The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 217: Mark Kurlansky on Saving Salmon

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Mark Kurlansky, Phil Taylor, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: Mark being a lifelong fisherman; fisheries and over fishing as only minor problems by comparison; how salmon get hit by everything we do wrong; the 11-foot-high jump of the salmon; Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain and dedicated fly fisherman; the Atlantic Ocean's decreasing carrying capacity; why catch it if you're going to release it?; calibrating the success of salmon stock recovery to population numbers from centuries ago; environmentalists spending too much time trying to stop things rather than fix things; subject as a proxy for your soapbox issue; the problem with solutions; New Deal dam building; dumbed down wild salmon; celebrating the completion of your 33rd book (Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate) by beginning to write your 34th book; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Alright everybody, not that we have guests, not that we ever have unspecial guests. I don't want former guests who are listening to feel broken hearted and beaten

down when I say that we have a special guest because they, right? No one wants to hear that. But it's like in the specialness of all our guests, there's, there's one that is rising up a little special right now where we have on author Mark Kurlansky. And I'm sure like everybody out there is familiar with some of his books. my world, for sure. Being familiar with Mark's book, Cod, and his book, Salt, which seemed to make its way onto every coffee table and bookshelf in the country. Also the author of 1968, The Big Oyster,

A World Without Fish. And we're here today to talk about mark's new book salmon and about salmon in general so uh welcome mark thanks for joining us and we're still in like our covid 19 recording situation where much to you know much to my chagrin we are not in the same room together mark is is holed up in manhattan but thanks joining us, Mark. It's my pleasure. Be nice to be in Montana right now, but what can I do? No, I think relative to many other places

in the country, we have it pretty good right now, even though we are still under, you know, stay at home orders by the government. But it's a pretty good place to, pretty decent place to do that. I caught this.

This is one of my top questions. And we already talked about it. This is we're setting up our equipment. You're a fisherman. Explain your explain your fishing life a little bit to people. Well, yeah, I've always been a fisherman. For a small time when I was young, I was a commercial fisherman. Oh, really? Okay.

Yeah, well, I'm from New England. Uh-huh. And when I was getting out of high school, I thought, what could be better than to fish on commercial boats. And I actually did love it when I was young. It gets to be less fun as you get older. But I've also always been a sports fisherman. I started off like most New England kids who don't have a lot of money, surf casting for stripers and blues, which, you know, if you ever surf cast, what that does is it gets you obsessed with the art of casting. And once you become obsessed with the art of casting, you inevitably go to fly fishing.

Nowadays, fly fishing is most of the time is the only fishing I do every once in a while I go to the ocean your book on on salmon um I hate to say I don't want to say this I hope people listen to the whole interview because I don't want to start out on a sour note, but your book on salmon winds up, you provide a pretty dim view on what the future of these creatures is. collapse that's that's ongoing today this collapse of salmon stocks and salmon fisheries you know around the world where salmon can be found but i find that right away and starting to go through your book i noticed that you would now and then speak fondly or empathetically of commercial fishermen and you even give some recipes and talk about cooking salmon and eating salmon. And I got to wondering if you were writing a book about the collapse of the elephant, somehow it seems that you would not put elephant recipes in that book.

Can you explain how those things can coexist? Yeah, because there isn't a sustainable elephant hunting system. Yeah. There is for salmon. Salmon is actually one of the easier fish to regulate a fishery for because they're very predictable and we know what they're doing and when they're doing it. And really all you have to do is count the number of fish that go up a river to spawn, which you can do from a tower or from an airplane. I mean, you can just see them. And when enough fish have spawned, then you tell the fishermen, okay, for a certain number of hours now you can fish. And this works quite well in the few places where there's still healthy salmon runs.

