Idaho's strategy in Idaho Department of Fish & Game v. National Marine Fisheries Service.

• Author: Whelan, Will
• Position: Colloquium: Who Runs the River?

This conference brings together an extraordinary cast of combatants on salmon issues to answer the question: Who rans the River? I sense that despite our deep divisions about the science and about the law, we would all answer that question the same way: The other guy runs the river, and he is screwing it up.

I noticed that of the panel members, I am the only resident of the Snake River Basin, the home of the threatened and endangered salmon rans. It may seem odd to some that a person who lives among sagebrush-covered hills in the desert of Idaho is here to talk about salmon in a city that is wet and green, and whose rivers are influenced by the tides. But Idaho, although it is very far inland, has some of the most productive salmon habitat in the Pacific Northwest. A single Idaho river, the Salmon River, once produced about forty percent of the spring and summer chinook run in the entire Columbia River Basin. Being from the Snake River Basin, I am much closer geographically to the habitat of these fish, and perhaps able to see them on a more regular basis than other lawyers in these cases. I think there is a real benefit in having a closer connection to the Idaho salmon country in dealing with the facts of my cases. James Buchal of the Direct Service Industries mentioned that if you fly over the country around Portland, you see clearcuts "all over the place."(1) However, when you fly over Salmon River country, for the most part you do not see a lot of clearcuts. You see mostly rocks, ice, lodgepole pine, and desert. At the core of the Salmon River country is a two million acre area of wilderness, which encompasses most of the drainage of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The heart of salmon country in Idaho is wildland. This country has few habitat disturbances, no logging, no hatcheries, no irrigation diversions, and at this point, almost no salmon.

Harvest is not to blame for the decline of salmon in this area. The spring and summer chinook that live in the Middle Fork of the Salmon River are currently harvested at about a rate of ten percent. The spring and summer chinook harvest fell off a couple of decades ago and has not increased. Mr. Buchal's argument that salmon harvest greatly increased in the years prior to listing holds true only for fall chinook.(2)

I focus on the Middle Fork of the Salmon in order to explain why when the biologists at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game looked at what was going on with Idaho's salmon runs...