Jim Lichatowich: Don’t Lose Faith in Nature

Jim Lichatowich is as happy as anyone that the Elwha dams on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula came down. But a recent attempt to witness the biological recovery there reminds him that there are equally stubborn obstacles to steelhead and salmon recovery that unfortunately can’t be removed with dynamite or heavy equipment. “A former colleague of mine organized a trip to Elwha after the dams were out,” Lichatowich says. “He called me and said, ‘the trip is still on but you’re not on it. The guy from National Marine Fisheries Service that was gonna show us around mentioned your name to his supervisor and was told you couldn’t come.’ So I was uninvited. But that was the week that Republicans shut the government down, so no one got to go anyway.”

Getting axed from an agency-led tour is a badge of honor Lichatowich has earned. For more than forty years, he’s worked as a biologist on steelhead and salmon streams from British Columbia to California, including six years as the assistant chief of fisheries for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. A second career as a writer was launched with the 2001 publication of Salmon Without Rivers , a critique of the century-long failed approach to anadromous fish restoration based on the false promise of hatcheries. Two years ago he published a second book, Salmon People and Place , which delves deeper into the true costs of what masquerades as salmon recovery, and offers some salient suggestions for alternatives.

Much has been learned about salmonids over the span of Lichatowich’s career. A lack of good information is no longer the most pressing problem. “I’ve had a couple really frustrating conversations with people recently,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘here’s what’s going on—but please, you can’t tell anybody that. If people find out I’ve told you that, then I’ll get in trouble.’ In the past twenty years, I’ve seen a growing gap between what the science is telling us and what policies are being implemented. And that gap is causing some people ethical problems. Do you do what you know to be right, or do you follow policies that are unworkable?”

For much of Lichatowich’s career, these unworkable policies have been untouchable, despite the fact that his views about their ineffectiveness are shared by a growing number of scientists, and have been championed for years by many fellow fisheries experts, including Bill McMillan. “Lichatowich has been a steady and articulate advocate for putting wild fish conservation and recovery first and foremost,” says McMillan. “He has well identified the great threat that hatcheries pose to wild fish populations and to the overall future for West Coast fisheries.”

Twenty years ago, it seemed to Lichatowich that a growing body of scientific evidence, along with a spate of legal advances, were going to usher in an age of enlightenment. But it just didn’t happen.

“No one’s holding the agencies accountable for making use of new information,” he says. “It seems to me that since the ESA listings in the 1990s—which was a really tumultuous time—things have deteriorated. I remember thinking that the listings, along with all the low returns, would start to change the status quo. I thought they were really going to shake things up. But it did just the opposite. The agencies are really doubling down on their bets, retreating back into the status quo.”

Lichatowich believes there are two main reasons for this retreat. “It’s a combination of a flawed conceptual foundation—the set of assumptions and beliefs that lean toward using artificial propagation instead of improving ecological conditions,” he says, “and the shifting baseline syndrome, this insidious thing that happens when runs are impoverished, but each new generation of biologists thinks the condition of the runs as they find them are the baseline. Those two factors work together to cause what my friend [and fellow senior salmon biologist] Rick Williams is calling a loss of faith in nature. We begin to think that the runs are impoverished naturally. No one goes back to look at the history and see that there were a lot of fish coming into all these rivers. All this inevitably leads back to more hatcheries. Because while we’ve lost faith in nature, we have an ever increasing faith in technology.”

Lichatowich notes the overwhelmingly positive results that occur when biologists and managers conspire to repair whole ecosystems rather than patch fragments with technological fixes. Dam removal is one way, but not the only way to do this, he says. “Look at Lake Osoyoos sockeye,” Lichatowich points out, referring to the lake on the eastern Washington-Canada border. “There’s a place where the managers didn’t capitulate to a big hatchery. Instead they started to manipulate flows coming into the lake to improve conditions for rearing juveniles. Their escapement jumped up several times over. And returning adults jumped from a few thousand up to over half a million. That’s a clear example where people took care of the system. They improved environmental conditions in the lake, and fixed some other problems with fish passage. The fish responded—and this is a place above nine dams.”

Institutional barriers to salmon recovery may ultimately prove more difficult to remove than the ones made of concrete. But Lichatowich isn’t giving up. A key, he believes, is the crop of fish biologists and managers who are just beginning their careers, for whom he has this bit of advice: “If you come into this profession and you agree to do what you know is not the right thing to do, if you are so afraid of losing your job that you are willing to implement policies that you know are wrong, essentially what you are saying is that you think the whole resource is worth a dollar less than your salary. And if that’s all you think it’s worth, then please find a job somewhere else. Because it’s worth a whole lot more than that.”