September 11, 2013
Wednesday AM

Heather Hardcastle's August 29 letter of advice to Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell was completely misleading on one important point. While the salmon resource is indeed a very important part of the Southeast economy, it definitely does not depend on "intact watersheds".

The environmental community has begun a push to try and convince the public that untouched watersheds are necessary to ensure healthy salmon runs. In this telling, any drainage basin that has had any timber harvested, roads built, hydro development or other disturbance is compromised and unable to continue producing salmon in historical abundance, if at all. Science as well as a hundred years of experience disproves that. This year's record Southeast pink salmon run is further evidence of how false the idea is. Pinks are the smallest and most numerous of our salmon and are adapted to use many small streams that other salmon cannot use. Many of them are in areas of past or present timber harvest. If these "impacted" watersheds were unable to produce good fish runs as the letter suggests, then the overall run would not have set an all-time record. The idea that development necessarily dooms the fishery of a watershed is just the latest attempt by wilderness-only advocates to lock away all possible land from any other use.

The notion is simplistic but possibly attractive to people unfamiliar with the history of many developed stream basins with long sustained good fish production. Since the beginning of large scale logging in the 1950s, stream systems such as White River and Carroll Creek on Revilla Island, Maybeso - Harris River, Steelhead Creek, Thorne River, and Staney Creek on Prince of Wales, or Indian Creek near Sitka, to name a few better known ones, as well as many others have continued their historic salmon production. Logging management to conserve fishery values have continued to improve during all the 60 years since then. The science of stream morphology developed during the 1970's and 80's and buffer strips to preserve streamside conditions were instituted. The Department of Fish and Game halted their previous practice of hiring logging companies to remove windfalls and half-buried trees from stream beds, and now has projects under way to artificially place them back.

The Forest Service on federal lands and the Alaska Forest Practice Act on State and private lands ensure that timber harvest takes place without endangering salmon migration, spawning or rearing habitat. It is those practices of careful management, not untouched wilderness conditions, that will ensure our salmon resource into the future.

Eric Muench
Ketchikan, Alaska

About: "I am a retired forester with 50 years experience living and working in southeast Alaska"

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