New Book Review: Managed Extinction by Rick Williams and Jim Lichatowich

“We didn’t want the book to just tar and feather everyone who works in fisheries management. That wasn’t the point, either. As we wrote, there are a LOT of really well qualified and well-intentioned, serious fisheries managers out there, but when the institution supports a paradigm that doesn’t work, and you’re expected to work within that institution, it sets the stage for failure, which, in this case, we’re calling Managed Extinction.” Rick Williams 

Published by Caxton Press in the late fall of 2024, Managed Extinction, by Rick Williams, PhD, and the late Jim Lichatowich, is arguably the hardest-hitting critique of modern salmon and steelhead management in the Pacific Northwest since Lichatowich’s 2001 Salmon Without Rivers. 

The nearly 5-year project is the culmination of a more than 35-year working partnership. Far beyond an academic critique, Williams, Lichatowich and the laundry list of credible contributors confidently and clearly outline centuries of fisheries-based insanity, and show a way out – should we so choose- through a delicate and difficult-to-achieve balance of oft-forgotten but precedent setting case studies and deeply personal storytelling. 

The esteemed authors each worked on the entirety of M.E., but each took lead on chapters focused on their respective wheelhouse, allowing their unique voices to shine through. Lichatowich: bold, radically concise and objective. Williams: also data-driven but with prose on a bit longer leash. Punchy without slipping towards anecdotal, credible without feeling dry, M.E. was consciously written in a similar style to Lichatowich’s Salmon Without Rivers; not cluttered with scientific references in the text (instead, they are notated and then all are neatly listed at the end of each chapter) that could distract from the book’s path from historical destruction, to modern mismanagement by northwest fisheries managers, to case studies that should NOT just be tools to inspire optimism, but should instead be the new paradigm. 

“The wildlife biologist John Livingston (as told by Neil Evernden) explained conceptual foundations best, although to our knowledge he did not use that term,” the introduction to M.E. states. “He said environmental problems are like iceburgs, the tip of the iceberg is where you will find the unspoken assumptions that direct programs and management actions and legitimate behavior that in turn can cause the environment crises that we have to deal with today. Hatcheries, for example, are one of the legitimating behaviors for Pacific Northwest salmon and steelhead. The hidden part of Livingston’s iceberg is what we’re calling the conceptual foundation. The problem is that the conceptual foundations are buried so deep in that culture of an organization that their influence on behavior is not generally recognized, and the assumptions they include are rarely evaluated. One of the major themes in our book is that the conceptual foundation that underpins present salmon management is flawed and needs to shift to a more ecological and salmon life history-based foundation if salmon and steelhead are to survive and flourish.” 

If M.E. has a flaw, it’s only how the plethora of examples of disconnection between what science has long shown is best for healthy fisheries, and what managers have chosen to enact as policy, may require the reader to take frequent breaks to refill their drink. 

“A lot of the ideas that run through my and Jim’s work, is that the current knowledge in fisheries SCIENCE, is not being reflected in the programs and choices of fisheries MANAGEMENT. A lot of people probably think they are the same,” Williams said. “They very much are not. Science is the research, all peer reviewed and vetted, management is what you DO for the fish. In an ideal world, science and management are hand in glove. Management is often held up as based in science, but it’s not. More of habitat work is science based, but genetics, harvest and passage activities, no. A few years ago, Jim did a deep dive into the major fisheries programs in Oregon and Washington, where leading fisheries managers are coming from, and there’s no ecology class, no evolution. But there were tons of options in fish aquaculture? I mean, what do you think you’re going to get? If that’s the tool you have, that’s what you reach for?” 

Heavy, but digestible, Williams shared that M.E. was written to strike a broad audience. 

“One of our primary audiences was simply the interested, educated conservation minded-anglers” Williams explained. “There’s a lot of technical stuff in the book, but I don’t think it reads like a technical book. Return To The River was written for an academic audience, and while M.E. HAS the references, this is a story. The secondary audience is probably the fisheries community at-large. We talked many, many times, and like our other books, we wondered, can we turn the ship with this book? The last group we targeted was fisheries education. Both undergraduate and graduate. Jim’s book Salmon Without Rivers has been used for a long time at colleges and universities in high level classes as a resource and we hope this will be used in the same way.” 

M.E. does review, but goes far beyond an analysis of the historically referenced  “Four-H’s” of hydrosystem, hatcheries, habitat and harvest impacts on wild Pacific Northwest salmon and steelhead. 

“I think of the variability of returns like a slot machine” Williams said. ”Three cherries, and the fish come back in spades. First cherry is the quantity of water: the snowpack, and that’s all about the outmigration. The second cherry: ocean conditions. The question of ‘are they thriving in the ocean?’ The third cherry is the return trip. If conditions are good, they’ll come back in spades. When you pull and get two cherries, things are ok. One or none, you get a crash year. Get three, you’ll see an uptick. Playing that way, it’s not sustainable, it’s gambling.”

Each of the authors craft individual chapters, walking through the declines of salmon and steelhead in the Snake River basin, Oregon Coastal Coho Salmon, Interior Fraser River steelhead, as specific case studies of managed extinction demonstrated namely driven by the myth of mitigation and what Williams and Lichatowich refer to as the “hatchery commodity conceptual foundation”, where technology is used to produce a commodity (salmon) for harvest and profit. 

M.E. pulls no punches and offers equal opportunity criticism of agency, industry and protected class, clearly demonstrating how regional salmon and steelhead mismanagement is mechanized, well-funded, and deeply entrenched. 

