Editorial:

In January, the Wild Fish Conservancy — the same Washington-based conservation group that unsuccessfully sued to shut down last year’s SE Alaska troll fishery for king salmon — filed a petition with the federal government to list Alaskan Chinook salmon as a threatened or endangered species and designate critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act.

This action obligated the National Marine Fisheries Service to conduct a 90-day evaluation of the petition.

And despite finding that the petition “contained numerous factual errors, omissions, incomplete references, and unsupported assertions a...