Some of you are just scraping the surface of the issue. You have to remember two important things:
!) Craven is right, many of former intact salmon streams are within or near urban areas now and the impacts of human population are so massive and profound that whatever is left of those streams simply cannot sustain a salmon population as before. Without hatcheries there would be no or very few salmon (and steelhead for that matter) in those urban streams and there would be literally no salmon fishing anywhere between mid Vancouver Island to California. Sadly, all the money and all the best intentions would not bring those streams back to sustain a wild salmon population that would even allow harvesting. There just is no true coexistence for salmon and humans under dense population conditions. And for exact those reasons were hatchery put in place. At the beginning and in their technology-confident ignorance, people thought they can simply replace nature with a bucket-bred salmon culture. So they never thought twice before daming rivers and raping spawning and rearing habitat. Since the late 80's they realized that hatcheries were not an equal replacement for nature. And that leads to the second important point.
2) After they realized that hatcheries cannot replace nature completely, they changed hatchery programs (not all but many) to enhancement programs where streams are allowed to naturally produce up to their compromised capacity and then hatcheries supplement the rest that nature simply cannot produce anymore but what is needed to satisfy the demand for harvesting and feeding the ecosystem. Without those hatcheries the entire ecosystem and our desired harvest levels would have to downgrade to a much lower category because those urban or urban-near streams cannot sustain a higher level by themselves. And make no mistake to think you could reverse evolution and return those urban streams to pre-urbanization conditions. Not happening. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement on many of our urban streams but not to a level that we could have sustainable salmon stocks without hatcheries. Whoever believes that is a dreamer - disconnected from reality.
Hatcheries are here to stay - forever - if we want to see and fish for salmon near our cities. Get used to them and support more of them on many of the other compromised streams that will never come back to harvestable levels without enhancement!
!) Craven is right, many of former intact salmon streams are within or near urban areas now and the impacts of human population are so massive and profound that whatever is left of those streams simply cannot sustain a salmon population as before. Without hatcheries there would be no or very few salmon (and steelhead for that matter) in those urban streams and there would be literally no salmon fishing anywhere between mid Vancouver Island to California. Sadly, all the money and all the best intentions would not bring those streams back to sustain a wild salmon population that would even allow harvesting. There just is no true coexistence for salmon and humans under dense population conditions. And for exact those reasons were hatchery put in place. At the beginning and in their technology-confident ignorance, people thought they can simply replace nature with a bucket-bred salmon culture. So they never thought twice before daming rivers and raping spawning and rearing habitat. Since the late 80's they realized that hatcheries were not an equal replacement for nature. And that leads to the second important point.
2) After they realized that hatcheries cannot replace nature completely, they changed hatchery programs (not all but many) to enhancement programs where streams are allowed to naturally produce up to their compromised capacity and then hatcheries supplement the rest that nature simply cannot produce anymore but what is needed to satisfy the demand for harvesting and feeding the ecosystem. Without those hatcheries the entire ecosystem and our desired harvest levels would have to downgrade to a much lower category because those urban or urban-near streams cannot sustain a higher level by themselves. And make no mistake to think you could reverse evolution and return those urban streams to pre-urbanization conditions. Not happening. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement on many of our urban streams but not to a level that we could have sustainable salmon stocks without hatcheries. Whoever believes that is a dreamer - disconnected from reality.
Hatcheries are here to stay - forever - if we want to see and fish for salmon near our cities. Get used to them and support more of them on many of the other compromised streams that will never come back to harvestable levels without enhancement!