01/24/06 Salmon 2100

A day long conference in Portland tomorrow is both a culmination and a beginning to resolve the long standing issues of salmon recovery in the Northwest. The Salmon 2100 project was developed four years ago, bringing together a panel of thirty three salmon scientists, policy analysts, and salmon advocates. The conference and project is headed by three people, including Dr. Robert Lackey of the Environmental Protection Agency's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory at Oregon State University. LACKEY: This project was predicated on this question & "What would society have to do to have significant sustainable runs of wild salmon through 2100?" Now another policy question would be "O.K., if you want to involve using hatcheries or spawning channels, some technological intervention & that brings up a lot of other options". But our focus was primarily on narrowly defined wild salmon runs. If you allow the use of hatcheries and recovery programs and spawning channels, and things like that, there's a much bigger suite of possible options. And what this project and conference is also designed to do is not point fingers but raise the intensity if not the urgency of the debate over salmon recovery. But having said that, Lackey says there are two overall conclusions that have come from the project. One is that recovery efforts long term are very unlikely to recover stream bed born salmon runs through the end of the century, and second, the options available to restore such salmon runs would require some significant economic, natural, population, and sociological changes that at this point seem out of reach. LACKEY: We're going to roll out the analysis long term forecast based on existing recovery efforts. It's going to be followed by laying out five representative policy prescriptions & you know, if society wants to have these runs, here's five very different, very different policy prescriptions. And then in the afternoon, various federal agencies, state agencies, tribes, various advocacy groups across the spectrum, not just pro-salmon, but ag, barging, traffic, and things like this, lots of different types of folks will react to the policy prescription. The wide variety of reaction will come from a range of speakers from Washington Farm Bureau President Steve Appel to a Senior Director of American Rivers, the heads of fishing coalitions to representatives from Bonneville Power Administration. Even the keynote speaker, former E.P.A. Director William Ruckelshaus, is expected to weigh in on what the future might hold for salmon recovery in the Pacific Northwest.