COLUMBIA / SNAKE RIVERS SALMON PROJECT For more than a half-century NRIC has been a major player in the struggle to protect anadromous salmon and steelhead and dependent tribal and nontribal economies in the 260,000 square-mile Columbia River Basin, an area larger than France. NRIC helped create what has been called the world's largest fish and wildlife conservation program. NRIC has produced numerous regional and subregional plans, reports, articles, and essays, provided expert testimony before regional commissions, councils and congressional committees, and has won path-breaking lawsuits in the federal courts.

UMATILLA BASIN PROJECT NRIC assisted the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation with the lead role in years of strategic planning, negotiations, and conflict resolution with the U.S. government, State of Oregon, and agricultural industry over rights to water in the Umatilla River Basin in eastern Oregon. The resulting $200 million+ project restored irrigation depleted streamflows, restored three extirpated populations of salmon, restored tribal and non-tribal salmon fisheries, and improved irrigation water supplies. The project ended 75 years of zero sum conflict between the region's irrigated agriculture economy and the Umatilla Tribe's treaty-reserved right to fish. It did so at great net economic benefit to the general public.

HYDROELECTRIC RELICENSING PROJECT The United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is engaged in wholesale relicensing of the nation's hydroelectric infrastructure. The economic, environmental, and social stakes are enormous and far-reaching. NRIC on its own behalf, and in support of others, intervenes in hydroelectric relicensing proceedings to defend the general public interest and Native American Indian treaty-reserved rights and interests, notably fish and wildlife values.

LIVESTOCK GRAZING / WATERSHED HEALTH PROJECT Of all human activities, the grazing of livestock has had the most profound adverse impact on the long-term health and economic productivity of watersheds in the vast commons of the western United States. NRIC pioneered West-wide consciousness raising and watershed restoration demonstration projects that resolve conflict between private livestock grazing and public environmental values.

INTERNATIONAL FRIENDS OF WILD SALMON PROJECT "Qúavons nous appris de cet énorme échec économique et humain. Voilà: Les saumons ont besoin de rivières!" * Throughout much of the northern hemisphere salmon are a key indicator of environmental quality and long-term economic productivity. Transboundary salmon treaties and political protocols bind nations in common cause, or purport to do so. In fact, wild salmon populations are in crisis throughout their range. This NRIC project seeks to raise consciousness about the international scope and common causes of the problem. * "What did we learn from all this enormous economic and human cost? Voila: Salmon need rivers!" Ed Chaney, Colloque Des Saumons et Des Hommes Brioude, France, December 1993.