Transcending Borders: Pacific Salmon and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Fisheries Conservation

February 1-2, 2007

THE EVENT
This invitational conference brought together scholars, policymakers, journalists, and industry players from the U.S. and Canada for an interdisciplinary conversation about the challenges involved in managing our western fisheries. On February 1, Arthur McEvoy, J. Willard Hurst Professor at the University of Wisconsin, kicked off this event with a keynote address entitled, “Situating Fisheries in History, Nature, and Culture.”  The following day, invited participants will engage in a day-long workshop focused on the following themes:
Session I:  The Players: Laying Claim to Salmon
Pacific salmon have been intensely regulated over the last century and interested parties have created a large number of transnational and multi-state organizations, projects, and agreements with regard to their conservation.  And yet many Pacific salmon runs remain endangered or on the brink of collapse.  Why haven’t cooperative efforts to save Pacific salmon runs worked?  This session thus focused on defining who or what lays claim to salmon, why, and what impact such claims have had and continue to have on conservation possibilities and efforts at co-management.
Session II: How Do We Know What We Know?
 This second session concentrated on the different methods for studying Pacific salmon fisheries and assessing their overall health.  How does a particular understanding of a fishery’s past influence contemporary and future policymaking decisions or judgments about what will happen next?  As past and future management decisions have been and are made based on specific assessments of fishery ‘health,’ dissecting how various industry players obtain and interpret this knowledge may open new doors to interdisciplinary conversations about how fisheries evolve over time.   
Session III: Fish Farms: What’s at Stake?
 Critical issues confronting the Pacific salmon industry are those of fish farming and artificial propagation.  The introduction of Atlantic salmon into western waters by coastal fish farms and the potential loss of species ‘purity’ or ‘weakening’ due to interbreeding are of particular concern to scientists and conservationists.  The chemicals in farmed salmon feed have also raised red flags with government officials, consumers, scholars, and conservationists.  This session placed fish farming and artificial propagation in their larger and longer historical contexts, assessed what’s at stake if they are allowed to continue, and explored the future viability of these controversial practices.

WHAT ENSUED: DISCUSSION HIGHLIGHTS
By Seth Zuckerman

Session I: Whose Salmon?
As participants in this session considered the myriad conflicting claims to salmon, those claims aligned along a continuum between particularity and homogeneity. From a biological standpoint, salmon are the product of specific rivers, and are members of discrete populations. Yet it is the nature of large bureaucracies — be they fisheries departments or supermarket chains — to lump diverse particulars into a single manageable or saleable category. Thanks to advances in boat technology, economic competition, and pressure from anglers, commercial fishing abandoned the rivers for the ocean, creating a fishery that was more reliable economically, at least in the short term. But this shift disconnected the management of salmon from their biological roots, making it harder to manage them wisely.
Thus, the conversation revolved around attempts to re-particularize the treatment of salmon. The Canada-U.S. salmon treaty, currently up for renewal, has approached salmon as a product, and allocates fish to user groups at sea and in the region’s rivers. What if, participants asked, the new treaty was rooted in conservation instead of allocation? What if the treaty explicitly considered the salmon's ecosystem, instead of simply alloting fish to “users” in each nation-state? Although this idea met with interest at the conference, one participant had a less encouraging view. Previous suggestions that the treaty regulate salmon habitat, he said, have been shot down by both countries as an infringement on their national sovereignty. Simply settling the issue of allocation alone is difficult enough, one participant pointed out. Even the First Nations have had difficulty agreeing amongst themselves about how to share an allocation of Fraser River fish along their migratory path from Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) to the upriver bands along the Fraser.
For a while, the conversation circled in what seemed like an eddy: an exchange about the impending release of hatchery fish from the Sacramento River which have been marked by clipping their adipose fins – a tiny, expendable fin located just forward of the tail. The clips will distinguish these fish from wild-hatched fish, and thus signify that catching them wouldn't constitute a blow to wild stocks. Yet the adipose fin clip has for decades been used to mark fish in whose noses a wire tag has been embedded, coded with information about the salmon’s provenance. When fishers catch an adipose-clipped fish, they are supposed to send part of the head to be analyzed in a lab, where the coded wire would be read, revealing where the fish had originated. Releasing clipped fish without nose wires would flood the system with false positives, leading them to search fish noses fruitlessly for wire tags that aren’t there. Although it may have seemed like a diversion, even this conversation was about the level of particularity that is worth attaching to each salmon: Is it enough to know that a fish is the product of some hatchery, somewhere, as the Sacramento River system would suggest, or is it more important to know exactly which river it came from, as the coded wire tags would reveal?
Finally, participants considered the distinction between hatchery fish and wild stocks. Most conservationists see hatchery stocks as entirely separate from wild populations, but many aboriginal people concede less of a distinction. A report by Jim Lichatowich (author of Salmon Without Rivers) considered whether hatcheries could be put to any ecologically sound use. He suggested that it might be possible, if the hatcheries could function as “tributaries,” adding juvenile salmon to downstream waters in proportion to the numbers that stream could accommodate. This would require a heightened level of site-specific knowledge, not merely the production of smolts to add to a large pool of catchable fish at sea.
Not only do managers struggle with the fact that salmon are heterogeneous in space, they have difficulty managing runs that fluctuate unpredictably over time. One participant labeled this phenomenon “dynaphobia,” and suggested that managers’ efforts to re-establish balance tend to fail and actually make the problem worse. The more managers can base their actions on the recognition that salmon runs are dynamic and place-centered, rather than stable and generic, the sounder their management will be.