But, you know, the reason I decided to do this book was because in 1997 I came out with my book on cod. And this was as the northern stock in the Grand Banks was collapsing. And people were really, for the first time, seriously thinking about the problems of overfishing and regulating commercial fisheries. I mean, the general public was, fishermen. I mean, when I was on commercial boats in the 1960s, it was all fishermen talked about. But now by the end of the 1990s, people were thinking about it, and that's what my book was about. And since then, I've been monitoring fisheries and what's going on. And it's become clear to me that overfishing and regulating fisheries is a minor problem. It's one of the

smaller problems. In fact, if you could find a fishery where that was the only problem, it would be wonderful. It would be so relatively easy to fix. But the problems are far more complex than that. And I thought that salmon was the perfect way to make that point because being an anadromous fish living both in freshwater and in the ocean, it gets hit by everything that we do wrong. So the problem is not that we're eating fish or fishing them commercially. The fact is there's places like most of the areas of Atlantic salmon, there is no commercial fishery anymore. And the fish are still becoming rarer and rarer. So, I mean, what's going on?

You know, there's deforestation, there's building dams, there's pollution, there's bad farming practices, there's urban sprawl, and there's climate change and climate change and climate change. Huge problem. And so basically, if you want to save the salmon, all you really have to do is save the earth. And then it'll be saved. Yeah. Yeah, in the intro at the end of the book has a prologue that starts out with a couple, you know, biographies or more like character portraits of a couple different commercial salmon fishermen. And then you end the prologue by remarking how, you know, there still is. It's remarkable that we still have a commercial fishery for salmon. And you say that this isn't a book about overfishing.

It feels like a very important point you want to make. But you go into what it would take to save salmon, and you list some things that seem so, uh, impossible that it left me wondering, um, if we had some wiggle room in there, because the things that we would need to do, frankly,

are very, very hard to picture us pulling that together. And so it left me wondering, uh, is there a plan B that we can be open to? And maybe we can return to that or you can tackle that one now, or we can get to it as our conversation moves on. look,

if we could all pull together because we're being attacked by a pandemic and close down the economy and start from zero and rebuild, then we could do that because of climate change also. Climate change is a far greater threat than a pandemic. In fact, a pandemic is just one of the threats of climate change. I sometimes wonder why we have failed to get that message across, that we really have to do drastic things. But when I look at the whole history of salmon, and, you know, going back to ancient times,

and there were a lot of talks about blocking rivers. Blocking rivers is one of the huge issues. And even in the Middle Ages, there were ordinances against blocking rivers. The Magna Carta specifies that the King of England cannot block a salmon river. And the problem of overnetting and damming were huge problems. But in the 19th century, along came the Industrial Revolution. And, I mean, if you look at Britain, I mean, they built all of these mills, which they powered by dams that blocked rivers. And then the mills dumped their pollution into the rivers. And

soon the rivers of Britain were completely dead. And then in New England, people, many of British origin, did the exact same thing. And then, you know, it was largely New Englanders who went out west and got this great idea of how to build the Pacific Northwest by blocking the rivers and having hydroelectric dams and producing more energy than anybody else had to build this economic powerhouse. So I was researching all of this, and I was thinking, why isn't anybody learning anything? And then I realized, because they're not trying to learn anything, they regarded these things that they did as tremendous successes. They did make Britain the greatest industrial power in the world. They did make New England the greatest industrial force in the world. They did make New England the greatest industrial force in North America. And they did take the Pacific Northwest, which had very little economic activity, and build a huge economy based on electricity from hydroelectric dams. These are

great successes that are destroying the planet. And so what's really happening here is that we need to rethink our whole idea of economic development. To develop an economy does not necessarily mean that you have to destroy the earth. You have to look for ways of developing that are not destructive. And we need to do that fairly quickly.

I mean, the Europeans who came to America and looked at the Native Americans whose lives depended on salmon wondered why their salmon stocks weren't getting depleted like the white people's were. And they came up with a couple of ideas that they didn't have enough fishing skills to overfish and that they only use this for, you know, sustainability for food. They didn't use it for commerce. And this is completely wrong. They had economies, they had built villages, they traded between them, salmon was an important commodity of trade, and they were brilliant salmon fishermen. If you read the journals of Lewis and Clark and McKenzie and any of the early explorers,

you know, if they wanted salmon, they had to find an Indian because the Indians were the ones who knew how to catch them. So it was such a flourishing salmon industry. Why didn't they destroy the salmon stocks like we did? Because the founding principle of developing their economy was that you can't destroy the habitat. You have to maintain the river. You have to treat the river respectfully. You have to treat the river respectfully. You have to treat the salmon respectfully. And I submit that we need to change our thinking.

