In Memoriam

Jim Lichatowich

May 10, 1941 – April 28, 2024

It is hard to exaggerate Jim Lichatowich's contributions to fisheries science, management of Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp., and environmental history, philosophy, and ethics. Jim was a beloved father, husband, and grandfather, and a gifted research biologist, agency administrator, consultant, writer, and woodcarver. He died April 28, 2024 in Portland, Oregon. Jim was our mentor and friend. His unconventional career path left an extraordinary legacy to salmon conservation.

Jim enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served for 4 years immediately after graduating high school. He was proud of his military service. In 1973, after receiving his Oregon State University MS in fisheries and working for a few years as a consultant, Jim took a research position with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He rose quickly through the agency ranks to become head of the Research Section in 1979 and Assistant Chief for the Department's entire Fish Division in 1983. During 15 years of state government service, Jim nudged the agency toward a more rigorous science-based approach to salmon conservation and fisheries management. The rapidly growing research group thrived under his capable leadership. As Assistant Chief of Fisheries, Jim assumed responsibility for developing species management plans, including the first statewide plans for Coho Salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch and Chinook Salmon O. tshawytscha, steelhead O. mykiss, and native trout.

In 1988 Jim began working with AFS Endangered Species Committee members Willa Nehlsen and Jack Williams on a broad West Coast status assessment of Pacific salmon stocks. The seminal 1991 paper in Fisheries titled, “Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads: Stocks at Risk from California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington,” made it painfully clear that salmonid decline was not confined to a few scattered watersheds. The paper's list of several hundred at-risk stocks of Pacific salmon, steelhead, and Coastal Cutthroat Trout O clarkii revealed a systemic management failure over a vast northern Pacific region.

Recurring fishery management failures motivated Jim's determined search to understand the historical and ecological roots of the salmon crisis. To focus his search, Jim traded his prominent role as a state fisheries administrator to become a field biologist for the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe on Washington's Olympic Peninsula in 1988. Three years later, he became an independent consultant to ensure the flexibility to set his own agenda. Over the next decade Jim and his coauthors published dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers, book chapters, and technical reports about the ultimate sources of salmon decline and alternative strategies for recovery. Jim served on numerous scientific review panels and provided technical advice for salmon studies and recovery programs from the Skeena River, British Columbia, to the Sacramento River, California.

For all his scientific achievements, many knew Jim primarily as a storyteller, an engaging writer of conservation and natural history essays and books. Jim had that rare talent for translating complex ideas and relationships with engaging clarity, wisdom, and even passion. Jim's first book, Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis, received wide acclaim for its insightful synthesis of geology, environmental history, and ecology, tracing the salmon's decline to “a vision based on flawed assumptions and unchallenged myths.” His second book, Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery, offers a personal and philosophical view of the salmon crisis and proposes an alternative fish conservation story grounded in “the history of the human–salmon relationship” and “an ethics of place.”

On March 3, 2016, Jim received the Oregon Chapter of the American Fisheries Society's Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor he greatly appreciated given the criticism he had often provoked for questioning status quo fishery management. During the next 8 years, he suspended most of his consulting and writing activities to teach himself wood carving and to create beautiful replicas of the birds and fish he loved. However, Jim's resolve to promote an alternative salmon story never waned. The final installment of Jim's salmon trilogy, written with his good friend and frequent collaborator, Rick Williams, will be published this fall. Managed Extinction: The Decline and Loss of Salmon and Steelhead in the Pacific Northwest highlights examples of scientific progress toward rebuilding salmon populations. It also exposes the wide gap between ecological understanding and fishery management. Jim's vision for creating a new human–salmon story clearly remains a work in progress. His life's work has left an enduring impact on the fisheries profession and provides a framework for meeting the many challenges ahead.

Watch a video tribute to Jim at https://bit.ly/3SGhAKq.