Friday — May 7, 2004

For tomorrow, government cooking up virtual salmon

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At last, and perhaps not surprisingly, the Bush administration is now applying smoke and mirrors and sleight-of-hand tactics to the fragile fall chinook salmon.

In a proposal to be published in the June edition of the Federal Register--usually the mere formality before ideas become federal law--the administration wants to count hatchery-bred salmon along with spawning wild salmon to measure whether to remove the species from the Endangered Species list.

How transparently deceitful:

As it is, four out of five salmon found in Northwest rivers, including the Columbia, are products of hatcheries. So, the White House seems Hell-bent on allowing one of the proud symbols of the Northwest’s flourishing wildlife and environment to continue its gradual disappearance, replaced by a faux, less sturdy, less tasty replica of the real thing.

This thinking is courtesy of the same White House geniuses who hatched decisions to ignore global warming, pooh-pooh mercury content in water, hail industrial air and water pollution as the price of prosperity and promote snowmobiling in Yellowstone as admirable recreation. Protecting habitat and the environment seems to be a nuisance to this presidency.

As for the salmon-counting ploy, the White House wants to dismantle any impediments to the hydroelectric industry, gradually end federal costs of rescuing the salmon from the torturous annual run to the Pacific, and free other industries to resume destructive environmental practices along rivers where salmon once thrived.

Reputable scientists who were asked by the administration to comment on counting wild and hatchery salmon together were astonished to find their criticisms deleted from a study. According to The Washington Post, their criticisms were considered "inappropriate" for the final document

Shameful as the Bush administration’s act is, equally as irresponsible is the apparent approval, tacit and otherwise, of Idaho’s congressional delegation, which seems unwilling to resist the conscious destruction of a species as political reward to industries whose motives are less than noble.

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