You are here:
POLICY CONUNDRUM: RESTORING WILD SALMON TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Citation:
Lackey, R T. POLICY CONUNDRUM: RESTORING WILD SALMON TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. Presented at Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, Corvallis, OR, July 10-14, 2000.
Description:
Across the Pacific Northwest region of North America, many runs of wild (in contrast to hatchery-bred) salmon have declined and some have been extirpated. Restoring wild salmon runs to the Pacific Northwest is technically challenging, politically nasty, socially divisive, and past restoration efforts have been largely unsuccessful. Society's failure to reverse the continuing decline of wild salmon has the characteristics of a policy connundrum: nearly everyone supports, abstractly at least, restoring salmon runs; considerable public and private resources have been devoted to their restoration; but society collectively remains evidently unwilling to make the draconian decisions clearly necessary to arrest their decline.
Much of the public discourse about salmon restoration revolves, at least superficially, around scientific issues. Even with complete scientific knowledge--and scientific knowledge will never be complete or certain--restoring wild salmon runs would be challenging. Further, the salmon-decline issue is often defined simplistically as a "habitat improvement" or "dam removal" problem, in part because changes in land or water use are highly visible, commonly occur on public or corporate lands, and are often financed or at least subsidized by taxpayers.
Because human activity affects salmon throughout their lives, any effective wild salmon restoration strategy would affect all segments of society; rural interprises (especially farming and logging); manufacturing (both enterprise construction and operation); electricity generation (including hydro and its possible alternatives, fossil, nuclear, wind, and solar); urban development (especially housing costs and flood protection zoning); transportation (including road, rail, air and water). Dissension involves competing and divergent visions of individual, property, and communal rights and freedoms; the prerogatives and roles of local, state, federal, and Indian governments, and future of