Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery

Part II: Re-story-ation

133 Part 2—Re-story-ation Only economists still put the cart before the horse by claiming that the growing turmoil of mankind can be eliminated if prices are right. The truth is that only if our values are right will prices also be right. —Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen1 Put more bluntly, we believe the current pressures on resources are caused directly and indirectly by increasing human numbers through many different avenues … Our conclusion is that population growth must be designated as the alpha factor. —Gordon Hartman, Thomas Northcote, and C. Jeff Cederholm2 Part II—Re-story-ation 135 The passages below describe two rivers. Both were once the home of steelhead, and the Carmel still is, but its steelhead population is listed as threatened under the federal ESA. Read the two descriptions, and I’ll catch you again on the other side. The Carmel River The Carmel is a lovely little river. It isn’t very long but in its course it has everything a river should have. It rises in the mountains, and tumbles down awhile, runs through shallows, is dammed to make a lake, spills over the dam, crackles among round boulders, wanders lazily under sycamores, spills into pools where trout live, drops in against the banks where crayfish live. In the winter it becomes a torrent, a mean little fierce river, and in the summer it is a place for children to wade in, for fishermen to wander in. Frogs blink from its banks and the deep ferns grow beside it. Deer and foxes come to drink from it, secretly in the morning and evening, and now and then a mountain lion crouched flat laps its water. The farms of the rich little valley back up to the river and take its water for the orchards and the vegetables. The quail call beside it and the wild doves come whistling in at dusk. Raccoons pace its edges looking for frogs. It’s everything a river should be. —John Steinbeck3 The Los Angeles River From its beginning in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley to its mouth at the Pacific Ocean, the river’s bed and banks are almost entirely concrete. Little water flows in its wide channel most of the year, and nearly all that does is treated sewage and oily street runoff. Chain link fence and barbed wire line the river’s fifty-one-mile course. Graffiti mark its concrete banks. Discarded sofas, shopping carts, and trash litter its channel. Weeds that 136 Salmon, People, and Place poke through cracks in the pavement are the only plants visible along its course. Fish larger than minnows are rare even where the river does contain water. Feral cats, rats and human transients are the dominant animal life on its shores. —Blake Gumprecht4 Did Steinbeck accurately describe the Carmel River circa 1945? I don’t know, but an accurate picture of the river was not the reason I included the passage. I used it as a description of what all rivers are capable of and what they ought to be allowed to be. Clearly Steinbeck believed rivers are the focal point for a community of beings including fishermen, children, and farmers, as well as frogs, mountain lions, deer, and foxes. The river defines a place not only as a physical presence, but as the setting for a series of place-defining events and relationships predicated on clean, flowing water. Steinbeck’s rivers have value beyond the commodities that can be extracted, packaged, and sold. Before proceeding, I need to add a postscript to Steinbeck’s description of the Carmel River. The current condition of the Carmel is certainly not what it was in 1945. It suffers from many of the same problems that afflict the Los Angeles River. In 1999, American Rivers placed the Carmel on its Top Ten Most Endangered Rivers list.5 The Los Angeles River shows what happens when a river’s only value is the monetary worth of its commodities. Los Angeles River water was converted to a commodity of such high worth that no other attributes or values mattered. Water was extracted and sold until the river ceased to exist; its ghost now roams the empty concrete channel. Water is a river’s soul. Flowing water sustains the web of relationships that is the essence of a river ecosystem. Unfortunately the value we assign to those relationships is not recognized by...