This film investigates the parallel stories of collapsing Pacific salmon populations and how biologists and engineers have become instruments in audacious experiments to replicate every stage of the fish’s life cycle. Each of our desperate efforts to save salmon has involved replacing their natural cycle of reproduction and death with a radically manipulated life history. Our once great runs of salmon are now conceived in laboratories, raised in tanks, driven in trucks, and farmed in pens. Here we go beyond the ongoing debate over how to save an endangered species. In its exposure of a wildly creative, hopelessly complex, and stunningly expensive approach to managing salmon, the film reveals one of the most ambitious plans ever conceived for taking the reins of the planet. Watch the full episode. Buy the DVD. This film premiered May 1, 2011. (Video limited to US & Territories).

What first interested you in the story of the Pacific Northwest salmon?

One of the great parts of this project was the opportunity to come back around to where I first heard the story – from Jerry Myers, who appears in the film and tells pretty much the same thing he told me shortly after I started guiding in Idaho. I was young, beginning and ending each day in a sleeping bag in the wilderness, well insulated from the burdens of conflicting education or experience… everything seemed perfect to me. And then one afternoon Jerry and I were fishing together, far up a tributary creek of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The Salmon is part of the upper vasculature of the Snake and Columbia River systems, an alpine womb which once produced as many Chinook salmon as anywhere on the planet. We lingered a long time at a place called the “salmon pool,” and Jerry started telling me what used to be there. It was actually a little frustrating at the time; it was hard to honor his more complete version of a landscape I knew as a form of ideal.

As guides, so much of our work involved the language of the pristine, the iconography of wildness, the gin clear water of Salmon Rivers and Redfish Lakes. Although the narrative was very much part of my life, much of that richness is just an anecdote for the generation who arrived in the Pacific Northwest after about the 1970s. It’s a story someone else tells us. Our timeline of memory begins just as that of abundant salmon was ending, and with it the biological and cultural nourishment on which so much depended. My experience as a guide, and the connection I am making now as a full-time resident, initially had no lens through which I could see working on rivers, facilitating what has essentially become a leisure pursuit, as a cultural remnant of once more robust and varied interactions with the land and water. So my interest in this story was originally very personal, an attempt to explore the paradox that a lot of the Pacific Northwest lives within: strong identification with the idea of a natural and cultural heritage derived from abundant salmon, but having just missed out on the heritage itself.

What were you most surprised to learn about salmon and/or the process and effects of harvesting them during the making of this episode?

Without question, I was most impressed by the degree to which we took the original myth of protection through production and never looked back. The scale of the infrastructure that has developed around providing alternatives to salmon swimming up and down streams – the billion dollar “mitigation economy” – is simply staggering.

I was also surprised by the degree to which everyone I met on the ground was genuinely engaged in doing the most they could for salmon, appropriate to the context in which they were working. The hatchery programs are trying to produce as many healthy juveniles as they can; the biologists in the hydropower system are trying to pass as many live fish as possible around the dams; the pilots of the juvenile fish transport barges and trucks are checking stress levels in the tanks; the predator chasers were really trying to reduce the number of salmon eaten by sea lions and terns. Telescoping in on each vignette, it looks like a lot of people doing everything possible to solve their piece of the problem. It’s when you open up and show the accumulation of those contexts that things get ugly, and arguably absurd.

Can you explain the significance of the federal salmon policy decision in the Columbia River Basin that will happen this spring? What is at stake?

In short, the listing of 13 Columbia River salmon and steelhead species as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act requires the government to develop a plan, or biological opinion (“bi-op”), for their protection and restoration. Both the 2000 and 2004 salmon plans were rejected by the courts, meaning that the current administration’s recently submitted plan is the latest in over a decade of modification, argument, and litigation. Technically, the bi-op covers the management of the hydropower system on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. An imminent decision from the federal judge should determine whether the most recent iteration of the proposed plan is legal. Of course, whether our approach to salmon management is actually sufficient for their protection, let alone their restoration, isn’t determined in a courtroom. When Jerry Myers is kept awake by the sound of splashing salmon in Indian Creek, when David Duncan can crouch by the river and find fire in cold stone, when the Tribes are nourished in the many ways derived from abundance…then and only then will we know we’ve done well.

