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The MeatEater Podcast
Ep. 217: Mark Kurlansky on Saving Salmon
Play Episode
1h47m
Steven Rinella talks with Mark Kurlansky, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis.
Topics discussed: Mark being a lifelong fisherman; fisheries and over fishing as only minor problems by comparison; how salmon get hit by everything we do wrong; the 11-foot-high jump of the salmon; Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain and dedicated fly fisherman; the Atlantic Ocean's decreasing carrying capacity; why catch it if you're going to release it?; calibrating the success of salmon stock recovery to population numbers from centuries ago; environmentalists spending too much time trying to stop things rather than fix things; subject as a proxy for your soapbox issue; the problem with solutions; New Deal dam building; dumbed down wild salmon; celebrating the completion of your 33rd book (Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate) by beginning to write your 34th book; and more.
00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bog bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X All right, everybody, not not that we have guests, not that we ever have unspecial guests, Like I don't want former guests who are listening to to feel broken hearted and beaten down when I say that we have a special guest, because they right, no one wants to hear that. But but it's it's like in the specialness of all our guests, there's there's one that is rising up a little special right now where we have on author Mark Kurlansky. And I'm sure like everybody out there is familiar with some of his books. Um in my world for sure, UM being familiar with Mark's book cod and his book Salt, which seemed to make its way, you know, onto every coffee table and bookshelf from the country. Also the author of The Big Oyster, A World Without Fish, And we're here today to talk about Mark's new book Salmon and about salmon in general. So, uh, welcome Mark, Thank thanks for joining us. And we're still in like our COVID nineteen recording situation where much too you know much to my shore grin, we are not in the same room together. Mark is is hold up in Manhattan. But thanks for joining us. Mark. It's my pleasure. Be nice to be in Montana right now. But what can I do? No, I think relative to many other places in the country, we have it pretty good right now, even though we are still under you know, stay at home orders by the government. But um, it's it's a pretty good place to pretty decent place to do that. Ah. I caught this. This is one on one of my top questions and were we already talked about it. This is what we're setting up our equipment. Uh, you're a fisherman. Explain your Explain your fishing life a little bit to people. Well, um, yeah, I've I've always been a fisherman. Uh for small time. When I was young, I was a commercial fisherman. Oh oh really okay, Yeah, Well I'm from New England and um, when I was getting out of high school, I thought what could be better than too? You know chish on commercial boats and uh and and I actually did love it, but I was young. It gets to be just to be less by as you get older. But I've also always been a sports fisherman. I I I started off like most New England kids who don't have a lot of money. Um, serf casting for stripers and blues, which you know, if you ever serf cast, and what what that does is it it gets you obsessed with the art of casting. And once you become obsessed with the art of casting, you inevitably go to fly fishing. It. Nowadays fly fishing is most of the time, is the only fishing I do. Every once in a while, I go to the ocean. Your book on on salm and um, I hate. I don't want to say this. I hope people listen to the whole interview because I don't want to start out on a sour note. But your your your book Hunt Salmon One's up. You provide a pretty doom view on what the future of these creatures is. Uh. And you you catalog this centuries long collapse that's that's ongoing today, that this collapse of salmon stocks and salmon fisheries. You know, around the world where salmon can be found. But I find that right away, and starting to go through your book, I noticed that you would now and then speak fondly or empathetically of commercial fishermen, and you even give some recipes and talk about cooking salmon and eating salmon. And I got to wonder if you were writing a book about the collapse of the elephant somehow, it seems that you would not put elephant recipes in that book. Well, can you explain how those things can coexist? Yeah, because there there there isn't a sustainable um elephant hunting system. Uh, there is, your say, emmen um. Salmon is actually uh one of the easier fish to regulate a fishery for because they're very predictable and we know what they're doing and when they're doing it um. And really all you have to do is count the number of fish that go up a river to spawn, which you can do from a tower or from an airplane. I mean you can just see them. And when enough fish have spawned, then you tell the fisherman okay for a certain about number of hours, now you can fish. And this works quite well in a few places where there's still a healthy salmon runs. But you know, the reason I decided to do this book was because in n seven I came out with my book on cob and this was as the northern stock in the Grand Banks was collapsing and people were really the first time seriously thinking about the problems of overfishing and regulating commercial fisheries. Um I mean the general public, use fishermen. I mean, when I was on commercial boats in the nineteen sixties, it was all fishermen talked about. But now by the end of the people who were thinking about it. And that's what my book was about. And since then I've been monitoring fisheries and what's going on, and it's become clear to me that over fishing and regulating fisheries is a minor problem. It's one of the smaller problems. In fact, if you could find a fishery where that was the only problem, it would be wonderful, it would be so relatively easy to fix. But the problems are far more complex than that. And I thought that salmon was the perfect way to make that point, because being an anadromous fish living both in freshwater and in the ocean, it gets hit by everything that we do wrong. So the problem is not that we're eating fish or fishing them commercially. Um, the fact is there's places like most of the areas of Atlantic salmon, there is no commercial fishery anymore, and the fish are still becoming rarer and rare. So, I mean, what's going on? You know, there's deforestation, there's building dams, there's pollution, there's bad farming practices, there's urban sprawl, and there's climate change, and climate change and climate change huge problem. And so basically, if you want to save the salmon, all you really have to do is save the earth and then it'll be saved. Yeah. And the intro at the end of the book as a prologue that starts out with a couple uh you know, biography biographies or more like character portrait of a couple of different commercial salmon fisherman and then you you end the prologue by remarking, how you know there still live It's remarkable that we still have a commercial fishery for salmon. And you say that this isn't a book about over fishing. You know, it's like a like a very it feels like an very important and a very important point you want to make UM. But you go into like what it would take to save salmon, and you list some things that seems so uh impossible that it left me wondering, um, if we had some wiggle room in there, because the things that we would need to do, frankly are very very hard to picture us pulling that together. And so it left me wondering, is there a plan B that we can be open to and maybe maybe we can return into that or you can tackle that one now, or we can get to it as our conversation moves on. Well, look, if we can all pull together because we're being attacked by a pandemic and close down the economy and start from zero and rebuild, UM, then we could do that because of climate change. Also, climate change is a far greater threat than a pandemic. In fact, a pandemic is just one of the threats of climate change. UM. I sometimes wonder why we have failed to get that message across. But we really have to do drastic things. But when I look at the whole history of salmon, and you know, going back to ancient times, and there were a lot of talks about UM blocking rivers. Blocking rivers is one of the huge issues and even in the Middle Ages there were ordinances against blocking rivers, and the Magna Carta specifies that the King of England cannot block a salmon river. Um and the problem of overnetting and and damning we're huge problems. But in the nineteenth century, uh, along came the Industrial Revolution, and I mean, if you look at Britain, I mean they built all of these uh mills which they powered by dams that blocked rivers, and then the mills dumped their pollution into the rivers, and soon the rivers of Britain were completely dead. And then in New England, people, uh many of British origin, did the exact same thing. And then you know, it was largely New Englanders who went out west and got this great idea of how to build this Pacific Northwest by blocking the rivers and having hydroelectric dams and producing more energy than anybody else had to build this economic powerhouse. So I was researching all of this, and I was thinking, why isn't anybody learning anything? And then I realized, because they're not trying to learn anything. Uh. They regarded these things that they did as tremendous successes. They did make Britain the greatest industrial power in the world. They did make New England the greatest industrial force in North America, and they did take the Pacific Northwest, which had very little economic activity, and build a huge economy based on electricity from hydro electric games. These are great successes um that are destroying the planet. And so what's really happening here is that we need to rethink our whole idea of economic development. To develop in a eonomy does not necessarily mean that you have to destroy the earth. Uh. You have to look for ways of developing that are not destructive, um, and we need to do that fairly quickly. I mean the the Europeans who came to America and looked at the Native Americans whose lives depended on salmon, uh, wondered why they're salmon stocks weren't getting depleted like the white people's were. And they came up with a couple of ideas that they didn't have enough fishing skills over fish, and that they only used this