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The Perfect Salmon Stronghold
webmaster : Apr 4.2009by: Will Patric
In February I attended the 2009 “State of the Salmon” conference in Vancouver. It was an ambitious three day gathering of distinguished fisheries experts from the United States, Canada, Russia, South Korea, and Japan.
Scientists and policy makers were convened for presentations analyzing trends in wild salmon populations around the Pacific Rim, management issues, genetic variability, survey methodology, harvest strategies, and other specialty areas. Climate change, and its influences on wild salmon, was an underlying theme of the conference. There was clearly a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience represented in the meeting, though I confess that much of the scientific discourse was beyond my comprehension.
The take home message, however, could not have been clearer. Wild salmon need wild salmon habitat. While scientific analysis is certainly valuable and necessary, it’s also moot without the habitat. I find myself impatient with talk when action is also needed. That temperament probably makes me better suited to nonprofit conservation advocacy than research or academia.
In my home state of Washington, we squandered most of our salmon habitat in the name of energy and agricultural interests. The Columbia and Snake River systems were once among the world’s top salmon producers, but a series of dams now essentially bar salmon from the vast Columbian watershed in which they once teemed in storied abundance. To the south, Oregon and California have had to ban commercial salmon fishing due to precipitous stock declines resulting from dams, agriculture, and other watershed development.
In southern British Columbia, wild salmon are likewise in trouble. If the Power Point data and graphs at the conference didn’t spell it out plainly, a front page story in the Vancouver Sun released around the same time did. “The salmon are disappearing,” read the headline (2/19/09), summarizing a major Fraser River Basin Council report. Salmon runs and catch rates have been declining on the Fraser for nearly two decades despite a concurrent reduction in harvest rates. “If salmon aren’t surviving and thriving in the 1,400-kilometer-long Fraser and its tributaries it means that something profound and disturbing is happening to the riparian system” a Sun columnist reflected. “Salmon are an indicator species, our canaries in the coal mine. They die off when we pollute the river too much, when we mindlessly fill in creeks, when we build developments too close to the river, when we clear-cut forests and when we overfish. Salmon define our stewardship of the province …”
This is why Rivers Without Borders is striving to promote a conservation vision for the Taku watershed of northwest British Columbia and southeast Alaska. The Taku is the wild heart of the spectacular transboundary region, the largest totally intact but completely unprotected watershed on the Pacific coast of North America. It is the region’s number one salmon producer, host to all five native species, and ranks among Alaska’s top five salmon systems. I heard the term “salmon stronghold” used at the conference. That’s one concept I understood right away, and it certainly describes the Taku. If there’s a watershed where limiting development in the name of wild salmon makes sense, this is it.
That’s what Rivers Without Borders is urging British Columbia to do. The Province and the Taku River Tlingit First Nation initiated a formal land use planning process for the Canadian portion of the Taku watershed a year ago. The outcome of this process, anticipated in 2011, will determine whether or not the Taku remains a top salmon resource or, yielding to the slippery slope of industrial development, will follow the way of the Columbia and the Fraser.
Rivers Without Borders is a conservation sector stakeholder in the planning process. Mindful of Tlingit aboriginal title concerns, we are doing all we can to inspire British Columbia to seize an opportunity. So far, the provincial vision for the land use plan has largely fixated on insuring that mining has a future on the lower Taku. To date, that’s meant proposals like Redcorp’s Tulsequah Chief Mine, which we’ve been opposing for years as a bad idea in a worse location and the “foot in the door” to more development. It doesn’t take a PhD to appreciate that mining and fisheries are never compatible. Provincial planners did not attend the salmon conference, but we are sending them the take home message. In an era of dwindling salmon populations, the watershed is far more valuable as is.
Alaska seems to be getting the message. This January, responding to requests from commercial fishermen, businesses, biologists, and elected officials, the State designated the lower Taku as “Important Habitat.”(pdf) The designation would not prevent the highly controversial industrial “hoverbarging” that Redcorp has proposed to initiate on the Alaska portion of the Taku to support its Tulsequah mining venture, just over the international boundary in British Columbia. But it would set a higher standard of environmental review for such schemes on the lower Taku.
Not long after the designation, Redcorp announced that it was temporarily shelving its mine proposal due to financial challenges (though the company still hopes to secure its barging permit, presumably to entice another company to buy into the project). Ironically Alaska then rescinded part of its designation, a legal technicality (or politics) intervening, but there’s real momentum now in Juneau to push for a designation to protect the lower Taku that will stick. We’re trying to make that happen.
For Rivers Without Borders, the Taku is not about Alaska designations, or Canadian land use plans, or scientific facts and figures, for that matter. It’s about one complete, fully intact, essentially pristine watershed of incalculable international significance, not only for wild salmon but for the traditional indigenous culture salmon still sustain. To say nothing of its rich wildlife and unparalleled scenic and recreational values. The perfect “salmon stronghold,” putting it simply.
Topics about Politics » The Perfect Salmon Stronghold Says:
April 5th, 2009 at 2:49 am
[...] TruthHugger placed an interesting blog post on The Perfect Salmon StrongholdHere’s a brief overview…the project). Ironically Alaska then rescinded part of its designation, a legal technicality (or politics) intervening, but there’s real… [...]