Salmon recovery remains critical from my point of view. After spending the last two years speaking with ocean scientists and fisheries specialists, while making the film A Sea Change, I have come to the conclusion that fish are currently confronted with an environmental "perfect storm." They have to struggle with warming waters, pollution, industrial fishing practices and now, ocean acidification. While many refer to ocean acidification as the "game ender", I think that we must work hard to protect and strengthen individual fish species as fully as possible so that they are best prepared to meet the short term challenges as we work to do the right thing and decrease CO2 emissions and thereby slow and finally stop the increases in ocean acidity.

While I fear that our time window for effective action is getting rapidly smaller, we now need new aggressive changes to our federal energy and climate change policies, laws, and regulations; we have to participate in setting emission targets at the UN Climate Change Conference in December; and we have to move our economy onto a sustainable energy platform. While this is happening, salmon must be kept as healthy and strong as possible because they will inevitably feel the stresses of the environmental costs that we have created by choosing to fuel modern life with energy derived from the combustion of fossil fuels. Our modern era has created a huge carbon debt and finally, we are beginning to understand that that debt is being called.

Even though the things we do to preserve our salmon culture here may seem like a small gesture, a tear in the ocean, in the face of overwhelming challenges like climate change, it is certainly a gesture worth making. Simply put, the salmon deserve our help. They deserve every effort we can make on their behalf; they did not ask for these difficulties and they are powerless to help themselves. So we will make the gesture, even if that's all it is. And we will be better for having made it.

Salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest are now in serious trouble because two things – abundance and diversity – in both habitat and fish populations are now mere shadows of what they were just 150 years ago.

I have no doubts that climate change and ocean acidification pose major threats to salmon and steelhead habitats, but I also think that in at least the next few decades those threats pale when compared to threats posed by the massive depletion and simplification of salmon and steelhead populations and habitats that’s taken place in the past century.

Habitat restoration, along with serious hatchery reform and careful harvest management, offers us great opportunities to turn back the clock to a time when diverse, dynamic and abundant habitat supported productive and diverse salmon and steelhead populations. I believe that we have no other choice if we want to have abundant and robust salmon populations in the future, no matter what happens with our climate.

Salmon have existed for millions of years. They have survived numerous geological events we would consider catastrophic. In geologic terms, this happened at a pace salmon were able to cope with. Human population growth and development are occurring at a pace that has created situations the salmon are struggling to overcome. If salmon are to continue to exist in any significant numbers it is incumbent on us to change our behavior and impacts on their environment. Salmon will survive given the chance.

Current recovery efforts are less than adequate, but are a start. A start to implementing the physical changes but also a start to educating society that there are ways we can coexist with salmon and our natural environment.

One step at a time…each individually…together a journey. Effort is paramount to success. We must make the effort. Success brings reward-failure will diminish us.

The goal of salmon recovery is to restore and protect the natural processes and habitats necessary to support the abundance, productivity, diversity, and spatial structure of natural populations at robust levels.

Such viable natural salmon populations are resilient to environmental perturbations like climate change and ocean acidification. In contrast, hatchery production that is currently relied on to provide harvest and other benefits is not resilient to environmental change.

Recently this has been vividly demonstrated by the crash of the hatchery-dependent Sacramento River fall Chinook. An expert panel convened by the Pacific Fishery Management Council concluded that this crash would have been much less severe had these fish been supported by healthy natural processes rather than just four hatcheries.

So, the reality of climate change and ocean acidification does not make salmon recovery efforts moot. Rather, it makes them more necessary and critically important as a means to adapt to these threats.

Problems facing salmon are the result of a century of anthropocentric stresses.  We understand some of the biggest stresses on salmon, even as we are challenged by social and scientific issues associated with over-harvest, hatcheries, hydropower, and habitat degradation.  Newer threats on the other hand, i.e., climate change and ocean acidification, are less well-understood, but will soon become problems in their own right and multipliers of existing problems facing salmon.   

Salmon are primitive and resilient fish. They persisted through historic natural climate changes with varying sea levels and temperature regimes during and after Pleistocene glaciations.  Although the current increasing rates of sea level rise and sea level temperature are unprecedented from the historical record, it would be premature to think that salmon cannot recover and adapt to changing climate conditions.  Ocean acidification may have alarming trophic consequences for salmon as many of their preferred prey are very sensitive to changes in pH.  However, the ocean has been more acidic in the distant past, and salmon may be capable of adapting to changes in the food web. Salmon have shown remarkable resiliency throughout time, and although rising sea levels, increasing sea surface temperature, and oceanic acidification appear daunting, the effects on salmon remain uncertain.  To be sure, salmon stand to benefit from recovery efforts regardless of climate change and ocean acidification, and recovery efforts can only improve their ability to evolve with rapidly developing climate changes.

The value of ongoing salmon recovery efforts in the face of climate change is substantial. If salmon are a useful indicator of fresh water aquatic function, then efforts to recover salmon via habitat protection and restoration should translate into better, more resilient aquatic systems that benefit multiple species including humans. Salmon are aesthetically and culturally important. As long as we struggle to save salmon, salmon will continue to be one of the most compelling, local poster species for making climate change real to the skeptics and critics.