Should the courts run the river?

• Author: Wright, Al
• Position: Columbia River - Colloquium: Who Runs the River?

For the sake of time, I am just going to touch on some very brief points that I think have emerged out of this process. First, let me mention a little bit of history and give it a bit of a different context than you have heard so far. Second, I want to discuss the two court cases that we have talked about. Third, I would like to hazard some guesses about where we are going, and who is going to run the river.

First of all, Lorraine Bodi said there were a lot of people, not just fish advocates and environmental interests, who were very optimistic in 1980 about what we were going to accomplish under the Northwest Power Act's(1) Fish and Wildlife Program.(2) Part of that optimism Was a vision of a recovery plan for entire stocks of the Columbia River Basin. Between 1980 and 1988, we saw some fruits from those efforts. In the mid-Columbia, when the Act was passed, the populations were about 12,000 and declining. In the late 1980s, there were over 100,000 fish. In the Snake River, the spring and summer counts in 1980 were down in the 9,000 to 10,000 range; by 1988, they were up to about a 50,000 population. Both spring and summer populations in the mid-Columbia increased throughout the 1980s. So, for whatever reasons, we were experiencing some successes. There was some proof that the efforts expended under the Fish and Wildlife Program, and other actions on the river taken by people like the mid-Columbia public utility districts, in cooperation with the agencies and tribes, were working.

What has happened since then? We have seen all the fish populations in the Columbia decline, some to dramatically low levels. But we have also seen populations throughout the West Coast decline in the same manner, no matter what the in-river conditions. We know we have experienced six or seven years of drought; we know we have had an El Nino effect during the same period. We have some indication that climatologically those two things are connected. Whatever magnitude impact you think those things had on fish populations, I think the facts support that these two phenomena have affected the fish populations. More importantly, there is factual evidence that when conditions were right, we were doing good for fish, and we were making improvements in the river. Since 1988, we have made even more improvements in the in-river survival conditions. Now those are either not working or they are being masked by other reasons such as drought and El Nino. I am not here to argue...