Session II – How do we know what we know?
Although this session was aimed at defining epistemologies, participants insisted on steering the discussion toward a related but different question: how do we apply what we believe we know about salmon to conserve and rebuild their populations? This drift in the conversation underscored a feature of salmon research and policy: much has been learned about salmon and their needs, but the political will to meet those needs is often lacking.
Actually, one participant offered a friendly amendment. We know a lot about what conditions are ideal for salmon, he said, but society rarely asks that question. Instead, in making policy, scientists are more commonly asked, “what's the bare minimum of protection that would suffice to keep salmon alive?” We are less confident in our answer to this question, and society's clumsy balancing act in weighing our collective desire for salmon against demands for water, land, and timber testifies to our uncertainty. Even our attempts to improve salmon habitat, complained one participant, are rarely designed so that we can learn the value of these acts of so-called restoration. At the same time, rejoined another, it would be impractical to wait until there was air-tight proof of a treatment's effectiveness before employing it where it would likely make a difference for the fish. In either case, as Richard White said in his concluding remarks, we ought to approach the project with great humility, since many of our interventions have not worked out as intended — going all the way back to the founding of West Coast hatcheries in response to what may well have been a natural variation caused by the ocean cycle we now know as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
One participant cited the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River as a place where people have inadvertently met the salmon's habitat needs. The Hanford Reach boasts the most robust populations of mainstem-spawning chinook in the entire Columbia system, because the presence of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation has prevented many of the common forms of habitat degradataion. But, as another participant pointed out, this boon to the salmon was achieved only by excluding people from the area and creating a serious public health hazard – hardly a model of interspecies relations! The Hanford example runs counter to the millennia-old tradition that people and salmon can share the same watersheds, a relationship whose revival is perhaps the greatest project of salmon restoration.
During this session, keynote speaker Arthur McAvoy offered the hypothesis that groups with greater "organicity" (which he defined as a quality of socially coherent groups that are not merely random collections of rent-seeking, alienated individuals) will be better at determining what we know and incorporating it into action. That process is a socio-political one, and he predicted that a society's coherence would affect its ability to practice it. In our society, McAvoy added, complex stories can be crystallized by powerful events, as happened in the case of the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. More recently, one participant observed, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth rode a crest of interest sparked by Hurricane Katrina's inundation of New Orleans, a harsh fire season, and a series of blistering summer heat waves. Such events can serve as flashpoints, to trigger action on an issue which had simmered unaddressed for a long time. And yet other participants felt that this analogy offers little hope for salmon: they doubt that declining salmon populations would ever trigger a crisis of those proportions. “If it takes a crisis to awaken people to action,” said one participant, “that makes me more pessimistic about salmon, since they will never cause a big enough crisis to provoke action. The only people willing to change their lives for salmon are the tribes.”

