Strangechord

I am beyond dismayed: Hatchery-bred fish to be part of wild salmon count - Decision could end federal protection status (login: emily7@hotmail.com; password: read).

The Bush administration has decided to count hatchery-bred fish, which are pumped into West Coast rivers by the hundreds of millions yearly, when it decides whether stream-bred wild salmon are entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act.

This is so serious; the very death knell of wild salmon. I had little knowledge or real appreciation of wild salmon until I read Derrick Jensen and this past term when I took Leadership for Sustainability and the professor had us read Totem Salmon (I highly recommend the book). Once the staple protein source of peoples of this region, over the past 100 years wild salmon have been at the mercy of habitat destruction and blockages to life cycle migrations, including dams, erosion into streams, pesticides, pollution, etc. Salmon runs are paltry today with ever-dwindling wild salmon numbers. Hatchery salmon, an idea developed decades ago as a “fix” for the endangerement of the species, are salmon with the brains bred out of them and are biologically inferior to wild.

“This is the same sort of mechanistic, blind reliance on technology that got us into this problem in the first place,” said Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited. “We built dams that block the fish, and we are trucking many of these fish around the dams. Now the administration thinks we can just produce a bazillion of these hatchery fish and get out from underneath the yoke of the Endangered Species Act.”

Six of the world’s leading experts on salmon ecology complained last month in the journal Science that fish produced in hatcheries cannot be counted on to save wild salmon.

What a punch to the gut.