King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon by David R. Montgomery

Abstract

Northwest and Gordon Sayre's insightfulreview of climbing on Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, andMount Shasta particularly rewarding.Tay lorpersuasively argues that support for salmon restoration isdefined by geography. Salmon are iconic west of the Cascade mountain divide, where fish harvests are most remunerative and environmental restrictions require fewer eco nomic sacrifices. East of the Cascades, where salmon numbers have declined most precipi touslyandwhere alterationsdesigned to manage riversforthebenefitoffish threatenagricultural economies, enthusiasm for salmon recovery is nearly absent. Taylor argues against an essential istunderstanding of the iconographie standing of salmon in theNorthwest; but by tying the salmon's political fateto specificnatural resource geographies, he in effectsubstitutes a different typeof essentialism. Gordon Sayre argues that the accepted idea that the search for solitude animates mountain climbingwas a product ofmid-twentieth cen tury wilderness and environmental advocacy. The origins ofmountain climbing in thePacific Northwest, Sayre points out, came fromhighly social adventures organized by outdoor enthu siasts in Seattle and Portland, who embraced Mount Rainier andMount Hood as theirpeaks. Recent attempts to limitmountaineering on bothmountains havemet stiff public resistance, which Sayre interpretsas a return to an earlier ethicwhen hundreds of climbers gathered on mountain summits. The collection concludes with threeessaysby the editors on the influence of Robert Redford and his Sundance Institute.Their postmodern argument critiques Redford's contrived New Westernisms, while theyapprove his valuation ofwestern environmental protection. Although thesepieces on Redford are less convincing than others inthevolume, theeditors are trueto their purpose. Imagining the Big Open avoids singular and positivist interpretations of theAmerican West in this era. King ofFish: The Thousand-Year Run ofSalmon By David R.Montgomery Westview Press, Boulder, Colo., 2003. Illustrations, photographs, maps, index. 303 pages. $26.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. Reviewed by JimLichatowich Columbia City,Oregon Recently, the Oregonian ran a story under the headline "Bush Officials Laud Salmon Successes on Northwest Trip." James Connaughton, chair of the president's Council on Environmental Quality, attributed recent increases in hatchery-reared salmon returns to theColumbia River to the success of federal salmon recovery efforts. The article also refered toother experts who said thatnatural changes in ocean conditions are contributing to the recent increases in salmon. Connaughton's remarks reminded me of similar claims of success in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when ocean conditions were in transition.At that time, the unfounded belief that improved hatchery tech nology had solved theproblem of diminishing salmon runs set the stage for the collapse of Oregon's coastal coho salmon in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article also reminded me ofGeorge Santayana's warning that"thosewho cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."If JamesConnaughton had readDa vidMontogmery's new book King ofFish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon, his assessment of current salmon recovery efforts might have been very different. 642 OHQ vol. 105, no. 4 Montgomery is a geologist by training and a professor at theUniversity of Washington. His work on the geomorphology of PacificNorth west riversnaturally led to his interest in the salmon. The geologist's domain isbroad; time ismeasured inmillions of years over vast land scapes, so itisnot surprising that Montgomery's book covers a broader geographic area and a longer time span thanother recentbooks on the salmon. King ofFish covers a range ofAtlantic and Pacific salmon from the British Isles to easternNorth America to thePacificNorthwest and Alaska. Itbegins in the thirteenthcentury and moves at a lively,highly readable pace to the present. As the Industrial Revolution moved west fromEngland toNew England and eventually to the Pacific Northwest, the salmon (Atlantic and Pacific) were subjected to a repeating se quence of devastating events. First came the shiftfrom subsistence harvest tomarket-driven commercial fisheries thatfeda growing number of factoryworkers. Industrialization and the growth of cities rapidly degraded rivers and salmon habitat. Early factoriesused waterpower provided by dams, which blocked salmon runs. Factories and cities produced waste, which was conveniently routed to the rivers fordisposal. The combined effects of overharvest and habitat degradation reduced or eliminated the salmon runs in river after river. Overharvest, degradation of rivers,and the loss of salmon were not the consequences of a public policy intended to sacrificethesalmon for industrialization.Officials knewwhat was caus ing thedecline of salmon and tried to...