I know you make that. Well, I want to return to that minute because I actually have a question about that coming up down the list here. But first, I want to lay a little more groundwork for people and touch on something you already touched on. I want to lay a little more groundwork for people um and touch on something you already touched on where you i want to connect two thoughts of yours one about that the survival of salmon is absolutely tied to the survival of the planet and also can you touch more on

anadromy like explain to people what that means why that makes the fish special and why it makes them all that much more vulnerable and you talk to in your book about the cost that anadromy uh entails like why it's a risky life strategy yeah you know i i say in the book that the purpose of the book was not to say, you know, that this is an incredible animal and it'd be really sad if we lost it. However, it is an incredible animal and it would be really sad if we lost it. I think salmon is one of the most remarkable animals in the animal kingdom. A fish that can jump 11 feet in the air. I mean, think about that.

That would be like a human being jumping 50 feet. It can accelerate as fast as an automobile. They board in rivers and they get to the size of a herring and they go out to sea and they eat so much, they hunt so much that they increase their size by about 95%. They're thousands of miles away now. And at a certain point, it's like a bell goes off, time to spawn, time to reproduce the species. And they find the river in which they were born, which is now thousands of miles away. And not only that, but in that river, they find the exact spot in the river where they were born.

Hey, Mark, I want to just interject. Can you speak just a little sidebar about how, like all the different ideas of how they think that salmon are able to do that? Yeah. They're not absolutely certain how they find the river. There is a lot of theories. And they're pretty sure that once they get in the river, they find the right spot through smell. And they can identify that it's the right river by the smell. But they can't smell the river from thousands of miles at sea.

So how do they get there? Some theorize that they use stellar or solar navigation. Some think that they're able to lock into electromagnetic fields. They seem to have some magnetic materials along the stripe in the center of their body, the lateral stripe there. And it's not completely certain. They're still trying to figure it out. But it's an ability that all salmon have. And occasionally, a salmon won't go back to the river of its birth. It'll spawn somewhere else. And this is a good thing because they find new rivers,

and they develop new rivers. At the moment, they're developing some rivers in the north slope of Alaska that are no longer iced over because of climate change. One of the remarkable features of salmon is that they completely adapt to the river they come from so that their DNA is completely focused on that particular river, which is why Hatteries, if they try to do eggs in two different rivers, they would look the same. But the DNA is actually more different than yours and mine. And when it becomes, it's not clear to me at what point this is or how this is decided, but when the DNA becomes too much different, then they're a different species. So there's like seven species in the Pacific, which is one genus, and there's only one species in the Atlantic, which is a separate genus.

But river to river, they're all different, and they have different skills. You know, if you're from a river that has big waterfalls, you're a great jumper or, you know, if you're stronger, if you have faster currents. I mean, I've seen salmon making their way in rivers that are so where the current is so strong that they're really just gaining a centimeter at a time. But they're unstoppable. They never give up. I've seen them jump waterfalls and not make it over the top, fall down on the rocks and kind of shake it off and jump up again and keep trying until they get it. Incredible determination. And once they enter the river, they stop eating. And this is nature solving a problem because, you know, salmon eat so much at sea that if it goes back in a river and continues eating

like that, the river will be destroyed. They'll eat out the whole river. They'll eat out the baby salmon. They'll eat out everything there is to eat. And so instead, they just stop eating when they arrive in the river, which raises all kinds of interesting questions for people who fly fish for salmon in rivers. Why do they take the fly? The whole other subject of debate is they're not eating, which is why salmon flies don't look like food. You know, like if you're fishing for a trout, you use a fly that looks like something that they eat. But you can do all sorts of weird, crazy things for salmon flies because they're not looking for food. They completely change their bodies.

