I was e-mail queried the other day by an unknown reader who, it turned out, was a blogger interested in my opinion about continuing the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program, which began in 1967 with the now impossible goal of establishing a viable sport fishery.

The question read: “Gary, is it fair to say you’re against the restocking effort because it’s ineffective, or because it’d be good to use those funds in another way?”

I first spotted the query at work going through my Web mail during a brief dead spot, made a note of it and revisited it upon retuning home after midnight. That’s when my cranial wheels got to spinning like bald tires in a shiny black mudhole. Yes, I have often called the program a failure and cited numbers, ones the experts implore us to ignore, to support my position. No, we never will enjoy that pie-in-the-sky sport-fishery we set out to establish way back when. And now, with the herring runs bordering on extinction and shad runs greatly diminished due to global warming and other factors, all Connecticut River anadromous fish migrations could be endangered. Still, I can make a case for continuing the cooperative, interactive, 41-year-old restoration effort, which, despite the salmon failure, has been a positive conservational influence on streams big and small throughout the Connecticut River basin.

I guess it comes down to politics and philosophy, and anyone who has read this space for any length of time knows I’m no conservative. The question I ask myself is: Where would we be now if there had never been a salmon-restoration program? What would our Millers and Deerfield rivers look or smell like today? How about the Chicopee and the Westfield; what would their status be? So it really shouldn’t come down to one issue, salmon, when assessing the restoration program, because it runs much deeper than that.

I remember the Connecticut and Millers rivers when you wouldn’t want to stick your little toe into them for more than an instant, that filthy. Today people are water skiing and bird watching and swimming, all byproducts of salmon restoration and river clean-up.

And how can our evaluation of the failed program come down to dollars and cents given the trillions we’re wasting elsewhere on far more damaging, potentially world-altering adventures for the benefit of greedy billionaires?

So, yeah, the salmon program has been a failure. There’s no other way to evaluate it. And had the shepherds of the program done their homework before embarking on the project, they would have learned that the Connecticut River never was an important Atlantic salmon river, except for a perhaps a 300-year window during the Little Ice Age, which happened to coincide with New England settlement.

But pull the plug? Why?

Like I told the blogger who queried me: To me, the vocal critic, 200 annual salmon returns is better than none. But that’s just one man’s opinion, one who is light-years removed from mainstream political thought.

We could and often do spend far more on less worthy projects.