Saving Seafood

Bolder efforts needed to save Northwest’s endangered orcas, report finds

July 14, 2025 — Efforts to save the Northwest’s endangered orcas are not working on either side of the U.S.-Canada border, according to an international panel of scientists.

In a new report, the panel of 31 researchers call for bolder measures to bring the endangered whales back from the brink of extinction.

The whale experts say these orcas urgently need comprehensive action for quiet, clean, salmon-rich waters.

“It’s a declining population, and it’s a population that we predict will be declining for a generation or two, and then that decline will accelerate rapidly towards extinction if we don’t turn this around quickly,” said Rob Williams, chief scientist with the nonprofit Oceans Initiative in Seattle and one of the report’s coauthors.

The salmon-eating orcas, known as southern resident killer whales, were declared an endangered species in Canada in 2001 and in the United States in 2005.

Read the full article at KUOW

US acknowledges Northwest dams have devastated the region’s Native tribes

June 19, 2024 — The U.S. government on Tuesday acknowledged, for the first time, the harmful role it has played over the past century in building and operating dams in the Pacific Northwest — dams that devastated Native American tribes by inundating their villages and decimating salmon runs while bringing electricity, irrigation and jobs to nearby communities.

In a new report, the Biden administration said those cultural, spiritual and economic detriments continue to pain the tribes, which consider salmon part of their cultural and spiritual identity, as well as a crucial food source.

The government downplayed or accepted the well-known risk to the fish in its drive for industrial development, converting the wealth of the tribes into the wealth of non-Native people, according to the report.

Read the full article at the Associated Press