Salmon Odyssey (6/3/11)

Published: June 6, 2011, 11:38 p.m.

b'Salmon Odyssey Phil Isenberg, Chair, Delta Vision Task Force James Norton, Filmmaker, Salmon: Running the Gauntlet Jonathan Rosenfield, Ph.D., Conservation Biologist, The Bay Institute In the post-World War II boom, previous generations prioritized cheap electricity and economic development over salmon. On the West Coast, huge dams blocked rivers and sprawl fragmented habitat. If wild salmon are to survive, in California and elsewhere, we must acknowledge that well-intentioned human ingenuity has failed and that tough choices wait, says this panel of experts.\\u201cWe overestimated our ability to mitigate the impacts of that dam construction,\\u201d says James Norton, writer and producer of Salmon: Running the Gauntlet. Fish ladders, hatcheries, barging \\u2013 all have been deployed in an attempt to work around Mother Nature. \\u201cIt\\u2019s turned out to be much more complicated than that, and it\\u2019s never really worked,\\u201d he says. The complications don\\u2019t end there. In trying to sustain a commercial salmon fishery even as dams killed fish and sprawl chewed up habitat, salmon and fisherman both lost. The result: commercial fishing is \\u201cremnant industry,\\u201d Norton says, with 30,000 jobs lost on the West Coast in past 20 years. To Norton, the lessons of this troubled history are clear. \\u201cI\\u2019d get out of the business of managing complex ecosystems. We\\u2019ve learned, over the last 150 years, there\\u2019s no appropriate surrogate for the natural productivity of these systems. We\\u2019ve learned that abundance \\u2013 true abundance \\u2013 is the default condition of these places. It\\u2019s not something that we tease out of them by being really clever.\\u201dFor Phil Isenberg, Chair, Delta Stewardship Council, it\\u2019s all about our establishing priorities. He notes that in California demands for water and ecosystems are on equal footing, which should work to the benefit of salmon. \\u201cWe have fought since before WWII the question of whether the human use of water is always more important than anything else. At least in California, the answer is No, it\\u2019s not.\\u201d Jonathan Rosenfield, a conservation biologist with The Bay Institute, cautions against pitting salmon against people or jobs. \\u201cIt doesn\\u2019t need to be framed in terms of either farmers in the Central Valley have water, or we have salmon.\\u201d We do, he says, need to heed the message sent by the salmon\\u2019s decline. \\u201cSalmon are a hardy, adaptable, incredibly creative species that have survived for millions of years, through several ice ages, in every watershed up and down this coast. The fact that we can\\u2019t maintain them in the system says that we have way, way overreached any semblance of balance between human use and what our ecosystems need.\\u201d This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on June 3rd, 2011\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'