This administration really does have the most amazing chutzpah, revealed in some of the oddest actions.
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 represents a major change in the federal government's approach to protecting Pacific salmon -- a $700 million-a-year effort that it has described as the most expensive and complicated of all attempts to enforce the Endangered Species Act. The decision, contained in a draft document and confirmed Wednesday by federal officials, means that the health of spawning wild salmon will no longer be the sole gauge of whether a salmon species is judged by the federal government to be on the brink of extinction. Four of five salmon found in major West Coast rivers, including the Columbia, are already bred in hatcheries, and some will now be counted as the federal government tries to determine what salmon species are endangered. [...] 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. The scientists had been asked by the federal government to comment on its salmon-recovery program but said they were later told that some of their conclusions about hatchery fish were inappropriate for official government reports.
"The current political and legal wrangling is a sideshow to the real issues. We know biologically that hatchery supplements are no substitute for wild fish," Robert Paine, one of the scientists and an ecologist at the University of Washington, said when the Science article was published in late March.
Of course, this is part and parcel of the administration's approach to science; if it doesn't support what the administration wants to do, then rewrite it until it does. That this makes hash of what is supposed to be science doesn't matter, as long as it works politically and for their backers -- er, pardon, for the constituents who have donated and lavished thousands upon thousands of dollars on their campaigns.
Federal officials said Wednesday that the new policy on hatchery salmon -- to be published in June in the Federal Register and then be opened to public comment -- was in response to a 2001 federal court ruling in Oregon. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan found that the federal government made a mistake by counting only wild fish -- and not genetically similar hatchery fish -- when it listed coastal coho salmon for protection. To the dismay of many environmental groups, the federal government chose not to appeal that ruling, though it seemed counter to the reasoning behind the spending of more than $2 billion in the past 15 years to protect stream-bred wild salmon.
Oh, now, really. What sane person would have expected this administration -- with its well documented anti-environmental, pro-logging, pro-big business policies -- to appeal a ruling that says that they can spend less money improving habitats for salmon, that they can allow logging and other actions in areas where counting hatchery fish means that the species might come off the endangered list? Honestly, nobody who has paid the least attention to this administration would have expected that.
Really, the only way to get the species to recover would be to utterly ban fishing of any sort in the area, as well as banning all logging and development. And that would produce furious protest from the fishing and logging industries, as well as the housing industry; the latter two being ardent supporters of the administration, it would seem highly unlikely that they would choose to irritate them in this way, now doesn't it?
Posted by iain at April 29, 2004 10:55 AM