They change from a silver skin. They develop a spawning look, the males. They become bright red and get humps on their backs and hook noses and all sorts of weird things, become this very strange looking animal. And it takes a tremendous amount of energy to do that. The red in the skin is the pigment from the flesh. When salmon, after salmon have spawned, they're like an albino. There's no pigment in them. The flesh is white. So they use everything they've got to get there, and their last energy is spawning,

and then they've done what they had to do and they roll over and die it's it's like the story was written by a greek tragedian you know one of the when talking about how salmon are all aren't uh all created equal you make this interesting point where you know looking at them if you're just like a passive observer a casual observer you look at salmon from two different river systems and and think like oh you know it's a sockeye or it's a king what the hell's the difference but you point out how bristol bay i think you're talking about fairly recent market trends where you're talking about commercial fishermen in Bristol Bay.

They'll sell their sockeye salmon for about $1 a pound, and they'll sell their king salmon for about 50 cents a pound. Copper River, the sockeyes, so same species of fish, but a sockeye that's going to head up the Copper River might go for two dollars and fifty cents a pound as opposed to a dollar a pound in bristol bay and that a king salmon headed up the copper might fetch around 250 a pound as opposed to 50 cents a pound in bristol bay and you point out that at those rates it's plausible to catch a king salmon that is worth to that fisherman about 200 bucks how do you begin to explain like like

how do you explain those price discrepancies um yeah you know and also the another question is how do you explain the discrepancy between what the fisherman is being paid and what you're paying, what they're paying at the Pike Market in Seattle? Yeah, that's definitely another. That's true of a lot of fish. When you hear what they're getting for it and what people are paying for it in restaurants, you realize that someone's making a hell of a lot of money somewhere right but the reason why i chose these two particular fisheries to go out on uh i mean i can't help myself i just any excuse to go out in a commercial fishery i go but uh the one that i did in bristol bay um was a uh you know there were set net. There were gill netters in both cases, but set netters is a very low investment kind of fishery. And they go out in these aluminum skiffs and they haul in the fish.

They don't take good care of them. The guy I went with, Ollie Olson, he was a Montana sheep shearer. I don't know. You've probably seen these guys at work. It's a tough job in itself. They discovered that in the off season there was money to be made in Bristol Bay. So he gets a bunch of young guys from around Montana to go up with him.

And these guys have never been on a boat before. And they're lost. They don't know what a bow is, what a stern is. They call a line a rope. But they earn a few thousand dollars, which, you know, they earn enough money for a down payment at a simple home in Montana, which they could never do with what they were doing in Montana. But they go out and you go out for like 15 hours.

I mean, the regulators will say, you know, there's an opening and it's 15 hours or 20 hours, whatever it is, you fish the whole time. And it's Alaska in the summertime, so there's no nighttime. And, you know, they're yanking these things out of the nets and throwing them on the deck, and they're stepping on them and kicking them and stuff and take them over to the tender and throw them into these canvas bags, and they take them away. Completely different from the fishery that I went to, the drift net fishery I went to in

Cordoba, Alaska, which is the Copper River salmon, which they catch out in open ocean in the Gulf of Alaska. When the regulators have found that enough salmon have made it into the Copper River to spawn. You know, they'll get an opener for 15 hours or something. But these are like real, well, they're small ships, you know, they're one person operations about 30 feet spooling and spool on the front. And they fish these things with great care. They take them out of the net and they bleed them from the gills as they take them out and they slide them into an ice hold. Nowadays, some are using holds with slush instead of ice because it surrounds it better.

And they take really good care of it. And that's the difference in price and there's also an issue that you spoke about about the condition of the fish that's entering the river yeah yeah well i mean as i said that fish in different rivers are different and a river like the copper river which is a tough, long river, it has big, tough fish. The more the fish has to go through to get to the spawning ground, the higher quality of fish it is. A lot of the Bristol Bay rivers are fairly small rivers and don't have to go through a lot once they get into Bristol Bay to get up to their spawning grounds. And so they're not as big or as strong or as fat.