Session III – Fish Farms: What's at Stake
In taking up the topic of fish farms, the conference circled back to a theme that underlay the first session: the homogenization of salmon. Few developments epitomize this trend as clearly as the rise of salmon farming, which now accounts for more than 60 percent of annual salmon consumption.
The session began with a 2002 video on the farmed salmon controversy and an update of developments since then. Although the industry has improved the ratio at which it converts feed fish (such as anchoveta) into salmon, that improvement has not been without its snags. Feed manufacturers have introduced more vegetable oil into the feed, but the resulting fish haven’t passed muster with some Japanese buyers because “they don’t taste like fish.” Feed suppliers are responding by trying to raise omega-3 fatty acids in plants, hoping to mimic the nutrient profile of the aquatic food chain. In recent years, Chile has used its low labor costs to grab an increasing share of the global market for salmon, stifling plans for British Columbia to expand salmon farming in its waters. However, caps on carbon dioxide emissions could threaten the Chilean salmon industry, which relies on air freight to ship much of its product. Other controversies center around introduced species: the parasite Gyrodactylus in Norwegian rivers, sea lice in British Columbia, and naturalization of farmed escapees in both Chile and British Columbia. In Chile, these escaped salmon are seen as an asset, creating an opportunity to develop a sport fishery upstream of the salmon farms.
One thread of the discussion centered around ways to reduce the impacts of salmon farming. One participant hazarded the guess that cartels or self-policed industry standards might curb the worst impacts of salmon farms. Another pointed out that salmon farms, like railroads and telecommunications firms, have high fixed costs and operate on a public right of way. Thus, he suggested, they ought to be strictly regulated (as the beneficiaries of the right to use a limited public asset) or be operated by the government itself.
In British Columbia, the colonization of several rivers by Atlantic salmon has aroused much consternation. The industry doubted that such colonizations would occur, since sportsmen in the early 20th century had attempted to introduce Atlantics to Pacific waters without success. But current circumstances are quite different. Atlantics are escaping continually, are escaping at various life stages, and are not exhausted by having made a cross-country trip by rail car, as the introduced smolts did a century ago. Perhaps most importantly, they are entering rivers whose salmon and steelhead populations have already been depleted. Given a few days to acquaint itself with new territory, John Volpe said, an Atlantic salmon is able to displace a comparably sized steelhead.
On the human side, too, unoccupied habitat is necessary for salmon farming to take hold. In Alaska, where the wild-capture salmon fishery is still strong, fishing interests have been able to exclude salmon farming. But the Kitasoo First Nation in British Columbia, whose commercial salmon fishery was extirpated, has embraced salmon farming as a pathway to economic development. This pattern foreshadowed a theme that Richard White sounded in his conclusion: constituencies that support salmon have been reduced, while a growing number of interest groups, from farmers to developers, view salmon as an impediment. This trend doesn't augur well for the salmon's chances.
Some participants questioned why the impacts of salmon farming warrant the intense scrutiny they attract, while other threats (hydropower development, irrigation, and urban development, to name a few) meet with virtual acceptance. Others responded that fundamentally, the value of wild salmon – both iconic and economic – is threatened by salmon farming. Even though a water diversion may diminish a salmon run, the identity of those salmon remains intact as long as some survive. But the effect of salmon farming is more insidious: it places the very meaning and identity of salmon at risk. Farmed salmon muddle even further the already homogenized nature of salmon, moving them even farther from their relation to specific places. Even a hatchery run depends on a matrix of nature's services and wild ecosystems for part of its life. But farmed salmon have become nothing more than a product. They’ve moved out of the commons, into the realm of private ownership. This development is the result of incremental choices which each seemed sensible at the time, but which have, over the last several decades, yielded a result that can only be characterized as crazy. Salmon were once an engine that fanned out across the continental shelf and gathered marine energy into our watersheds. Today they have become an energy sink, in which the salmon stand still and we bring them their food.

THE PARTICIPANTS
From Stanford University:
-Jim Bettinger, Knight Fellows Program, Stanford University
-Alice Chiu, Center for Environmental Science and Policy, Stanford University
-Jon Christensen, History Department, Stanford University
-Tammy Frisby, Bill Lane Center, Stanford University
-Andy Gerhart, IPER, Stanford University
-David M. Kennedy, Bill Lane Center, Stanford University
-Kathleen McCoy, Anchorage Daily News, Knight Fellow, Stanford University
-Margaret O’Mara, Bill Lane Center, Stanford University
-Steve Palumbi, Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University
-Lissa Wadewitz, Bill Lane Center, Stanford University ( )
-Richard White, Bill Lane Center, Stanford University

