NMFS needs to explain how it arrived at salmon listings

NMFS needs to explain how it arrived at salmon listings

By Steve Appel

I know why salmon are endangered.

It’s not because of irrigation ditches in the Methow Valley. It’s not because of dams on the Snake River. It’s not even the result of urban sprawl, salmon-gulping Caspian terns or overfishing.

Salmon are endangered because the National Marine Fisheries Service says they are.

And unfortunately, the media that pride themselves on being government watchdogs have swallowed the listing of salmon hook, line and sinker.

Even The Seattle Times, in a recent editorial, talked about the need to protect "a treasured food source."

Excuse me, but have you been to the grocery store lately? Salmon is selling for $2.99 a pound, which is about the same as the top brand of hotdogs!

We are not in danger of losing salmon as a food source. We are not in danger of seeing salmon disappear from our rivers and streams. Hatcheries in Washington release more than 100 million salmon every year.

The truth is that not a single species of salmon native to the Northwest is threatened with extinction. The truth is that not even the National Marine Fisheries Service believes a single species of salmon is endangered. The federal agency just wants the public to think so because that makes it easier to impose even more restrictive policies.

In March, NMFS listed nine "evolutionarily significant units" of salmon as threatened. But an ESU is not a species. In some cases, an ESU is an individual run of salmon. In other cases, it’s a collection of runs. An ESU is a made-up term that means whatever the National Marine Fisheries Service says it means.

Take the listing of Puget Sound chinook.

Puget Sound chinook is not a species.

The species is "chinook," or Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. It’s also known as king salmon, tyee salmon, Columbia River salmon, chub salmon and other local names. They are the largest of any salmon, with some weighing more than 120 pounds. Their native waters stretch from Kotzebue Sound in Alaska to southern California.

Are their numbers declining? Yes.

Do we need to redouble our efforts to maintain and restore spawning habitat? Yes, and we are. We also need a wiser government policy regulating harvest during the recovery period and better management of hatcheries to preserve and strengthen genetic diversity.

But are chinook salmon, the species, in danger of going the way of the passenger pigeon? No.

So far, only one group has had the nerve to even question the listings by the National Marine Fisheries Service. That’s Common Sense Salmon Recovery, a coalition of individuals and organizations, including the Washington Farm Bureau, that wants the feds to demonstrate that salmon are really threatened before imposing more restrictions on the way we live.

Is it too much to ask the National Marine Fisheries Service to explain how it decided which salmon runs, or ESUs, to list?

To explain why hatchery fish weren’t included in its equations, especially since the courts ordered the development of hatcheries specifically to supplement wild runs? To offer up its science for peer review? To justify the actions the agency has already taken?

Earlier this year, the feds refused to allow farmers in Okanogan County to irrigate their fields because some salmon might swim into the irrigation ditches and die. The same federal agency recently increased the allowable catch in the Pacific Ocean because of stronger runs.

Explain that to a farmer who can’t pay his banker or feed his family.

Common Sense Salmon Recovery has filed a lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service seeking to force more accountability.

One of the things the coalition wants is access to documents – reports, scientific studies, the administrative record required under the law – that led to the listings this spring.

That’s the kind of evidence the watchdog media also ought to be asking for.

It would be easier to accept some of the regulations being foisted on us by state and federal agencies if we were comfortable their decisions were based on sound science and not on misguided policy or only a desire to increase harvest for special interests.

So far, however, federal agencies have stonewalled these Freedom of Information requests: They say the documents are in Portland. No, they’re in Seattle. Sorry, they’re really in Washington, D.C.

Do they exist at all?

Is this how government is accountable to the people?

When CSSR filed its lawsuit, Will Stelle, regional director for the National Marine Fisheries Service, called it "nutty." Shouldn’t we question government actions? Or are we sheep blissfully accepting what the shepherd has in store for us?

The people I represent as president of the Washington Farm Bureau believe local control is better than blind mandates passed down from Washington, D.C. We believe the people of Washington can improve salmon runs without the heavy-handed, arm-twisting approach the government seems bent on taking.

We can have salmon without destroying people’s lives.

In the meantime, suggesting that draconian measures are needed to save "a treasured food source" is like telling people they shouldn’t eat turkey on Thanksgiving because there aren’t as many wild gobblers as there used to be.

Eat hearty. The same newspapers that have been parroting the agency line that salmon are going extinct have been filled with recipes lately on how to cook them.

Steve Appel is a wheat and barley farmer from Whitman County and president of the Washington Farm Bureau. For more information about the Common Sense Salmon Recovery lawsuit, call Dean Boyer at (360) 357-9975.

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