And I mean, there's a different quality of fish in different rivers. Mark, did you taste test those two fish? Could you tell? You don't have to tell. I did, but you know, you could look at them and tell, and you really get,

um, but. Just like the amount of fat coming off them. Yeah. Just the, you know, the whole way that they look, you know,

the, the, I mean, Copper River salmon are beautiful. Um, also, you know, I have to say in fairness that the Copper River people are brilliant marketers. And, you know, I remember I got nowhere on this, but I have roots in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and I was trying to convince Gloucester fishermen to go out to Cordova and just check out how the Copper River fishery is done, how they market their fish. They've managed to create in people's heads the idea that that's a species of fish.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it has a little to do with the fact that it's the first run in Alaska, so it opens the season. But it also has to do with the fact that they guarantee the quality that it's fished really carefully. But it's also just plain old marketing.

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of American readers, you know, when they're going to tuck into a book about salmon, I think they're expecting to see a bunch of stuff about Alaska. Right. salmon fisheries and the history of salmon in japan the history of salmon in europe uh can you give a snapshot of of salmon as a global resource like like who has them who don't yeah it's a it's a northern fish and they're also in the southern hemisphere but they're not supposed to be they're fake they they were planted in places like New Zealand and Australia and Chile. Not there by nature. By nature, they're in northern hemisphere. They're uniquely, all salmonids are uniquely northern hemisphere.

A salmon cannot live in water that is over 68 degrees. It can't live in it. It can't reproduce in it. So that dictates going, you know, rivers that are fairly far north. And also it's one of the problems about climate change. The Pacific salmon are from California to Alaska and in northern Japan, Hokkaido, and in Pacific Russia, the Kamchatka, the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska are the two healthiest salmon runs in the world. And the reason for that, what are these two places have in common they're hardly any people uh short growing seasons so there's almost no agriculture

um so those rivers are just undisturbed and wild um that's interesting is you know the thing we've talked about, an observation I've had about wildlife conservation, that if you go back in American history a bit, you see that we had wilderness and wild things sort of in spite of our best efforts to get rid of it like we just it took us a while to conquer it all right like we sort of had the appetite and intention to go get it all we just hadn't gotten around to it and eventually we got around to it and now we have oftentimes the wild things that we have and the wildlife that we have is now because we've made a very conscious decision to have it. And we understand that it's costly to have it, but we insist on having it and we make sacrifices to have it. Is Russia, you hear about the salmon and the brown bears and in in russia and siberia are they still in the phase of they just have it because they haven't gotten around to killing it off yet

or are they sacrificing for it you know the um and there is serious commercial fishing uh going on in the kamchatka and other parts of uh r. And also the area is very rich in oil. And so far they've stayed away from the Kamchatka, but there are some areas near there that were very good salmon places but have been damaged by oil and mineral exploration. Yeah, it's just a remote, it's, it's a remote, uh, you know, it's like, why don't we all move to Alaska? I don't know. We don't.

That's what saves Alaska. I think they like it that way. What, how are the runs in Japan? Are there good salmon runs in Japan? There are some, there are some good in the in the north mainly in hokkaido which is the northernmost island like you can walk out and stand on the bank and look out and there's a bunch of salmon spawning there in this in the uh uh in cities you can see the salmon spawning in rivers they're uh uh and they have a unique species called masu, or sometimes in English called cherry salmon, because it runs around the time of cherry blossom season.

Oh, what's it most closely related to of our specific salmon? Oh, I don't know. It's maybe like a sockeye or something. I don't know. It's maybe like a sockeye or something. I don't know. It's a very good eating salmon. And kind of a unique species. It shows up a little bit in other places in Asia, a little bit in the Kamchatka, and a little bit in Korea.

But it's mainly a Japanese species. There's a lot of problems in the Japanese salmon fishery. Something like 95% of the wild salmon in Japan have some hatchery DNA in them. Oh, really? That's not good yeah when you were when you were mapping your book out and and trying to think of what areas to write about and what salmon to pay attention to i'm asking this as just a person that grew up as a kid in the great lakes did you have

what were your considerations around talking about your reluctancies or ambitions to talk about the make-believe salmon like you know we have several species of salmon in the great lakes that were removed there do you do you feel that it's it's irrelevant to the conversation does it inform i do i do feel that it's irrelevant. It doesn't speak to the preservation of wild runs. It's like farm salmon. I mean, there's a lot of things you can say pro and con about farm salmon, but one thing that's clear is it has nothing to do with whether wild salmon will survive. I mean, it's a completely different thing um well except that it does have something to do with wild salmon surviving because it could possibly make them not survive correct the farm the farm yeah yeah okay we're getting into that now or later let Let's wait a second.

