You are here:
WILD SALMON RESTORATION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: FORECASTING THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Citation:
Lackey, R T. WILD SALMON RESTORATION IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: FORECASTING THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Presented at Newport, OR, November 1, 2000.
Description:
Restoring wild salmon runs to the Pacific Northwest is technically challenging, politically nasty, and socially divisive. Past restoration efforst have been largely unsuccessful. Society's failure to reverse the continuing decline of wild salmon has the characteristics of a policy conundrum: 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 painful decisions clearly necessary to arrest their decline. The salmon policy conundrum is characterized by competing societal priorities being adjudicated in a political environment where few are willing to acknowledge publicly the future consequences of prior de facto policy choices. Through the twenty-first century, many, perhaps most, stocks of wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest likely will remain at their current low levels or continue to decline in spite of current protection and restoration efforts.