Wild Pacific Salmon Wisdom and History

Wild Pacific salmon hold a great importance in the ecosystem of the ocean and rivers, as well as on land.

Text, review and photos by Wendy Kotilla

SALMON PASSAGES

Wild Pacific salmon and I have been bound on a parallel journey that began even be­fore I first breathed west coast air. My grandfather and fa­ther were born on Vancouver Island, my dad left to join the Air Force, had a family on the east coast of Canada, and in 1964 we returned home with him. Ever since then, salmon have been intertwined with my own

lifeblood, much like wild Pacific salmon are the lifeblood of the west coast.

I have travelled a course with wild Pacific salmon that has gone from the tops of the mountains, to the bottoms of the valleys, and out to the wild blue ocean. This voyage has taken me from learning about salmon in my youth, to the cockpit of west coast trollers, to salmon research and restoration, and to sharing salmon wisdom with youth today.

My soul reverberates with salmon’s wild freedom and independence to roam the coast. Our connection feels so strong, it is as if my heartbeat and the heartbeat of salmon are beating together. If the salmon are ever gone, then my heart will shatter in a million pieces, just like the coast will be in pieces without the salmon to unite it all together. If we allow that to happen, I don’t think we really know how to put it back together again.

When I think of what wild Pacific salmon mean to the BC coast and to the world, they are ambassadors of wilder­ness, connectivity, freedom, and generosity. Salmon repre­sent what we love about this place where we live, this vast wild coast with many watersheds, streams, and coastline that all connect together. Salmon are symbols of that con­nection; they connect the ocean to the land and freshwater streams to the forest. Salmon are a keystone species that nurtures a multitude of land and water creatures, and their habitats. Salmon declines are indicators of the health of the ocean and watersheds where they live, and a warning sign about the state of the relationship humans have with the natural world.

SALMON WISDOM

Wild Pacific salmon are the teachers and I am the student. I have been hon­oured to learn many lessons from salmon over the past 43 years, but the stories are their stories. Salmon wisdom can never be owned, it flows like a river flows to the ocean. People used to say they could remember when there were so many salmon spawning in the rivers that you could walk across their backs, but those days are long gone. Now, as salmon numbers are fewer and less people witness their magic and beauty, their stories need to be shared.

As a girl living in Holberg, on the north end of Van­couver Island, I first became a student of salmon. Fam­ily fishing memories are many and I recall standing on my tiptoes to see the Chinook-filled fish bins at BC Packers in Winter Harbour. As a young woman, I was a deckhand on west coast trollers, and followed salmon trails all over the BC coast. Out on the Pacific Ocean, survival and liveli­hood requires paying attention to every detail of the ocean environment, from what fish are eating, to tide currents and changes, to which way the wind is blowing. I soon realized that salmon stock declines were a problem, and in 1986 joined a local salmon enhancement group.

From 1990 to 1998, I worked at Carnation Creek, a long-term study of the effect of forest harvesting on fish and their habitat. For about eight months a year, I lived at the remote research station monitoring fish-counting fenc­es, weather conditions, and the impacts of logging 83% of a small watershed. During my first year, I hid in the bush­es to watch coho spawning in Study Section 5 and felt a sense of wonder at witnessing this amazing event. Over the next five years, I watched the 100 metre section fill in with gravel from steep-slope logging. In the fall of 1995, after a large storm deposited 132 millimetres of rain in 24 hours, the unstable accumulation of gravel in Section 5 relocated downstream.

These days, I share salmon stories with Comox Val­ley youth through the Youth and Ecological Restoration Program. Most of the youth don’t know salmon names and think that they come from hatcheries. I take them out to work with community members who are trying to restore local salmon stocks. Current practices include capturing dwindling numbers of adult salmon before they spawn to take the female’s eggs, fertilize them with milt from the males, incubate them over the winter, and release the fry in the spring. The youth and I love being involved, but I feel a deep sadness about ripping salmon off the spawn­ing grounds after they have traveled thousands of miles to complete their life cycle.

Salmon have a legacy of nurturing the west coast land and waters with their abundance. Human relationships are out of balance with the natural world, and salmon are tell­ing us it is not working for them. Our greatest hope for a future with wild Pacific salmon lies in helping people expe­rience salmon in the places they call home. Hearing salmon wisdom means respecting and repairing their place in the world.

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SALMON 2100: AN OVERVIEW

Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon

Robert T. Lackey, Denise H.Latch, and Sally L. Duncan, edi­tors. American Fisheries Society, September 2006.

629 pages, with colour illustrations. ISBN 1-888569-78-6 $39.00 US.

To Order: American Fisheries Society, Orders Dept, 1650 Bluegrass Lakes Parkway, Alpharetta, GA 30004, USA. Ph: 678-366-1411, Fax: 770-442-9742; Email: afspubs@pbd.com

In 2006, the American Fisheries Society (AFS) pub­lished a 629 page book called Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon, edited by Robert T. Lackey, Denise H. Latch and Sally L. Duncan. The authors were asked the following question: What is it really going to take to have wild salmon populations in significant, sustainable numbers through 2100? Thirty-six salmon people wrote 23 chapters, presenting a diversity of expertise and opinions on how we might realize a future with wild Pacific salmon.

Reflecting optimism for salmon’s future, the front cov­er has artwork of eyed salmon eggs by Andy Everson of the Comox First Nation who says:

“Beginning” is my rendition of this very start of life for salmon. For the many First Nations throughout the coast, the salmon was given to us by the Creator as an inte­gral source of food salmon is also seen as being related to us and, as such, is given an incredible amount of respect. One reason I created “Beginning” was the birth of my son, Matthew. Like the young salmon egg, he is imprinted with a sense of place and a sense of belonging.”

