Since passage of the Endangered Species Act 50 years ago, more than 1,700 plants, mammals, fish, insects and other species in the U.S. have been listed as threatened or endangered with extinction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has counted 160,000 juvenile winter-run Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River this year, down from an average of 1.3 million.
Damming the powerful waters of the Columbia River was a boon for cheap, clean electricity. But the fish that swam those waters are dying out. And the agency in charge isn’t stopping that.
A study directed by Daniele Tonina, an ecohydraulics professor at the University of Idaho, finds that spawning areas for Chinook salmon in Bear Valley Creek are disappearing due to slower rivers and lower water levels.
The U.S. government promised Native tribes in the Pacific Northwest that they could keep fishing as they’d always done. But instead of preserving wild salmon, it propped up a failing system of hatcheries. Now, that system is falling apart.
Farmers in Washington State and British Columbia want to dredge the Nooksack River. Native communities and scientists say that will doom the endangered Chinook salmon.
