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Critiquing the Critic by Matt Fisher Opinion, The Oregonian, October 30, 2003

There a few things Howard Morgan misjudged in his opinion article about salmon and dams (Oct. 20, OregonLive). First, an actual environmental indicator of salmon recovery is not how many hatchery fish we can raise and truck over a dam; rather, it's the amount of naturally returning wild salmon that can bypass the dams on their way to the ocean and on the way back, a feat that hatchery fish have to do only once. Yes, we may have had record returns recently, but not of wild returning salmon. Additionally, the record runs are relatively big now but small compared to 200 years ago, even with the hatchery fish counted.

Morgan also seems to have an awkward mistrust of scientific sampling procedures and population studies. It's quite obvious that we can't count every fish in a river, but thanks to the miracle of mathematics we can make accurate projections about fish populations.

Related Pages
A Foolish Focus on Allegedly 'Lethal' Dams, by Howard Morgan, The Oregonian, 10/20/3