Restoring Salmon Ecosystems

Abstract

vast areas, Sometimes it seems we are bound to repeat history even when we are well aware of it. Such has been the history of conservation in America. Even after more than a century of documented experience, we continue to lose many of our native species, communities, and ecosystems. The collapse of native salmon stocks in the Pacific Northwest is one of the most recent examples. Despite the well-publicized loss of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) from most of New England in the nineteenth century, many populations of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) today face extinction for most of the same reasons. Now, even as the Northwest begins the enormous task of restoration, we are also reminded that repeated efforts to recover Atlantic salmon have met with little success. For all these reasons, the task of Northwestern restorationists is more than just the recovery of salmon. It is a fundamental reshaping of the traditional tenets of resource conservation. When several hundred natural resource professionals met last fall in Eugene, Oregon to discuss the latest ideas about restoring Pacific salmon, I could not help but recall accounts I had read of similar meetings more than a century ago. On June 13, 1872, state fish commissioners and fish culturists gathered in Boston to discuss plans for a new federal hatchery program to restock the depleted waters of New England and to introduce the most popular fish species across America (United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1874). Then, as now, salmon was the focus of attention. Then, as now, salmon depletion was attributed to these causes: dams, water pollution, overfishing, and degradation of stream habitat resulting from the clearing of forests and the cultivation of agricultural lands (Marsh, 1857). Of course, in the 1870s the possibilities of a newly developed hatchery technology seemed limitless; the genetic and ecological risks of releasing large numbers of hatchery fish were simply unknown, and in any case, surely would have been unpersuasive in the giddy atmosphere of America’s gilded age. What now seems sadly ironic--that many once viewed the Pacific coast as a vast storehouse to replenish exhausted supplies of Atlantic salmon--then seemed only logical. Fish culturist Livingston Stone, who in 1872 established the U.S. Fish Commission’s first Pacific salmon hatchery on California’s McCloud River, typified the notion that restoration of Atlantic salmon was a simple economy of scale: