Through a glass, darkly: Columbia River salmon, the Endangered Species Act, and adaptive management.

• Author: Volkman, John M.

1. INTRODUCTION

   Like most of the American West, the Columbia River Basin has been developed, not managed as an ecosystem. Over the last 150 years, the Basin's forests and salmon runs have been intensely harvested. Since the early 1930s, more than seventy-five federal, nonfederal, and Canadian dams have been built in the Basin,(1) irrigation diversions have depleted countless tributary streams, and myriad developments have added to the River's load of silt, minerals, and chemicals.(2)

   In economic terms, all of this has been enormously profitable. The federal hydropower system alone generates approximately three billion dollars per year in revenues, and its economic and environmental benefits ripple through the Northwest. When the benefits and costs are balanced, however, the Columbia River's value as an ecosystem has never weighed heavily. Donald Worster may have overstated things when he implied that the Columbia had died and was reborn as money, but not by much.(3) The truth is that the Columbia is no longer a very hospitable place for salmon.

   With the listing of three Snake River salmon populations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA),(4) the importance of the riverine ecosystem in the Columbia River's management is up for debate; however, the notion that the survival of fish species may have priority over human uses does not square with the assumptions on which the Columbia River was developed. Beneficiaries of the Columbia's development feel the ground tilting and worry about what the angle of repose will be.

   As with most complex environmental problems, the number and depth of unknowns in the salmon controversy is large. It will require extraordinary learning efforts for the salmon recovery debate to be shaped by good science as well as politics. This Essay discusses attempts over the last ten years to structure the debate over salmon recovery with a scientific principle called adaptive management, and considers how these efforts may evolve in the endangered species era.

2. COLUMBIA RIVER SALMON AND ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT

   1. The Framework for Salmon Recovery

      As dramatic as the ESA listings are, the conflict between salmon and people who use the river is anything but new. Concern for the impacts of human activities on salmon began in the 19th century, when massive salmon harvests wiped out significant fish populations.(5) Conservation efforts have played catch-up as human development, especially hydropower, transformed the salmon's ecosystem.

      Some of the most powerful salmon advocates have been the Indian tribes, whose Indian treaty fishing rights litigation revolutionized the management of the salmon fishery in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1976, the Indian treaty cases passed beyond harvest issues, and began sketching out broad environmental principles which the tribes asserted to protect salmon habitat.(6)

      The Indian treaty litigation focused attention on the Columbia River, while major controversies were brewing in the Columbia's largest tributary, the Snake River.(7) The Snake River was the site of a lengthy debate over hydropower development on the Snake and its tributaries; the State of Idaho's fight to expand its harvest rights against Oregon and Washington; and the filing of petitions in the late 1970s to list Snake River salmon stocks under the ESA.(8)

      These developments prompted a range of legislation. The 1976 Fishery Conservation and Management Act,(9) and the Pacific Salmon Interception Treaty with Canada,(10) established important new principles and procedures for controlling harvest. The Salmon and Steelhead Conservation and Enhancement Act of 1980 promised to reorganize and rationalize fishery management.(11)

      The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Council's (the Council) fish and wildlife program, which is the subject of this Essay, was developed under broader legislation, the Northwest Power Act of 1980 (the Act),(12) which links energy conservation with fish and wildlife recovery. This legislation was based on three premises.(13) First, the Act called for energy conservation to be developed as a resource, ahead of traditional resources such as coal and nuclear power. Sorting out priorities among competing resources is to be based on a full survey of economic and environmental costs associated with development. Second, the Act was premised on the idea that healthy fish and wildlife populations depend on "suitable environmental conditions that are substantially obtainable" from the management of the hydropower system.(14) The Act specifically called on the Council to find ways to improve salmon survival by providing suitable river flows.(15) Third, the Act gave the states authority to guide federal agency activities--a political and legal innovation which took several years of constitutional analysis and litigation to validate.(16) Through this innovation, the states could guide the federal agencies' energy and fish and wildlife initiatives, and particularly the investment of hydropower revenues.(17)

      While the Northwest Power Act established the importance of environmental considerations in the region's energy system, it also contained counterbalances, which reinforced the idea of the Columbia River as a stable producer of resources for consumption. First, fish and wildlife protection measures could not jeopardize an "adequate, efficient, economical and reliable power supply."(18) Congress did not, however, make clear precisely how this power-fish balance was to be struck. One of the congressional committees that reported the Act gave the following equivocal guidance:

      The objective is to give flexibility to all concerned to devise effective

      and imaginative measures that are also reasonable and will not

      result in unreasonable power shortages or loss of power revenues.

      Some power losses, with resultant loss in revenues, may be inevitable

      at times if these fish and wildlife objectives are to be achieved.

      Such losses, however, should not be a burden on the consumers of

      the region.(19)

      The second counterbalance was the requirement that the Council's fish and wildlife program "complement" the activities of the fish and wildlife agencies and Indian tribes.(20) This requirement cut two ways. On the one hand, the fish and wildlife agencies and Indian tribes are staunch fish and wildlife advocates, particularly when it comes to changing the operation of the hydropower system and restoring habitat. Obliging the Council to complement the agencies' and tribes' activities emphasized reforms in these areas.

      On the other hand, the fish and wildlife agencies and Indian tribes also represent fish and wildlife harvesters. Traditionally, fish and wildlife agencies have been harvest managers first and foremost. The agencies' large-scale fish hatcheries complement this function by producing fish to satisfy harvest demands. Losses to wild salmon runs, which often were casualties in hatchery-targeted harvests, was a price harvest managers were willing to pay. "Complementing" this aspect of the agencies' activities could have meant a Council program that emphasized hatcheries, maximized harvest opportunities, and gave short-shrift to wild populations.

      The final counterbalance concerned the Council's authority to implement its plans. The Council's authority in the fish and wildlife area is constrained; it can guide, but not command, federal river management. The investment of federal hydropower revenues to help fish and wildlife must be "consistent" with the Council's program, but the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal power marketing agency, actually writes the checks.(21) The Council has no authority over fish and wildlife agencies, land managers, or irrigators. The Council is not toothless, but it cannot command and control.

   2. Adaptive Management

      The Northwest Power Act thus pointed toward hydropower system changes which were to aid salmon recovery without impinging too sharply on human activities. Many of these changes would require the cooperation of four states, two nations, more than a dozen Indian tribes and countless interest groups.

      Finding a way through this thicket raises complex biological questions that would be difficult to sort out even if scientists were in charge. The migratory range of salmon is vast, the number of factors that affect salmon survival is large, and few of these factors are controllable. Sorting out cause and effect in salmon recovery is an extremely difficult undertaking. With careful, scientific methods applied over a long time, perhaps we could learn enough, although the journey would be long and difficult. But the situation is much harder than that. Scientists are not in charge. Rather, decisions are left to a political system that often seems to operate more by the squeaky wheel principle than by science.

      Salmon recovery, then, poses a conundrum. Recovery efforts cannot succeed unless they are scientifically sound. But scientifically sound salmon measures cannot be implemented unless they are politically palatable. Can a political process be scientifically clear-sighted? Can scientists accommodate political realities without compromising clear-headed science?

      In 1984, Professor Kai Lee, then a member of the Council, suggested that the problem lent itself to the idea of adaptive management: the notion that fish and wildlife measures should be seen as a series of experiments, with formal experimental designs to help answer critical questions about the interaction of humans and the ecosystem.(22) By structuring salmon recovery measures as experiments, the Council could acknowledge scientific uncertainty, act on reasonable hypotheses, and learn from the results. Adaptive management can be a radical doctrine. With traditional management, action is based on existing knowledge and established modes of operation. The course is altered if it appears unproductive, but information is not sought aggressively or strategically, and, when it is gathered...