Close to Home: A feel-good fix that won’t restore salmon

King salmon. Delicious. California king salmon, that is. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was priced a little bit more than hamburger. It was a staple on family plates. During World War I, canned king salmon from the abundant rivers and tributaries of the Sacramento Valley fed American and allied forces in Europe, and a goodly portion of America too. Last summer, I saw king salmon for sale in a Bay Area fish market priced at $32 a pound.

Currently, one can purchase king salmon at Costco for about half that price, but it arrives frozen from New Zealand on a ship. It’s raised on a salmon farm. Who knows what antibiotics are used? Frozen salmon is also available at supermarket chains. Some comes from Alaska, but it’s never king salmon. A large portion of Alaska salmon sail frozen to China, where it is unfrozen, processed and packaged and frozen again before it’s shipped to your local store. Yum. It takes two to four months to cross the Pacific twice.

Rep. Jared Huffman, co-chair of the wild salmon caucus, says he has a remedy to restore king salmon to their historical spawning grounds. According to a news release from his office, he’s introduced a bill that would provide $40 million to “provide identification of salmon areas and strongholds” to “sustain thriving salmon populations.” What a noble inclination — restore salmon in California to “thriving” numbers. Who could resist? How about the fish?

I’ve read the bill. Huffman’s legislation purports to spend a great deal of money to identify “strongholds.” In other words, historic, salmon spawning grounds. Ask some old-timers, or the Sierra Club, they’ll tell you exactly where they are, and it won’t cost a dime. Huffman’s bill also provides money to remove obstacles to salmon spawning grounds. Great idea. Start a company. Give it a fancy environmental name; rake the money in removing log jams and impediments blocking access to historical spawning beds. The only problem is that when salmon arrive at their “strongholds,” the gravel and pebbles needed to incubate their eggs will still be covered by hundreds of years of silt created by logging practices, housing developments and agricultural expansion.

Dig the mud and silt out, place fresh gravel in to restore the spawning grounds? Now we’re getting somewhere. Like digging the Panama Canal, which will take a lot more than the $40 million provided by this bill to restore hundreds and hundreds of miles of impacted salmon beds. Without spawning gravel replacement and provided there’s enough water to do the trick — climate change anyone? — it could take a thousand years to wash the mud and silt to the sea. By then, there may be a dozen wild salmon left.

There’s a larger issue here; one that impacts every one of us. On most rivers, salmon spawning grounds are blocked by dams. Do you really care about salmon? Do you want their indigenous spawn to endure? Simple. Take out every dam. In California, agriculture will cease to exist. There will be no juice for your Tesla, and people in Santa Rosa will be limited to one gallon of water a day. This bill is a feel-good farce.

Currently, off the shores of California, most salmon swimming in the sea (up to 90%) began their lives in a restorative hatchery on the endangered Sacramento River. They’re raised as juveniles and trucked to San Pablo Bay where they’re released to go to sea. Restorative hatcheries are not fish farms where salmon are prisoners, dosed in antibodies and swimming around in what comes out the other end. State restorative hatcheries in California sustain what few salmon are left. Wild king salmon spawning naturally? There are hardly any left, where — once upon a time — they thieved in every river north of the Golden Gate. Restorative hatcheries? When it comes to Huffman’s bill, there’s not one cent for that. Enjoy the symbolism on your plate.

Michael Koepf, a former commercial fisherman, is a novelist who lives in Elk.

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