BOARD02415

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/2000
• Description: Directors' Reports
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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Through all this dam building the salmon managed to hang on, continuing their annual migration
rites up the Columbia, then into the Snake and on into the Salmon River system ofIdaho. Fish e
ladders helped some. Hatcheries were built by the dozen to boost production of declining stocks
and offset fish ground up in turbines and eaten by predators in the long stretches of slack water.

Then the scales tipped toward extinction in the 1960s with congressional authorization to build
four more dams -- Ice Harbor, Lower Monument, Little Goose, and Lower Granite -- on the
Snake River upstrearn from its confluence with the Columbia. The four dams together were
projected to add only a small increment of additional power to the northwest grid, and by then
the rationale for adding still more power was wearing thin. Enter a bold new justification - an
inland seaport for Idaho.

Idaho would haye a seaport from which to barge Montana wheat down to the Pacific. Never
mind that the Burlington Northern and Union Pacific were already shipping grain by rail on
tracks that parallel the river. By 1975 the four Snake River dams were complete, and barges were
on the river from Lewiston, Idaho to the Pacific.

The salmon runs plummeted. In 1988 just one sockeye salmon managed to find its way back to
Redfish Lake in the Sawtooth Mountains ofIdaho. The following year it was six. Almost none
have been seen since. The over-the-edge effect of these four dams can also be seen in eastern
Oregon where the John Day River, a tributary of the Columbia, still has viable salmon runs,
while to the east the Grand Ronde, a tributary of the Snake, is virtually devoid of fish. A key
difference is that the Grand Ronde enters the Snake above the four darns.

One approach to the collapse of salmon runs is to manipulate natural systems even more
intensively. Take the fish out of the river and put them in trucks - even as we take the grain out _
of trucks and put it in the river. Shoot the sea lions that congregate at Ballard Lock to feed on ..
salmon and steelhead. Get rid of the flocks of birds on Rice Island that prey on salmon smolts.
Offer bounties for fishermen to catch more of the squawfish that prey on smolts in the lakes
behind the dams. More hatcheries.

This tinkering in the name of "mitigation" has now gone on for over two decades with little sign
of success. It may not be possible to have all the dams and viable sahnon runs in the upstream
river stretches. There are economic considerations on both sides. Barge transportation does
provide a marginal saving over rail transportation. Even small amounts of hydropower do have
value as do the disappearing salmon fisheries.

But there are also values beyond calculations with pencil and green eyeshade. In 1856, Isaac
Stephens, the Governor of Washington territory, set out to make treaties with northwest Indian
tribes. The Columbia River tribes ceded land and agreed to reservation boundaries on one
condition - that they would be entitled for all time to use customary fishing sites and to share
equally in the salmon harvest. Yet without fish there can be no harvest, and the tribes are
demanding that the United States, in exercise of its trust responsibilities, take steps to protect and
restore the salmon runs.

The sahnon runs of the Northwest, for both Indians and non-Indians, are an emblem of hope, an
object of reverence. Like the sound of migrating geese in autumn or the scent of a carnpfire,
wild, native salmon are a part of us, a link to an older, mysterious world. They are swimming,
spawning, biological coordinates that give us a sense of where and who we are. Lose that and

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