CONCLUSION No Way Home?

Abstract

THERE MAY COME A TIME when a million truly wild salmon make their way up the Columbia River to spawn each year instead of the million hatchery-reared fish that do so today. Such a transformation would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to achieve. It would require habitat-restoration programs up and down the Columbia and its tributaries, restrictions on offshore fishing, and perhaps the breaching of several dams. Dozens of institutions and agencies and thousands of individuals would have to embrace the idea, and it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But it could be done. On the other hand, I am reasonably certain we will never again see the Columbia teeming with tens of millions of wild salmon as it did at the start of the nineteenth century—not with all the demands we now make on that river in terms of hydropower, irrigation, and navigation. Similarly, the American Prairie Foundation may well succeed in restoring a free-roaming herd of bison in eastern Montana, but it will never re-create the herds of millions that once spanned the Great Plains. Nor does the foundation even aspire to do so, given the degree to which people have converted the once-vast grasslands of the midcontinent into farmland. A similar situation pertains to springbok in South Africa. The springbok has not declined to the point of being in danger of extinction, but its days as one of the world’s greatest migratory spectacles are over.