It looks to me like a propitious space for the City Council to oper- 

 ate in. People would not be surprised if you took a collection given 

 the seating arrangements. A New Englander is reminded of 

 church. Perhaps it makes it less painful when you are required to 

 take an occasional collection. 



You are also very brave to subject yourself to eight Members of 

 Congress, at least I think we are eight, the Committee on Merchant 

 Marine and Fisheries and our hostess and guests from the Pacific 

 Northwest from other committees in the Congress, Congressmen 

 Hamburg and Wyden seem to have their own departments operat- 

 ing here. I don't know if they are the judge and the jury or what. 

 We have a long morning in front of us. 



We will have two panels, one focused on the crisis for the salmon 

 and the other on the Magnuson Act itself. We are going to hear 

 them as entire panels. First, however, you need to be subjected to 

 us because that is our way in terms of opening statements. I am 

 going to try to be very brief myself and ask my colleagues to do so 

 as well. 



We have three hours, we are on a precisely timed schedule, and 

 people will lasoo us out of here promptly whether we are ready or 

 not. 



We meet today to hear testimony, as I said, on two issues that 

 are of vital importance to this committee and particularly to the 

 Pacific Northwest. First, the decline of Pacific salmon, a problem 

 that in spite of all the attention it has received is as yet, as you 

 very well know, unsolved; and second the reauthorization of the 

 Magnuson Act, the law that governs the conservation and manage- 

 ment of the country's fisheries resources. 



The 103rd Congress faces decisions more fundamental than any 

 in recent memory. Not only the budget and health care but envi- 

 ronmental and natural resource management decisions with im- 

 mensely important and far-reaching repercussions. Within the re- 

 authorization of the Magnuson Act our choices could determine the 

 very survival of the small family fishermen here and elsewhere 

 around the country, and within the Endangered Species Act and 

 the Clean Water Act, the survival of species such as salmon and 

 indeed of entire ecosystems and maybe even of us. 



Nowhere are these decisions more clearly highlighted than here 

 in the Northwest. You all were probably brought up on the famous 

 excerpts from Lewis and Clark detailing salmon too numerous to 

 count in your rivers. Today, as you know better than we, the 

 number of wild salmon can be indeed counted on the fingers of one 

 hand in some cases, if at all. 



Many people believe that if we do not act now, the opportunity 

 to save these fish will be gone forever, and gone with it, even those 

 who don't hail from the Pacific Northwest understand, would then 

 be a way of life that has since time immemorial defined this region 

 and its people. 



The causes of this decline are extraordinarily complex, and no 

 one can be singled out. We are all told the famous four "H's" are 

 to blame— hydropower, hatcheries, habitat loss and harvest. The 

 solution is locked clearly somewhere in words like ecosystem and 

 watershed, but we haven't decoded that secret yet. 



