Pacific salmon have long symbolized the Northwest’s natural abundance and form a cornerstone of the region's culture and economy. Environmental and economic changes since the nineteenth century have destroyed salmon habitat throughout Washington and vastly diminished fish populations. As early as 1877, governments placed limits on fishing to help conserve the species and built hatcheries to artificially propagate salmon to bolster shrinking numbers across the Northwest. Despite these efforts, salmon populations kept declining. Growing awareness of environmental problems, stronger federal laws, and legal challenges all prompted wider efforts to restore salmon runs. After long studies by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Snake River sockeye salmon became the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act (1973) in 1991. Soon other runs were added as threatened or endangered across what amounts to roughly 75 percent of the state. As NMFS prepared to list several new species in the 1990s, recovery programs emerged, including Washington’s Salmon Recovery Act (1999) and the federal government’s Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund (2000). Such programs have sustained and expanded recovery efforts across the state, infusing communities with economic boosts and improved habitat and salmon conservation. However, salmon populations still struggle.
A Species to Define a Region
Pacific salmon have been swimming in Northwest waters since glaciers retreated after the last ice age. Six species in the genus Oncorhynchus live in the Northwest. Each has a unique life history, but most are anadromous, meaning they are born in freshwater, mature in saltwater, and return to freshwater to spawn and die. Salmon runs before Europeans arrived in the Northwest are estimated to be between 11 and 16 million fish. A few high waterfalls, such as Palouse Falls near the confluence of the Palouse and Snake rivers, kept some streams salmon-free, but salmon found their way through much of the Northwest.
In fact, it is easy to equate the region with the fish. "The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to," wrote journalist Timothy Egan in The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (Egan, 22). When Egan published those words in 1990, the region stood on the brink of crisis. Salmon populations had been plummeting. Throughout the 1990s, the National Marine Fisheries Service named several distinct salmon species as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (1973). "Rivers without salmon have lost the life source of the area," Egan concluded. The Northwest without its iconic species seemed nearly incomprehensible. Thus, efforts to restore healthy salmon populations have driven a significant part of Northwest politics and economics in recent decades.
The roots of salmon as central to regional culture go back much further in time. Since time immemorial Indigenous peoples throughout the region developed close relationships with salmon that transcended mere food. Salmon Chief was a teacher, instructing people not to take too many salmon, according to Andrew George (Naxiyamtáma). The Coast Salish, according to Pauline Hillaire (Lummi), held a sacred covenant with the Salmon People, renewed every year with the Salmon Ceremony. After the first salmon of the season was caught, everyone prepared for the First Salmon Ceremony. "We have to agree with each other, as well as have a covenant with the salmon population," Hillaire explained. "Our covenant with the salmon population has to do with taking care of their habitat" (Hillaire, 275). For millennia, the relationships between human cultures, salmon, and surrounding habitat have been critical to regional thriving.
Precipitous and Persistent Decline
Indigenous populations throughout Washington harvested salmon in great numbers, estimated as between roughly one-quarter and one-half the regional salmon runs. This was done sustainably, so that when Europeans and Americans entered the Northwest, they encountered abundance. Almost immediately, salmon populations started declining. The causes were myriad. Most obviously, canneries packed up Northwest salmon and shipped them around the world. The first Columbia River cannery started in 1866. By 1901, Columbia River canneries shipped more than 5 million cases, each of which included 48 one-pound cans. This figure does not include canneries on the Pacific coast and Puget Sound. Nor does it account for the impact of any other commercial or sport fishing. But much more than harvest affected salmon populations.
Throughout the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs and others were developing various natural-resource industries, each of which altered local ecologies in ways that killed salmon or jeopardized healthy habitats. By the 1840s, fur traders had cleaned beaver out of most streams, altering watercourses in ways that often hurt salmon. Mining depleted streams through diversions and polluted them with byproducts of processing ore. Livestock trampled riparian areas and often destabilized ranges, which increased erosion. Farming diverted and blocked streams for irrigation and milling grain, and agriculture filled in wetlands and diked estuaries. Logging removed trees along streams that raised water temperatures, and used rivers as transportation corridors, which relied on splash dams and other methods that harmed Northwest rivers. As cities developed, rivers often served as dumps for industrial and municipal waste. All these activities, well underway by the time the nineteenth century closed, harmed salmon habitat by raising water temperature, removing woody debris that served as critical habitat, buried gravel that furnished ideal spawning habitat, and generally lowered water quality. As early as the 1870s, local officials warned about the imminent demise of Pacific salmon.
