Salmon recovery plans: some fundamental choices.

• Author: Casavant, Ken
• Position: The Second Annual 'Who Runs the River?' Colloquium

When I was first approached to become a member of the Northwest Power Planning Council, having been an academic for nearly three decades, the first thing I did was a thorough literature search. That is when I was first introduced to Professor Michael Blumm and, as I read his thoughtful pieces, I realized that, if I became a Council member, I would either have a great opportunity or a great headache. As it turned out, I got both. I think there was a sense of opportunity, a sense of change that we might be able to effectuate, but also a sense of foreboding, a sense of having realized that we materially altered a river over a great many years, and now we were trying to reconstruct and rehabilitate it in a very short period of time. Actually, we are being asked to do it faster than is feasibly possible.

As I consider some of the background written by Professor Blumm(1) and some of what the Council is currently doing,(2) there is no question that history will tell us whether we have succeeded or failed. Today, I would like to offer some brief comments about both the Council's program and the 1995 biological opinion of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS),(3) highlighting some of the concerns and issues that have arisen in the last year. The Columbia River hydroelectric system and the environment in which it operates are incredibly complex.(4) want to distill from that complexity one or two lessons and speak frankly about some fundamental choices. I suggest that there are two basic choices that the region is now facing. After discussing those choices, I will identify advantages and risks of some of the alternatives within those choices.

The first choice is simply whether salmon recovery is worth the effort and expense. Much of the discussion that I have witnessed and participated in during my year-and-a-half on the Council speaks directly to the magnitude and structure of the programs we are using to try to effect salmon recovery. This is not a question that will go away. It was the subtext of the recent congressional efforts to place a cap on the fish and wildlife expenses of the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA).((5) The fish and wildlife budget that the Clinton Administration and Congress agreed to may be a reasonable compromise from the Council's perspective, but the underlying question of how important salmon recovery really is will continue to plague the process.

On the power side, the Council is undertaking a "comprehensive review, for the electrical industry. We have also been directed by Congress to review the issue of the governance of the fish and wildlife program, a report due in May 1996(6). Implicit in the latter is the question of whether salmon recovery is worth the effort and expense.. In that evaluation we have to force...