for you know, sustainable ability for food, they didn't use it for commerce. And this was completely wrong. They had economies, they they have built villages, they traded between them salmon was an important commodity of trade, and they were brilliant salmon fisherman. If you read the journals of Lewis and Clark and Mackenzie and any of the early explorers, you know if they if they wanted salmon, they had to find an Indian because the Indians were the ones who knew how to catch them. So it was such a flourishing salmon industry. Why, um, why didn't they destroy the salmon stocks like we did, Because the founding principle of developing their economy was that you can't destroy the habitat. You have to maintain the river. You have to treat the river respectfully, you have to treat the salmon respectfully. And I submit that we need to change their thinking. I know you make that well. I want to return to that, manx. I actually have a question about that coming up down the list here, But first I want to lay a little more groundwork for people, um and touch on something you already touched on where you I want to connect to thoughts of years one about that the survival of salmon is absolutely tied to the survival of the planet. And also can you touch more on anagrem like explain to people what that means, why that makes the fish special, and why it makes them all that much more vulnerable. And you talked to you in your book about the cost the anagremy uh entails like why it's a risky life strategy. Yeah, you know. I said in the book that the purpose of the book was not to say, you know that this is an incredible animal and it would be really sad if we lost it. However, it is an incredible animal, and it would be really sad if we lost it. I think salmon is one of the most remarkable animals in the animal kingdom. Um a fish that can jump eleven feet in the air. I mean think about that. That would be like a human being jumping fifty ft. It can accelerate as fast as an automobile. Um. They they born in rivers, and they get to the size of herring, and they go out to sea and they eat so much, they hunt so much that they increase their size by there's thousands of miles away now and at a certain point, UM, it's like a bell goes off, time to spawn, time to reproduce the species, and they find the river in which they were born, which is now thousands of miles away, and not only that, but in that river they find the exact spot in the river where they were born. And Hey, Mark, I want to just interject. Can you speak just a little sidebar about how like all the different ideas of how they think that salmon are able to do that. Yeah, they're not absolutely certain how they find them of it. Um. There is a lot of theories, and they're pretty sure that once they get in the river, they find the right spot through smell, and they can identify that it's the right river by the smell. But they can't smell the river from thousands of miles at sea. So how do they get there? Um? Some theorize that they use uh, stellar solar navigation. Some think that they they're able to lock into electric electro magnetic fields. They seem to have some magnetic materials along the stripe in the center of their body, the lateral stripe there. And uh, it's not completely certain they're they're they're still trying to figure it out. Um, but it's uh, it's an ability that all salmon have. And occasionally salmon won't go back to the river. It's earth will spawn somewhere else. And this is a good thing because it they find new rivers and they developed new rivers. At the moment, they're developing some rivers in the north slope of Alaska that are not no longer iced over because of climate change. UM. The one of the remarkable features of salmon is that they completely adapt to the river they come from, so that UM their DNA is completely focused on that particular river, which is why hatcheries, if they try to do eggs from a different river, it won't do well in that river because it's a it's a specific subspecies UM. And if you look at two salmon of the same species and two different rivers, they would look the same. But the DNA is actually more different than yours and mine UM. And when it becomes it's not clear to me at what point this is or how this has decided, but when the DNA becomes too much different than they are a different species. So there's seven species in the Pacific and which is one genus, and there's only one species in the Atlantic, which is a separate genus UM. But river to river, they're all they're all different, and they have different skills. You know, if you're from a river that has big waterfalls. You're a great jumper, you know, if you're stronger, if you have faster currents. I mean, I've seen I've seen salmon making their way in rivers that are so where the current is so strong that they're really just gaining a centimeter at a time. But they're unstoppable. They never give up. I've seen them jump waterfalls and not make it over the top, all down on the rocks and kind of shake it off and jump up again and keep trying until they get it. Um incredible determination. And once they enter the river they stop eating. And this is nature solving a problem because you know, salmon eats so much at sea, then if it goes back in the river and continues eating like that, the river will be destroyed. They'll eat out the whole river, they'll eat out the baby salmon, they'll eat out everything there is to eat. And so instead they just stop eating when they arrived in the river, which raises all kinds of interesting questions for people who fly fish for salmon and rivers. Why do they take the fly the whole other subject of debate because they're not eating um, which is why salmon flies don't look like food. Uh, you know, like you if you're fishing for a trout, use a fly that looks like something that they eat. But you can do all sorts of weird, crazy things for salmon flies because they're not looking for food. Um. They completely changed their bodies. They changed from a silver skin. They developed a spawning look. The males, Uh, they become bright red and get humps on their backs and hook noses and all sorts of weird things. Become this very strange looking animal. Um. And it takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that. The the red and the skin is the pigment from the flesh when salmon. After salmon has spawned, they're like an Albano. There's no pigment in the flesh is white. Um. So they use everything they've got to get there, and their last energy is spawning and then they've done what they had to do when they roll over and die. Yeah, it's it's like the story was written by um. You know what what we're talking about. How salmon are all are uh all created equal? You make this interesting point where you know, looking at him, if you're just like a passive observer, a casual observer, you look at salmon from two different river systems, and and think like, oh, you know, it's a soak I or it's a king what the hell's the difference? But you point out how Bristol Bay. I think you're talking about fairly recent market trends were you're talking about commercial fishermen in Bristol Bay, they'll sell their soaki salmon for about a dollar a pound, and they'll sell their king salmon for about fifty cents a pound Copper River. The sakis sold the same species of fish, but asaki that's gonna head up the Copper River might go for two dollars and fifty cents a pound as opposed to a dollar a pound in Bristol Bay. And then a salmon headed up the Copper might fetch around two fifty pound as opposed to fifty cents a pound in Bristol Bay. And you point out that at those rates, it's plausible to catch a king salmon that is worth to that fisherman about two bucks. How do you begin to explain, like, like, how do you explain those priced discrepancies? Um? Yeah, you know. And also another question is how do you explain the discrepancy between what the fisherman is being paid and what you're paying, what they're paying at the pike market. Yeah, that's definitely another that's that's true of a lot of a lot of fish. What do you hear what they're getting for it and what what people are paying for it in restaurants, you realize that someone's making an awful lot of money somewhere, right. But the reason why I chose these two particular fisheries to go out on, I mean, I can't help myself. I just said, any excuse to go out in a commercial fishery, I go. But the one that I did in Bristol bay Um was a you know, there were set dators there. They're guild letters in both cases, but set Ators is a very low investment kind of fishery. They go out in these aluminum skips and they hauling the fish. They they don't take good care of. And the guy I went with, Allie Olsen uh using Montana sheep share. I don't know. You've probably seen these guys at work. It's a it's a tough it's a tough job in itself. They discovered that in the off season there was money to be made in Bristol Bay. So he gets a bunch of young guys from around Montana to go up with him. And these guys have never been on a boat before, and they're they're lost that they don't know what a bo is, what a stirred is. Um they call a line or rope um. But they earned a few thousand dollars, which you know, they earned enough money for a down payment and a simple home in Montana, which they could never do with what they were doing in Montana. But they go out, and you go out for like fifteen hours. Uh, I mean, the the regulators will say, you know there's an opening in it's fifteen hours or it's twenty hours, whatever it is. You fish the whole time. Um. And it's Alaska in the summertime, so there's no nighttime. And you know, they're yanking these things out of the nets and throwing them on the deck and they're stepping on him and kicking him and stuff, and take him over to the tender and throw them into these canvas bags and they take them away. Completely different from the fishery that I went to. The drift net fishery I went to in uh Cortinville, Alaska, which is the Copper River salmon which they catch out in open ocean in the Gulf of Alaska. UM. When the regulators have found that enough salmon have made it into the Copper River to spawn, you know, they'll get an opener for fifteen hours or something. Um. But these are like real um. Well they're small ships, you know, they're they're one person operations about thirty ft spooling and spoiling the front and um. They fish these things with great care. They take them out of the net and they bleed them and the gills as they take them out, and they slide them into an ice hold. Nowadays some are using holds with a slush instead of ice because it's surrounds it better and they take really good care of it. And that's the difference in price. And there's also an issue that you spoke about about the condition of the fish that's entering the river. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean as I said that fishing different rivers are different. And a river like the Copper River, which is a big, tough long river, uh, it has big tough fish. Um. The more the fish has to go through to get to the spawning ground, the higher quality of fishing is a lot of the Bristol Bay rivers are are fairly small rivers and uh don't have to go through a lot once they get into Bristol Bay to get up to their spawning grounds, and so they're not they're not as big or as strong as fat and uh, I mean there's a there's different quality of fish in different rivers. Did you, Mark, did you taste test those two fish? Could you tell? You don't have to? I did, but you don't. You could look at them until you like that. Um, but just like the amount of fat coming off them. Yeah, just you know the whole way that they look. You know that. I mean, Copper River salmon are beautiful. Um. Also you know, I have to say in fairness that the Copper River people are brilliant marketers. Um. And you know, I remember I I got nowhere on this, but I I have roots in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and I was trying to convince Gloucester fishermen to go out to Cordova and just check out how the Copper River fishery has done, how they market their fish. You know, they've managed to create in people's heads the idea that that's a species of fish. Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it has a little to do with the fact that it's the first round in Alaska, so it opens the season. But it's also and it also has to do the fact that they guarantee the quality that is fished really carefully. Um. But it's also just plain old marketing. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of American readers, you know, when when they're gonna tuck into a book about salmon, I think they're expecting, um to see a bunch of stuff about Alaska, Right, But you also spend time discussing salmon fisheries and the history of salmon in Japan, the history of salmon in Europe. Uh, can you give a snapshot of of of salmon as a global resource, like like who has them? Who don't? Yeah, it's a it's a northern fish, and they're also in the Southern hemisphere. But they're not supposed to be. They're fake. They were planted in the places like New Zealand and Australia and Chile. Um not there by nature. By nature, they're a northern they're uniquely all salmon are uniquely Northern hemisphere. Um. A salmon cannot live in water that is over sixty eight degrees. You can't live in it and can't reproduce in it, So that dictates uh going rivers that are fairly far north UM. And also it's one of the problems about climate change. UM. The Pacific salmon are um from California to Alaska and uh uh in northern Japan, Kaida and uh in Pacific Russia, the kom Chaka, the com Chaca Peninsula, the kom Chaca Peninsula and Alaska are the two healthiest salmon runs in the world. And the reason for that one of these two places have in common. They're hardly any people. Uh, short growing seasons, so there's almost no agricult here UM. So the rivers are just undisturbed and wild. UM. That's interesting is you know the thing we've talked about, an observation I've had about wildlife conservation UM. That and if you go back in American history a bit, you see that we had wilderness and wild things sort of in spite of our best efforts to get rid of it, Like we just it took us a while of conquered all, right, Like we sort of had the appetite and intention to go get it all, we just hadn't gotten around to it and eventually got around to it, and now we have oftentimes the wild things that we have and the wildlife that we have is now because we've made a very conscious decision to have and we understand that it's costly to have it, but we insist on having it and we make sacrifices to have it. Is Russia, you hear about the salmon in the brown bears and in in Russia and Siberia. Are they still in the phase of they just have it because they haven't gotten around to killing it off yet, or are they sacrificing for it now? The um and there is serious commercial fishing going on in the Kumbchotka and other parts of Russia. And also the area is very rich in oil, and so far they've stayed away from the Kumbchatka, but there are some areas near there that we're very good salmon places but have been damaged by oil and mineral exploration. UM. The Yeah, it's just it's a remote you know. It's like, why don't we all move to Alaska? I don't know, we don't. That's what saves Alaska. I think they like it that way. How are the runs in Japan are there good salmon runs in Japan. There are so there are some good in the in in the north, mainly in Hakaida, which is the northernmost island. Like you can walk out and stand on the bank and look out, and there's a bunch of salmon spawning there in the in the in the uh uh in cities, you can see the salmon spawning in the rivers there. Uh And they have a unique species called messiou or sometimes in English called cherry salmon, because it runs around the time of cherry blossoms. What's it most what? What's what's it most closely related to of our specific salmon? Oh? I don't know. It's um maybe like a saki or something. I don't know. It's a it's a very um. It's a very good eating salmon um and um uh kind of a unique species. It shows up a little bit in other places in Asia, a little bit in the com Chotka and a little bit in Korea, but it's mainly a Japanese species. Um. There's uh. There's a lot of problems in the Japanese salmon fishery, like something like of the wild salmon in Japan have some hatchery DNA in them. That's not good. When you were when you were mapping your book out and trying to think of what areas to write about and what salmon to pay attention to. I'm asking this as just a person that grew up as a kid in the Great Lakes. Did you have what were your considerations around talking about your reluctancies or ambitions to talk about the make believe salmon? Like, you know, we have several species of salmon and the Great Lakes that wemoved there. Do you do you feel that it's it's irrelevant to the conversation. Does it inform I do? I do feel that it's irrelevant. It doesn't. Um it doesn't speak to the preservation of wild runs. It's like it's like farm salmon. I mean, there's a lot of things you can say pro and con about farm salmon, but one thing that's clear is it has nothing to do with whether salmon while salmon will survive. I mean, it's it's a completely different thing. Um well, except that it does have something to do with while salmon surviving because it could possibly make them not survived. Correct the part the part, Yeah, Okay, we're getting into that. An hour later, let's wait a second. That's wait because what I didn't talk I do have that question here and answer your original question about places. Um, I didn't get around to talking about Atlantic salmon um, which is uh New England and Maritime Canada and Newfoundland and uh Iceland and Britain and Ireland and Norway and part of Russia used to be a lot more. You know, it used to be Poland and France. And that's what I couldn't believe that Spain used to have salmon. Yeah, northern, northern they were in Spain, um Alicia um. Yeah. Franco um, who I absolutely loathed because I'm showing my age, but I actually covered Franco as a reporter and he was a monster. He's a dedicated fly fisherman. Oh he was. Yeah. Yeah, this is this is a good way of disproving the claim. You know, the fly fisherman, good people, really good people, fly fisherman. Franka was a fly fisherman, and you know, the way he ran Spain. He could do whatever he wanted and so he uh he tried to preserve northern rivers, which is where the salmon were, because he wanted to fish in them. Um. Well to be honest, that's a lot of UM, that's a strong conservation incentive for a lot of people. Yes, And I don't, I don't, I don't discount it right right, Well it um, you know it is uh, it's what's made a lot of fishermen and hunters, um, environmentalists. It's good that works. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it right right. Um. But the thing that struck me with Atlantic salmon A few things struck. But first of all, Atlantic salmon, and if you've never fished for it is really something else, something spectacular. It's um, it's just this furious wild animal on your line there, leaping and charging from one side of the river to the other, and just an unbelievable fish. Um. And so you know, sports fishing for wild salmon has always been extremely popular and really at the roots of fly fishing. Um. But New England has almost no salmon. You know. I was I was born and raised in Hartford by the Connecticut River. The Connecticut River used to be one of the great salmon was of North America. And nobody mentioned that when I was growing up. I had no idea. Seven was never talked about, seven was never eaten. You know in New England. Now you get it, but you know it used to be if you went into a fish market in New England or a famous seafood restaurant or something, there was no salmon. Um because salmon wasn't a local fish. But salmon was a local fish in the eighteenth and seventeenth century. Um. And the only place where it's left now is in Maine. Um. They're trying to bring back the panob Scott River. Um. They tried to bring me back the Connecticut River and failed. And Um. What's been happening in New England, which I have also found in Ireland and Scotland and Norway and all the Atlantic salmon places. There's almost no commercial fishing anymore. Um. And yet the stock keeps declining. And they tell me they're all going to see and just not many are coming back, and fewer and fewer returns every year. And the reason for this is climate change. The reason is carbon dioxide, which it turns out loves water. So about a third of the carbon dioxide that's produced on land ends up in the ocean, and it impacts on the hydrogen content of the ocean, and that impacts on the ability of certain small animals to grow like zooplankton and capelin little fish that salmon and cod feed on and um, so they're smaller, so there's less to eat. So the Atlantic Ocean uh is having less and less carrying capacity. It's losing it's a ability to feed the animals that live in the ocean. That is the scariest thing I've ever learned. I mean, my god, if if the ocean can no longer provide enough food for fish, we're sunk. Uh. And that's climate change. When you