The twentieth century brought the last major factor: dams. Dams for mills, irrigation, and electricity had been constructed on Northwest streams for decades. In 1933, the first one crossed the Columbia River, Rock Island Dam near Wenatchee. Soon, other major dams on the Columbia included Bonneville by 1938 and Grand Coulee in 1942. Bonneville was built with expensive and elaborate fish ladders to help salmon bypass the dam to swim upstream. Observers recognized the costs and risks. "The food of the Indians, the future of an industry, the sport of thousands of anglers, and the usefulness of the most elaborate and costly fish equipment ever built will be at stake when the salmon runs of the near future reach the massive barrier at Bonneville," wrote Oregon journalist and future politician Richard Neuberger in his 1938 book Our Promised Land (Neuberger, 139). Grand Coulee was built so high, no fish ladders or any other mitigation measures were applied. By cutting off thousands of miles of streams and habitat from spawning salmon and introducing a massive dam-turbine gantlet, engineers created a river system difficult for salmon to thrive in. The major dam-building era continued until Lower Granite Dam near Pullman was completed on the Snake River in 1975.
Although many of these dams included fish ladders or incorporated barging around the dams, the dams indisputably harmed salmon heading out to the ocean and blocked them on the return trip. Combined with all the other environmental changes, salmon struggled. A once-great population had plummeted, held together by expensive technological fixes, which included artificial propagation at hatcheries, fish ladders, and elaborate barging systems.
Emergence of Environmental Protection
Few measures slowed the activities that harmed salmon until the 1960s and 1970s, when new laws and new interpretations of responsibilities set the stage for serious action to protect salmon and their habitat.
As early as 1877, Washington imposed seasonal limits on the Columbia River with a vague hope it might slow salmon decline. Restrictions on the type of gear permitted in fishing often pitted types of fishers against each other – sport or commercial, indigenous or immigrant – during the twentieth century, although at least nominally such measures were meant to reduce harm to fish populations. Advocates saw hatcheries as a panacea where experts could make more salmon to supplement dwindling natural salmon runs, helping to avoid stronger restrictions on harvests. By the environmental decade of the 1970s, action at the federal level in both Congress and the courts reshaped how salmon fit in the region’s political economy
At the federal level the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, signed by President Richard Nixon on January 1, 1970, required environmental assessments for any major developments that included federal involvement, such as a federal agency, public lands, or dams on interstate rivers. The process required potential plans to account for potential ecological harm, as well as that they be shared with the public and input solicited before decisions were made. NEPA opened greater possibilities for lawsuits to challenge projects with deleterious effects on salmon.
In 1973, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) went into effect, declaring the moral right for species to continue their existence. This meant actions that harmed endangered or threatened species could be restrained, and alterations to critical habitat could be stopped. The bureaucratic and scientific process to implement the ESA was complicated and slow. It has tended to promote technical solutions. As legal scholar Dale D. Goble once put it, "Since 1978, the optimistic, we-can-engineer-a-solution-to-any-problem attitude has overwhelmed the moral imperative embodied in the ESA" (Goble, 250). Nevertheless, the ESA required that governments implement recovery plans to protect and restore species and the habitats they depended on.
Coinciding with expanded federal environmental protections came a renewed recognition of Native peoples’ sovereignty and entitlement to a greater responsibility for the region’s salmon. After decades, activists for tribal fishing rights upended the status quo. For years, Washington imposed strict fishing regulations that violated tribal treaty rights. Fish-ins on rivers closed to fishing brought attention to the issue, but legal campaigns unfolded alongside the activism and transformed the politics of salmon management.
The critical legal decision came in 1974 with United States v. Washington, known widely as the Boldt Decision after the federal district court judge who presided, George Boldt. The judge ruled that the common treaty language – "the right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations, is further secured to said Indians in common with all citizens of the Territory" – meant treaty tribes were entitled to 50 percent of the harvestable fish at a time when they were taking only about 6 percent. Besides this potential economic boon and boost to indigenous sovereignty and identity, the decision established the treaty tribes as co-managers of the fishery with Washington. The Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission has helped coordinate that work and develop a coherent strategy and voice in salmon conservation. In the decades since the Boldt decision, the NIFC has been instrumental in developing tribal capacity to manage fisheries and be an effective political actor.
These laws and the rise of stakeholders connected to them helped set the stage to respond to the continuing catastrophic losses of salmon.
