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WILD SALMON IN WESTERN NORTH AMERICA; THE HISTORICAL AND POLICY CONTEXT
Citation:
LACKEY, R. T., D. H. LACH, AND S. L. DUNCAN. WILD SALMON IN WESTERN NORTH AMERICA; THE HISTORICAL AND POLICY CONTEXT. Chapter 2, Robert T. Lackey, Denise H. Lach, Sally L. Duncan (ed.), Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon. American Fisheries Society, Bethesda, MD, , 13-55, (2006).
Impact/Purpose:
The primary goal of the Salmon 2100 Project is to identify practical options that have a high probability of maintaining biologically significant, sustainable populations of wild salmon through this century.
Description:
Nearly all of the participants in the Salmon 2100 Project concluded that wild salmon recovery efforts in western North America (especially California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and southern British Columbia), as earnest, expensive, and socially disruptive as they currently are, do not appear likely to sustain biologically significant populations of wild salmon through this century. Long-term sustainability, although apparently broadly supported in the abstract, remains elusive in reality. The primary goal of the Salmon 2100 Project is to identify practical options that have a high probability of maintaining biologically significant, sustainable populations of wild salmon through this century. Rather than supporting or advocating any particular policy or class of policies, the overarching theme of the Salmon 2100 Project is to help policy makers and the public evaluate a suite of possible policy options by providing a number of independent, policy-neutral analyses and proposed policy prescriptions. To accomplish its goal, the Project enlisted two dozen senior scientists, resource managers, and policy analysts. The policy prescriptions offered by Project participants are universally candid, sometimes uncomfortably radical, and occasionally sobering. Nearly all conclude that major, sometimes wholesale modification of core societal values and preferences will have to occur if significant, sustainable populations of wild salmon are to be present in the region by 2100. One major tangible product of the Project will be a book scheduled for publication by the American Fisheries Society in 2006.