The way I tell the story, the day my father removed my last diaper he placed a fly rod in my hands. Since then, I’ve cast a line over nearly any open body of water I can find. He nurtured an avid fly fisherman, sure, but also an avid environmentalist.
And so I was sad to see this headline: “Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace” above an article that described the virtual disappearance of the Chinook salmon from the Pacific Northwest. “The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations – and coming up dry.” Fellicity Barringer, NY Times, March 17.
Not that I should have been surprised. For much of the past 18 years, I’ve had the privilege to fish for Atlantic salmon in New Brunswick and Quebec on some of the most productive rivers. And for many of those 18 years, the conversation over the fish population has been marked by concern and confusion in almost equal measure.
Last year, for example, the runs on the Grand Cascapedia were particularly low. From those who worked and fished the river, the explanations were many: changing sea temperatures, an ice blockage off Greenland, etc. Always, people say they’ve never seen a year like this. There was no science to back up these stories, only concern.
On the Miramichi, another prized Salmon river, this one in New Brunswick, the story has been somewhat different. While the river doesn’t produce it nearly as many fish as it once did, and its different branches report varying returns year to year, the strict catch and release policy that has sustained sizeable runs makes it a model for the area. Growing up, I can remember Miramichi guides remarking on how quickly the salmon seemed to be recovering.
My home state of Maine offers a similar lesson. The Penobscot River closed in 1999 to salmon fishing, with populations down to around 530 in 2000 — down still from 5,000 twenty years prior. By 2006, the river had recovered to runs over 1,000 and restored a short fishing season.
It seems to me that trying to read the lessons offered by the conversation records on these rivers yields conflicting lessons. One, that Salmon are remarkably resilient and can be nurtured locally, river by river. And two, that they depend on remarkably complex systems. As an anadromous species, they depend upon the rivers they return to, and the oceans they live in. They depend upon watersheds in areas often heavily logged, and on areas of the Atlantic that, until recently, were over fished.
In this sense, Salmon reflect the problem of climate change: they are global in cause and consequence. If these stories do offer a lesson, it’s that while our experience fishing for salmon is often rural, continued practice of fly fishing is dependent upon stabilizing global patterns – rising sea temperatures, shifting ocean currents, and bottom trawling, to name only a few.
But then, to paraphrase Isaac Walton, author of the book everyone owns but nobody has read, if ever hope sprung eternal, it’s in the heart of the angler. Let’s hope he was right.
Source: Originally published in On Earth on March 17, 2008.