Listing of Species
Because the Endangered Species Act demands changes to economic activity, listing a species as threatened or endangered is a slow, controversial process that is guided by science, but always within a political setting. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) (commonly known as NOAA Fisheries) is the federal agency charged with monitoring anadromous fish under the Endangered Species Act. NMFS started preparing to list several inland fish runs in 1978, but political compromises in the form of the Northwest Power Planning and Conservation Act (1980) forestalled the listing. The act’s failure to move salmon conservation forward led to pressure from environmentalists and tribes. NMFS finally listed Snake River chinook and sockeye salmon in 1991 and 1992.
In 1997 and 1998, two more runs in were listed for the Upper and Lower Columbia River steelhead. Then in 1999 came a series of several more runs that included more on the Columbia River, the Olympic Peninsula, and throughout Puget Sound. Again, long delays and several lawsuits characterized the process. According to the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife in 2024, 17 populations of salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered. This covered three-quarters of the state, making it a dominant Washington political issue.
The expansion of protections in 1999 signaled a new era, especially because of the high percentage of population that lives in the Puget Sound basin. Historian Matthew Klingle emphasized, "The 1999 endangered species listing drove home an important biological point: almost everywhere that water flowed to the sea was potential salmon habitat" (Klingle, 254). Such an analysis demonstrates the potential far-reaching reach of activities to improve or restore habitat for salmon right where infrastructure and populations are densest.
Federal Help
The ESA obligates government agencies to develop recovery plans to protect and restore species. Given the scale of the threat, the programs designed to address the threatened and endangered salmon species have a wide geographic scope and demand significant investments. Local governments, tribes, and nonprofit organizations needed money to support the extensive work necessary to protect and restore salmon and the critical habitat that sustained them. The federal government’s Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund (PCSRF) offered one of the first conduits of funding to Washington.
In October 1998, the governors of the Pacific coastal states requested that the Clinton administration establish a fund to support restoring and conserving Pacific salmon. They asked for $50 million annually for each state (Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington) for six years to support local and regional projects. President Clinton requested $100 million in his next budget and included tribes as part of the process. Congress appropriated $58 million for fiscal year 2000. Initially, Congress planned the fund as part of a Pacific Salmon Recovery Act. Ultimately, that law did not pass, but Congress incorporated the funding mechanism into federal budget processes. The PCSRF has continued beyond the governors’ original six-year request.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) distributes the competitive grants, through NMFS, to states and tribes to work on salmon conservation. The projects must work toward recovering species listed under the Endangered Species Act. They also can support species critical to tribal treaty rights. By 2023, the grant totals exceeded $1.87 billion and attracted more than $2.2 billion in matching contributions. Washington led all states with $563.5 million invested.
Statistics do not break down by state, but the total work accomplished since 2000 included almost 16,000 individual projects. Salmon habitat across some 1.2 million acres have been restored or engineered, while more than 12,000 miles of streams have been made accessible to fish by removing barriers in streams and otherwise helping with fish passage. The economic impact on its own is significant. NMFS cited studies that demonstrate these projects add value in local economies. Investing $1 million to restore watersheds can generate between 13 and 32 jobs and inject $2.2 and $3.4 million into communities, all while strengthening ecosystem resilience.
The nature of the PCSRF required partnerships in local communities for the funding to go be used effectively. Washington’s legislative response built local capacity to accomplish that.
Washington’s Responses
Because the decline in salmon fisheries occurred over time and restrictions on certain economic activity seemed certain, many groups worked to avoid or forestall listing species under the ESA. Although not ultimately successful, these efforts established foundations subsequent legislation used.
Conflict over timber cutting and its effects on fish and wildlife, especially the northern spotted owl, drew interest groups together to devise solutions that might reduce expensive lawsuits, harm to species, and more restrictive policies. In 1986 and 1987, groups held 60 meetings and crafted a compromise between timber interests, tribes, environmentalists, and state agencies. The result was known as the Timber Fish Wildlife (TFW) Agreement and hailed as a collaborative win.
Despite the optimism that greeted the TFW Agreement, fish populations continued declining. Similar groups met in the 1990s, although some environmental organizations eventually left the process because they did not believe plans protected species sufficiently. Eventually, representatives from six groups – state agencies, tribes, forest landowners, conservationists, counties, federal agencies – met to determine a plan to protect salmon that would meet legal standards for the ESA and the Clean Water Act, while not crippling the timber economy.