can you sketch for people a little bit, Well, let me approach this a different way. If you're doing a book about the demise of something, you have an obligation to show where it began and how things looked when it began, because you can't understand. Yeah, like any movie about the fall of someone needs to show someone at their height or else. The whole story it's kind of pointless. Um. And I think that like when you get into something like um, you know, like Buffalo, there's all these stories that that were still familiar with of herds that took days to pass, and you know, the clouds of them that look like shadows from clouds moving across the landscape and no, no, no, no, what are how good was it with salmon? I mean you could you could just pick a spot that you happen to take a shine to during your research. But is there a way to show people like how good it was somewhere? Well, yeah, and a lot of places, I mean in in uh the Columbia River in northern California and New England, um, and all over Europe, I mean all over Europe, the Rhine River. Um. You know, salmon were so prevalent that you just saw them. You people in Paris in the sixteenth century you could see salmon leaping in the scent um. That's how they got their name is Roman soldiers marching through France. Uh would see these fish that were always leaping out of the water. And uh that's what samo means is leaper. Huh. So they were, they were just they were a common site in in rivers. To what to what extent did indigenous peoples rely on on salmon in in North America? Who were the salmon cultures, Well, the the cultures of New England and Maritime Canada and um, you know, Alaska and British Columbia. Uh, Idaho and Washington and um Oregon in northern California. These were all cultures that were centered on salmon um and you you can still see what that means if you visit Indigenous people in Alaska in the summertime, when they're at their summer camp, uh, putting up their food supply for the rest of the year, you know, smoking catching salmon and smoking it, having a supply for the year. I mean to a Native American, Uh, I'm not sure what seems dumber the idea of fly fishing. Generally, they don't think much of or worse than that catching release. You know, I'm not knocking catching release. I think it's a good idea, But to to to a Native American, you know, if you're gonna release it, why catch it? It's a it's a it's a good argument. Why why why messled it? Right? The purpose of fishing is to catch a fish. I mean, that's that's the odd thing about fly fishing. The purpose of fly fishing is to make it as impossible as you can to catch a fish so that you can feel really good about it when you get it. Can you talk about the first caught saying that the first caught salmon ceremonies, Like what what that is? Yeah, And it's an interesting thing that almost actually every salmon culture, I mean in in in Pacific, Russia, and the original indigenous people in Japan and all the indigenous North Americans, all these people had a ceremony for the first salmon of the season that was caught. Um. And the idea of this uh ceremony was to thank them for coming back. Um. Because in in their culture, um, you know, in our modern scientific culture, you know, the fish are born in the river and they get to a bigger size and they go out to the ocean, then they come back to spawn. But in their in their culture, the salmon come in. Why did they come in? They come in so that we can have a few to eat, and then they go back out again, and then next year they come in again, and we have to thank them for that. Um. Now, in fact, we know that it's actually not the same salmon coming in, that there are different generations, but that was the original way of looking at it. And you have to thank them for coming back. If you don't thank them for coming back next year, they won't come. Can you, uh explain what a stock is of salmon. Like in your book you say that of salmon stocks are headed towards extinction. You don't mean you don't mean of the salmon species. What is the stock? It's a subspecies. As I was saying before, there's the salmon are slightly different in every river. So that's uh. You know, like Copper River is a stock. They're saki or kings, but they're they're a stock. Um it's uh. I mean this is true of other fish too, but with with salmon, it's I identified usually by river. How many stocks have we lost so far? Uh? I mean can you even say? No? I I can't accept that. Uh. And it depends where you're talking about. I mean in in the Pacific Northwest we've we've lost over half. In in New England. In New England we've lost most. But it globally? Was it fair to say that have we globally lost hundreds of stocks of salmon? Probably? But um, look some good news some of us coming back um as rivers are getting cleaned up. Uh. Uh. Famine has come back into a lot of rivers, especially in Europe. Uh. It's they've out at it in the Thames. Um and a lot of British rivers that were thought of as dead are almost dead have come back. Rivers and France are coming back. Um you know. But part of the problem is what scientists called shifting baselines. So you have a you have a stock and it's in real it's and it's in really bad shape, and you sound the alarm, and you struggle for years and years, and you get the river cleaned up, maybe you take down some dams, you get the river working again, and now you have like maybe a quarter as many fish as you had before all of this trouble started. And it's pronounced the success, but it's really not a success, you know. I mean, we really need to do is to get back to uh centuries ago. And so the problem is that our goal needs to be things that we no longer remember, things that we only know from stories and myths, that no one's ever seen. You you describe yourself as an environmental writer. Have you always looked at have you as regarded yourself as an environmental writer? Or is that a new way of describing yourself? Uh? Well, I do a lot of things, but I have always, from time to time, uh done environmental writing, starting when I was a newspaper Record Reporter, and I covered nuclear energy issues opposition to nuclear energy, and um, I've always uh covered environmental issues from from time to time. Somebody an interview went to and somebody said, uh so, uh you think that the uh the the environment is really uh um, it's it's something that you really like. Huh, Yes I do, I said. I said, yeah, you know, I like air. Uh. I was gonna ask you more about, um, sort of what your obligations if you're an environmental writer. I was going to ask you about your obligations. But you just brought up something that I want to distract ourselves with for a second. Uh used to write an opposition to nuclear power. It's to me, it's becoming um. To me, it's again becoming increasingly seductive. Uh huh. But you know, here's here's the thing. Oh god, I'm talking like Joe Biden. Here's the thing. Well, then you'll have to you'll have to say something that doesn't make any sense after um. The the hydroelectric industry, damns. Their whole argument is, well, this is better than fossil fuel or nuclear energy. And I think that's a false argument. Um damns are destroying rivers destroying rivers is going to unravel the natural order and unravel the planet. So it's it's not an option either. So why do we pretend you know that you can't produce energy without being destructive. I mean, there are alternative energies and they're becoming, um bigger and bigger, more successful. I think have you ever seen it? Have you ever been visited a big wind farm? You think that? I mean, come on, it's horrible. Oh you mean that if they're not a nice thing. No, No, they're horrible. They're horrible for a while, they're horrible for wildlife. Yeah, it's a massive development. I think you have to cover all of England with solar to power England, or seventy of the landscape or some staggering statistic I can't remember what it is. Um. Yeah, I mean you you do a combination of these things. And you know the lesson there with wind power is that you try not to do um large installations. Um. That's good, you keep it, keep the scale down. Yeah, I don't. We'll have to have you on again today because I want someone to convince me that I kind of want someone to convince me that nuclear doesn't need to be revisited. But it's it's like I said, it's to me, it's increasingly seductive. Listen, this is this is my My whole attitude about environmentalism is that I think that environmentalist spend too much time talking about stopping things instead of fixing things. That. Yeah, um, that's a good point. They get, they get a reputation. So there are some real problems with nuclear energy. If you want to have nuclear energy, you have to solve those problems. It's just like the same thing with fish farming. I don't I don't say that there should not be farm fish. I did say that at one point actually in my COG book, but I've changed my mind on that. I've spent a lot of time talking at fish farmers. I do believe that they are sincerely interested in finding solutions to these problems, and you have to fix it because it's a worthwhile contribution if you fix it. Um. I sometimes wonder, you know the pebble mine, you know, with the pebble mine. I got a whole question coming up about that. I just had a conversation about that with the last two days with surprising individuals. But yes, well aware of pebble mind Okay, So I've been opposing the pebble mind for years. But you know, it occurs to me that we may have the wrong approach here. Maybe we shouldn't say you can't have this mind. Maybe we should say, if you're going to have this mind, you have to do it in a way that you don't put Bristol Bay at risk. You have to fix your way of doing things. Well, they would just come and tell you that they already have and that there is no risk. Well you know that that's now you're talking about the problem of reality. Yeah, yeah, but um, yeah, and all the things that happened when you try to be reasonable people who don't want to be reasonable, and it uh, fish farmers actually do want to be reasonable. But I think it's always I think it's always worth a try. I think, Um. The guy I dedicate this book too or I Are Slender, came from a commercial fishing family and it was a brilliant fundraiser, and he went around the world raising money for fund and then he would go to commercial salmon fishing fisherman and he didn't say, you know, you're doing something terrible, You're destroying things. You gotta stop. He said, how are you fishing? Let me see your gnats, let me And he took a real interest in what they were