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past efforts to solve habitat problems have been inadequate, and 

 because the salmon need major, coordinated help now . 



Things people do have driven the resource to its knees. 

 Washington's, Oregon's, Idaho's, and California's wild salmon 

 populations are pitiful, fast-declining remnants of what they 

 once were. In the last two years, fishing has had to be 

 virtually stopped on many stocks. If we keep doing what we've 

 been doing to our lands, forests and waters, there will soon be 

 no economically viable wild salmon fishery. 



Please realize that a national treasure is collapsing. It 

 is collapsing because of us — because of what we are doing. We 

 can still turn the situation around if we change some of our 

 actions, but it will have to be soon. 



Again and again in our history, we have destroyed the 

 habitat basis of fisheries and thought that hatchery programs (a 

 sort of fish farming) could make up for it. That hasn't worked. 

 It has never worked. For fundamental biological and economic 

 reasons, it cannot work. Only healthy watershed ecosystems can 

 economically produce salmon on a sustained basis. 



In the Pacific Northwest are we going to echo past folly? 

 Will we continue to damage our forest and grassland watersheds 

 and lose the fisheries that depend on them? 



