Panel discussion.

• Position: Colloquium: Who Runs the River? - Panel Discussion

Janet Neuman(1) -- I want to take about ninety seconds to tell you, in case you did not realize it, that four of the speakers all essentially agreed with each other. Here is what I think they said.

Jim Buchal disagrees with the other parties' versions of the facts. He did not use the phrase from the Clinton campaign (slightly twisted), but he might have. "It's the fish, stupid." Even though he disagreed with the other speakers on what would help the fish, that is essentially what he was saying. Adam Berger said that when you go to court, you may lose control over your case, and you might get away from your underlying goal, which in his case was to increase the flows for fish. Again, "it's the fish." John Volkman said that when you go to court someone is going to get scolded. Despite how the court got there and whom it scolded, the Ninth Circuit also got back to this simple level, which is "it's the fish." John also said you are not going to get all you need from the court; you need scientific monitoring and follow-up to find out if what you are doing makes any sense, and legal gridlock is not going to help anybody. And finally, John Shurts asked, "What is next?" What is next is going back to the law and going back to the science and going back essentially to where we were in 1980--which is the law says fish will be given equal priority. So now go do the science and figure out what that means. We have a system in place to do that; we have the agencies with expertise and recommendations helping to do that. This brings us all back fun circle to what the 1980 law requires for fish and it is something that Nike has already figured out--"Just do it!"

Audience -- There is a large, ongoing debate about the merits of the transportation program. One thing that bothers me in that debate is the repeated simplification of the issue to one of "we tried transportation for twenty years and the fish runs are still declining, so obviously transportation is not worldng." I think there are some logical flaws in that argument. You could as easily say that we have increased flows for the last twenty years, but fish runs are still declining, so the flows must be bad for the fish. I would not make that argument, and I think it is just as simplistic to say that just because transportation has been used, and the runs still decline, it is ineffective.

Lorraine Bodi -- I would suggest that barging's fundamental flaw is more scientifically based than that. The flaw is that for barged fish we do not get one fish back to the spawning grounds for each fish in the preceding generation. In other words, we see declining populations of barged fish. Today we barge the vast majority of fish. We have tried to improve the transportation program, but we have not changed the basic fact that barging does not enable the rebuilding of salmon runs.

Some people say transportation is better than leaving the fish in the lethal river. I think that is a false dichotomy. On the one hand, we have barging, an imperfect measure with fundamental flaws despite the best efforts of credible scientists to make it work for twenty years. On the other hand, you have the lethal river. We have to start focusing on making that river less lethal--because that is what is better for the salmon, because that is what the Northwest Power Act(2) requires,(3) and because no matter how many fish we barge, we still have unbarged fish in the river.

I would like to digress a bit and comment on past efforts to improve barging. I formerly represented the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in its habitat work in the mid-Columbia River working with the five public utility district dams licensed under the Federal Power Act.(4) All of the fishery agencies and tribes, including NMFS, opposed the extension of fish barging to the mid-Columbia in the 1980s. As a compromise, to try to accommodate the utilities which wanted to begin barging, we agreed to study barging in the mid-Columbia, trying to improve on the Snake River experience. However, our results were identical to the experience in the Snake. We had hilly variable returns, and negative returns to the spawning grounds. So, while it may be simplistic to say that barging does not work, there is a lot of scientific evidence to support that assertion.

James Buchal -- I am curious as to what that evidence is because there have been about thirty transportation studies, they were all peer reviewed this spring, and the conclusion of that report was that transportation works. So, where are these studies that show that transportation does not work? I would like to look them up.

Lorraine Bodi -- I would disagree with your conclusion as to what the peer review says. I believe the peer review says that if you rely on transportation, you will not recover the stocks.

James Buchal -- That is a different conclusion than...