doing because he was interested in commercial fishing. It was his background. And then he would talk to them and then at some point he'd say, okay, how much money? Did want to stop fishing? And it mostly worked a few there were a few people already never talked out of fishing, but it it mostly worked. And this guy, I loved this man and he was to me, he was a model. Or he died while I was working on the book. He was a model of what an environmentalist should be. I would like to take you know, young environmentalists and introduced them to Worry and have them talk to them about, you know, how you get things done, because you don't always get things done by antagonizing everybody. And you know, the CEO of Marine Harvest in Scotland, one of the big fishing fish farming outfits, said to me, you know I talked to environmentalists and I hear them out. And I know he did, because I know I know a number of environmentalists that he's talked to. But he said, you know, if I talked to somebody and they say fish farming has to be stopped. They don't have anything to say to them. And you know that's the problem. It's a real dialogue stopper. You're evil. You have to go. Where does the dialogue go from there? The reason earlier before I got off on asked you about nuclear energy, I was asking about self identifying. By the way, for the record, I did not necessarily a pose nuclear energy. I wrote about people who opposed nuclear Okay, that's that's a that's an important distinction. Um. The reason I brought up being an environmental writer is I if there's a I don't mean this, I'm not directing this at you. But if someone identifies first and foremost as an environmental writer and then they write about a subject like let's say, I don't know they're writing about wild horses, or they're writing about predators that they're writing about salmon um, I'll often wonder is their subject is the subject they've chosen to focus in on, is it a is it a sort of proxy for something else that they're getting at, or is the interest really on the thing they're focused on. Because I'll often find some writers will no matter what subject they're taking, I know where they'll fall on it, and I know what parts of it I'll accentuate because I know that they're not actually talking about the thing they're talking about. They're talking about the other thing, and they're using the thing as a tool to raise a broader point. I I usually do that. I'm almost never talking about the thing I seem to be talking about, and you're open about it. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote a book about baseball in the Dominican Republic and uh, both the Eastern Stars, and it really wasn't about baseball at all. It was about the US relationship with the Dominican Republican. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. Do you do you feel that when you if you if you care, if you're a writer, like you have a certain amount of power as a writer, especially when you have an audience, and you have an audience, UM and your purpose driven writer? Right, you want to like like you want to affect change, you'd like to affect change. Do you feel that you need to be um? Do you ever feel a poll about being hyperbolic and when you're sounding the alarm because of overselling a problem, because it's more likely to create and to drive an impetus for change, Or do its party. You feel that, Man, I need to be absolutely frank and truthful because I have to deliver truth or you trying to drive action. And if you need to fudge truth to drive action, that's okay. No, I'm not into fudging truth. I think that you know, if you do that, you know, you can rally a lot of people. But you know at a certain point they're gonna say, wait a minute, this guy's I don't no nonsense. I can't believe anything he says. Um. I I so the best I can. I try. I try to be truthful and I and I try to be reasonable. And this book, uh, probably more than any other book, is making some fairly bold statements. And to be honest, it is because I am absolutely panicked about what climate change is doing. Uh. It's uh the impact it's going to have, what it's going to do to our lives and to our children's lives is just so huge. Um. And you know, we're confronted with people who are not facing up to that, and so you know, sometimes you just have to scream, yeah, you say, I think that, like you acknowledge some things. I guess you don't do what I was asking if you ever feel necessary to do because you acknowledge some things where you talk about how you cite these years in the in the past decade where there were record runs of sacks like these phenomenal sac I runs, and that those phenomenal ski runs insided with the hottest years we had on record. And I think other people might look and say, well, how could salmon in Alaska suffer from warming temperatures if we used to have these massive salmon runs in California the Sunshine State. Um. I think that people can look at all this and probably talk themselves out of there seeming to be a problem we're having, like king salmon runs go down, but we're having these records pink salmon runs in some areas, Like like how can you know? How can it all? How does it fit together in a way where people can't look at it and think that we're okay after all? You know, if you if you talk to scientists, I mean real scientists, which I love to do and politicians and government people hate to do. The thing about real scientists is that they give you no absolute I mean, try talking to some epidemiologists about the coronavirus. For example. You know that there's things we know, there's things we don't know this, you know, I mean the most common answer you ever get from a scientist is maybe you know yeah. Yeah. My brothers, my brothers are both scientists, and I'll often ask them, like about their research. I'll ask him, what do you hope happens? Yeah? Right. They take that as an insulting question, what do you what do I hope happens? Right? Right, So it's it's uh, it's it's very uh, it's very complicated. And um. You know one thing I can tell you though about you know, warm years and good Alaskan salmon runs is last year there was a great Alaskan salmon run and it was about the warmest year on record that Alaska ever had, and you know what, a lot of those salmon died. Yeah, so there was a good return, but a lot of fatality, right, yeah, fatality before spawning. Yeah, if if the if the water temperature goes above sixty eight degrees, they will not spawn. They can't spawn, they can't live, which the salmon species seems to be the most dire you mean, in the most difficulty. Yeah, like like is it like our king's kind of the most screwed right now in the Pacific. Not not I was. I was gonna say Atlantic salmon, there's about a million and a half Atlantic salmon left in the world. How can that be true? Man? And you know when you think about sixty sixty million running into Bristol Bay every June July, uh, one and a half million total Atlantic salmon, it's there's are people. There's more people in the Pugets you know, there's more people around Puget Sound in their Atlantic salmon left in the world. There were more farm salmon in a good farm uh salmon farming operation than there are wild salmon in the in the world Atlantic man, thus depressing that part of So they're they're the ones that are really in the in in the deepest trouble. Uh. As for other ones. It depends where you're talking about. But by and large, king are not doing well. You know, chinook? Is it? Is it well understood? Um? You know, I know there's probably like there's like as you mentioned it as a litany of factors, But is it well understood where where someone's gonna say, yeah, yeah, there's a dozen things. But here's the real killer on King salmon, Like, here's the real problem with kings am and are kind of the main problem, like like what is it? Well, it depends where you're talking about. I mean in the Columbia River it's damns um. You know, the Columbia River system used to be a great um king habitat and most of it is blocked now. And then northern California also, I've actually got a question about that. Mark Um. I grew up on the banks of the Columbia in Vancouver. This is still the engineer. Ladies, gentlemen, he's quiet so far. The engineers better pay attention. He's been diligently. He's been diligently engineering till now. He's been saving, saving it up. I I grew up on the Glombia River and we took multiple field trips growing up to Bonneville, dam Um. I didn't learn anything about hydro electric power. But one thing they were always super excited to show us was the fish ladders. And they've got big windows you can look through at the ladders, and they they were always trying to convince us everything's fine. Look at all these uh these salmon are are doing great. So I fish ladders, what's the deal. I'm guessing they're not very effective based on what you're saying here. Well, Um, you know, some fish ladders are are better than others. Um, some don't work at all, and some work pretty well. It also depends on the damn. Um. Uh, I mean getting over the Bonneville Is that the one you said you were on. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty tough getting over talent these uh, these gravity damns you know in the Pacific Northwest, which are you know, these are the largest hunks of concrete in the world. Um, it's pretty tough getting over them. They some of them work to a certain degree. Uh, some of them are getting better. Some of them don't have them. A lot of damns don't have any ladders at all. Um. And then you know, nature has a kind of a nasty way of adopting to our inventions. So uh, most fish ladders you'll find lots of marine mammals hanging out there because that's a good place to get fish to eat. Uh, And they're just you know, they're just being set up for the slaughter there. It's surprised me in your in your book, it surprised me how you left the how you seem to leave the door open a little bit too. Two doing some control on marine mammals, lethal control on marine mammals. Yeah, you know, look, the thing is, now that we've thoroughly screwed up the natural order, we're trying to make it work again. You have to. And it turns out it's really complex case. You know that everything has unintended consequences and um uh it's just very hard to figure these things. Um. As someone who has been I mean I read about it this in my book, I know it. It's like, uh to be fishing for salmon commercially and and watch. You know, in one case it was like four seals just eat our entire net. Um. So you know, you have to you have to find a balance. But in the balance, um, you know, everybody loses a little and and wins a little. I I I did some writing about uh wolves, the reintroduction of wolves m mainly in Idaho, and I did um. And I have a lot of friends who are cheap ranchers and uh, you know, so they hate these wolves and they're they're furious about this. But what I say to them shortly before they take away my drink and asked me to leave, is you know they're supposed to be there. You know, if you want to raise sheep in Idaho, you have to accept the fact that there is going to be a certain amount of fredation. What happened in this country, UM. You see it most in the West, but it was all over the country is that they just had this idea, let's identify the predators and kill them and then we'll be fine. And they did this at the request of the ranchers and the farmers, and they killed everything that was a predator, and it completely destroyed the balance of nature. Uh. And a lot of cases in the West. Uh, the idea is, can't we just be the predator, you know, so you know, you get rid of everything that prays on unlets and then you know, hunters can go out and they can shoot deer and elk for their hearts content. Um. But actually, you know, those herds are supposed to be controlled by wolves and bears and mountain lions. It's the way the thing is supposed to work. And you know, certain types of um, you know, like willows uh can't survive if there's if there's too many alkin, then the birds that live in the willows can't survive. So, you know, nature is a very complicated thing, and uh you have to do it very very carefully. I think that in some cases you can make arguments for some killing of marine mammals. Um, these arguments have to be made pretty pretty carefully, though. I was surprised to see that you have. I haven't found where you you double down on this, but you suggest that saving salmon would involve stopping the killing of bears. And I was curious, are in coastal areas that have salmon runs, have you seen evidence of over harvest of bears somehow impacting? No? I haven't even even in the So that was just like an add on thought. Yeah, they come chodka. Um statistically has the the largest brown bear population uh per square mile of any place in the world. I mean, it's just loaded with bears and you were out fishing and there they all are. Uh. Aldo, When I say over harvest you made shouldn't that we need to stop killing bears in order to save sam over harvesting the bears like our humans over harvesting bears to the detriment of salmon. Like, I don't understand that. I don't understand what what? What backs that up? Um? I say that, yeah, really, and the prologue and the prologue. I was just curious what that what the what the meant by that? Um? Well, I mean the the the the primary cause of the killing of bears is the destruction of their habitat. Um. Oh no, I got you. I don't think the bear hunting. So killing bears through habitat destruction, yea, eliminating them, because then that mean that that trickles down. Obviously, the sentence was about stopping the killing of many animals, including beavers, wolves, bears. Yeah, well, you know, um these are all different cases. Beavers would be the most drastic. I mean, beavers were were slaughtered for their pelts at one time. Yeah, we almost ran out of them, right right, which is not the case with bears. But you, you, you have to be extremely careful. I mean, I have to admit that I don't understand bear hunting. I don't know why anybody wants to shoot a bear. I could explain it to you someday. You I mean, do you do you eat it? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you like it? I do, well, I like it depends what they've been eating. I don't like them. You don't like the brown bears because they taste fishing because they've been eating salmon. I've never eaten one. Yeah you're talking about black bears. Yeah, well they're they're they're better because they eat berries. The ones that are eating berries are quite good. The ones on the coastal areas where they've been feeding on some you know, dead sea lion they found for a month, are a little bit touchy. So I I much prefer to go find the ones up in the higher elevations. But we don't need to. I don't want to spend too much time on that. But but this this whole thing about beavers and bears and wolves, um it was I was really talking about a historic thing. Uh. None of those are are huge practices now, um ah, the wolves would be if you let them. Yeah, there's You have a chapter called the Problem with Solutions. I think I think that's right. The problem solutions tell me, Like I I could see someone saying, um, well, if we can produce them at hatcheries, why don't we just make millions and millions of salmon and turn them loose? And who the hell cares? That's what was said originally? Where does that fall part? In France when they first started doing hatcheries that's exactly what they did. They they petitioned the government. They said, look, we found this huge solution. You know how the salmon are all dying because of all these nets across the river and everything. Don't worry about it anymore. We can make more. Um, can you date that mark? Because that's what I like, really struck me is how long we've been at this hatchery thing. Not off the top of my head it stated in the book it's eighteenth century. They're trying they're early nineteenth century. I think they're trying to propagate salmon in the early Yes, yeah, why does it not? Like why is it not? What's wrong with that? There? Is it? Is it effective? Or is it not effective? And if it's not, why is it not effective? Okay, complicated question? Um. I kind of fought with my publisher, Patagony about this because they were much more anti hatchery than I am. Um. The the problem with hatcheries there there's several problems. I mean, the problem the original problem was that the fish don't live, and that was because the the eggs didn't come from the river that the fish were being released it, so they weren't suited for that habitat but a bigger problem is that if you take a river like the Columbia or some of the polluted industrial rivers of England and Uh, you make a bunch of hatchery fish and you release them in those rivers, you will get nothing because the same things that destroyed the wild fish will destroy the hatchery fish. So you have to fix the habitat before you can before a hatchery can do any good. Another problem is that hatchery fish seems to me, and there's summer for debate about this, but they seem to be somewhat inferior fish and less survival skills, so when they mix with wild fish, they're sort of dumming down the species. That's why having of the Japanese wildfish have some hatchery DNA and it is caused for concern. There's a lot of hatchery, you know. You'll often see these stories about somebody who went to some salmon, some fish store, a bunch of fish stores, took a bunch of fish that were being sold as wild wild salmon, tested their DNA and found out they weren't wild. And then everybody says, oh, well, these guys are a bunch of crooks. Not necessarily a lot of fish that is a lot of salmon that is supposed to be wild has a lot of hatchery DNA in it because it's crossed with it with with hatchery fish. Um. That's why they they invent to this new phrase, um, wild cot. They're not going out on a limb. They're saying it was caught in the wild like a wildfish. We don't know what its DNA is because you know fish, commercial fisheries can't be testing the DNA of all the fish. You mentioned habitat and what's the like, what is it? Why is it the reluctance of people to over these centuries now to to not accept the habitat. It's probably the main problem because it's costly to fix, and it sometimes means changing your economic activities. I mean, if you're if the habitat is being destroyed by a dam that's providing your electricity, or its being destroyed by a factory that's uh, you know, creating wealth and jobs. Um, people aren't gonna want to mess with it. Um. That's getting back to my idea that you just have to change your whole concept of economic development. What was the what was the heyday of damn building? Like what years the depression that the New Deal. You know, Rosell put this out as a wonderful thing. And what he got three sang a song to the you know, the damn building on the Columbia. I mean, would he got three the man of the people, Wasn't this great? They're building damaged to block the Columbia. Man, it would have seemed that he would have been a pro samon guy. But so he probably would be today. Well, the reason I'm asking that question is I thing I've always been curious about. Um, A lot of things that happened in history we now like to sit and look and think about, Oh, they were so stupid, right, they were so rapacious and horrible, right, But it was the people that were doing these things were it was us, right, it was awesome. It was us in earlier form when they were getting there, when they were building those day ms. Do you know, was it well understood what this would do? What was someone saying, you know, um, I'm all for it. Let's let's generate tons of electricity, Let's become a dominant power, will come a dominant military power because we can smell aluminum and build an air force and on and on. But this means salmon or screwed. Did someone say that? Wasn't known? Someone said that, and those are the people that we call Indians. The native tribe said that a lot like they looked and said, I just have a feeling that when you block this river off, it will mean that these fish can't go up there anymore. This is this is not you know, high tech science to realize that if you have a fish that has to run the river and you block the river, you're going to destroy the fish. Right, Yeah, but what was the conversation, Well, you know it, it's going back to what I was saying before that. The conversation was, we're developing the economy. It's the depression and we're creating jobs, you know, and like tough ship. It was like tough shot to the right. We're making we're we're making New England a prosperous place, you know, where we're Britain is going to dominate the industrial revolution. But it was but you feel I mean, came like saying the same thing. But you feel that someone that it was in the it was it was part of the calculus. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's uh like when someone starts smoking, right, I don't. I don't think they say like I'm gonna start. I don't think they really conceptualize that. They're not like I'm gonna take up smoking. I do realize that this will mean i will die younger of lung cancer, but I'm committed. Do you think they're not doing it that way? But how could people have not have done it that way with salmon? Do you know there's a Republican congressman in Indiana I can't think of his name who said that, you know, people are going to have to um uh die from the Corona virus and that's just you know, that's just what we have to do to get the economy moving. It doesn't surprise me that someone would say that, because I think people have similar conversations about you know, I think you could say the same thing, like people have an appetite for alcohol, um and people want to be able to drink alcohol, but we lose I don't know what it is fifty people to alcohol related deaths every year, and we accept that because some of us it's really important for us to have a beer at night, or it's really important for us to go out and have a glass of wine. So we will take the fact that we will have massive amounts of highway fatalities from alcohol, we will have massive amounts of domestic violence from alcohol. Uh, and we will have child neglect because of alcohol and financial destitute for people because of alcohol. Because when I go home at night, I like to have a cold beer. So sure we do that all the time. Yeah, it's no different. Well, it is kind of explain how it's explain to me how it's different when you go home and have your beer. That's really not causing somebody to beat the wife. No, but we're taking a thing that we know, like I have alcohol, and you have to deal with you have to deal with you have to deal with alcohol and people's ability to use it in a better way. Yeah. I think we've pretty successfully proven that banning alcohol doesn't work. Uh, you know, and I don't know that banning travel works. Um, it works, but I think that banning cards. Think how many lives who would say exactly exactly, But I can't get behind it. Let's go, let's get back to salmon. At the at the end of your book, this is a buddy mine who he guy work with, Sam Longren. He knew we're gonna be talking and and he had there's a sentence you talked, you used in your book cod that he wanted me to ask you about where he says that you wrote about how most fishermen cannot stop fishing, like acknowledging that it's like this, it's a compulsion. It's like a compulsive behavior. Yeah, it's because if you are a commercial fisherman, um, that is a life that you love and there's no substitute for it. There's nothing else you can do. What does a commercial fisherman do instead of fishing? There's there's there's there's nothing else like it, um and and and it's a it's a fisherman's entire identity. Do you think that that identity? I mean so much so, so much so. The fisherman you know, had they have trouble relating to people who who who don't fish. I mean that I tell you you know how it has changed my whole relationship as a journalist with fisheries. The fact that they know that I've actually worked on commercial boats, they accepted they'll be more likely to talk to you. Right when my Cord book came out, it came out at the same time as Sebastian Younger is a perfect storm. And we did a TV show together in Rhode Island, and then we were kind of walking out to the parking lot and and he was saying to me, you know, when I saw her in the book, I just couldn't get anybody to take me on their boats. Well, how did you get people to take him on their boats? And um, you know, he just he's a nice guy. You know, he looked like a rich guy in this very fancy car. What could I say to him? Yeah, I guess yeah, that's true, man, um a way that and I think we all do it where like even if you imagine as a writer, when you're talking to someone who might get your antenna might be up. You know, you're not sure about them, what their motivations are. But then they say some little thing that reveals some intimacy with your industry, some intimacy with your craft, right, you do, your guard goes down, right, But it's it's also I mean, I I think it's true that I do have an understanding and an empathy for commercial fishermen that a lot of writers don't have. I mean, I think that this, I think that over fishing is sometimes a problem, but it is it is pounced on much more than it should be because these are marginalized blue collar workers. Uh, and people don't really understand them or what they're doing. And it's so easy to say, oh, you know, here's the problem these guys, and and you know, to call a fisherman greedy is so absurd. I mean, take a look at what they have. How greedy could they be? Yeah, you're so greedy? You want to just work your ass off all the time to every year, worry about whether or not you're gonna make a living, right, and the next thing you know, you're gonna want to have a house to live in, you know, all while you're covered in fish line, right. I think that people think of like hatcheries and fish farming often in the same sentence. You know, I imagine a lot of people don't even really understand what the difference is. But explain for people like what fish farming is and the term that people use like sea cattle or sea grazing. I can't remember what would expression and and and how fish farming impacts salmon. I said sea cattle, but I'm they have made that up. Okay, Um, yeah, I mean the difference between farming and and hatcheries that hatcheries are trying to work with the wild stocks. Farming is something completely separate. Farming is a way of producing an alternative UH product. That's I mean the the It was started in the nineties seventies in Norway by guys who thought they were coming up with a UM low cost sustainable product UM. And the first problem with it is that it's not so sustainable if you're feeding them wildfish. So you know, they take factory trawlers worse kind of fishing. They scoop up all the stuff grinded up into meal to feed the salmon and the farm. Then when you eat a farm salmon, you're killing more wildfish than if you just stayed a wildfish. UM. Fish farmers have have been trying to deal with They they they they've lowered the percentage of fish in the food. It's down to about and there's all kinds of really kind of high tech experiments soldier fly and all sorts of ways of trying to get other protein to do this differently. UM. The problem is that the consumer UH tends to find that the more actual fishes in the feed, the better they like. To fish. Uh. So this is something they're working on that that they've improved, but they've got a ways to go. That's an interesting thing about fish farming. I don't know that I haven't given a lot of thought to it until recently around an issue around Manhattan. Um like just like bait, like fishing bait and fish feed that you think, if it's farmed, it must not be killing fish, right, But to hear about the quantities of fish it takes to feed the fish, that's right. Uh, that's right. So they're they're trying to lower that. And then they have the problem of escapes. Um. And you know that's just the problem that uh, some of the farm salmon get out of the nets, either by accident or sometimes they'll just hop out. I've been a fish farms. A salmon just leaps out and somebody says, oh, grabs the net and throws him back in. But um, almost all farm fishes atlantic salmon. So if if atlantic salmon escape in the Atlantic, they will cross breed with wild Atlantic salmon. This is very bad because you know, in farming, you eliminate, um, a natural selection, you replace it with a human selection. It's like cows. You know, cows don't have anything natural about them. Everything's been chosen by by by farmers and biologists. You know, they're talking about don't feed the cow GMO food the cows gmo menetically modified cow um. And same thing with salmon. So you know, they have chosen their genes that they have bread these salmon um for one thing, one thing, only to to grow very quickly so that it just you know, less expense raising them to market size. They have no skills, they have no you know, they can't find the river the earth. They have no river their birth, but couldn't if they did. They have you know, no, none of all these extraordinary abilities of wild salmon has They are They are are just a fast growing moron. You know. So now they're getting out and they're breeding. How do how does the breeding happen if they can't find the river? Uh, well, they can find a river, it's just not the river of their birth. They'll just go up a river and if there's a female there, you know, if there's a male and there's a female they're digging a red, they'll deposit their milt on it, or if it's a female will dig a red and a wild male will you know, they salmon. If they see a nest, they go for it. So they still do have the urge to run up a river at some point. Yeah, but it's just any river. And uh so this is going to dumb down wild Atlantic salmon. Now in the Pacific, most of the farm salmon are also Atlantic and it's a hard rule of biology that different genera don't cross breed. So an Atlantic salmon and a Pacific salmon are two separate genera, so they won't breed. So it's not really as big a risk as people get very excited when there's escapes of farm salmon in the Pacific, but um, most of the time they just disappear because it's gonna happen there. They're not going to cross breed with the wild. All they can do is set up their own Atlantic salmon. But since they're all dumb fish, uh, they're not going to compete with the wild populations and and they'll probably die out. But it's a huge problem in the Atlantic. Um. And then there's the problem of sea lice. Um. Sea lice is a crustacean that attacks salmon, and um, you know, these lights are traveling all over the ocean, they'll find a salmon or two. But then when you have this fish farm with a million salmon in one cage, you know, it's it's like leaving honey out for the bears, you know, just all the lights will just gravitate to the farm and they won't limit themselves to the farm of Carson. There's any wild salmon there, they'll attack them also, so that there's a huge sea lice problem. Um, and you know, fish farmers are trying to deal with this. They found certain species of fish that eat sea lice and they've used them, but you know, they they used so many of them that they started over fishing them. They started to disappear. So what do they do, their fish farmers, They started farming these other species to eat. Really, yeah, the fish they're using to eat lice off salmon are a fish that they were going out and catching. They were depleted the resource. They depleted it, and then they started farming him. But they don't see if we'll be able to come up with enough of them. They handle the lights just like some never end to it, man, right, So