Visitors:
-David Arnold, History, Columbia Basin College
-Nancy Baron, Ocean Science Outreach Director, SeaWeb / COMPASS, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
-Paula Burgess, Wild Salmon Center
-Virginia Butler, Anthropology, Portland State University
-Jeff Curtis, Western Conservation Director, Trout Unlimited
-Matthew Evenden, Geography, University of British Columbia
-Mike Ford, Director, Conservation Biology Division, NOAA
-Billy Frank, Chairman, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
-Mike Gruyum, Executive Director, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
-Doug Harris, Law School, University of British Columbia
-David Jenkins, Roundhouse Institute for Field Studies
-Paul Kariya, Director, Pacific Salmon Foundation
-Arthur McEvoy, Law School, University of Wisconsin-Madison
-David R. Montgomery, Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington
-Noelwah R. Netusil, Department of Economics, Reed College
-Lisa Monzón, Conservation and Science Program, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
-Rik Scarce, Sociology, Skidmore College
-Joseph Taylor, Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Simon Fraser University
-John Volpe, Environmental Studies, University of Victoria
-Ken Weiss, Los Angeles Times
-Ronald Yoshiyama, Fish and Conservation Biology, University of California, Davis
-Seth Zuckerman, Director of the Wild and Working Forests Program, Mattole Restoration Council

READ MORE ABOUT IT
Books & Theses:
Arnold, David. The Fisherman’s Frontier: Natives, Whites, and Salmon in Southeastern Alaska. Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming.

Berringer, Patricia. “Northwest Coast Traditional Salmon Fisheries: Systems of
Resource Utilization.” M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1982. 

Boxberger, Daniel L. To Fish in Common: The Ethnohistory of Lummi Indian Salmon
Fishing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Collins, June McCormick. Valley of the Spirits: The Upper Skagit of Western
Washington. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974.

Crutchfield, James A.and Giulio Pontecorvo. The Pacific Salmon Fisheries: A Study of
Irrational Conservation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.

Dorsey, Kurkpatrick. The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife
Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998.
Evenden, Matthew. Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River, New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2004.

Findlay, John M. and Ken S. Coates, eds. Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. 

Fisher, Robin. Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia,
1774-1890. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1977.

Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon
Industry, 1870-1942. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

Goble, Dale D. and Paul W. Hirt, eds. Northwest Lands, Northwest Peoples: Readings
in Environmental History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

Harmon, Alexandra. Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities
Around Puget Sound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Harris, Cole. The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and
Geographical Change. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997. 
Harris, Douglas C. Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Knight, Rolf. Indians at Work Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Labour
in British Columbia, 1858-1930. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1996.
Lichatowich, Jim. Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999.

Marchak, Patricia, Neil Guppy, and John McMullan, eds. Uncommon Property: The
Fishing and Fish-Processing Industries in British Columbia. Toronto: Methuen
Publications, 1987.

Mason, Beryl Troxell. John Franklin Troxell, Fish Trap Man: Puget Sound and San
Juan Islands, Washington. Oak Harbor, WA: Watmough Publishers, 1991.
McEvoy, Arthur F. The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Meggs, Geoff. Salmon: The Decline of the B.C. Fishery. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991.
Montgomery, David R. King of Fish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2003.

Muszynska, Alicja. Cheap Wage Labour: Race and Gender in the Fisheries of British
Columbia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. 

Newell, Diane. The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry: A Grown
Man’s Game. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.

_________.  Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada’s Pacific
Coast Fishery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Roos, John F. Restoring Fraser River Salmon: A History of the International Pacific Salmon Commission, 1937-1985. Vancouver: Pacific Salmon Commission, 1991.

Roy, Patricia. A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989. 

Shepard, M.S. and A.W. Argue. The 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty: Sharing Conservation Burdens and Benefits. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. 

Singleton, Sara. Constructing Cooperation: The Evolution of Institutions of Comanagement. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Stewart, Hilary. Indian Fishing: Early Methods on the Northwest Coast. Vancouver: J.J.
Douglas Ltd., 1977.

Suttles, Wayne. Katzie Ethnographic Notes. Anthropology in British Columbia. ed. by
Wilson Duff. Memoir No.2. Victoria, BC: B.C. Provincial Museum, Department of Education, 1955. 

_________.  Coast Salish Essays. Seattle: University of Washington Press; Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1987. 

_________, ed. Northwest Coast. Vol. 7 of  Handbook of North American Indians. Edited by William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990.
Taylor, Joseph E. III. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

White, Richard.  Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island
County Washington.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992.
White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill & Wang, 1995.
Woody, Elizabeth, et al. Salmon Nation: People, Fish, and Our Common Home. Portland, OR: Ecotrust, 2003.

