"If you look at the four places on the planet that salmon runs originally occurred — the Asian Far East, Europe, Eastern North American and Western North America — as the numbers of people increased, the numbers of salmon went down," said Robert T. Lackey, a salmon biologist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Corvallis, Ore., and one of the organizers of the project to protect Salmon.  "You can't have high salmon runs — wild salmon runs — and all these people and their standard of living."

According to Salmon solutions, a Columbia River based organization in the pacific Northwest, the issue regarding Salmon populations worldwide is connected to our damming of Rivers for water storage, flow control and hydroelectric power. Migrating juvenile salmon need natural river conditions — cold, clear, fast moving water — to make it to the ocean alive. Instead, according to Salmon Solutions, they sit in warm, stagnant lakes behind dams — making them late for their date with ocean currents, and more prone to disease and predators. A decline in salmon numbers was first noted officially in the 1890s.

Since the late 1970s, those numbers have dropped sharply, raising the specter of imminent extinction for many native populations. NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service has declared several population groups of salmon threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. During the early to middle years of the 20th century, attempts to aid the fish took what might be called a "mechanical" approach. As dams went up on the region's waterways and human development encroached more and more on the land, attempts were made to help fish live with these changes. Fish ladders were installed in dams, and hatcheries were built to supplement natural fish runs. In essence, this approach sought to make the fish adapt to human-made intrusions in nature. The result over the course of the century was a dramatic decline in native fish numbers.

Locally, scientists still don't know why the numbers of salmon are down so dramatically, over recent years counts, in the rivers of the San Joaquin Valley. At their peak, as many as 85-thousand Chinook salmon made their way to the Pacific Ocean and back to their spawning grounds in the Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers. But their numbers began to drop dramatically in the 1990s, with only 719 salmon counted returning last to the Tuolumne River. In the Stanislaus River, a count finished last week found a little more than 26-hundred salmon. That was 752 fewer than the same time a year ago. Scientists acknowledge a five-year study they're about to wrap up next month still hasn't pinpointed the cause for the decline in the number of salmon. But they do say ocean conditions, nonnative predatory fish, delta pumping operations and environmental problems are all contributing to the drop locally.