that thanks to continuing improvements to the dams and the salmon-barging system, smolts are surviving their journey to the ocean at the highest rate since the early 1960s.

One of the most tantalizing stories, especially for suburb-dwellers along Puget Sound’s undammed creeks, comes from Rep. Barb Lisk, R-Zillah. Four years ago, the Yakama tribe started raising batches of Coho salmon in a netted-off irrigation ditch fed by water from the upper Yakima River. Wild Coho had vanished from that river, long ago. But last fall, more than 4,500 adult Coho swam up the Columbia past four large dams, swam up the silt-polluted Yakima River and over another dam, and spawned along the tributaries, leaving 2,000 nests of eggs from which a new generation of fish could emerge this spring. They grew up in a ditch, smelling the call of the wild in water from the mountains and they followed it home.

With ingenious help and a continuous habitat improvement program, salmon can survive dams, and maybe even Seattle’s suburbs. True, there are other serious obstacles including overfishing and hostile ocean conditions. But, if our region responds with intelligence, creek by creek, perhaps we can have our economy, and salmon, too.