Select Articles:

Boxberger, Daniel L.“Ethnicity and Labor in the Puget Sound Fishing Industry,
1880-1935,” Ethnology vol.33 no.2 (Spring 1994), 179-91.

Boxberger, Daniel L. “In and Out of the Labor Force: The Lummi Indians and the
Development of the Commercial Salmon fishery of North Puget Sound, 1880-1900,” Ethnohistory 35:2 (Spring 1988), 161-190.

Gunther, Erna. “A Further Analysis of the First Salmon Ceremony.” University of
Washington Publications in Anthropology 2, no.5 (June 1928): 129-173.

_________. “Klallum Ethnography.” University of Washington Publications in
Anthropology 1, no. 5 (January 1927): 171-314.

Harmon, Alexandra. “Lines in Sand: Shifting Boundaries Between Indians and Non
Indians in the Puget Sound Region.” Western Historical Quarterly 26 (Winter 1995): 429-453.

Jockel, Joseph T. and Alan M. Schwartz. “The Changing Environmental Role of the
Canada-United States International Joint Commission.” Environmental Review 8 (Fall 1984): 236-251.

Millerd, Frank W. “Windjammers to Eighteen Wheelers: The Impact of Changes
in Transportation Technology on the Development of British Columbia’s
Fishing Industry.” B.C. Studies no. 78 (Summer 1988): 28-52.
Naylor, Rosamond L. et al. “Salmon Aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest: A Global Industry.” Environment 45 (Oct. 2003): 19-39.

Newell, Diane. “The Rationality of Mechanization in the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry Before the Second World War.” Business History Review 62 (Winter 1988): 635-636. 

O’Bannon, Patrick. “Waves of Change: Mechanization in the Pacific Coast Canned
Salmon Industry, 1864-1914.” Technology and Culture 28, no.3 (July 1987): 558-577.

Suttles, Wayne. “The Economic Life of the Coast Salish of Haro and Rosario Straits.”
In Coast Salish and Western Washington Indians I. A Garland Series. American Indian Ethnohistory, Indians of the Northwest. Compiled and edited by David Agee Horr. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974.
Taylor, Joseph E. III. “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon: Culture, Nature, History, and the Politics of Blame,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998), 437-457.

Wade, Jill. “The ‘Gigantic Scheme’: Crofter Immigration and Deep-Sea Fisheries
Development for British Columbia (1887-1893).” B.C. Studies 53 (Spring 1982): 28-44.
Wadewitz, Lissa. “Pirates of the Salish Sea: Labor, Mobility, and Environment in the Transnational West,” Pacific Historical Review (Nov. 2006), 587-627.
Weiss, Ken. “Altered Oceans” ( http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-series,0,7842752.special) (winner of both a Pulitzer and a George Polk Prize for 2007)
Yoshiyama, Ronald M. “A History of Salmon and People in the Central Valley Region of California.” Reviews in Fisheries Science 7 (1999): 197-239.

Websites/Organizations of Interest:
Government:
Northwest Fisheries Science Center ( http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/)
-Technical Recovery Planning Site ( http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/trt/index.cfm)
-Viable Salmonid Populations and the Recovery of Evolutionary Significant Units ( http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/assets/25/5561_06162004_143739_tm42.pdf)
National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Regional Salmon Recovery Site ( http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/Regional-Office/Salmon-Recovery/index.cfm)
Pacific Salmon Commission ( http://www.psc.org/index.htm)
Bonneville Power Administration ( http://www.bpa.gov/corporate/)
Federal Caucus ( http://www.salmonrecovery.gov/)
Fisheries and Oceans Canada ( http://www-comm.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/publications/wsp/default_e.htm)
The Northwest Straits Initiative ( http://www.nwstraits.org/PageID/1/default.aspx)
Marine Resources Committee ( http://www.sjcmrc.org/index.html)
Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission ( http://www.critfc.org/)
Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission ( http://www.nwifc.wa.gov/)

Non-Profit:
Salmon Nation ( http://www.salmonnation.com/)
TidePool  ( http://www.tidepool.org/)
Conservation Institute ( http://www.conservationinstitute.org/)
Think Salmon ( http://www.thinksalmon.com/)
Save Our Wild Salmon ( http://www.wildsalmon.org/)
Trout Unlimited ( http://www.tu.org/site/pp.asp?c=7dJEKTNuFmG&b=275410)
Western Canada Wilderness Committee ( http://www.wildernesscommittee.org/)