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Fishy Thinking Salmon and the Persistence of History in Urban Environmental Politics M a T T h e w K l i n G l e [ 73 ] When the flood waters came, Jennifer Forrey knew what to blame. The weather was only partly at fault. On the evening of December 14, 2006, a powerful low-pressure system slammed into the Pacific Northwest, delivering heavy rainfall and hurricane-force winds. Some two million residents from southern British Columbia to Oregon lost power for days, some for weeks. At least eight people died and damage estimates ran into the tens or hundreds of millions. Forrey was one of the many victims. She and her partner, Jack Lawless, fled their West Seattle home at the height of the gales.When they returned, they found their newly renovated basement filled with water and their seventeen-foot aluminum boat floating in the driveway. The mangled garage door dangled in its tracks. Another likely suspect was Pilchuck Construction, a private contractor rerouting natural gas lines in the neighborhood. Workers had left dirt and gravel piled on the street near storm drains, but that alone was not enough to cause the severe flooding. In Forrey’s opinion, the real problem was the cloth filters mandated by state authorities to prevent construction debris from damaging endangered salmon habitat downstream. Across Seattle, almost 350 homeowners and businesses reported that drains blocked by clogged filters had led to extraordinary flooding. In the recriminations that followed the so-called Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm, city officials accused builders of not removing the filters. Alan Justad, a representative for Seattle Public Utilities, retorted,“we hadn’t gotten complaints about these inserts until this big storm.” In the minds of Forrey and other waterlogged Seattleites, the blame came down to one culprit: salmon.1 In the spring of 1999, the National Marine Fisheries Service tried to stop ebbing Chinook salmon runs. Seattle and its neighbor to the south, Portland, Oregon, [ 74 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e were now the first urban areas in the United States to face an Endangered Species Act listing. Endangered salmon had become an omen of urban growth gone amok. In the words of then-mayor Paul Schell, salmon were also “the fish that might save Seattle”—provided that Seattleites learned to stop and even roll back sprawl. If Seattle needed saving, however, salmon were an expensive indulgence. As James Vesely, editorial editor for the Seattle Times, explained soon after the 1999 federal edict, residents needed to expect “major confrontations of property rights, tough limitations on recreation time and space, and residential development.”“Likewise,” he continued, “political careers and campaign strategies” would revolve on who could“deliver a salmon campaign that ignites the hearts of voters.” No wonder that many since have questioned the premise behind Schell’s naïve assessment since salmon have divided northwesterners from the beginning of American rule in the former Oregon Country, if not before.2 Ultimately, the debate over salmon is less about the fish than about one of the oldest and most enduring conflicts in American society: the longing for community . For more than a century and a half, disputes over salmon have figured into almost every argument in and around Seattle over how to balance society and environment. A century ago, the terms of the debate revolved around improving nature to improve society by redirecting rivers, leveling hills, filling estuaries, and luring industry. By millennium’s end, restoring nature propelled discussions over redefining human community. The story of Seattle’s salmon suggests a more complicated view of how history, human and nonhuman, creates and splinters the idea of community through time. Paying attention to the persistence of the past can suggest how, if Seattleites think historically, they might be able to rebuild a city that is home to salmon and people, too. The paths that connect past to present stretch back into the epoch before human time, beginning with the unique evolutionary adaptation called anadromy, a trait shared by all species of Pacific salmon, members of the genus Oncorhynchus . The rising and falling of the ocean, coupled with the advance and retreat of great Pleistocene Era ice sheets, cut ancestral salmon off from either salt water or fresh, in alternating cycles, compelling them to migrate between the two for survival . Pacific salmon thus became anadromous: born in freshwater, maturing at sea, and then returning to spawn and often die in lakes and streams...

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