In the episode, it is said that, “If the fish were in any worse shape, they wouldn’t be savable, if they were in any better shape, people wouldn’t care as much. This is the time.” Do you agree with that? Do things have to get bad enough for people to care enough to make a change?

I agree this is the time for a radical re-evaluation of the goals and approach to salmon recovery. Many people have cared, a lot, about declining salmon populations for over a hundred years. Unfortunately, sometimes a response to declining resources is an even tighter grip on the agents of that decline. Even as the situation becomes more desperate, it becomes harder and harder to make big changes because everything feels more fragile. In this film, we wanted to get beyond the documentation of now familiar insults to nature and examine the role, and legacy, of how we have tried to save.

Do you see the salmon situation as proof that human ingenuity is no match for Mother Nature?

No. That proof has been offered too many times before, in too many different ways. The story of the Columbia is, perhaps, an affirmation of that maxim. The modern salmon situation does express interesting components of the relationship between human ingenuity and nature. Something we seem to have lost is the appreciation that the abundance we’re now working so hard, at such cost, to wrestle out of the Columbia is the default condition of the place. Abundance is not something we’re going to tease from the river by being clever. The problem here is shifting baselines. Diminishing abundance determines each new generation’s opportunities on the Columbia; these present opportunities become our memories of a collective past, and together they mark the boundaries of what we imagine it could be again. The thrilling potential of restoration, then, isn’t just about more fish – it’s about expanding our capacity to imagine, increasing opportunities to live a life in the story of our choosing.

How do the Tribes’ relationships to salmon fit into the picture going forward?

The additional levels of complexity and intensity inherent to the tribes’ relationship to this story are humbling. Since no 50-minute program can cover everything, we wanted to focus on the Euro-centric, techno-industrial mitigation component of this story. Of course we make reference to the issue as it concerns the Tribes, but they are still very much in the process of working it out for themselves. I hope they find ways to share their stories, because those stories are so terribly underrepresented in the dialect of salmon science and conservation. There are many expressions of what we know about salmon other than what can be plotted, shaded, extrapolated and correlated, including things we can measure but also things we can’t. This information has been part of indigenous communities for millennia. Comprised of replicated observations over many generations of time, these knowledge systems are not only inherently scientific; they represent our only connection to the deep time on which most ecological systems operate.

Equally meaningful, they also encompass the culture of respect that evolved among people as a function of profoundly intimate experience with the specific environment around them, not only as a form of ritual but as an application of effective governance. Information is shared as a narrative covering many aspects of life in the watershed, not exclusively packaged as data sets. We should be maintaining and promoting this paradigm, where the results of formal research are incorporated into a broader sense of place that includes indigenous understanding and oral histories.

There are so many complicating factors for the Tribes within the context of their separate and collective histories, the struggles they have had getting their treaty rights affirmed legislatively and judicially, how that struggle has influenced their considerations about what to fight for and how, what kind of relationship they will have with commercial fishing and hatcheries. As it concerns the nature and extent of salmon recovery, what the Tribes decide is good enough will have a big effect on what happens with salmon in the Columbia.

What message do you hope audiences will take from this episode?

First, we hope audiences will simply celebrate salmon themselves – their truly extraordinary life history and why they stubbornly remain icons of wildness, resilience, and abundance. Certainly, we hope this episode will contribute to an appreciation of their role in stitching together oceans and continents, estuaries and alpine meadows, coastal rainforests and high deserts. By extension, people should come away with an understanding of why their decline is so consequential on so many levels.

Also, we hope audiences will explore the original assumptions that informed our approach to managing salmon – and how committed we remain to trying to make that story work despite 150 years of evidence that those assumptions might be leading us astray. At incalculable cost, we constructed a reality out of our illusions and have forgotten which is which. Maybe it’s time for a new story.

