The Battle for Bristol Bay - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 275

the counting stations—tall towers set up along the rivers, from which fisheries biologists
monitor the red tide—the governor goes on the radio to say something like “Okay, all
you folks out there in Bristol Bay, it's time to start fishing—good luck!”
By the end of the 2008 season , the Bristol Bay fishery was down 6.7 percent com-
pared to 2007. Alaska's statewide salmon harvest of 146 million fish brought in $400
million, 31.4 percent below the year before. Even so, it was still the sixteenth-largest
catch since 1959 and was far healthier than the salmon fisheries in the Lower 48 states.
Thanks to overfishing, pollution, and the construction of dams on spawning streams,
the Atlantic salmon of New England are listed as endangered species. On the West
Coast, the California salmon season was canceled in 2008 and 2009 by federal regulat-
ors. Central Oregon fishermen were granted a nine-thousand-fish catch in 2008, and
Washington State fishermen were granted only a short season in 2009. Millions of sock-
eye once spawned along Idaho rivers, before hydroelectric dams were built. Now the
salmon have to swim nine hundred miles from the Pacific, surmount eight dams, and
climb sixty-five hundred feet up to lakes in the Sawtooth Valley. In 2006 fisheries bio-
logists suggested that Idaho sockeye were “functionally extinct.” In 1995, not a single
salmon returned to the Sawtooth; in 2007, only four salmon were reported to have sur-
vived the trek. A hatchery program is promising, but whether hatchery-bred fish can
survive the grueling life cycle of an Idaho salmon is an open question.
Today, far more farm-raised salmon exist in the world than wild salmon. Farming
salmon adds pollutants, such as PCBs (the chemical that pollutes the Housatonic River),
to the ecosystem, where they enter the food chain. The threat of domesticated salmon
escaping and crossbreeding with native fish, and the amount of wild fish required to
feed farmed salmon, add to the environmental stress. Salmon advocates across the
country have petitioned Washington for sweeping changes in the way wild salmon
stocks are managed, and in 2009, they asked President Obama to appoint a national sal-
mon czar to oversee the care, maintenance, and rescue of fish populations.
Aside from limiting the catch, the best way to help wild salmon is to remove dams
that block their spawn runs. In 2008, American Rivers reported that 430 outdated dams
had been removed in the last decade. The first was the Edwards Dam, on the Kennebec
River, in Maine. On the Penobscot, also in Maine, fish ladders will open one thousand
miles of river to salmon. In the West, three dams in Washington State are slated for re-
moval in 2011, while four dams on California's Klamath River will be removed by 2015.
But in Alaska dams aren't the issue: salmon advocates fear contamination of the water,
particularly by Pebble mine.