Let's wait. Let's wait, because what I didn't talk about... I do have that question here. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law

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I didn't get around to talking about Atlantic salmon, which is New England and Maritime Canada and Newfoundland and Iceland and Britain and Ireland and Norway and part of Russia. Used to be a lot more, you know, used to be Poland and France and Spain. That's what I couldn't believe that Spain used to have salmon. Yeah, northern Spain. Galicia. Yeah. Franco, who I absolutely loathe because I'm showing my age,

but I actually covered Franco as a reporter, and he was a monster. He was a dedicated fly fisherman. Oh, he was a dedicated fly fisherman oh he was yeah yeah this is i had no idea this is a good way of disproving the claim you know that fly fishermen are all softies good good people really good people fly fishermen franca was a fly fisherman and you know he the way he ran Spain, he could do whatever he wanted. And so he tried to preserve northern rivers, which is where the salmon were, because he wanted to fish in them. Well, to be honest, that's a lot of, that's a strong conservation incentive for a lot of people. Yes. And I don't discount it.

Right. Right. Well, it, you know, it is, it's what's made a lot of fishermen and hunters environmentalists, which good, that works. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it. Right.

Right. Which, good, that works. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it. Right, right. But the thing that struck me with Atlantic salmon, a few things struck me. First of all, Atlantic salmon, if you've never fished for it, is really something else, something spectacular. It's just this furious wild animal on your line there, leaping and charging from one side of the river to the other, and just an unbelievable fish. And so, you know, sports fishing for wild salmon has always been extremely popular popular and really at the roots of fly fishing. But New England has almost no salmon. You know, I was I was born and raised in Hartford by the Connecticut River. The Connecticut River used to be one of the great salmon rivers of North America.

And nobody mentioned that when I was growing up. I had no idea. Salmon was never talked about. Salmon was never eaten, you know, in New England. Now you get it. But, you know, it used to be if you went into a fish market in New England or a famous seafood restaurant or something, there was no salmon because salmon wasn't a local fish, but salmon was a local fish in the 18th and 17th century. And the only place where it's left now is in Maine. They're trying to bring back the Penobscot River.

They tried to bring back the Connecticut River and failed and what's been happening in New England which I have also found in Ireland and Scotland and Norway and all the Atlantic salmon places there's almost no commercial fishing anymore and yet the stock keeps declining and they tell me they're all going to sea and just not many are coming back and fewer and fewer returns every year. And the reason for this is climate change.

The reason is carbon dioxide, which it turns out loves water. So about a third of the carbon dioxide that's produced on land ends up in the ocean. And it impacts on the hydrogen content of the ocean. And that impacts on the ability of certain small animals to grow, like zooplankton and capelin, little fish that salmon and cod feed on. And so they're smaller. So there's less to eat. So the Atlantic Ocean is having less and less carrying capacity.

It's losing its ability to feed the animals that live in the ocean. That is the scariest thing I've ever learned. I mean, my God, if the ocean can no longer provide enough food for fish, we're sunk. And that's climate change. Can you sketch for people a little bit? Let me approach this a different way. If you're doing a book about the demise of something you you have an obligation to show where it began and and how things looked when it began

because you can't understand yeah like any movie about the fall of someone uh needs to show someone at their height or else there's no sense of a fall this whole story is kind of pointless right um and i think that like when you get into something like uh you know like buffalo there's all these stories that that we're so familiar with of herds that took days to pass and you know yeah clouds of them that look like shadows from clouds moving across the landscape and on and on and on what are how good was it with salmon i mean you could you could just pick a spot that you happen to take a shine to during your research but is there a way to show people like how good it was somewhere well yeah in a lot of places i mean in in uh the columbia river in northern california in new england um in all over europe i mean all over

