By JIM LICHATOWICH

How many billions does it take to save the Pacific salmon? This is no joke. We've already spent three billion on salmon recovery on the Columbia River alone, yet we still don't seem to be making much progress. What will it take to turn this situation around? One year ago the alarm sounded by Endangered Species Act rang yet again nine more stocks of Pacific salmon were in trouble.

Despite the impression that salmon populations have recently plummeted, this crisis has been over a century in the making.

Understanding how we got here is necessary if we are to find our way back to a future that includes salmon. History books don't explain how each successive wave of our industrial development impacted salmon. First the fur trade, then the gold rush, then logging, fanning and fishing took their toll.

The near annihilation of beaver by trappers in the last half of the 19th century meant a major loss of salmon habitat. Today, the lack of quiet waters, which beaver ponds provided, is a bottleneck to the successful overwintering of juvenile coho. Next came the frantic search for gold. Hydraulic mining and dredging devoured entire river bottoms and caused heavy siltation, smothering incubating salmon eggs and aquatic insects on which juvenile salmon depend.

As the Pacific Northwest's first lumber mills chewed the old-growth forests to lumber, they churned out mountains of sawdust covering river bottoms and clogging the salmon's gills.

Rivers were conduits to flush logs downstream - making them a dangerous place for fish. Loggers cleared stream channels, dynamited logjams and blocked off side channels. More recent effects are nutrient and pesticide runoff.

And finally the dams. When pioneers first proposed dams, the problems they posed were no secret. Laws were passed requiring fish passage at all dams, but like most laws intended to protect salmon habitat, were poorly enforced. As humans relentlessly rearranged the rivers of the Northwest, salmon trying to follow the paths of their forebears found themselves in dead-ends and death-traps.

Yet there was a reason for our complacency. Hatcheries lulled us into thinking technology could substitute for good stewardship. We believed that we could have salmon without rivers. Now we realize hatcheries alone can't save the salmon. Genetically diverse wild salmon stand a better chance of weathering the storms of changing environmental conditions. Diversity is Nature's insurance policy. In the past, 10 million to 16 million wild salmon swam up the Columbia River to spawn; now less than 1 million salmon make the journey and of these 80 percent are hatchery fish. But genetically modified salmon suited for the hatchery environment do not necessarily have the right stuff to survive. Instead of the solution, now they're part of the problem. Hatchery salmon may out-compete wild salmon for food, or even devour them. They can spread disease to wild populations and if they interbreed with wild fish they dilute the natural gene pool and its inherent lessons of survival.

To save the salmon we must address problems in all four Hs: hatcheries, harvest, habitat and hydro. The emphasis in salmon management policy will have to shift to natural production and watershed health.

The salmon's life cycle is a chain with many links - the diverse habitats where their life functions are carried out. Salmon Restoration is the process of locating all the broken links in the chain and fixing them.

For certain populations, dam breaching could repair many of the broken links and is a major move in the right direction. Salmon need unimpeded access to spawning and rearing areas. Because salmon use rivers from headwaters to the estuary, they bump up against almost every aspect of our lives and economies. It will take our concerted efforts and shared concern to recover them.

Salmon are the clarion call, the opening round of what is going to be a continuous succession of expensive problems. We need to address this now - to do less is false economy. Comprehensive, visionary action is needed to protect the natural web of life we all depend on for survival. This means we have to let politicians know that we are committed to recovering the salmon for a whole lot of reasons.

Let's stop applying billion-dollar Band-Aids that put on a good show but in the end get us and the salmon nowhere. Instead that money should be spent on carefully planned and monitored repair of the whole foundation that supports salmon life and all other life for that matter.

There are no quick fixes but there is reason to hope. Salmon have proved to be survivors. Over the past millions of years, they have withstood ice ages, volcanic eruptions and us. If we do our part for wild salmon by restoring the links of their lives, the salmon will do their part beautifully.

Jim Lichatowich is the author of "Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis" and former chief of

fisheries research for Oregon.

Readers may write to him at:

182 Dory Road Sequim, WA 98382.

Corvallis Gazette Times, Friday 4/7/2000.

Jim Lichatowich is a member of the Independent Multidisciplinary Scientist Team assigned by the Oregon Governor Kitzhaber, the Speaker of the Oregon House, and the President of the Oregon Senate with the charter of review and advice regarding the Oregon Plan - see their reports at http://www.fsl.orst.edu/imst/reports/index.html