Guide Mike Hicks looks at the hatchery steelhead caught by Brad Marczuk on the Salmon River 600 miles from the Pacific. Wild steelhead have to be returned because they are endangered.
The dramatic election victory of Donald Trump has prompted fears and anxiety among many of my Democratic friends.
I share some of those fears but my experience covering transitions going back to Reagan suggests in environmental policy comes slower both ways. Trump’s regulatory schemes could have some dramatic effects especially if he is able to reauthorize the Endangered Species Act. The last time the Act, passed in 1973, was reauthorized was in 1992.
The law, arguably the strongest environmental law in the world, requires the government to prevent the extinction of endangered species with rare exceptions. It has stood up to many attacks without losing that mandate.
The memory that sticks in my mind was when President Clinton turned over the reins to George W Bush. I had joined Clinton’s Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on his plane while he toured Craters of the Moon as he planned to expand it. Babbitt, a former Arizona governor, told me on his plane ride back to Boise he was considering adding the Owyhee Canyonlands at the southwest corner of the state to his list of monuments. He asked me if I thought he had time to put together the kind of public process including hearings he had done at Craters. Conservation and preservation groups had been pushing the administration hard to include the desolate, 4,500 square miles of sagebrush steppe highlands and deep chasms into the national monument system.
But it was late in the year, and I had just attended a meeting organized by the feisty Sagebrush Rebel Republican Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth. Dozens of ranchers expressed their anger at lawsuits filed by the group Western Watersheds, head by a Hailey Architect Jon Marvel. I told Babbitt he would face a firestorm of protest if he were to move forward in the Owyhees even though they clearly deserved protection.
In the announcement about Crater’s expansion in November of 2000, Clinton said in his proclamation that he had considered the Owyhee Canyonlands but did not have the time to add the area to his new list of monuments. But he said it clearly qualified.
Fred Grant had worked with Chenoweth on Owyhee issues the Owyhee County’s commissioners, mostly ranchers themselves. He could see the writing on the wall. If they waited around until another Democratic administration was elected, the future of the management of the public lands that made up most of the county would be taken out of their hands.
With Republican George W. Bush in the White House and an entirely Republican Congressional delegation, this was the time for them to move. He reached out to the environmental groups who were pushing the national monument except for Jon Marvel, and said he wanted to seek a deal together.
They agreed. With Republican Sen. Mike Crapo moderating the group that became the Owyhee Initiative. Here ranchers, local officials, conservation groups including the Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy and the Idaho Conservation League, outfitters and motorized recreationists worked for 10 years to craft a bill that protected 517, 000 acres of wilderness and a series of actions to help local ranchers. President Barack Obama signed the bill in 2009.
“Fred knew we were not going to go away,” said former ICL executive director Rick Johnson.
Today the people who have fought for nearly 30 years to save wild salmon and steelhead and restore justice to the Northwest tribes whose rights were taken away when federal dams were built on the Snake and Columbia rivers are also not going away.
So in this latest Republican victory the issue that affects the entire Pacific Northwest, will continue to challenge federal, state and tribal governments. Previously, courts have been the major forum of this dispute. But the Biden administration, tribes, sportsmen and environmental groups reached a settlement that recognizes what fisheries scientists have said for years: The Snake River salmon and steelhead can’t be restored to abundant, let alone sustainable levels, with the four lower Snake dams in place.
The settlement funds studies of how to meet the needs of barge grain shippers, downstream irrigators and power needs. But Biden administration officials said that only Congress has the authority to breach the four dams.
Meanwhile climate change is increasingly making the four dams less valuable for power as the flows drop. Southern Idaho farmers are growing more dependent on the water they send down stream to flush the flows through the dams for salmon. They would prefer to pump it into the aquifer to meet their own needs and dry up fewer acres.
As Elon Musk seeks to cut excessive spending, the subsidies that keep the grain barges running will be harder for Palouse farmers to defend as their southern Idaho grain growers ship their grain by truck and rail at full cost. As private interests are proposing four nuclear plants along the Columbia, a Republican administration may want to rethink a government utility (the Bonneville Power Administration) that gets in the way of the free market and innovation.
When the Nez Perce water agreement comes up for renewal in the next decade a new deal negotiated when Republicans are in charge might make Idaho farmers to reach out the way that Fred Grant did in the Owyhees in 2001.
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