Fresh, wild salmon may disappear this summer from
dinner plates throughout West Marin, and fish lovers here could have
Karl Rove – among others – to blame for it.
Regulators this week said that they are considering
a ban on all commercial and recreational salmon fishing off California’s
North Coast for the 2006 season, which begins in April and goes through
November. Their cause for concern is dwindling numbers of Fall Chinook
salmon in the Klamath River, which runs across the Oregon-California
border.
At a series of meetings in Seattle beginning next
week, the council will discuss what to do. Outright cancellation of
the season isn’t a certainty. Chuck Tracy of the Pacific Fishery
Management Council, a group that advises US regulators about ocean fishing
limits in California, Oregon, and Washington, said the council will
also consider allowing a minimal amount of fishing in order to avoid
economic ruin for commercial salmon fishermen up and down the West Coast.
Different options for addressing the problem will be aired at public
hearings up and down the coast later this month.
Fishermen’s fears
But West Marin’s commercial salmon fishermen
– a small fraction of the fishing industry here that nevertheless
supplies many local stores and restaurants with fresh fish – are
worried.
"The consequences could be devastating,"
said Jeremy Dierks, a Bolinas fisherman, who said he relies on salmon
fishing from May through October, when sales from the fish make up half
of his income. "Closing the season to the whole coast is just ridiculous.
The California economy would be hit hard from it. The trickle down is
huge – restaurants, fish companies that sell to restaurants, hotels,
you name it."
A salmon-fishing ban would also irk West Marin’s
many ocean sportfishermen. "Salmon is the heart and soul of the
recreational fisherman’s pursuit out here," said Gordon Bryan,
a Point Reyes Station resident and member of the Coastside Fishing Club,
an association of sportfishermen that plans to fight cancellation of
the 2006 season. If the ban comes to pass, said Inverness fisherman
Tom Baty, "I would have to find something else to do with my summer."
CA fishery healthy
Ironically, California’s salmon fishery as a
whole is in a state of high health. Only a small percentage of the salmon
off the state’s North Coast come from the Klamath River; most come
from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, where fish are thriving.
"The salmon aren’t hurting, by any means,"
Dierks said. "The last four or five seasons have been the best
they’ve had in 50 years or more." Early in the season, he
noted, it’s not uncommon for a California fisherman to catch 300
salmon a day.
Klamath salmon off the California coast also make
up a small fraction of Klamath salmon overall, most of which prefer
the water further to the north. Allen Grover, a senior biologist with
the state Department of Fish and Game, estimated that in the month of
July, with the season in full swing, only 30 out of every thousand salmon
from the Klamath River are caught by Bay Area fishermen.
Bush threw ‘red meat’ to his base
Fishermen say that conditions in the Klamath River
have been deteriorating because of damming, irrigation, and other hydrology
projects for at least the past decade; different theories exist as to
why the river is in poor shape. But most agree that a milestone in the
Klamath’s decay occurred in 2002, when huge quantities of water
were diverted to irrigate 220,000 acres of farmland in the Klamath River
basin.
The same year, more than 30,000 salmon died, in what
some say was the largest adult fish-kill in the history of the West
Coast. The diversion of water to farmland was the deciding factor behind
the catastrophe, fishermen and environmentalists say: lower water levels
made for warmer, slower-moving water in which bacteria and parasites
that can kill salmon thrive.
"You’re talking about the River Styx here,
as far as fish are concerned," said Zeke Grader, executive director
of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. Grader,
who traveled to Washington, D.C. to fight the change in water policy
in 2002, said that federal agencies "chose to do nothing. It’s
a Katrina redo here – just total incompetence at the government
level."
In an article published in July, 2003, the Wall
Street Journal revealed that White House political strategist Karl
Rove had worked extensively behind the scenes with managers in the Department
of the Interior, signaling that the administration was siding with Oregon
farmers who wanted more water for their crops. Republican leaders in
Oregon had clamored for the water release, as a means of supporting
their constituents in agriculture – "throwing red meat to
their base," Grader says.
A National Marine Fisheries Service biologist later
asked for protection under federal "whistle-blower" laws,
saying he was pressured to go along with the Klamath River basin plan
despite scientific evidence suggesting the plan’s negative environmental
consequences.
A White House spokesperson, commenting for the Journal,
said that Rove’s visits to government agencies were intended merely
to keep political appointees informed about the president’s priorities.
Deadly parasites
Today, salmon in the Klamath are still suffering the
after-effects of decreased water flow. The primary cause for their decline,
biologists say, is a widespread parasite that infects 80 to 90 percent
of young salmon born in the river system. Most die on their journey
out to sea.
According to the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s
current management plan, a ban on catching the fish is triggered if
biologists predict that fewer than 35,000 salmon will return into the
Klamath River to spawn. "If you’re not going to meet your
conservation objective, the council has to close the fisheries under
its jurisdiction," Tracy said. "That would be all commercial
and recreational salmon fisheries from northern Oregon to Monterey."
This year, he said, even if no fishing were to take place at all, the
number of salmon to return is expected to fall short of the 35,000 goal.
Bandaid solution?
Faced with the loss of their pastimes and livelihoods,
fishermen here are frustrated that the season’s fate hinges on
degraded environmental conditions in a distant river. Even if the Klamath
salmon avoid fishermen’s nets and return to spawn, they note, their
offspring will still be at risk from the river’s parasite-laden
water.
"We can take all the fishermen out of the picture
permanently, and these fish will still die," Baty said. A better
solution than closing down California’s salmon fishery, many believe,
is to concentrate on fixing the Klamath itself. Grader said that useful
measures would include releasing large flows of cold water to flush
out the river and trapping young salmon in order to transport them overland
to the ocean, thus saving them from the disease-fraught journey downriver.
"If you improve the habitat up there, that’s
the answer," sportfisherman Bryan said. "The answer is not
to save one in a thousand fish down here."