europe the rhine river um you know salmon were so prevalent that you just saw them. People in Paris in the 16th century could see salmon leaping in the Seine. That's how they got their name. These Roman soldiers marching through France would see these fish that were always leaping out of the water. And that's what salmo means. It's leaper. So they were a common sight in rivers. To what extent did indigenous peoples rely on salmon in america like who were the salmon cultures well the the

cultures of uh of new england and maritime can Oregon and Northern California. These were all cultures that were centered on salmon. And you can still see what that means if you visit indigenous people in Alaska in the summertime when they're at their summer camp, putting up their food supply for the rest of the year you know smoking catching salmon and smoking it having a supply for the year I mean to a Native American I'm not sure what seems dumber the idea of fly-fishing general general which they don't think much of or uh worse than

that catch and release yeah you know now i'm not knocking catch and release i think it's a good idea but to it to to a native american you know if you're going to release it why catch it it's a good argument why why why mess with it right why taunt it the purpose of fishing is to catch a fish i mean that's that's the odd thing about fly fishing the purpose of fly fishing is to make it as impossible as you can to catch a fish so that you can feel really good about it when you get it can you talk about the first caught the the first caught salmon ceremonies like what that is yeah and it's an interesting thing that almost uh practically every salmon culture i mean in in pacific russia and the original indigenous people in japan and all the indigenous North Americans, all these people had a ceremony for the first salmon of the season that was caught.

And the idea of this ceremony was to thank them for coming back. because in their culture, you know, in our modern scientific culture, you know, the fish are born in the river and they get to a bigger size and they go out to the ocean and then they come back to spawn. But in their culture, the salmon come in. Why do they come in? They come in so that we can have a few to eat. And then they go back out again. And then next year they come in? They come in so that we can have a few to eat. And then they go back out again. And then next year, they come in again.

And we have to thank them for that. Now, in fact, we know that it's actually not the same salmon coming in, that they're different generations. But that was the original way of looking at it. And you had to thank them for coming back. If you don't thank them for coming back, next year they won't come. Can you explain what a stock is of salmon? In your book, you say that 23% of salmon stocks are headed toward extinction.

You don't mean 23% of the salmon species. What is the stock? It's a subspecies. As I was saying before, the salmon are slightly different in every river. So that's, you know, like Copper River is a stock. Their sockeye are kings, but they're a stock. Okay. It's, I mean, this is true of other fish too but with salmon it's uh identified usually by

river how many stocks have we lost so far uh i mean can you even say no i i can't except in uh and it depends where you're talking about i mean mean, in the Pacific Northwest, we've lost over half. In New England, we've lost most. But globally, was it fair to say that? Have we globally lost hundreds of stocks of salmon? Probably. But look, some good news. Some of it's coming back.

As rivers are getting cleaned up, salmon has come back into a lot of rivers, especially in Europe. They've spotted it in the Thames. And a lot of British rivers that were thought of as dead or almost dead have come back. Rivers in France are coming back. You know, but part of the problem is what scientists call shifting baselines. So you have a stock, and it's 1970, and it's in really bad shape, and you sound the alarm, and you struggle for years

and years, and you get the river cleaned up, maybe you take down some dams, you get the river working again. And now you have like maybe a quarter as many fish as you had before all of this trouble started. And it's pronounced a success. But it's really not a success. You know, we really need to do is to get back to centuries ago. And so the problem is that our goal needs to be things that we no longer remember, things that we only know from stories and myths that no one's ever seen. You describe yourself as an environmental writer. Have you always regarded yourself as an environmental writer, or is that a new way of describing yourself? Well, I do a lot of things, but I have always from time to time done environmental writing, starting when I was a newspaper reporter and I covered nuclear energy issues, opposition to nuclear energy. I've always covered environmental issues from time to time. An interview once, and somebody said, so you think that the environment is really, it's something that you really like, huh?

Why, yes, I do. I said, yeah, you know, I like air. I was going to ask you more about sort of what your obligations, if you're an environmental writer, I was going to ask you about your obligations, but you just brought up something that I want to distract ourselves with for a second. You used to write in opposition to nuclear power.

