Why Fight Over Crumbs?

Trollers in Southeast Alaska are idled this season. This should be mourned as the tragedy it is for the 1,450 fishers who depend on some portion of the $85 million in income, and $148 million in economic output that this season generates annually. It’s also a continuation of a more disturbing pattern, whereby fishers take the economic hit for a much larger illegal take of salmon, a crime that goes largely unpunished. More on that in a few paragraphs. 

At the beginning of May, Judge Richard Jones, ruling from Seattle federal court, granted a conservation organization, the Wild Fish Conservancy, a request for a halt to the season, after WFC’s win in a lawsuit over this fishery. NOAA-Fisheries, the defendant in this case, admitted to ignoring the evidence for decades that overharvest was a problem.

This southeast Alaska chinook fishery takes place in a part of the Pacific where a king from just about any river from the Columbia north might be non-selectively caught on a troller’s long line. 

Salmon spawn in rivers from California to Alaska, but in the ocean they mix, and their river of origin, for any fishing boat plying the Pacific, becomes indecipherable. An ESA listed wild spring chinook from the Deschutes River in the mid-Columbia Basin could be boated on the same line as a hatchery spring chinook from the Cowlitz River in Washington state, and both fish would be labeled “wild caught Alaskan salmon.”  

A boat sits idle, awaiting the closure of the $85 billion Alaskan salmon fishery.

For decades, this kind of non-selective ocean fishing, whether trawler or troller,  has led to overharvest of some fish from some rivers where their numbers are down. 

But it is also true that “overharvest” doesn’t take into account the criminal take of salmon that occurs because of habitat destruction where Pacific salmon begin and end their lives–in rivers plugged by dams nearly everywhere they spawn and rear outside of Alaska.  

In the 1990’s, another federal court commissioned a scientific panel to determine the percentage of salmon decline that could be directly attributed to the thorough transformation of what was until recently the world’s most productive chinook salmon producing river, the Columbia. The panel’s conclusion: dams cause 80% of the decline. Dams take the lion’s share of salmon. The rest of us are fighting over the dwindling one-fifth that’s left. 

The Bonneville Power Administration has its ample bureaucratic ass hanging out so far that it’s practically begging for a fisherman’s boot.

In light of these facts, it seems like a fine time to invoke the spirit of Nat Bingham, a Mendocino Coast (northern California)  commercial chinook fisherman who, prior to his death in 1998, became one of the commercial fishing industries’ most effective voices. 

As salmon stocks dwindled off the California coast in the 1980’s, Bingham began organizing his fellow fishers to begin advocating for the well-being of salmon in the freshwater stages of their life cycle. Bingham took on big timber, big oil, and big hydro at a time when no one else would. He eventually became a lobbyist for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA.) 

In my new book, Cracked, the outsized influence that Bingham had on some salmon advocates can be traced to getting some of the credit for what might be deemed their largest win: the removal of Klamath River dams, which is happening as I write this. Glen Spain is general legal counsel and Northwest Regional Director for the PCFFA, and spent 30 years helping to get all stakeholders to yes on Klamath River dam removal. Of the beginning of his law career in 1982, as Spain recalls in Cracked, “I was a young environmental attorney in the Bay Area, and I kept running into this feisty commercial fishing group, at that time led by a charismatic northern California fisherman named Nat Bingham, who was already talking about taking out dams. I admired how they were kicking the shit out of the agencies, and kicking the shit out of their opponents in the public relations arena too. So I went to work for them.” 

Who will be the Alaska Trollers Association’s Nat Bingham? After all, there’s no shortage of kicking the shit out of agencies that still needs to be done, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The Bonneville Power Administration, for example,  has its ample bureaucratic ass hanging out so far that it’s practically begging for a fisherman’s boot. The BPA markets and sells power from 31 dams on the Columbia, and has burned through $17 billion on a 50-year failed salmon recovery effort on the Columbia River. For BPA, there’s no success like failure: this quasi-federal agency that relies on billions of dollars in sales of hydropower throughout the region to make budget every year is also financing, implementing, and exercising a thorough control over salmon recovery. As is the case with any hydropower-dependent utility, these contradicting objectives represent a massive conflict of interest. Utilities are designed to make money, not salmon, a reality that no amount of smooth PR campaigns and back-door political connections will fix.  

In the Pacific Salmon Treaty, agreements between the lower 48, Canada, and southeastern Alaska are supposed to rely on each region furnishing a fair share of salmon from their respective rivers, a goal that was supposed to be achieved via investment in the health of freshwater habitat. The Columbia, once the world’s greatest chinook producing river, falls short of its quota under the treaty, year after year. Again, 80 percent of decline of salmon comes due to dams in the Columbia River Basin. 

There are all kinds of intriguing legal thought problems pertaining to the BPA and the Columbia that might be parsed over beers as boats are idled in Sitka and Petersburg and Haines. Patient, passionate, skillful attorneys like Glen Spain are out there, as the Wild Fish Conservancy’s successful legal venture proves. 

The prize here would be adding momentum to the case for removal of four dams on the lower Snake River, the Columbia’s most fecund tributary in terms of salmon production, and gateway to millions of acres of wilderness, harboring 5,000 miles of salmon-bearing streams that once nurtured half of all the chinook in the Columbia system. 

With chinook returns and future forecasts at an all time low, there’s never been a better time than now.

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