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natural resources and conservation of salmon. The outcome of 

 this choice is now overwhelmingly clear: salmon, and the many 

 people dependent on thea, have lost. Nowhere is this clearer 

 than the Columbia River system where pre-European settlement 

 r\ins, estimated at 16 million fish, have been reduced to severaly 

 hundred thousand wild fish. This dismal record follows after 

 construction and operation of 89 state, federal, and tribal 

 hatcheries, and over one billion dollars spent under the 

 provisions of the Northwest Power Planning and Conservation Act 

 for salmon restoration, much of it on hatcheries intended to 

 mitigate the effects of the Columbia's hydroelectric system. 



Hatcheries in exchange for habitat destruction has been a 

 terrible deal for Pacific salmon. The region must immediately 

 and dramatically make substantial changes to improve habitat 

 protection and watershed management (such as those highlighted in 

 Dr. White's statement), provide flows in the Columbia River 

 hydrosystem which nurture and restore wild salmon, and 

 substantially reduce salmon harvest. Importantly, the region 

 must also reform hatchery production of salmon to ensure: 1) 

 cost-effective results; and 2) most critically, that wild stocks 

 are not damaged by hatchery-produced fish. 



TU believes that protecting and restoring wild salmon stocks are 

 the keys to all salmon conservation efforts and the acid tests 

 against which all hatchery efforts must be measured. Hatchery 

 production of salmon must, in the words of a now widely used 

 axiom, "first, do no harm," to wild fish stocks. The rich salmon 

 genetic diversity of the region is one of its biological crown 

 jewels. Those jewels have been diminished and tarnished greatly. 

 Salmon conservation efforts should emphasize restoring this 

 diversity and resiliency, not reproducing it in hatcheries where 

 overwhelming evidence suggests we are doomed to fail. 



This is not to say that all hatcheries in the region are bad. 



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