Salmon, The Currency of the Coast

Every autumn, across the rivers of western Washington, something extraordinary happens. Pacific salmon, chinook, coho, chum, pink, sockeye, return from years at sea to the exact gravel beds where they were born. They navigate by the Earth's magnetic field, by the chemical signature of their home stream, by mechanisms that science still does not fully understand. They fight their way up rivers, over falls, through rapids, until they spawn and die, their bodies dissolving into the streambed, feeding the entire forest with nutrients brought up from the deep Pacific.

For the Coast Salish peoples and the Columbia Plateau nations, salmon was not simply food. It was the organizing principle of the year, the basis of trade, the center of ceremony. When the first salmon of the season was caught, it was returned to the river with honors, so that it could carry word back to its people in the sea that the humans were still grateful.

The canning industry arrived in the eighteen sixties. By the eighteen eighties, dozens of canneries lined the lower Columbia and the Puget Sound tributaries, and the runs that had seemed inexhaustible were already thinning. Hatcheries were built as a substitute, and they worked, partially, for a while, but hatchery fish can be genetically narrower than wild fish, and less resilient, less adapted to the variation of any particular stream.

Dams blocked the runs. Logging destroyed the stream-shading trees that kept water temperatures cold enough for salmon to survive. Agriculture and development paved over the riparian zones where young fish need to shelter.

Today, multiple Washington salmon stocks are listed under the Endangered Species Act. The runs exist. They are a fraction of what they were. The question of whether that can be reversed is the central environmental question of the Pacific Northwest.