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

Chapter 6. Salmon, People, and Place

189 Chapter 6—Salmon, People, and Place “Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” —Antoine De Saint-Exupery1 [No] big things happen for just one reason. This may sound like a trivial matter, but in fact it’s quite important. Notwithstanding the attraction of tidy, sound-bite-ready, just-so stories, most things happen not for one reason, but for many. … The more one looks at any situation, the more one marvels at the interlocking gyre of cause and effects. Part of the beauty of the world, even including its disasters, is its complexity. —William deBuys2 Of Rivers and Salmon I am a salmon biologist and I consider myself fortunate to live within sight of the Columbia River. It was once one of the world’s great salmon rivers. I often turn away from the computer, look at the river, and think about its problems and the problems of all salmon rivers. I am thinking about the river today; it is March 15, 2012. The spring Chinook are returning to the Columbia, keeping alive a ritual that has persisted for many thousands, if not millions, of years. The spring Chinook swimming up the river migrate hundreds of miles from oceanic feeding grounds to reaffirm their attachment to a special place, to the stream reach where their life’s journey began. I can’t see the salmon, but I am confident 190 Salmon, People, and Place they are there, in the muddy waters of a spring freshet. While I look out at the river, I wonder how long the people of the Pacific Northwest will look at their rivers in spring and be confident that wild salmon are on their way home. The spring Chinook will disperse to their home tributaries in those parts of the basin not blocked by dams and, in six or seven months, they will spawn. After spawning, they have one last task to perform to fulfill their evolutionary mandate to preserve their species. Once the incubating eggs are safely buried in the stream’s gravel, the adult salmon die. By their death, they give their bodies to feed and enrich the entire ecosystem. Over millions of years the river and the fish became enmeshed in a web of relationships that developed at the slow pace of evolution, giving the whole salmon-sustaining ecosystem the resilience needed to cope with change. Each generation of salmon returning to the rivers of the Northwest confronted change; gradual evolutionary change, and change due to large events such as volcanoes, landslides, and fires. Those latter changes gradually softened and then blended into the web of relationships. Salmon returning to the rivers today are confronted with changes of a very different nature. The changes occur in rapid succession and they are big and permanent. Massive walls of concrete block the path of the salmon’s migration. Dewatered rivers, high temperatures, silt, and polluting chemicals are no longer episodic events, but permanent conditions. The rate and magnitude of change is outstripping the salmon’s capacity to coevolve complementary adjustments to the new conditions. The web of relationships, which acted as a safety net against extinction, is frayed with gaping holes, leaving wild salmon dependent for their survival on the flimsy protection of the federal ESA. Eventually, but with lightning speed when compared to evolutionary change, we replaced rivers with things that still look like rivers to the humans who engineered them, but to the salmon, are impoverished substitutes. The destruction of the once boundless capacity of rivers to produce salmon was justified, made rational, and accepted as inevitable by the myth that says it’s possible and even desirable to replace wild salmon with an artificially propagated substitute. The nurturing ecological relationships—the things we can’t see, but are so critical to the salmon’s survival and the health of the ecosystem—are being degraded and stressed to the breaking point. But we are told, “Do not worry, because fish factories are a more than adequate substitute.” The few remaining wild fish are becoming aliens in their home streams. They Chapter 6—Salmon, People, and Place 191 hang on to what little habitat remains like the thin line of little oxalis plants in the clear-cut forest. This is not the inevitable or unavoidable...