The recent guest commentary, “Cooperative work will meet needs of farms, fish,” by Terry Williams and Brian Bookey suggests that the new Sustainable Lands Strategy will benefit both fish and farmers. Though it reads more like politics as usual than “strategy,” a lot of important titles make up the SLS Executive Committee, and their desire for interested parties to come together and better understand and respect each others’ needs, build trust and forge common solutions is hard to ignore. But farmland survival issues deserve more than glittering generalities.
Washington rivers and floodplains have many problems that defy easy narration. Fish vs. agriculture is not one of them. Merely imagine a world without farmers and a world without salmon, and our resource of unconditional necessity becomes clear. Salmon don’t even belong on the same survival agenda with farmers. The SLS should build more hatcheries and get on with the real issues of human survival.
Yet whatever the mission of the SLS, some serious research has long been waiting for issues of fish and farmer needs. Does the SLS “strategy” involve trained and unbiased investigators? If so, important questions can be answered close by. For example, a portion of Ebey Island was never diked and remains in pristine tidal habitat. Why not go there and find out if salmon smolt are actually using such habitat as the authors claim. Then to Drainage District No. 6, where farmland was previously flooded, and see if salmon are actually benefiting there. Then access any historical data that proves “native salmon are threatened with extinction,” as the authors claim. Further, access any research that proves hatchery salmon cannot make good the population declines of native salmon.
I suggest the SLS folks produce more homework and less rhetoric that sounds like an election campaign. As a lifetime investigator and floodplain farm owner, salmon are underappreciated in their ability to find habitat while humans are scheming to make habitat for them. Any adverse effects that agriculture may have had on salmon are minor by comparison with the Cordilleran glacial intrusions and other events they survived in the course of their own history.
Alex G. Alexander
Everett
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