In 1999, they issued the Forests and Fish Report with recommendations to "develop biologically sound and economically practical solutions that will improve and protect riparian habitat on non-federal forest lands in the State of Washington" (Forests and Fish Report, 2). The legislature accepted the report’s practices and the state’s Forest Practices Board adopted its rules for habitat protection. The Forest Practices Habitat Conservation Plan followed, a key requirement to satisfy ESA standards.
Salmon Recovery Act and 'the Washington Way'
While stakeholders and state agencies developed these practices, the legislature established other components to promote salmon recovery throughout the state and creating what some touted as "the Washington Way." The biggest piece was the Salmon Recovery Act that passed the legislature in 1998 and went into effect the following year. (Subsequent amendments have been added.) The law created several components for the recovery efforts. These included the Governor’s Recovery Office, the Salmon Recovery Funding Board, and the Lead Entity Program.
The governor’s office mainly coordinates and prioritizes recovery efforts and ensures the program works with all the various laws and organizations involved. The funding board receives money from the PCSRF and the state, and it oversees the distribution of funds. The board is responsible to making grants or loans for habitat projects and salmon recovery work.
On the ground, the lead entities are a locus of action in these recovery efforts. They are organizations within watersheds where projects for endangered salmon are located. The identify and prioritize habitat restoration projects through committees with representative stakeholders. They also are conduits for the funding and work. Lead entities both do the work and can partner with other organizations to work on salmon recovery throughout the watersheds. Currently there are 25 such lead entities who fall under seven salmon recovery regions. Habitat restoration is their primary focus. To support the larger recovery efforts, the state had established nonprofit regional fisheries enhancement groups earlier. There are now 14 such groups that often cooperate with the lead entities.
All these organizations aim to build local support and deepen awareness about salmon. Their rootedness in communities helps ensure local needs and restoration projects make sense and collaborate with landowners, local governments, conservation groups, tribal programs, and more. This approach relies on science and adaptive management while aiming for consensus-based decision making. This approach is called "the Washington Way."
Removing Barriers
Much of the recovery work required breaking down barriers between different groups, such as conservationists and local landowners, or tribes and the timber industry. Another focus in salmon recovery has been breaking down physical barriers in streams.
Budget processes, legislation, and local nonprofit organizations have been key components in promoting salmon recovery, but lawsuits have often been accelerators. One of the most notable has been United States v. Washington (Phase II), a continuation of what originated as the Boldt decision.
More than 25 years after the Boldt Decision, in 2001, 21 tribes and the United States filed another lawsuit in U.S. District Court arguing that Washington was obliged by treaties to maintain fish runs and habitat. In particular, it targeted culverts that impeded fish migration. Tribes and the United States insisted the culverts be repaired, replaced, or removed. Washington dragged its feet and litigated. In 2007, the district court determined that, although culverts were not the only factor in declining salmon runs, the state needed to fix them. Progress was so slow the court issued an injunction in 2013 insisting it significantly speed its work. Appeals went all the way to a Supreme Court that deadlocked in 2018, letting stand a lower court’s decision that the state had to spend billions on this. The litigation produced long and costly delays, but the state aims to complete culvert work by 2030.
Culverts are small in size but many in number. By comparison, dams are large and few. Dam removal is part of the salmon recovery process as well. Washington’s most famous dam removal happened on the Elwha River between 2011 and 2014 after several decades of advocacy by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and environmental groups. The Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act passed in 1992, which authorized the removal of two dams on the river, but politics slowed action until 2011. Salmon returned to the river above the dam sites immediately and have continued to grow as years pass. Similar stories have happened where other small or large dams have been removed.
Throughout Washington culverts, dams, and other obstructions are being removed. Some salmon advocates have called for the removal of four dams along the Lower Snake River. Federal reports have touted it as an important way to help recover salmon, but the idea is controversial and is likely to remain so. That controversy is unsurprising given how important salmon are to regional identities and economies, as well as how they and their habitat touch the vast majority of the state. Any effort to restore habit and fish populations necessarily will disrupt existing human and natural systems.
The Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office issued reports in 1999, 2006, and 2021. The first one was titled Extinction Is Not an Option. The most recent one still sounds alarms. While noting how long efforts to recover salmon have been going, it pointed out that "we’re losing more habitat than we’re gaining. Far too many salmon face increased threats that could make them extinct ... Time is running out" (2021 Governor’s update, 3). The legal system – federal and state – now support the same covenant the Coast Salish people have: to take care of salmon habitat.