Wild salmon begin their lives in rivers and streams, migrate to the sea, where they spend the next several years until they mature, then return the to the same rivers and streams to spawn and die. It is a true life cycle, ending where it began. Few organisms spend time as salmon do in both fresh and salt water. Salmon are anadromous (derived from the Greek, meaning running upward), migrating upriver from the sea to spawn, facing myriad obstacles along the way in order to create a new generation. Their journey is arduous and their gifts to the ecosystems they travel through are countless. Here is a brief look at the lifecycle of one of the world’s most popular and most important fish.

Before laying her eggs, the female uses her tail to create a depression in the riverbed, known as a redd. Males compete to fertilize females’ eggs, fighting for position using various courtship displays or mimicry behaviors. The dominant male swims alongside the female, quivering and gaping, which stimulates the female to release her roe into the redd. To fertilize the eggs, the male then deposits milt, or sperm. After the female covers the eggs with gravel, she moves on to create a new redd. During the spawning period, one female may create up to seven separate redds and lay between 2500-7000 eggs.

The embryos hatch into small larval fish called alevins. The highly vulnerable alevins live underneath gravel in the streambed for protection and receive all their nutrients from small yolk sacs attached to their bodies.

Once the yolk sac is fully absorbed, the salmon emerge from the gravel as fry, and begin to move about and feed on their own. Chum and pink fry start swimming toward the estuaries, while other species of salmon wait months, even years, before heading downstream.

The next stage of salmon development, the parr stage, is characterized by the vertical bars that develop on the sides of their bodies. These bars, or parr marks, help camouflage the small fish from predators. This stage can last months or years, depending on the species.

When the dark parr stripes fade, the young salmon are left with bright silver scales—a color that will camouflage them in ocean environments. Now seaward-migrating smolts, these young salmon swim downstream, leaving their familiar fresh-water homes. In the estuaries, smolts go through a series of physiological and morphological changes that allow for a transition to life in salt water. Before entering the ocean, salmon must change their osmoregulation process, undergoing physical adaptations of their gills and kidneys that help build a tolerance for salt water.

In the ocean, salmon travel in large, loose schools, and feed on small fish, krill, and crustaceans. They remain in the ocean for 2 to 8 years, traveling hundreds—even thousands of miles. Here, they develop into adult salmon. After spending a period of time at sea, salmon return to their home rivers and streams to spawn. In the brackish water of the estuaries, salmon change their osmoregulation process once more, this time acclimating to fresh water.

Adult salmon head upstream, toward their spawning grounds—usually the same waters in which their lives began. Once salmon begin the trip, they will not stop to feed, deriving all their energy from stored fats. At this stage, each species develops distinct physical characteristics. Bright colors replace silver scales and some males develop humps or hooked snouts, called kypes; these transformations result from changes to their fat composition, blood chemistry, and hormone levels. Salmon travel an average of 150 miles from the sea to reach their spawning grounds, and each trip contains its own set of obstacles: waterfalls, man-made dams, and hungry predators. If they successfully run that gauntlet, the adults lay and fertilize eggs that will hatch into a new generation of salmon.

Once salmon have spawned they are referred to as either spawned-out salmon, or kelts. Most salmon die within days or weeks of spawning. Nutrients from their carcasses fertilize the streams where their young will hatch and begin to grow. Certain species of salmon, like steelhead, that don’t die after spawning, will re-migrate to the ocean for another season.

Family: Salmonidae

Subfamily: Salmoninae

Genus: Oncorhynchus

Species: The major species of salmon that populate the Pacific Northwest include:
Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha)
Chum (Oncorhynchus keta)
Coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch)
Pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha)
Sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka)
Steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss)

Size and Weight: Size and weight varies depending on species. The length of a mature salmon can range from between 20 inches to almost 5 feet. Adult salmon can weigh anywhere between 3 lbs to over 100 lbs.

Diet: Young salmon feed on small aquatic insects and zooplankton. As salmon grow and mature, they feed on larger animals including shrimp, eels, and smaller fish. Unlike other species of Pacific salmon, zooplankton makes up the majority of the sockeye diet throughout their lifecycle.