About 4,000 years ago, as ice-age glaciers receded, more freshwater habitat was available and ecological con­ditions began improving for salmon. First Nations salmon harvest subsequently increased and, prior to 1500, more of a balance existed between salmon and humans. Salmon numbers started to decline shortly after the California gold rush days in the 1850s. On the Columbia River, salmon runs were in serious decline by the 1880s, and when the first dam was constructed in 1933, only one-fifth of the original stocks remained.

Each of the salmon species has many stocks that have adapted to specific ecological and watershed conditions over long periods of time. These stocks represent genetic variations crucial to the survival of salmon. Nehlsen et. al. (1991) determined that in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, more than 200 wild salmon stocks were at moderate or high risk of extinction; a similar assessment by Slaney et. al. (1996) for British Columbia and the Yukon identified over 702 populations at moderate or high risk. What would be the result of a current evaluation on wild Pacific salmon stocks?

Wild stock declines are generally understood to be a combination of factors including: changing ocean and cli­mate conditions, excessive fishing, farming and ranching, dam construction, water diversion and withdrawal, pollu­tion, hatchery production, fish farms, habitat degradation, urban development, forest harvesting, predation, competi­tion with nonnative fish, diseases, parasites, and others.

Salmon are a connector species that have a critical function in bringing marine nutrients to watersheds; in the southern half of their range, these nutrients are estimated to be less than 10% of historical levels. This decline repre­sents a significant impact on the survival of juvenile salmon and their freshwater habitat that is not well understood. As a keystone species, the survival of salmon is linked to the survival of many other species, both plants and animals. What is the impact of declines in wild Pacific salmon on bears, eagles, orca, ducks, otters, aquatic insects and many others?

Salmon 2100 editors identified four core policy drivers that form the foundation of the present status of wild Pacific salmon. By focusing on more obvious factors of salmon de­clines and an assortment of solutions, society’s attention is being drawn away from significant truths. These four core policy drivers are central for determining what society wants for the future.

Core Policy Driver #1 – Rules of Commerce: Cheap consumer products for humans do not include the ecological cost of restoring the environment or wild Pacific salmon.

Core Policy Driver #2 – Increasing Scarcity of Key Natural Resources: Human demands on fresh water, land, and other natural resources compete with what wild Pacific salmon require for life and abundance.

Core Policy Driver #3 – Regional Human Popula­tion Levels: Pacific Northwest human numbers are forecast to increase from about 15 million to 50 million or more by 2100; cumulative lifestyle demands will lead to decreasing support for wild Pacific salmon space.

Core Policy Driver #4 – Individual and Collective Preferences: Society’s behaviour consistently indicates our preference for goods and services over our desire for a fu­ture with wild Pacific salmon.

Wild Pacific salmon depend on habitat that increasing human populations require for water, electricity, food, and recreation. These services are managed by myriad agencies at many levels, and are rooted in cultural values that are subject to change, unforeseen and beyond our control. Ma­jor changes include energy and water shortages, and future technology that we cannot envision. Most people support salmon recovery, but will that extend to giving up their pri­vate property rights or standard of living?

Author Recommendations

Somewhere between pessimism and optimism are real­istic ecological and social policies that include the survival of wild Pacific salmon. Salmon renewal involves a broad range of issues from economic to spiritual to ethical. Their complex life history requires huge regions of marine, fresh­water, and land habitats that cross national and internation­al boundaries and jurisdictions. Salmon 2100 authors had four general themes for sustaining salmon.

1. Maintain enough freshwater and estuarine habitat to sustain wild runs. Limit protection of wild Pacific salmon to choosing specific streams as sanctuaries.

2. Change institutional structures to more effectively implement salmon recovery. Minimize bureaucracy to develop local watershed management strategies, and change harvest limits and policies on wild Pacific salmon.

3. Increase role of the science and technology in recov­ery efforts. Integrate current practices with expanding knowledge of human impacts on wild Pacific salmon.

4. Change people’s values and beliefs, which are as­sumed to translate into changes in practices and actions. Shift cultural beliefs to include the reality of human impacts on wild Pacific salmon and the human choices required for their recovery.

Summary

Salmon 2100 final chapters by the editors noted the au­thors’ struggles with answering the futuristic salmon ques­tion and the unknown variables of the next hundred years. Human population increases and global climate change were paramount considerations. Forward thinking requires contemplating subjects like perpetual ecosystem dynam­ics, non-linear thinking, shifting worldviews, and impacts of human decision making on ecosystems.

Making development projects pay for infrastructure, protecting farm land and greenbelts, and implementing Smart Growth strategies may help to control future urban sprawl. Restoring wild Pacific salmon is directly depen­dent on society making some “painfully difficult choices,” but current trends of salmon declines are probable if hu­man population numbers continue to increase. It is a soci­etal illusion to think we can maintain healthy wild salmon populations AND the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed.

The authors all commented that “political interference and manipulation of science is a serious problem.” Science is a compass not intended to be used alone, but short-term politics have come to be the main guide for environmental decisions. Some suggested that the public is not aware of what it means to lose wild Pacific salmon. Over time, fewer salmon numbers would result in fewer people having a per­sonal connection with salmon. That would be a crisis for both salmon and humans.

Salmon 2100 contributors agreed that transformation of our approach is essential for humans to restore a balance with wild Pacific salmon. The majority synopsis was, “If we give up on wild salmon, we give up on ourselves.” Recog­nizing the larger human and social dimensions of declines in wild Pacific salmon is required if there is any hope for a future with them. We could also learn from First Nations traditions of respecting salmon as a gift from the Creator, and having a sense of knowing this place as home.

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Wendy Kotilla lives in the Comox Valley and co-ordi­nates Youth and Ecological Restoration Program, to educate young people about the connections of the natural world.

[From WS January/February 2008]

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