Chinook Watershed, Washington
A community undermined by the salmon crisis embraces an innovative restoration plan to reconnect people with place
Toward the end of February 1996, veteran fisherman Les Clark of Chinook, Washington, the fourth generation of a local fishing family, ended a three-day gillnet fishing season on the lower Columbia River with a single spring chinook salmon to share among three generations of his family.
It was not always so.
The quiet town of Chinook once prospered unimaginably from that fishery. A century earlier, more than fifty canneries lined the banks of the lower Columbia. Chinook was then known as the "salmon capital of the world" — and the wealthiest town per capita in the United States.
"A lot of people who just got into (commercial fishing) don't understand because they never had all of that, haven't seen what it was before it all went down," Les says. "But to see how great it really was and then have it all taken away from you — it's hard to sleep sometimes."
At the peak of the bonanza, Chinook resident Alfred Houchen established the first private salmon hatchery in Washington state on the quiet river near his town. It operated for forty years, until the Washington legislature banned the fixed fish traps that had supplied the hatchery's broodstock. The Columbia River fishery was already well into its long decline.
In 1967 a group of town residents organized the nonprofit Sea Resources to educate students from fishing families, and try again to revive Chinook River salmon runs. The next year the organization, based at the hatchery, launched a vocational education program in fisheries and hatchery management for local high school students, using a curriculum designed by a young teacher from Tacoma named Ray Millner.
Thirty years later, salmon runs and the salmon economy hit rock bottom. Fewer than one salmon in a thousand returned to the hatchery. Students lost interest, enrollment plummeted, and Sea Resources faced a crisis. Millner, then the group's board chair, refused to settle for defeat. He talked with Arthur Dye of Ecotrust, and the two organizations recruited a team of ecologists and fisheries scientists to take a fresh look at the twelve-square-mile watershed tucked at the mouth of the River of the West.
Restoration ecologist Charley Dewberry and his team examined the hatchery and salmon picture in the context of the whole watershed. They developed a plan to restore uplands, slopes, tributaries, valley bottoms and the estuary to a functional whole better able to support native fish - a restoration plan the community itself could undertake with the tools, resources, and commitment at hand.
This involved a hard look at logging and farm practices in the basin, not just hatchery management. The community embraced these new and challenging ideas, and Sea Resources adopted Dewberry's 100-year plan to guide its classes and hatchery practices. The program's new name — the Sea Resources Watershed Learning Center — conveyed its new vision.
Chinook is now in the fourth year of a restoration initiative intended to last more than a century. Efforts to replant streamside forests, secure upland "anchor habitats," restore tidal flows to the river's estuary, and manage the hatchery selectively to restore the abundance and diversity of chinook, coho, and chum salmon in the basin will take time. But Dewberry knows what will make the difference: "The strength of the project is the level of local interest."
More students are enrolling, and more state, federal, and private donors are contributing support. Teacher training workshops, computer mapping and boat building classes, oral history projects, and a unique native plants nursery that supplies restoration efforts around the region offer students exciting new choices. This vitality set the stage for a local land trust's acquisition of critical lands adjacent to the estuary, where over 1,000 acres of restored wetlands and renewed tidal flows will favor salmon survival.
Dewberry continues to advise the program, and other Ecotrust staff assist the teacher workshops and teach computer mapping skills. Shorebank Enterprise Pacific helped to finance an upgrade of the facility's aging septic system, while ShoreBank Pacific and its EcoDepositors supported streamside tree planting. Natural capital and community capital are slowly accumulating again.
A Chinook River restored to health, and Chinook community reconnected to its past like a stream to its floodplain cannot by themselves reverse the fortunes of the Columbia Basin. But they can reveal lessons that deserve emulation, and demonstrate new thinking about a set of old and intractable problems. From that effort, possibilities emerge.
"My own feeling is that you get out of a community what you put into it, and this is a great community," Millner says. "A tough place to make a living, I will admit, but we could change that."