Trout Unlimited vice president of government affairs, Lindsay Slater, represented salmon advocates in Congress Tuesday at a hearing ominously titled, “Left in the Dark: Examining the Biden Administration’s Efforts to Eliminate the Pacific Northwest’s Clean Energy Production.”
Slater, who grew up on a fifth-generation family farm on the Wallowa River in eastern Oregon, told the committee that we can and will replace the services of the lower four Snake River dams, but we can’t save salmon with the dams in place.
“If we allow salmon to go extinct, we are breaking the covenant with the Pacific Northwest sovereigns. This covenant is not an implied responsibility to the Tribes – it is an explicit legal obligation in Treaties, as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” Slater said in the hearing.
The House Natural Resources subcommittee on water, wildlife and fisheries took up the discussion based on a confidential document leaked from an on-going court case involving numerous litigants including Tribal nations, the State of Oregon, the National Wildlife Federation and others. Trout Unlimited is not a party to the lawsuit. The administration is expected to announce an agreement in the long-running lawsuit over Snake River salmon on Dec. 15.
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