Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Here on the Salmon Coast, soul-stirring runs return with the rains. We always know both are coming, we don't know how much.
And, just like the weather, while everybody talks about the fate of wild salmon, nobody does anything about it.
The iconic salmon is entangled in our sense of identity. It symbolizes our home and reminds us of our own transient place in nature. First nations elders say their cultural survival is linked to salmon.
Yet our misty-eyed reverence evaporates the moment the needs of salmon conflict with somebody making money.
For example, every year since 1993 the Fraser has been prominent on the annual list of endangered rivers. Threats include gravel extraction, logging, farming and suburban sprawl.
So it's no surprise that, even as we get more grim news about the prospects for wild salmon survival, another huge gravel mining operation prepares to scalp salmon spawning habitat.
After studying 30 years of data, the David Suzuki Foundation found shocking salmon declines. Since 1990, stocks plummeted by 70 to 93 per cent among 10 representative B.C. populations.
The report doesn't say it, so I will. Among our leading culprits is the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, notwithstanding its many fine individual scientists, dedicated public servants and their notable achievements.
But the DFO pontificates about wild salmon policy while behaving like a hostage to industry. Although specifically mandated to protect wild salmon, it approves projects which biologists say will harm them.
It salves its conscience with promises it seems incapable of fulfilling. What else to conclude from watching salmon runs under its stewardship dwindle from astonishing abundance to pathetic tatters?
You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice that the period in which the steepest declines began coincides with the Mulroney government's remaking of the department. Sure, the DFO nabs the occasional poacher, illegal clam digger or householder messing with riparian zones, but when it comes to the big-ticket stuff, it just doesn't seem present or accounted for.
Want to "mine" the province's most important and endangered salmon river -- be our guests! Decide that of all possible locations on this huge coast, you simply must locate your fish farm on a main migration route -- no problem! Leave a salmon river so choked with debris torrents it looks like a landing strip for jumbo jets -- let bygones be bygones!
Our provincial government is also a player in this two-faced farce. Pave the parks, treat them like a land bank for resort development, liquidate the old growth in watersheds, let timber giants convert forest reserves to real estate without paying the compensation due as the original deal for access to public lands, kiss off the last spotted owl habitat, industrialize pristine foreshores, turn a blind eye to repeated pollution permit violations.
Similar hypocrisy permeates the commercial fishing sector. The same folks lamenting DFO incompetence will lobby furiously for fisheries openings that biologists warn may tip already weak stocks like the Sakinaw or Cultus sockeye over the brink and into the abyss of extinction.
Sports anglers think it's all about them. Salmon returns are declining? Let's kill all the seals so there are more fish for us. No Chinooks in the Cowichan River? Let's launch a bizarre ocean ranching scheme in which the release of hatchery fish at convenient fishing spots will create angling opportunities that mask the real declines in abundance.
First nations aren't immune either, not if there's a major buck to be made logging or mining a watershed or digging the gravel out of spawning beds. All of us, all the while, go on chanting the sanctimonious mantra of the sacred salmon.
Well, as I've said before, in a democracy, citizens get exactly what they deserve. The onus for change lies not with the bullied bureaucrats but with the voters who have the power to hold accountable those to whom they delegate authority.
Time to start asking yourself whether your grandchildren deserve a coast of barren rivers and denuded landscapes, in which the salmon that once came to us by the hundreds of millions have largely been lost to concrete blocks, video games and toilet paper.
shume@islandnet.com
ear Mr. Canning: 
