33 



Mr. Hamburg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Indeed, we cannot 

 forget California. And mentioning the Central Valley Improvement 

 Act, it has had some salutary effects on the Trinity-Klamath 

 system, but we are still facing severely diminished runs of fish, and 

 there is a lot more work to be done. 



Part of that, of course, is habitat restoration. I just want to pick 

 up on something that Mr. Strong said. This was actually part of a 

 statement you made to the President's Forest Conference in Port- 

 land, but your statement was to the effect that native peoples lived 

 here for some 700 generations and lived as part of a sustainable 

 system. Salmon were a very important part of that system. And 

 your statement was that in just ten short generations, America has 

 reduced its life forms to struggling endangered species. 



There is perhaps a lesson we can learn from this, that ecosys- 

 tems once politicized always invite an irreducible conflict with 

 human intervention, and I guess in some measure I am picking up 

 on what my colleague from Maine began to talk about, which is 

 how do we make these decisions when we have these kind of irre- 

 ducible conflicts. 



And one of the things I am trying to grapple with is our existing 

 regulatory framework, how well it functions and how well — the 

 extent to which it fails to function, and I would like to ask you, Mr. 

 Strong, if you would comment specifically on the regional manage- 

 ment councils and the extent to which you feel that they deal with 

 these conflicts that we have because I know that the native peoples 

 in my district along the Klamath River have been fairly dissatis- 

 fied with the degree to which political conflict has been worked out 

 through these councils. 



Mr. Strong. Congressman Hamburg, thank you very much for 

 the opportunity to comment. 



First of all, the difficulty being specific about this is that tribal 

 peoples were created with a culture that suggests very strongly 

 that the human being must follow all of nature, and the irreduci- 

 ble conflicts that are created with politics is that the politicians are 

 really yielding to the many interest groups and their constituen- 

 cies. The constituency-based decisions are entirely different than 

 resource-based decisions. 



Tribes and tribal leaders have been raised since infancy knowing 

 that the natural resources must come first, and that is a philoso- 

 phy; it is an ethic. It is a value that has to be ingrained into people, 

 and to exercise a forum and many of the regional processes that 

 you are referring to based upon the last three years or even the 

 last decade of data is not going to create that same sense of feeling, 

 so what we have in the Northwest with the many different fora 

 that are convened is this irreducible conflict because of competing 

 funding for many of the projects, we have got just numerous plans 

 that are on the table at the present time. 



Some of the things that we look at are very natural. If we look at 

 the hydropower system, it is unnatural. And the hydropower 

 system, quite frankly, is the one that destroyed the habitat, and if 

 you don't mind me saying so, the hydropower system is the one 

 that spawned the need for hatcheries, and the hydropower system 

 is the largest harvester on the Columbia River of salmon, not the 



