12 – Federal and State Approaches to Salmon Recovery at the Millennium

The salmon recent recovery documents provide federal and state strategies for salmon recovery in the Columbia River Basin (CRB) over the next decade. They vary in their scientific content, ranging from the technically detailed to the more general policy- and process-oriented Governors' Plan. This chapter reviews approaches to salmon recovery put forward in four recent documents: Four Northwest States Governors' Plan, Northwest Power Planning Council's Plan, National Marine Fisheries Service's Biological Opinion (BiOp), and (4) Federal Caucus Plan. The BiOp is the federal action plan for recovering threatened and endangered salmon listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the Columbia River Basin. It contains specified progress milestones to be achieved by 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2010, including both habitat-based and population-based evidence of recovery. Taken together, the four papers represent a realistic assessment of the problems facing salmon recovery, and there is consistency in many of the kinds of recovery actions proposed in the documents. However, the strategies often lack details about how the various recovery actions would be implemented, with the exception of actions related to mainstem passage. There is no doubt that the proposed strategies would result in some beneficial results; however, the status of many wild stocks has become grave. Recovery documents containing explicit and quantified details are needed so that their sufficiency can be evaluated. The four documents, collectively, fall short of providing this detail. Furthermore, the documents propose actions that mix ecological recovery with approaches that involve artificial substitution and mitigation.