Doug Hatch (29:10)
No, unfortunately the. A lot of the fish are managed on ESA levels. Right. That's holding things on the brink of extinction. And that's one of the issues with the ESA itself. Well, for one, it's not proactive. And two, they have protections when things get really bad to save them from extinction. But there's nothing in the act that's binding. It's recommendations towards recovery. There's no requirements to recover a species. So it's just the minimal amount possible that you could do to keep this species from going extinct. And you know, that's not acceptable as a society, not just with tribes of allowing species to go extinct or, you know, we don't want museum relics that in the river that we look at, you know, we want to be able to enjoy the bounty and continue our way of life and you know, kind of getting what we signed up for in the treaties. And that's where the really, you know, sustainable, healthy and sustainable populations that we're able to harvest. Because, you know, we've talked about treaty rights and our ability to harvest, but that's a shared right that we have with, with the public right, the treaties. There's been two big court cases that kind of led to the formation of our organization and really the formation of the tribes taking a leading role. First was USV Oregon. And that was really the tribes being established as a co manager of the resource because it was a treaty. Right. So it's our, you know, we have the obligation to ensure that it persists for future generations. And then several years later, we had U.S. v. Washington that made the determination that the tribes were entitled to 50% of the harvestable run. Not just 50% of the total, the 50% of the harvestable run. And so we have the, you know, that unfortunately, you know, I've heard others, you know, what I've learned is unfortunately, we operate in gavel. The gavel fish management. Because you talk about gravel to gravel, like, right. You're inclusive of the entire life cycle. But unfortunately we work in gavel to gavel because it's just court ruling to court ruling. Yeah. And that's. I saw that you have a show out that talks about the recent litigation on the hydro operations of the, on the Snake River Dam. And that's kind of been pulled in really kind of unfortunately became just a breach campaign. But it's. To us, it's a lot more than that because with our culture, everything, the importance, everything has a purpose, a place and a purpose. And so we really have that holistic management aspect. And you know, we don't really have the silos that a lot of the state and federal agencies work for, work under. That's why, you know, we have people that want to work for tribes that really care about, you know, the resource and things like that. Because everything that we do is so broad and you know, like, I'm wearing the sturgeon hat and you know, like, all species are important to us, not just the salmon, but sturgeon, lamprey Even you know, trout and bridge lip suckers and all of those things that are a part of nature. But you know, we hold all of those things sacred as our first foods. And so that's the way we, what we bring to the table in our management aspect because you know, we're not about ESA level. We don't want museum relics, we want healthy and sustainable and we would love more than to have work ourselves out of a job. That's what I've heard one of my other bosses say. But just you know, the tools that we have to work with along the way, like you know, hatchery production. I know there's a big, a lot of issues between hatchery versus wild and the tribes do do a lot of supplementation hatchery production. But we try to bring in non conventional methods. It's not just fish factories pumping out numbers, we're you know, using. We have a genetics lab, state of the art genetics lab that we have in cooperation with the University of Idaho that's located in southern Idaho in Hagerman. So we're kind of leading the way on the genetic side. And then also the way we implement our hatcheries is not just releasing them all directly from the hatchery but taking them out to acclimation sites so they could return to areas that have suitable spawning habitat and things like that. And as Doug mentioned, we do all the monitoring at Bonneville Dam of all the stocks that are coming through. So we're able to take that information which also aids in harvest management. And just our work is so broad and diverse. We have ocean, you know, estuary program that we've acquired about five years ago now. So we're really looking, you know, like I said, gravel to gravel and bringing in all aspects and you know, the tribes have, I'd say were a lot less risk averse I think because we take that approach to be careful to do things. It's like we don't want to study things to death. You know, things get wrapped up in 10, 10 plus year studies before you could actually even do anything. It's like, and you know, myself being the fish science manager, that was kind of, I kind of thought twice about taking this job. It's like I don't want to be just a research scientist but the approach that the tribes have been taking is like applied research. You're taking actionable measures and measuring the success of those actions and you know, you use what's working and advance that and yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. And you know, we've really grown a Lot like I mentioned, those two court cases, USV Watch Washington, USV Oregon, where you know, the tribes sued the states over harvest and you know, co management and things like that. But we've came a lot a long ways in even just recently during that litigation on the Snake river, the hydro operations litigation informed the six sovereigns, that's with our four tribes in the states of Washington and Oregon and come together. And that's how we entered into a stay in litigation. It was meant to be a 10 year stay with a set of commitments over the first five years. Then there was a check in and then it could have rolled over to another five years. And we were just getting started rolling in that and it was bringing commitments to the basin and also giving us a voice to look for appropriations. It's not like we weren't trying to upend energy prices or anything like that. It's just like, okay, can you pay the true cost of the cheap electricity that you're benefiting from? And it's not really grandma's electricity or the common person, it's corporate. Right. It's industrial customers that have really the huge benefit of our cheap power in the region. And that's why like we're talking about fish in the Columbia Basin. But really it's, it's a global, a global thing. Right. Because of all of the industry that our region attracts because of the cheap power. Like back in the 80s and whatnot, we had all of the big aluminum smelters where we have none of the natural resources to make aluminum. But they were all there because it was so cheap to process because of that cheap power. And then now we're seeing the new onslaught of that is data centers. We have data centers a lot.
