Maine residents have two choices in approaching the hearing today with federal wildlife officials over the potential endangered-species listing of Atlantic salmon: They can stomp their feet, make threats and scream about the injustice of it all or they can go in and state their case calmly, with the best relevant information they have. A tip — the feds have heard screaming before. It doesn’t work.

What might work for Maine, however, is a renewed effort for its salmon-recovery plan, a thorough economic assessment of the impact of a listing under the Endangered Species Act and a strategy for economic recovery based on the assessment. Maine lawmakers already have begun the first item, but they need to spend time on the next two, providing residents with good information — as opposed to the guesswork and rumor Maine currently is using — and a clear path if a listing does occur.

The time to plan is now, while the state and the private sector still have an opportunity to play a significant role in a listing process. It will be too late if Maine waits until its legal appeals are exhausted before taking these steps. And, practically, residents cannot expect to hurl insults at federal officials for the next year while the listing is being debated and then have the feds give Maine any sort of break if a listing does occur.

People attending the meeting in Machias today might recall the state’s encounters with the right whale nearly three years ago. At the first meeting on that endangered species, plenty of speakers — mostly the nonfishermen — raised the roof with their imprecations against the federal agencies. And nothing was accomplished. It was only later that a compromise was reached, when the people whose livelihoods were directly affected by the proposed rule changes knew that shouting wouldn’t get them anywhere and they sat down with the regulators to discuss things calmly.

More than 1,200 plants and animals are listed as threatened or endangered. Maine has 21 on the list; California, with one of the hottest economies in the nation, has 259. A 1995 study by Stephen Meyer, director of the Project on Environmental Politics and Policies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concluded that “a state by state comparative analysis across three consecutive five year periods reveals … higher numbers of listed endangered species are associated with higher rates of economic growth and corresponding population pressures.”

Dr. Meyer makes a point of observing that just because a state does well overall doesn’t mean that a community within that state is unharmed. But his work does give Maine reason to go slow on its doomsday conclusions. Better, it provides incentive to renew the effort for recovery — both economy and salmon — in Washington County.