Here's a followup with author Bruce Brown, author of "Mountain In the Clouds," who is profiled in today's Seattle Times.

One of the chief tenets of Brown's book was that state- and tribal-run fish hatcheries, slapped on as a Band-Aid fix for declining Northwest fish runs for a century, were bound to harm, not help, efforts to save wild salmon over the long haul.

Since then, many fish-watchers -- particularly sport fishermen, who benefit the most from hatchery fish because many native stocks are off-limits to fishing -- have come to see hatcheries as a vital strand in our fish web.

Many fishermen believe hatchery fish, harvested through "selective fisheries," in which only fin-clipped hatchery salmon are retained, can and should successfully coexist with wild stocks. That practice, in fact, is largely responsible for maintaining sport fishing in Puget Sound and coastal waters, even though Puget Sound chinook and other stocks are endangered species.

But hatchery fish remain controversial, and there is little widespread agreement among scientists on their impact on native stocks.

I asked Brown whether his strong opinions about hatcheries have evolved over the years.

Quick answer: No way. Hatchery fish might provide some expedient relief to harvesters, but their overall impact is negative, he said in an e-mail:

"Boiled down, hatcheries and fish farms are still a big part of the problem, not the solution. Even in those situations where they "do well," hatcheries radically impoverish the world around them. With wild fish, much of the salmons' nutritive wealth is plowed back into the wilds -- to make the Northwest we all know and love with its forested valleys and rich bays. With hatcheries and fish farms, most of the salmons' nutritive wealth is channelled off for the benefit of one species, and more than that, one imaginary coporate being.

If you don't understand anything else on this subject, you should know that hatcheries are environmental leaches that weaken the larger system. In a way, salmon hatcheries remind me of the surveillance cameras that are becoming so common in "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Our nation's wealth has been plundered and our society is now is coming apart at the seams, but instead of looking at the root causes, we violate our basic beliefs for short-sighted, short-term solutions, and then tell ourselves a thousand lies a second to cover the raw, naked fact of our actions."

The debate isn't likely to end anytime soon. Salmon management, in spite of the high stakes involved, often is as much guesswork as precise science. Fish experts now have a firm grasp on problems facing salmon in their spawning grounds. But what happens to them in the years they spend swimming in the open Pacific remains largely a mystery.

Scientists have no solid answer for why a particular run of salmon, such as Fraser River sockeye, might be 3 million fish one year, then 35 million the next. Research about ocean survival, Brown and others note, would be quite expensive, and not something economically floundering U.S. government entities are likely to undertake anytime soon.