Wild Fish Conservancy v. Kenneth Salazar

The historian Donald Worster described the Columbia River as the river that died and was reborn as money. The Columbia River Basin was once home to one of the world’s largest salmon runs, but over the course of the twentieth century the main-stem Columbia and its tributaries were radically re-engineered to become the most hydroelectrically developed river system in the world, incorporating more than one hundred and fifty dams. Nw. Res. Info. Ctr., Inc. v. Nw. Power Planning Council, 35 F.3d 1371 , 1375 (9th Cir.1994). In combination with deforestation, overfishing, irrigated agriculture, grazing, mining, and urbanization, the hydropower system reduced native salmon and steelhead populations from levels of mythic abundance to the brink of extinction. Id. at 1375-76.

This appeal concerns the control of water necessary to sustain native fish populations in Icicle Creek, a tributary of the Wenatchee River, which is itself a tributary of the Columbia. The Wild Fish Conservancy and Harriet S. Bullitt (collectively, “the Conservancy”) allege that the United States is improperly diverting water from Icicle Creek to the Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery (the “Hatchery”) and…