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Once upon a time, according to Richard Wagner, three beautiful maidens disported in the river Rhine. They sang happy songs. Their long, golden hair floated prettily in the water. Their principal occupation was to guard an immense nugget of pure gold - the Rheingold.
Until the 19th century, traces of gold washed down from the Alps could be found in the gravel beds of western Europe's longest river. But natural historians say the true and original "Rhine gold" was a fish - the salmon.
The Atlantic salmon (salmo salar) was once a source of food and glittering wealth for towns and villages along all 1300km of the Rhine. The migratory fish used to swim from the western Atlantic through the North Sea to Rotterdam and up the great river to spawn in the streams of the Alpine foothills in Switzerland and Germany.
Many old buildings in Alsace, on the French bank of the river, have wooden carvings of salmon on their doors or eaves. In the 18th century, the Rhine was the most productive salmon stream in Europe.
Native salmon disappeared from the river 50 years ago, finally defeated in their heroic quest to return to their birthplace by industrial pollution, human sewage, canalisation and hydro-electric dams. Eight bedraggled, native salmon were caught in the Rhine in Germany in 1958. They were too full of carbolic acid to be eaten.
Over the past decade, after a concerted campaign by several European governments, salmon have made a spectacular return. The once fetid and rank waters of the river in the industrial heartlands of the Netherlands and Germany have been de-toxified.
The Rhine is now one of the cleanest large rivers in Europe. Salmon fry have been released in tributaries of the Rhine in Germany and France. Giant fish-ladders have been built on two dams between France and Germany. In the past 12 months, adult salmon have swum upstream as far as Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace and, say the French, also the joint capital of Europe.
But France is at the centre of a squabble with its neighbours about how far the salmon can reasonably be expected to go.
Hydro-electric dams owned by the French power giant ElectricitE de France (EDF), bar the Rhine in half a dozen places in the 100km between Strasbourg and the Swiss border at Basel. A "salmon bypass" which opened last year at Gambsheim, 16km north of Strasbourg, is the most spectacular of its kind in Europe. It has a 200m-long cascade of connected pools which enable salmon and other migratory fish to swim up to the level of the dam and then down to the river on the other side.
Visitors can watch the fish through plate-glass windows from a viewing platform below water-level. The cost of similar works on dams south of Strasbourg is estimated at about €100 million ($196 million).
EDF, which would have to foot most of the bill, has baulked at the cost. So the French Government has been trying to wriggle out of a European Union commitment, approved by Paris in 2001, to make the Rhine a "natural" river from mouth to source by 2020.
France proposed instead that migrating fish should be scooped out of the river, put in trucks and driven to Switzerland. The Swiss and German governments were not amused. Neither were nature campaigners.
Last month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy convened a two-day environmental summit intended to pole-vault France to the forefront of ecological policy-making in Europe. Efforts to raise the salmon issue were forced off the agenda after EDF lobbying. The cost of new fish bypasses south of Strasbourg could not be justified, the company claimed.
An idealistic "green" goal - a natural Rhine from its mouth to source - must give way to a more concrete "green" goal, the need to preserve and increase "renewable" sources of energy. Hydro-electric power, the company suggested, was more important than the ancient rights-of-way of salmon.
This month, the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine held its 14th annual ministerial meeting in Bonn. The German, Dutch and Swiss governments and the European Commission confirmed their intention to make the Rhine a "natural" and fish-friendly river from the North Sea to the Alps by 2020.
Paris did not oppose the declaration but did not formally restate it either. But it did abandon the idea of giving the salmon a lift in trucks.
It also agreed to build a new fish bypass at a hydro-electric dam near Strasbourg by 2015 and to "study" the building of another fish ladder around the next dam to the south at Gerstheim. It was agreed that a master plan for fish migration in the Rhine should be drawn up by 2009.
No advance was made on how to get past the barriers of the three further EDF dams before the Swiss border.
"The problem is that EDF has infiltrated all French Government thinking on this problem,"said Jean Wencker, the vice-president of Alsace-Nature and an acknowledged expert on fish populations of the Rhine.
"It has churned out disinformation and even deliberately misleading maps to confuse the issue. Its job is to produce electricity. It is not interested in fish. Fair enough. But it should not be allowed to make government policy at a time when the French Government is proclaiming itself to be the ecological leader of Europe."
One possible solution now under discussion is to bypass the remaining French hydro-electric dams north of the Swiss border by persuading the salmon to enter the "old Rhine" - a gentle, slow-flowing river which runs parallel to the canalised Rhine proper.
This would require two large-scale fish ladders, at two dams further north at Gerstheim and Rhinau. It would also need expensive work to increase the water flow of the "old Rhine" and to encourage the fish to switch from one river course to another.
Officially, EDF says it is up to the French Government and its European partners to decide what work is necessary to encourage the river's bio-diversity.
Privately, it has lobbied the French Government to resist spending more money which would bring no benefit to French rivers. It even says some of the salmon campaigners are radicals who want to destroy the economic case for hydro-electric power.
That, it says, would hurt the French Government's aim to reduce its reliance on oil and nuclear power and increase "renewable" energy sources over the next 20 years. It believes one "practical" green issue should trump another "symbolic" one.
Wencker says there is no ecological threat to hydro-electric power. Salmon-friendly dams already exist and remain viable.
He says the estimated cost of each bypass compares favourably with the annual profit from running all French hydro-electric plants on the Rhine.
But why is it important that salmon should breed in Alpine streams they have not reached, in any great numbers, for almost a century?
"We speak of our renewed respect for nature and the environment," Wencker replies. "There could be no better test of that commitment than how we treat one of our great rivers."
- Independent
