Yvon Chouinard, the outspoken founder of Patagonia, penned a recent op/ed in which he and a fisheries ecologist heavily criticize a new salmon management plan in California.
The crux of the plan, as announced by Governor Gavin Newsom, is upgrading state-run fish hatcheries and enhancing plans to truck salmon around dams. Hatchery fish factory heavily into Newsom’s salmon management plan, despite overwhelming science that shows hatchery salmon dilute the wild gene pool.
“These schemes would waste our tax dollars on ineffective and never-ending boondoggles that fail to solve the destructive impacts of dams on our fisheries and watersheds,” Chouinard writes. “Hatcheries harm endangered California salmon without addressing a major cause of their decline: migration-blocking dams that degrade our treasured watersheds.”
Chouinard claims these new initiatives will run California taxpayers $1 billion, and that they’ll only succeed in making salmon survival dependent on humans, instead of helping them recover in the wild.
Research in recent years has shown that fish raised in hatcheries—salmon, steelhead, and trout—are just different enough genetically that they can alter the gene pool of wild fish. This leads to the suppression of unique genetic traits, decreases the variability of genes on the landscape, and results in fish that are more prone to disease and predation.
“California’s own Steelhead Restoration and Management Plan makes a timely point: ‘There is a risk that operation of an artificial production facility [hatchery] to rebuild a depleted population … can mask the real problems and delay implementation of long-term solutions.’ Artificial truck migrations do the same,” Chouinard continues.
“What we said ten years ago rings just as true today: recovered wild fish don’t ride in trucks—and they aren’t born in plastic mixing bowls at hatcheries either.
“There is a proven way to solve the problem, and Newsom should know it: restore unassisted fish migration to natural habitats they’ve been blocked from by removing dams in favor of more climate-resilient water and energy solutions.”
Chouinard and Matt Stoecker, the fisheries ecologist who co-wrote the op/ed, make a series of interesting points that are worth considering, whether you agree with most of what Chouinard says or not. Wild fish are an important part of the world we exist in as fly anglers, and it pays to be as well-read on the subject as possible.
You can read the entire op/ed here.