Trout Unlimited Alert

[Dryrod]

November 28, 2007

[black]Dear Friend,
[/black][url "http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=bhKRI7OFLjIUKaJ&s=frKSIWNFLiJKLXNEIpE&m=lmJWKhM3KpLeG"][black]Please visit our online action center before December 15th [/black][/url][black]and tell NOAA Fisheries (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - National Marine Fisheries Service) that you demand all options be considered in the federal recovery plan for Columbia-Snake River salmon and steelhead, including lower Snake River dam removal.[/black]
[black]WHY WE CARE
[/black][black]The struggle to recover what was once the world's largest Pacific salmon and steelhead producer - the Columbia-Snake River Basin of the Pacific Northwest - is now in its second decade, and has become a story of gridlock, inaction and waste. It has cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars -and has squandered critical years fighting over salmon and steelhead that could have been spent recovering them. And the latest effort by the agency in charge of a recovery plan for Endangered Species Act-listed salmon and steelhead in the Columbia-Snake offers little new. Let's not add the nation's wild salmon and steelhead legacy, centered in the Pacific Northwest, to the list of things we wasted when history remembers this story.

On October 31, NOAA Fisheries released its third attempt at a recovery plan for salmon and steelhead. Federal courts ruled the agency's previous two plans were inadequate and illegal. Unfortunately, the agency's Halloween offering was more trick than treat, offering too few real recovery actions and still refusing to even consider the one recovery action that the vast majority of scientists maintain is necessary - removal of four outmoded dams on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington. [/black]
[black]Science right now paints a still hopeful but increasingly urgent picture when it comes to the recovery possiblities of the ESA-listed salmon and steelhead affected here. That science tells us that the ingredients are there - the genetic integrity, the intact spawning and rearing habitat, the ecological diversity and abundance - that would allow many of these irreplaceable wild stocks to recover themselves. That window of opportunity is closing, however, and the fish need help from us now in order to keep it open and to see real and lasting recovery through it. That help, the science says, must come in the form of significant change in the dams blocking the lower Snake River.[/black]
[black]WHAT YOU CAN DO[/b][/black][url "http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=ekIXJgPRKmL1IkI&s=frKSIWNFLiJKLXNEIpE&m=lmJWKhM3KpLeG"]
[black]Please visit our online action center before December 15 and contact NOAA Fisheries [/black][/url][black]to let them know you demand all options be considered in the federal recovery plan for Columbia-Snake River salmon and steelhead, including lower Snake River dam removal.[/black]
[black]Thank You,
--
[/black][black]Alan Moore
Acting Director Pacific Salmon
Trout Unlimited

[/black][/url] [black][/black] [black][/black] [black]Trout Unlimited, 1300 North 17th St., Suite 500, Arlington, VA 22209
Copyright 2007 Trout Unlimited. All rights reserved.[/black]

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