Salmon and Complexity: Challenges to Assessment

Salmon in the U.S. Pacific Northwest are in widespread decline despite countless environmental assessment studies and billions of dollars spent. Having been involved in environmental assessment for more than three decades, I am forced to conclude that this decline tells us that our established practices of assessment and management are fundamentally deficient. Rather than studying the salmon, we should examine our own practices. These practices presume that, if individual actions are found to be beneficial through analytical assessments, the cumulative outcomes of many actions will also be beneficial. This “linear” presumption is embedded in institutions, analytical methods, and assessment practices. For a whole class of emerging problems, including declining salmon, this presumption is fundamentally wrong. Declining salmon provide a warning that our own analytical habits of thought and notions of progress are leading to outcomes that are both destructive and contrary to our best intentions. This paper is a response to this warning.