When Gov. Dirk Kempthorne waded into Redfish Lake
this month to help release a group of captive-bred sockeye salmon into the wild, he
clearly wanted to send Idahoans the message that he cares deeply about salmon. To further
drive that message home to the skeptics among us who judge politicians by their deeds
rather than their platitudes, the governor announced the creation of a new state level
salmon cabinet consisting almost entirely ofyou guessed itpolitical
operatives.
When all the buckets were poured and the scarlet-colored fish swam free
to the clicking of photographers' cameras, Gov. Kempthorne remarked, "There's
something spiritual about this. This is exactly what nature intended."
Anyone who has witnessed the courtship dance of the sockeye will attest
that it is indeed a deeply moving, if not spiritual, event. Especially when one pauses to
consider the grueling 1,000-mile-long, 7,000-foot climb these fish must complete in order
to reach the waters of their birth to spawn and then die.
But was it really nature's intention that we destroy the very river
upon which these fish depend for survival by plugging it with a chain of four l00-foot
high dams? Was it nature's intention to drive these fish to such low levels that we now
have to capture every last one and imprison them in a captive breeding program in order to
preserve the last strands of DNA in the gene pool? Was it nature's plan to have hatchery
technicians club these fish over the head and spawn them in plastic buckets?
Only seven sockeye salmon returned to Idaho this year. For most
Idahoans who never knew the days when tens of thousands of sockeye returned to the Stanley
basin every summer, that was reason to celebrate. After all, it was the second best return
this decade after the boom of '93 when 12 fish made it back.
But I doubt most Idahoans are happy about a program that costs nearly
$2 million per year and produces only seven fish. Each sockeye that returned this year
cost over a quarter million dollars.
Clearly, the status quo is not good enough. As Paul Kline, the IDFG
biologist who heads the captive breeding program, said last week, "It's going to take
a lot more to restore sockeye salmon to Idaho."
Made-for-Hollywood photo-ops at Redfish Lake won't cut it. If the
governor is truly sincere about bringing salmon back, he should direct his new salmon
cabinet to stop selling snake oil to the public in the form of "fish-friendly"
turbines, strobe lights and fish pipelines, and start heeding the nearly-unanimous advice
of the scientific community.
As much as it may pain our governor, the vast majority of biologists
say the only way to keep salmon in Idaho is to bypass those four dams on the lower Snake
River. Any recovery plan that ignores that amounts to pouring very expensive water into a
bottomless bucket. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game has known this for decades. But
Gov. Kempthorne and Idaho's congressional delegation, all of whom have made their careers
advocating for state's rights, have mysteriously turned a deaf ear to their own state
professionals and instead embraced the very federal agencies that got us into this mess in
the first place.
It's true that there are lots of factors that have driven Idaho's
salmon to extinction's edge over the past century. But the biggest factor by far is our
elected leaders' collective lack of courage to save them, Gov. Cecil Andrus
notwithstanding. Idaho's salmon have a hard enough time surviving eight dams between
Lewiston and the ocean. But now theres a ninth dam, its called politics, and
it is perhaps the most lethal one of all.
Scott Bosse is a conservation scientist with Idaho Rivers United, a
Boise-based rivers advocacy group