In fact, in this judge's view, anything man does to the salmon is wrong. He dramatizes this by presenting a salmon-centric capsule history of North America in which man is the constant villain. First, man-the-villain depletes the salmon. "Despite their ability to survive the catastrophic events of millions of years of evolution," the judge writes, "salmon populations have experienced substantial declines since the commencement of European settlement of the Pacific Northwest, due to overharvest and severe habitat degradation resulting from logging, mining, irrigation and construction of dams for hydropower, among other factors."
Then man-the-villain increases the salmon, building artificial -- even capitalistic -- fish hatcheries "to compensate for the declines in salmon populations and meet the demands of the burgeoning canning industry."
These hatcheries are soon "releasing far more fish fry than result from natural spawning."
But, wait! These teeming schools are not real salmon, they are man-tainted ones.
"These floods of hatchery fish," the judge observes, "can result in the appearance of a well-stocked fishery, though in actuality it would not be so without human interference."
Finally, the man-bred salmon threaten the survival of the real salmon. "Hatchery fish and wild salmon also have ecological interactions that are detrimental to the wild population," says the judge. "Hatchery fish, which tend to be larger than wild fish, compete for habitat and food and prey upon smaller wild fish."
You have no doubt discerned by now that the movement to preserve the salmon through the ESA is not really about preserving salmon. So, what is it about?
It is about shackling man. "The legislative history of the ESA reinforces this view that species are to be protected in the context of their habitats, until they are self-sustaining without the interference of man," the judge concludes. "(T)he ESA is designed to protect not just a species' genetic material, but its place in the natural world."
For those who see man as an interloper "in the natural world," few acts of government can match those that would seek to remove the effects of man from the habitat of the salmon -- which covers all the major rivers of our Pacific Coast and the ocean into which those rivers drain.
Saving the salmon from man may be the next best thing to global warming, which depicts the most productive activities of our race as a mortal threat to all of Earth.