there's a lot of problems and and you know a lot of people like this idea of moving the fish farms inland, in in enclosed UH spaces so that there's no escaping and no sea lice can get into them, basically making a hatchery for well, it's more it's more confined than a hatchery in there there, you know, when they're raising them to full size. So what this means is it means tremendously increasing their carbon footprint because the original idea of farm salmon was that they used the energy of the current in the ocean. They didn't use any energy. Um. Now they're getting into all of the problems that environmentalists oppose in UH cattle farming, you know, the nutrient and yeah, oh that I found it funny that there's environmentalists who opposed cattle farming but want to bring UH salmon farming on land. UM. So I don't think that that's the solution. UM. Most fish farmers don't think that's the solution either, But you know, maybe there's some ideas in there that that work. I don't understand why they can't stop escapes. I mean just I don't know, make it higher walls on the on the pens or something. You know, there was a big there was a big escapement. And remember in Puget Sound when I was living there and it was it was I think it was storm related, yes, and they tried to get all the fishermen fired up to go catch them, and people were catching them like crazy. Yeah. But you know when people got very excited, I heard people comparing it to the Exxon, Valdi's oil spell and all these things. But um, what happened to those fish? I mean the ones they didn't catch, they're gone. Nobody knows they died off. They just they can't farm salmon, can't make it. The only way they can make it is to reproduce with wild salmon, which they can't do in the Pacific. When when you were finishing your book? When when what was the pup date? What's the pup date of your book? It was Archer this year, so I just came out. So you finished it probably a year ago, maybe maybe more. Yeah, I don't remember when, uh when you got it done, did you? I'm sure you were happy to have finished a book, just because it's like as a writer and making a book, regardless of the subject and how you might impact that subject. Um, it just feels good to finish them, right, to get them out, But did you Actually it's actually my thirty third book. Um, and you know, my my response to finishing it was to start working on my thirty fourth board. But it when you finished it, were you just, um, knowing the enormity of the problem. You know, if you imagine ahead a hundred years, it just looks really bad for salmon, especially as you lay it out. When you finished it, did did you were you you know, like catatonic from the depression of it all or where you know, because I'm just not I'm not like that. I just, um, I I can't believe that we're just going to sit around and let the earth parish. I think that, um, we will get together and do things to fix these things. And that's why I write a book like this too, you know, promote this happening. And I think it can happen. And I you know, I have a daughter who's nineteen in college, and those kids are fantastic. Uh, they're so aware of environmental problems and and so so piste off. We've handled things and determined to do it better. And um, you know, there's there's hope for the world, and there are you know, programs that are taking down damns, and there's a tremendous number of rivers whose pollution has been cleaned up, and um now there is. We aren't without hope, you know. We just can't sit around and say, oh, I'm sure it'll be fine, you know, we have to make it happen. Yeah, the things that we've restored we restored at great cost. Well, that's one of the problems is that tearing down damns, it turns out, is incredibly expensive and it comes with its own risks. Yes, and you really have to kind of rebuild the river after the dam comes down. It's not like, you know, you're kind of think in your mind. You take down the dam and then the water rushes out and you're back to what you had before, but so much changed because of the dam that you know you have to you have to get a gravel bottom on the river again, because salmona won't live on a river that doesn't have a gravel bottom if it all gets silted over because of this release from tearing down the dam, you have to do so think to fix the bottom. Ice live in a community, and I'd lived there for quite a while while there was a long a statewide and also very local you know, dialogue around removing a dam in town and um some of the people most adamantly opposed to removing the dam were the fisherman because there had been a lot of um mining upstream on this river and there was a lot of heavy metal and toxic sediment they had built up behind that damn where the dam was kind of an extinct damn. It was just the whole reservoir had filled in with toxic sediment and there was a bitter pill of the dam should come down, but we need to know that you're gonna stir this stuff up and a lot of this ship is gonna get sent down river. Well that's going back to what I was saying about Hatch. He's the first thing you have to do is restore the habitat of the river or all of us No good. I mean, you know, you take down the dam and then the the the salmon are going to swim up stream and spawn in the toxic area. No, that's not going to happen either. Uh. Every decision, every decision has a painful part to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mark, what's your like favorite bright spot that gives you hope after working on this project and knowing all so much about it, Like what what stands out as a success or a win right now? That give you a little hope? Well, and a number of things. I mean, these these projects taking down dams. There's a big one in California. There was the l Y in Washington, the penam Scott in Maine. These are huge things that are being done um and you know, the way in which they were done is very impressive. I mean, the Panamscott happened because a whole coalition of environmentalists and fishing people and state government and federal government and Native Americans and all these different groups got together to make this happen. And when I see something like that happened, I think, wow, you know we can do it. You know. Also there, you know, there was a pole. I love this. There was a poland you know, the Oregonian, the newspaper in Portland. So the Oregonian did this pole in which an overwhelming majority of people that they asked in Oregon said that they considered, um, saving salmon in the Columbia River more important than any economic activity for the river. That's interesting. I wonder if you had run that pole in other parts of that state. I think you'd have seen dramatically different results. Perhaps well yeah, yeah, yeah, you know you like you getting nowhere. Get nowhere in in Idaho because they've built their whole economy on being a seaport for grain um, which was made possible by damns Um, and so many people are economically hitched to that system that you know, it's basically when it comes down to, is them and some fly fishermen. You know, you know, I don't want people to think they can skip reading the book because of this conversation. So I need to point out to people that we have not covered the saber tooth salmon. Yes, but don't don't cover it an extinct bygone fish called the sabertooth salmon, And I'm not telling you if it's coming to your neighborhood or not. Hit people. Hit people with another thing or two that, uh, another titillating item or two that they'll encounter in your book when they go read the thing for real. Um, I mean the the the whole um saga, the Connecticut River, which I guess I'm partial too because I was born at it, but you know, the one of the greatest salmon rivers in North America. And they've spent billions trying to make it come back, and um, they cannot. They can. They can get the fish in the river, they can get them to spawn, and they can get the young to go out to sea, but then they don't return. And yet every once in a while somebody will be in some little tributary and find find a salmon. Really yeah, just wand and around. He's like, where is everybody? You know, I mentioned earlier going up the Great Lakes and we had our you know, are kind of make believe salmon there, but the you are now and then catch one up in a farmer's drainage ditch. And when you kind of like looked at a map, you'd realize the number of wrong turns that that fish had made. It just kept getting just kept getting worse and worse. Well, you know, it's like, you know, biology got off there because they weren't supposed to be there in the first place. But you can hardly blame him. He's like, dude, I'm a stranger around here. Man, I don't know what's going on. You can get a lot of recipes from the book, and you can get a lot of Native American recipes from Alaska that will absolutely horrify you. Yeah. But also on that is um, it's it's it's it's exhaustive, not exhausting, but exhaustive in that um just like how Native Americans caught fish, how they mechanics of it, so many did with it, you know. I mean, it's it's a really it's it's there's a lot there. It's it's well worth to read. We kind of focused here in this conversation on an element of the book, and it's a big element, and it's the driving force of what's there. But everything is very richly contextualized and every um, every part of this is poked and prodded and explained. And it's not just meant to It's not a book that's just meant to deliver this awful news to you, but it's meant to, uh paint this really like lush, elaborate portrait of a beautiful collection of animals. And so I would urge people to go out and check out the book Against Salmon by Mark Kurlanski, made available by Patagonia Books, which I which I it is not your that's not been your publisher in the past, So no, no, you can since we're all buying things online these days. So you can get it from Patagonia, or you can get it you know, you can get it from the Amazon, but you can get it from your local bookstore to people don't realize that most uh independent bookstores have their own online service that's pretty efficient and you know you can go online, take the bookstore you like and they'll horder and ship it to you. All right, Mark, thanks for coming on. Um, we'll plan one in the future. When your next book comes out. I'll tell people what your next book is. I don't want to blow it for you, but when that goes out, will okay if it's a lot, we can talk about in that to have it back on. Thank you very much. Thanks great talking to you guys. One
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