A Snake River-Colunbia River Fish Story
There are certainly enough claims for ‘equity’ these days and salmon may not strike you as having a voice in the discord that’s out there, but Congress thought they did. Admittedly, they thought that some twenty-five years ago, a full ten years before Larry Craig became the Senator from Idaho and set out to erase equity as a salmon standard.
In 1980, Congress passed a law ordering that salmon in the Columbia hydro-system receive "equitable treatment," along with electricity generation, irrigation and barge transport. I don’t know how exactly you measure being equitable to a salmon, but those were days when Congress worried about such things. For that altruistic concern, the created the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that sells power from federal dams.
So far, so good.
That twenty-five year ago legislation created the Fish Passage Center, a tiny fish-science organization with just 12 employees that counts salmon in the river ecosystem, to see how they’re doing. …