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13 Institutional Analysis
Pages 324-347

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From page 324...
... If there were once thought to be easy remediessuch as hatcheries or fish ladders or temporary fishing restrictions or large-scale subsidies from the hydropower dams-they have proved to be less durable and more painful than had been hoped. A harder, subtler remedy is deliberate institutional redesign: the recovery team chartered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)
From page 325...
... But that serious and determined effort will take perseverance and durable support from a people and an economy marked more than anything else by their pace of change over the last century. Rehabilitating the salmon of the Pacific Northwest will take decades, incur direct costs in the billions of dollars (the cost of the Columbia River Basin effort to rebuild salmon populations since 1981 is more than $1 billion, and current costs exceed $200 million per year tHardy 19931)
From page 326...
... But until salmon have migration routes and habitat that can sustain their populations, decline will continue. In discussing bioregionalism, cooperative management, and adaptive management, the committee's purpose has been to use these ideas diagnostically to spell out the predicament faced by salmon today.
From page 327...
... The Olympic National Park in Washington state encompasses a mountain range, a natural province; the Columbia River basin defines the geographic scope of the Northwest's most ambitious plan for salmon (NPPC 19921; the Forest Ecosystem Management Team (FEMAT) identified key watersheds in the range of the northern spotted owl (see Figure 7-4~.
From page 328...
... Beginning in 1987, northwest American Indian tribes and fishery agencies gathered data and formulated plans to manage the Columbia's salmon populations in 31 subbasins (see Figure 13-3) , but that biologically coherent approach to the assemblage of populations has been shunted aside in the effort to save the four populations protected under the ESA (Volkman and McConnaha 1993~.
From page 329...
... Source: Pacific Northwest River Basins Commission, 1972. in both cases led to little action, in part because both relied on administrative or planning boundaries that have no visibility or acceptance among local communities.
From page 330...
... The provision of mainstem habitat for salmon, a stem effect, has proved to be the Achilles' heel of the Columbia River (see Chapter 91. The Northwest Power Planning Council (NPPC)
From page 331...
... In the Columbia River Basin, money and information were centralized in the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and NPPC; authority was dispersed among fish and wildlife agencies, partly countered by the centralized powers of the U.S.
From page 332...
... Cooperative management of salmon rehabilitation implicitly recognizes the central role of equity in fashioning solutions to difficult questions of naturalresource management. If the salmon problem is largely a human problem and if approaches to it are likely to have large social and economic costs, then many of the people affected will demand to be involved trying to solve it.
From page 333...
... First, beginning with treaty fishing-rights litigation in the late 1960s, the treaty tribes and the state of Washington finally worked out genuine cooperative management for salmon fishing in the Puget Sound in the middle 1980s, and a federal court oversees a similar arrangement in Oregon (Cohen 1986, Pinkerton 1992, Hanna and Smith 1993~. Second, the Pacific Fishery Management Council has designed its decision structure to promote active consultation with its salmon advisory committees.
From page 334...
... Indeed, two organizations, the Pacific Northwest Utilities Conference Committee, an organization formed by electric utilities and large industrial consumers of electric power, and the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife Authority, a parallel organization created by the tribes and fishery agencies, gained influence within their communities largely because of the magnitude and complexity of the issues raised by the Northwest Power Act. Because the council eschewed any role in managing catch levels, fishing groups played little active role in its deliberations, and their interests were represented by state agencies.
From page 335...
... 19931. Most cooperative arrangements, such as Washington state's cooperative-management regime for nonfederal forest lands (Halbert and Lee 1990, Pinkerton 1992)
From page 336...
... An adaptive approach has been tried in three arenas and proposed in a fourth, all in the Pacific Northwest. Developed initially by a group centered at the University of British Columbia, adaptive management has been used in fisheries as part of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans' sophisticated program of salmon management; two recent case studies (Hilborn and Winton 1993, Walters et al.
From page 337...
... Third, an abortive attempt to borrow the flexibility implicit in an experimental approach was tried in 1987 in state-forest management in Washington State (Halbert and Lee 1990, Pinkerton 1992~. Finally, the idea of adaptive management areas, in which timber harvest would be combined with ecosystem management, is being studied in the USDA Forest Service (USFS)
From page 338...
... Even with these changes, the move away from hatcheries, which permit far greater control of salmon populations, at much lower monitoring cost, and toward ecosystem management will raise the expense of learning and demand much more precise intervention into the life cycles of specific, identified populations (~7olkman and McConnaha 1993~. How to carry out experimentation and learning under the more demanding conditions has not been well explored; indeed, experience with artificial propagation suggests that even that presumably easier problem of adaptive management has been formidable (Hilborn and Winton 1993~.
From page 339...
... In particular, halting the decline of all populations that stakeholders judge to be worth saving must be accorded the highest priority, even at substantial risk to human communities and other, healthier species of fish and wildlife. Intertemporal rules, such as interest or discount rates and lengths of contracts or leases, should take into account that changes in abundances of salmon and in our understanding of the biological needs of managed salmon have undergone substantial shifts on time scales of about a decade.
From page 340...
... · Experimentation and adaptive management. Because salmon populations are far from their natural equilibria and because the salmon life cycle is comparable in length with many societal rhythms, learning about salmon is obscured by changes among human observers.
From page 341...
... The details must be worked out by the individuals and institutions of the region. The committee proposes that the relevant agencies, including the National Marine Fisheries Service, agree on a process to permit the formulation of salmonrecovery plans in advance of listings under the ESA and that the Pacific Northwest states, acting individually and through the Northwest Power Planning Council, provide technical and financial assistance to watershed-level organizations to prepare and implement these preemptive recovery plans.
From page 342...
... Because of the groundwork carried out by generations of fishery biologists and most recently summarized in FEMAT and the subbasin planning process of NPPC, it is possible to identify the geographic outlines of salmon bioregions. And with the resources available within the Columbia basin under the Northwest Power Act, it is possible to formulate and to begin implementation of adaptive management aimed at ensuring the survival of salmon populations.
From page 343...
... The plans would be preemptive in the sense that NMFS would agree that while a recovery plan it has adopted is in operation, the salmon population it covers is protected as much as is possible under the ESA. Protection of populations would be improved by including in the preemptive recovery plan minimum sustainable escapements for salmon populations and approaches for filling out the dendritic habitat of salmon populations.
From page 344...
... Although preemptive recovery plans would have a bioregional focus, it is critical to their success that they take into account the entire life cycle and environment of salmon, including such factors as ocean conditions, international fisheries, large-scale interactions among salmon populations, as well as more obvious but more local factors. The prospect of constructive action to conserve and rehabilitate at least some salmon populations without the conflict and delays encountered under the present ESA regime leads the committee to advance the idea of preemptive plans.
From page 345...
... . Like the preemptive recovery plans proposed here, HCPs are negotiated settlements; but HCP negotiations potentially involve fewer parties and their basis might be slightly narrower i.e., the right to use some habitat for purposes other than conservation in exchange for setting other habitat aside for conservation.3 A recovery plan is an experiment, not a guaranteed recipe for rebuilding salmon populations; there are no guaranteed recipes.
From page 346...
... Columbia River System Yakima River, Washington Attempts are already under way to rebuild salmon populations in the Yakima basin. Most of the upper Yakima falls within the boundaries of either the national forest system (Mt.
From page 347...
... The Nisqually River Council, along with the Nisqually Tribe and other landowners, forged a local coalition to develop and implement salmon restoration strategies. This basin could show some substantial gains if attention were paid to restoring floodplain connections and a more natural flow regime and if policies regarding hatcheries and fishing in the area were adapted successfully to rehabilitation.


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