“Years ago, when I was in my final years on the science groups for the (Northwest) Power Council, we were analyzing a river for a potential hatchery. The Klickitat is a beautiful small to mid-size tributary of the Columbia, goes all the way up into some wilderness areas that the tribe controls. Anybody that wants a hatchery needs to go through all these reviews, watershed plans. One of the things I pointed out was that there was an opportunity on the Kilickitat to really do something holistic, which, of course, they chose not to do,” Williams growled. “Well, they sort of did. They do have spring chinook and they wanted to keep them in the upper part of the watershed, but the tribe also wanted all these hatchery programs on the middle and lower river, too. So, the tribe, as the manager, did what everyone has done. The Council and the region has these series of programs, and they tell that you can have wild fish, you can have a hatchery, you can have a supplementation hatchery, a  lower river harvest augmentation hatchery. Whatever you want. But, the lesson is, and time has shown, if you try to do it all, you sacrifice everything. But, because those programs are out there, and the money is there for them, they, we, all want the money, we all want the jobs, so we do all these programs, and the fish pay the price. There’s no large, strategic plan to create wild fish focused watersheds, preserve genetic diversity.” 

“To us, when we (scientists) look at the smolt-to-adult-return ratios (SAR) graphs, showing returns like the Snake River spring chinook and steelhead coming to Idaho, and it heads downhill like an expert ski-hill, there’s nothing unequivocal about that graph. It tells us the story, where we’re headed, the tragedy ahead of us if we don’t change,” Williams said. “Yet, if we look at our political leaders here in the northwest, decisions are NOT being made that reflect the imminent crisis we’re facing. It makes me wonder, when we, scientists and those like us, look at these graphs, fire alarms are going off, and nothing is happening.” 

So, Jim and I went, “what does it take for people to change?” That’s why the major point of the last three chapters which I primarily wrote, was to tell a new salmon story. I challenged Jim to go back and see where and how we could insert personal stories, ours or others, into the book.

Williams shared that shortly after reading the final manuscript, Lichatowich told him seeing him develop as a writer, editor and literary architect was one of the finest parts of working on the book together. Williams said that was one of the most memorable and powerful accolades he’d received in a long history of academic and not -to-mention fishing instructional accreditation. 

“Another interesting aspect of writing this book, we never figured out how to weave it into the book, is that Jim, well, he’s a chinook guy. If we think about a chinook, if we anthropomorphize a bit, steelhead are quick. Aggressive,” Williams said, reflecting, leaning back in his chair, as if reliving when he and Lichatowich realized their aquatic dopplegangers. “I have ADHD and I’m quick to react. Chinook, we think of as brooding, and that was more Jim. Maybe not brooding, but definitely a deep thinker. Slower to react. We were a bit of a tortoise and the hare. It was a beautiful decades long working relationship because we saw the same things, but approached them differently. We were at both ends of the spectrum, in that way, we represent a lot of dynamics of the basin, the fish, the fishing styles, the constituents.” 

Be ready. M.E. is a bitter pill to swallow. It clearly shows – again, and again and again and again – a blatant, active disregard for the public trust and demonstrates how modern fisheries management is not designed to course-correct. A bitter pill that aims to inspire a fundamental shift in mission of fish and wildlife agencies across the region, an actual commitment to data-based decision making, a recognition of our confirmation bias, lack of accountability in our sporting heritage and a willingness to adopt a new paradigm to scale the proven successes of the stories of the Elwha, Klamath, on Oregon’s Salmon River and Sockeye salmon in Lake Osoyoos and the Columbia Basin. 

Come to think of it, M.E. isn’t a bitter pill to swallow, it’s the overhead speakers in the hospital demanding a lobotomy. But, no matter how big the ask, M.E. articulates Managed Extinction, the solutions, and the motivation to pursue them, in way that feels far from extreme to the reader.

“Our goal in this book is to show that elegant solutions to recovering salmon populations – and place-based local salmon dependent economies – are not only possible, but feasible and achievable,” Williams said when asked about the importance of solutions in M.E.

“Equally important, maybe even more powerful to the story, is the clear support it would offer to the local economies to have these fish back. For instance, here in Idaho, we’re both resource rich, and resource depauperate, in ways. The reason I say that is because mining has become constrained, forest succession times are in the times of 200 years, logging has been constrained, sediment impacts have been constrained. What resources are available, that for little cost could renew itself? Salmon and steelhead.

What did I hear someone say, he went up to Riggins (Idaho) in the early 2000s (Snake basin salmon and steelhead saw an uptick in returns 2000-2003 before returning to their decades-long trend of decline), and he saw new trucks, new buildings, and new wives,” Williams said, bursting into laughter.  

-Rick Williams

Williams called M.E. his late co-author’s swan song, and said he hopes we can begin to tell a new salmon story, one focused on engaging western perspectives and technology, traditional knowledge, and adding a “third eye,” with the salmon thermselves as teachers. 

“If there’s ever a work field that can turn you into a hardened cynic, it’s Columbia River, Pacific Northwest wild fish recovery,” Williams shared with a hearty laugh. “I do burn out, but I recover quickly. I think it’s because I’m optimistic and hopeful. I expect the best out of myself, and other people, so, I think I innately lean that way. Jim and I talked a lot about how we wrote this book as a plan pointing to the future, instead of just documenting the loss of things. But, the book will serve both purposes, either way.”