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One step closer to breaching the dams!
A federal judge today ordered the U.S. government to consider the upper and lower parts of the Snake River together when deciding whether dams harm threatened and endangered salmon.
U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland, Ore., ruled in favor of environmentalists and against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation. The judge rejected the agencies’ argument that separate plans for protecting salmon were designed to get around the Endangered Species Act. Redden called a 2005 plan, known as a biological opinion, “capricious” and “invalid” under the act. He ordered the two agencies to revise the plan to correct its flaws.
Idaho users of Snake River water -- mainly farmers -- worry that the federal government might end up draining additional water from Idaho reservoirs to aid salmon migration.
American Rivers, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to Redden’s ruling, believes the cheapest and most effective way to help save salmon from extinction is to remove portions of four dams on the lower Snake in Eastern Washington. That would remove obstacles to adult fish swimming upstream to spawn and young fish swimming downstream to the ocean.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060523/NEWS0105/60523012
A federal judge today ordered the U.S. government to consider the upper and lower parts of the Snake River together when deciding whether dams harm threatened and endangered salmon.
U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland, Ore., ruled in favor of environmentalists and against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Reclamation. The judge rejected the agencies’ argument that separate plans for protecting salmon were designed to get around the Endangered Species Act. Redden called a 2005 plan, known as a biological opinion, “capricious” and “invalid” under the act. He ordered the two agencies to revise the plan to correct its flaws.
Idaho users of Snake River water -- mainly farmers -- worry that the federal government might end up draining additional water from Idaho reservoirs to aid salmon migration.
American Rivers, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to Redden’s ruling, believes the cheapest and most effective way to help save salmon from extinction is to remove portions of four dams on the lower Snake in Eastern Washington. That would remove obstacles to adult fish swimming upstream to spawn and young fish swimming downstream to the ocean.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060523/NEWS0105/60523012