Geography: Salmon are anadromous; meaning that they are born in fresh water, migrate to the seas where they spend most of their adult life, and then return to their home range of fresh water to spawn. Certain species, however, stay in their freshwater homes and are known as landlocked salmon. Salmon of the Pacific Northwest are based primarily in and around the Columbia River Basin before migrating out to the Pacific. (Other species of salmon can be found in the western Pacific Ocean in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Russia and off both coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.)

Reproduction: After spending one to five years at sea (depending on the species), sexually mature salmon return to fresh-waters to spawn. Accompanied by a male, the female uses her tail to create a depression in the riverbed, known as a redd. To fertilize the eggs, the male then deposits milt, or sperm. After the female covers the depression with gravel, she moves on to create a new redd. During the spawning period, one female may create up to seven separate redds and lay between 2500-7000 eggs.

Lifespan: Salmon live anywhere from 2-8 years, depending on the species. Spawning generally marks the end of the salmon’s lifecycle, with most species dying within days or weeks of reproducing.

Threats: Man-made dams and reservoirs threaten salmon numbers in the wild by blocking their paths, creating obstacles for young salmon heading for the ocean and adult salmon returning to their spawning grounds. Overfishing, habitat loss, and a number of changing environmental conditions also continue to affect many salmon populations. For instance, rising river temperatures have been connected to an increase in marine illnesses that adversely affect salmon growth.

Additional Facts:

• In addition to Oncorhynchus genus, the Salmoninae subfamily also includes the Brachymystax, Hucho, Salmo, Salvelinus, Salvethymus, and Acantholingua genera.
• The genus, Oncorhynchus, derives from the Greek words, onkos (hook) and rynchos (nose), describing the hooked jaws prevalent in many species of sexually mature male salmon.
• Steelhead were grouped with trout until the 1990s, when they were reclassified in the Oncorhynchus genus with salmon.
• Salmon stop eating once they head toward their respective spawning grounds. They rely solely on fat reserves for energy.
• Salmon can jump up to 6.5 feet (2 meters), a skill that helps them in their upstream swim to their spawning grounds.
• It is not until sexually mature salmon return to fresh waters that the different species develop drastically different physical appearances. Males often have brighter coloring than the females. Depending on species, many males also develop humps and hooked jaws, known as kypes.
• Scientists believe that salmon rely heavily on their olfactory senses to find their way to their spawning ground.
• Chinooks travel further to spawn than other salmon. A Chinook salmon tagged in the Aleutian Islands and recovered in Salmon River, Idaho was determined to have traveled 3,500 miles to spawn. Chinook salmon are also the largest of the species – the record is 126 lbs., though most weigh about 30 lbs.
• Pinks are the smallest of Pacific salmon with an average weight of 3.5 to 4 lbs.
• About 75% of the salmon we consume in the United States is farmed salmon.
• Kunimasu salmon, believed to have been extinct since the 1940s, were recently found in a Japanese lake near Mount Fuji in December 2010.

Part of the massive Tongass National Forest, Admiralty Island in southeast Alaska supports the largest concentration of bears anywhere in the world. Sustained by a wealth of salmon streams, isolated and protected by their environment, some 1,700 Alaskan brown bears are part of a unique circle of life that has played out here for centuries. Beginning in August, millions of salmon — pink and chum, coho and sockeye — return to the island to spawn, providing a feast for the bears, eagles, orcas, sea lions and even the trees. As long as the salmon continue to arrive, all is well. But this year, the salmon fail to arrive for the first time, and the bears get a bitter taste of what the future may hold.Buy the DVD. This film premiered on January 25, 2012. (Video limited to U.S. & Territories.)

Admiralty Island hosts the largest concentration of brown bears in the world. Watch video.

After a spring and summer with no sign of salmon, a mother bear is desperate to catch fish to feed her famished cub. Watch video.

It’s taken all spring and summer, but salmon finally return to Admiralty Island to spawn. Watch video.