An angler in Oregon lifts his hatchery-raised king salmon
Pat Ford, one of Idaho’s most effective and hardest working wilderness advocates, called me in 1990 very troubled.
I was the editorial writer for the Idaho Falls Post Register and had covered environmental issues in Idaho for five years. Ford spoke of his successful effort to protect the Franck Church River of No Return Wilderness and his current effort to save the Boulder-White Clouds. But it was all for naught he declared. Protecting the land without protecting the wild fish that not only lived in the rivers but carried energy and nutrients from the Pacific to central Idaho was crucial to the land. These fish were going extinct, and he hadn’t done anything about it.
The Shoshone Bannock Tribes had just petitioned NOAA Fisheries demanding they put Snake River sockeye salmon on the federal Endangered Species list. Oregon Trout and other environmental groups had done the same thing for Snake River spring chinook. Thus began his 34-year campaign to save salmon across the entire Pacific Northwest, an area about the size of France.
Ford’s plea that I editorialize and report about the salmon also started my own odyssey to learn and report on the impact of salmon and dams. When the Post Register’s new editor asked me to manage a reporting project that would include all the staff and affect every reader, I proposed examining the Endangered Species Act.
“What?” He said “why?”
Because every time a family runs their dishwasher, refrigerator or turns on the light the law touches them. That’s because the federal agencies that operate 29 dams throughout the region will have to ensure they are not driving the salmon into extinction. Let alone the Act’s protection of bald eagles Peregrine falcons, grizzly bears and wolves.
He agreed and on July 1 1990 I went to a hearing in Portland , Ore. Chaired by Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield seeking a way to prevent the Snake River spring chinook from being listed. There I learned the basics about how the survival of salmon and the future of the hydroelectric dams, the region’s irrigated agriculture, the barge shipping between Lewiston, Idaho and Portland were all connected. I also learned how important salmon were to the region’s Indian tribes, not only for food but also for spiritual sustenance. I soon realized how much was taken away from tribal families when the dams were built of the Snake and Columbia rivers.
I finished the series, Endangered Species, Embroiled Region and it was so popular, the Post Register was paid by federal agencies to reprint it and place 100,000 copies in Pacific Northwest schools. Later I wrote my first book based on the series Saving All The Parts: Reconciling Economics and the Endangered Species Act.
Hatfield soon convened what he called The Salmon Summit, a moderated collaboration between all the parties, environmentalists, utilities, tribes, states, agriculture, industry, barge shippers and others. The goal was to create a plan that would protect salmon well enough to keep them off the endangered species list. It failed but it helped all the groups to see just how complicated the issue would become.
Salmon advocates and Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus proposed drawing down the reservoirs behind the eight dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers to aid salmon migration. The dam managers, NOAA Fisheries, farmers, industry and barge shippers all preferred collecting the migrating salmon in barges and carrying them through the dams and releasing them in the Columbia estuary below.
This was the basic migration fight as the salmon and steelhead were listed as threatened and endangered species. Andrus and Idaho filed the first lawsuit requiring the federal government to ensure the dams would not forces the fish into extinct.
Since then, 30, years ago, the federal government lost five lawsuits requiring them to do more to protect salmon from the dams. They kept spending billions of dollars to improve the salmon’s migration through the dam and it helped.
I moved to the Idaho Statesman in 1996 and continued to cover the issue. In 1997, It's conservative editor John Costa asked if I thought he could make a case that removing the four Washington dams would not only save salmon but also protect Idaho's precious water. I said I thought so. So he gave me a month to research the issue.
Based on my research, the Idaho Statesman, wrote a series of editorials calling for breaching the four lower Snake dams in Washington to restore salmon abundance. The editorials urged paying for the impacts on dam removal on power supply, grain transportation and irrigation as a more effective and cheaper fix than continuing failed policies. Once again more than 100,000 reprints were distributed throughout the Northwest and in Washington D.C.
I returned to the issue again in 2017 with a major series based on a trip to follow the salmon home from the Pacific to Idaho. We found that the issue had changed but the status quo was stubborn
Wild salmon are better off than they were in the late 1980s when they were put on the Endangered species list, at least there are more of them. The devices to help salmon spill over the eight dams on the Snake and the Columbia have made the trip easier.
But in the last decade the naturally spawning salmon in the Snake River Basin have not been able to replace themselves even with good ocean and flow conditions. The overwhelming majority of fisheries biologists in the Pacific Northwest say removing the four dams on the Snake River would be enough to reverse the trend for all Snake River salmon and steelhead, which have ideal spawning and rearing habitat.
The Pacific Northwest has a surplus of electrical power so the Snake River dams are not as important as an energy source. But the four run-of-the-river dams that don’t store water still are critical for producing power for four to eight hours when demand is high and to back up wind and solar plants. Still, the price Bonneville Power Administration sells power from the dams is higher than the market rate for electricity in part because of fish and wildlife costs. So if Bonneville has to find a way to reduce its costs removing the four dams may be the cheapest alternative.
Managing salmon as a commodity and not as a part of their ecosystems has led the Pacific Northwest to take them out of the rivers; raise them in hatcheries, has allowed non-selective harvest; which together have reduced the genetic fitness the fish will need to survive climate change.
The rising river temperatures, drop in snowfall and dropping flows in the late summer and fall from climate change will have a profound impact on salmon, our own food and power production and the entire life community of Pacific Northwest. But Idaho’s high elevation spawning and rearing habitat provides hope that salmon can survive if they can migrate when temperatures are lower than 68 degrees.
A Nez Perce fisherman tries to catch salmon in Rapid River in Idaho
In 2021 Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson sent shockwaves through the Pacific Northwest by calling for removing the four lower Snake Dams but paying up to $34 billion to make all of the people who would be affected whole. His main effect was to empower the tribes, especially Shannon Wheeler, chairman then of the Nez Perce Tribe’s own effort to change the debate.
The leadership of the tribes changed Democratic Sen. Patty Murray’s position on the issue. She joined Gov. Jay Inslee in endorsing a study of how to replace the services provided by the 4 dams.
The study showed that breaching the four dams was the most promising approach to salmon recovery, though it would require spending from $10.3 billion to $27.2 billion to replace the electricity from the dams’ hydropower, plus grain shipping and irrigation.
With Wheeler and the Columbia tribes now leading the campaign the Biden Administration shifted the federal government’s long-time opposition to dam breaching as first proposed by the Idaho Statesman 25 years before. In 2023 Biden issued a Presidential Memorandum that – for the first time ever – directed Federal agencies to prioritize the restoration of healthy and abundant salmon, steelhead, and other native fish populations in the Columbia River Basin.
Finally, in an agreement that settled the long series of lawsuit in December of 2023, the Biden administration agreed to work in partnership with Pacific Northwest Tribes and States to restore wild salmon populations, expand Tribally sponsored clean energy production, and provide stability for communities that depend on the Columbia River System.
It promised $1 billion for wild fish restoration and other dollars for tribe energy programs like the Nez Perce effort to develop solar and battery power to begin to offset the power from the dams. It supported programs to help all of the users of the river when Congress decides to authorize removing the four Snake dams.
Wheeler explained the tribal position that day:
“The federal dams on the lower Snake and mainstem Columbia rivers have had – and continue to have – devastating impacts on the salmon and our people, burdening our Treaty partnership. So today, as Six Sovereigns joining together with the United States to advance salmon restoration throughout the Basin – including preparation for breach of the four lower Snake River dams – we are also witnessing the restoration of Tribal Treaties to their rightful place under the rule of law.”
So now we will see if Congress is ready to take that step and free the Snake River so salmon have a fighting chance.
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