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Consider the Salmon [1]
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Date: 2024-09-25
Hi, Keep It Rural readers! We’re pulling a little uno reverse this week, as this edition was first released in audio form for the Keep It Rural podcast. If you want to listen instead of read it (or do both!), click here.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you’ve probably heard about salmon migration, which begins in late summer and extends into December every year.
The journey these salmon embark on is spectacular. They’re born in freshwater rivers and streams, and once they’re old enough, they head to the ocean. There, they feed on invertebrates and insects, and are fed on by larger animals like orcas, seals, sharks, and of course, humans.
If – when – they reach about four years old (the age differs between salmon species), a sort of homing sense kicks in. They start heading back upstream, usually to their birthplace, to spawn and then die.
But how does a salmon find its way, sometimes hundreds of miles, back to its exact birthplace?
Scientists don’t really know. The U.S. Geological Survey theorizes that salmon use the earth’s “magnetic field like a compass” to go back to the river or stream where they were born, a place they already know is a good spot to spawn.
To get back to their specific home stream, scientists believe salmon navigate by smell. If they can’t find their way home, some will continue to search until they run out of energy and die, before they’re able to spawn.
Going, Going, Gone…
Everything about this migration is beautiful and tragic to me because of what it can tell us about our future.
Wild salmon populations have decreased drastically in recent years as the health of rivers and streams deteriorates with climate change and habitat loss. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, nearly half of the wetlands in Oregon’s coastal estuaries where salmon live have disappeared. Eighty percent of tidal wetlands in Washington’s Puget Sound have been cut off from rivers or destroyed to make room for development. Roughly 90% of California’s wetlands have been paved over.
Much of the West Coast’s Chinook salmon fishing season was canceled last summer because of population decline. Scientists estimate the Puget Sound’s Chinook salmon population is as low as 10% of their historic numbers.
To me, this warns of times to come, times in which we won’t find salmon in local rivers and streams.
There have been some efforts to stop this decline: In 2023, a proposal to remove four dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon to improve salmon migration was greenlit. Now, in fall of 2024, the project is finally complete, marking the largest dam removal in U.S. history.
But is it enough?
I remember in sixth grade, I learned what global warming meant for our planet. Always an animal lover, the biggest takeaway for me was that animals would start to disappear if we didn’t do something. I went home after school that day and wrote handmade flyers with sketches of birds along the border to stuff in my neighbors’ mailboxes. Did they know that in 50 years, there might not be birds in the sky? That in 50 years, the salmon on their dinner plate might be a thing of the past?
That was almost 20 years ago, and things are much more dire now. In a 2023 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists warned that we’ll pass the temperature threshold for a livable planet in the next 10 years.
I have a hard time staying optimistic when I hear that. I get just plain ole’ sad at the thought of losing so many plants and animals, and, eventually, ourselves.
One remedy I’ve found is paying close attention to my surroundings. Author and artist Jenny Odell writes about a concept called bioregionalism in her 2019 book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Bioregionalism is a place-based philosophy asserting that human cultures develop in relationship with the environments they inhabit. Odell argues that in the digital age that is the 21st century, we’ve abandoned this relationship with our physical surroundings.
Bioregionalism can help us repair this relationship. Casting our attention toward our local ecosystems – the changing colors of tree leaves in the fall, or the salmon on their hero’s journey home – counterbalances the demands of our new digital reality.
These demands for growth and money and development have led us down a very dangerous path. And it’s a path we might not survive, unless we opt out of it.
Right now, looking for the salmon is how I’m responding to this existential climate threat we’re all facing. What will you look for?
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