Outspoken Salmon Plan Critic To Speak James Buchal Joins Panel Discussion On Salmon Restoration Issues
Anyone who has been to a hearing about Northwest salmon restoration knows the upshot of James Buchal’s message.
His sentiments are shared by farmers who feel abused when their irrigation is limited for the sake of salmon. They’re shared by landowners who oppose development restrictions and businessmen fighting to save dams. They’re the thoughts of folks who see fishermen on the Columbia River and wonder how it is that an endangered species can be netted and sold.
But few speak as forcefully as Buchal, who has become a hero to many people who share his beliefs. The author of “The Great Salmon Hoax” will be part of a panel discussing salmon Thursday in Spokane.
The federal and state agencies that form “the salmon recovery empire,” are run by people who don’t care about fish, he tells crowds. They only want to accumulate power.
“I dream of the day when the citizens of Washington can identify the agents of the empire by sight,” Buchal told an anti-regulatory rally in Yakima this year. “And I dream of the day when the citizens of Washington refuse to serve them in restaurants. And the citizens of Washington refuse to sell them gasoline. And the citizens of Washington make it so uncomfortable for them that they go back to their cities and leave us alone to grow our own salmon.”
Buchal, 40, is an Illinois native who moved to Portland from New York eight years ago. He is married, has two sons and likes to fish, although he’s yet to hook a Pacific salmon.
An attorney educated at Harvard and Yale, Buchal said he was lured to the Northwest by his brother, who wanted to commercially raise abalone on the Oregon coast. Regulations propagated by the “salmon bureaucracy” were so overwhelming, Buchal said, that his brother started the aqua-farm in Hawaii instead.
Buchal has represented a number of groups battling fish agencies. Recent clients include the Columbia River Alliance, which represents aluminum producers, barge companies and other industrial river users.
“He’s a brilliant attorney. On the legal side, there’s probably no one who knows the issues better,” Alliance Director Bruce Lovelin said.
But, Lovelin said, Buchal’s comments outside court “are frankly too aggressive for the people we represent. … The last thing that the salmon issue needs is people to demonize other people.”
Critics say Buchal misuses numbers to draw overly simplistic conclusions about complex biological issues.
“James Buchal is a firebrand,” said Jim Baker, a representative for the Sierra Club. “His style in both speaking and in writing is a take-no-prisoners approach, and clearly there are people who agree with him and like that approach.”
Buchal said his self-published book has sold about 5,000 copies. It stems largely from his legal research.
Buchal said poring over government documents convinced him that dams and irrigation have little to do with declining salmon runs. Rather, he said, a primary cause is years of gluttonous fishing, overseen by the same agency now in charge of salmon recovery: the National Marine Fisheries Service.
What’s more, Buchal contends, salmon should never have been listed as endangered because they are at no risk of extinction over the extent of their range.
Some of the five salmon species have disappeared - or are at risk of disappearing - from some rivers and tributaries. Federal biologists say those individual stocks are genetically distinct and irreplaceable so should be treated as if they were separate species. Buchal contends that’s a scheme designed to give federal bureaucrats control over as much land as possible.
“If you’re going to have the federal government in there mucking around, it ought to be something that’s about to disappear from the face of the Earth,” he said.
Buchal’s latest target is hatchery reform, championed by state and federal agencies.
Many biologists say hatchery-reared fish threaten the genetic purity of wild runs. Scattered hatcheries are eliminating hatchery runs of chinook salmon and replacing them with the progeny of native fish. Buchal and others say any excess hatchery fish should be allowed to spawn with those in the rivers - even if their ancestors came from hundreds of miles away.
Citizens for too long have accepted what the government has told them, Buchal contends. It’s time to rebel.
Speaking at the Yakima rally against federal rules for salmon protection, he coached the crowd to ask pointed questions at an upcoming hearing.
“And when they evade your questions, or tell their lies, don’t just sit there like sheep,” he chastised the crowd. “Shout them down. Sit down in the doorways. Clog the halls.”
This sidebar appeared with the story: SYMPOSIUM Salmon
“Both Sides of the River,” an Eastern Washington University symposium on salmon recovery, is Thursday at the Met, 901 W. Sprague. Here is the tentative schedule: At 9 a.m., Richard Mullan of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the Rev. Scott Cobel of Gonzaga University will discuss the spiritual importance of rivers and salmon.
William Dietrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and environmental reporter, will give the keynote address about 9:45 a.m.
From 11 a.m. to noon, Will Stelle, Northwest director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, and Tom Karier, Washington member of the Northwest Power Planning Council, will talk about federal salmon policies.
From 1 p.m. until 3 p.m., a panel of regulators, environmentalists and others will discuss salmon restoration issues.