Building, Farming, Electricity Matter In The Pacific NW - Salmon Do Not

[hatrack]

"Ballard is as good a mythic center of fishing as any for a region that has made the salmon a cultural icon, the fierce, fighting fish that, at maturity, somehow find their way from the ocean back to their inland birthplace to spawn and then die. Their carcasses feed scavengers and eventually fertilize the majestic forests that ring this city. But now federal policies on salmon are being drastically overhauled. The changes are a windfall to the housing and energy industries. But to solitary fishermen like Kawahara, they seem the beginning of the salmon's doom in the West.

"The government is doing everything it can to escape its responsibilities," said Kawahara, 50, who grew up like many boys in Seattle, fishing recreationally for salmon with his father. "They're trying to manipulate science to cover what's been a ruinous policy." In November, the Bush administration announced a near-reversal of the environmental policies that were instituted to rebuild salmon runs -- the time the fish swim back upriver -- in Washington, Oregon and northern California.

In a much stricter interpretation of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the administration announced that it will protect as "critical habitat" only rivers and streams currently occupied by salmon, not areas that were once, or might become, part of their habitat. The new interpretation reduces protected territory by 80 percent, federal officials say. The administration also has proposed to stop protecting land on the region's military bases and in federally owned forests. The decision is being challenged in court by environmental groups and will not become final before summer.

The decision came within months of the administration's conclusion that the removal of dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, which would have benefited salmon recovery, is no longer an option, and its decision to count hatchery-raised salmon as wild salmon when considering population. The triple whammy comes as a great relief to those in the building, timber and energy industries, which consider the protection of salmon under the Endangered Species Act costly, complex and overreaching. Government estimates put the cost of protecting salmon at up to $700 million a year. One particularly contentious issue is the practice of spilling water over dams in the summer to give young salmon ample water to swim to sea. Spilled water cannot be used to turn hydroelectric turbines and generate electricity, electricity that could be sold for profit to power-hungry California. The revenue that spilled water could bring during the summer amounts to about $1 million a day. The added benefit to salmon populations has been a point of debate."

EDIT

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-ussalm0207,0,1646735.story?coll=ny-nation-big-pix

[rfkrfk]

1. the states could act, but don't, why?

shrub's indifference to this matter, is predictable.
What I don't get, why do the concerned state legislatures
stand idle, when they have the authority to
correct these situations.
It is time, for the individual policymakers in these legislatures,
to stop expecting to get what they want by default.