Fish & Fisheries

An Oregon Perspective on Fisheries

Jay W. Nicholas
Project Leader
Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

In many respects, Oregon is in pretty good environmental shape when compared to the rest of the industrialized world. Vistas of green forests, clear sparkling streams, golden fields, and farms greet our view each day. Some of our native salmon, steelhead, and trout populations are healthy and support fisheries that are internationally famous.

Nevertheless, we have traded some measure of Oregon's environmental health for improvements in our quality of life, for cultural and economic opportunities. We have straightened rivers, cleared stream banks, filled wetlands, and replaced forests and meadows with asphalt. We have blocked salmon from spawning areas with dams and culverts. We have sometimes caught too many salmon in commercial and recreational fisheries. We have introduced non-native species that threaten the health of forests, farms, and fish. We have polluted many of our waters with the by products of our cities, our industry, and our agriculture. In many respects, our forests, rivers, soils, air, and salmon populations are not as healthy as we would like them to be.

The Oregon we treasure is threatened by the demands of a growing human population on an environment that supports both people and salmon. In striving to achieve sustainability, we struggle to achieve a balance between maintaining our prosperity without diminishing the opportunities our children will inherit.

Achieving sustainability will require learning to live within a context of finite environmental resources: climate, space, living organisms, soil, water, and air. The Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds www.oregon-plan.org began as an effort to restore populations of Coho salmon in Oregon coastal rivers to productive and sustainable levels. However, it quickly became obvious that one cannot simply save salmon. Saving salmon requires achieving sustainability of watersheds statewide that support salmon - the same watersheds that support our communities, our economy, our recreation, our spirits, and our future.

The future of salmon is in our hands. They need whole watersheds, unbroken and healthy, not a little piece of river here, another there. Are people any different? Have we forgotten how our lives, our homes, were forged from the richness of our watersheds?

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Leo Grandmontagne

Leo is a rancher and logger who has worked tirelessly to save streams for fish, both on the ground and at the political level, while also protecting local jobs.
Source: Sustainable Northwest


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