It's to me, it's to me, it's becoming, to me, it's again, becoming increasingly seductive. Uh-huh. But, you know,

here's, here's the thing. Oh God, I'm talking like Joe Biden. So he always says, here's the thing. No, well then you'll have to,

you'll have to say something that doesn't make any sense that's coming up the hydroelectric industry, dams their whole argument is well this is better than fossil fuel or nuclear energy and I think that's a false argument. Dams are destroying rivers.

Destroying rivers is going to unravel the natural order and unravel the planet. So it's not an option either. So why do we pretend that you know, that you can't produce energy without being destructive? I mean, there are alternative energies, and they're becoming bigger and bigger, more successful, I think, John Greenewald 00,00,00 Have you ever seen a you ever been

visited a big wind farm? You think that? I mean, come on. It's horrible. Oh, you mean, they're not a nice thing no no they're horrible they're horrible for wild they're horrible for wildlife yeah it's a massive development i think you'd have to cover all of england with solar to power england or 70 percent of the landscape or some staggering statistic i can't remember what it is um yeah i mean you you do a combination of these things and you know the lesson there with wind power is that you try not to do um large installations um that's good you keep the you keep the scale down yeah i don't we'll have to have you on again

because i want someone to convince me that i Because I want someone to convince me that, or I kind of want someone to convince me that nuclear doesn't need to be revisited. But it's, like I said, to me it's increasingly seductive. Listen, this is my whole attitude about environmentalism is that I think that environmentalists spend too much time talking about stopping things instead of fixing things. Yeah.

That's a good point. They get a reputation. So there are some real problems with nuclear energy. If you want to have nuclear energy, you have to solve those problems. It's just like the same thing with fish farming. I don't say that there should not be farmed fish. I did say that at one point, actually, in my cobbler, but I changed my mind on that.

I've spent a lot of time talking to fish farmers. I do believe that they are sincerely interested in finding solutions to these problems and you have to fix it because it's a worthwhile contribution if you fix it um i sometimes wonder you know the the pebble mine you know what the pebble mine i got a whole question coming up about that i just had a conversation about that with the last two days with surprising individuals but yes well aware of Pebble Mine. Okay. So I've been opposing the Pebble Mine for years, but it occurs to me that we may have the wrong approach here. Maybe we shouldn't say you can't have this mine. Maybe we should say,

if you're going to have this mine, you have to do it in a way that you don't put bristol bay at risk you have to fix your way of doing things well they would just come and tell you that they already have and that there is no risk well you know that that's now you're talking about the problem of reality yeah for sure yeah yeah but um yeah and all the things that happen when you try to be reasonable. People who don't want to be reasonable. Fish farmers actually do want to be reasonable. But I think it's always worth a try. I think the guy I dedicate this book to, Bori Fignusin, an Icelander who came from a commercial fishing family

and was a brilliant fundraiser. And he went around the world raising money for a fund. And then he would go to commercial salmon fishermen. And he didn't say, you know, you're doing something terrible. You're destroying things. You've got to stop. He said, how are you fishing? Let me see your nets. And he took a real interest in what they were doing because he was interested in commercial fishing. It was his background. And then he would talk to them. And then at some point he'd say, okay, how much money do you want to stop fishing?

And it mostly worked. There were a few people who already never talked out of fishing. And it mostly worked. There were a few people who already never talked out of fishing, but it mostly worked. And this guy, I love this man. And he was, to me, he was a model. He died while I was working on the book. He was a model of what an environmentalist should be. I would like to take, you know, young environmentalists and introduce them to Ori and have them talk to them about, you know, how you get things done. Because you don't always get things done by antagonizing everybody. You know, the CEO of Marine Harvest in Scotland, one of the big fish farming outfits, said to me, you know, I talk to environmentalists and I hear them out.

And I know he did because I know a number of environmentalists that he's talked to. But he said, you know, if I talk to somebody and they say fish farming has to be stopped, then I don't have anything to say to them. And, you know, that's the problem. It's a real dialogue stopper you're evil you have to go yeah where does the dialogue go from there the reason earlier before i got off on asking you about nuclear energy uh i was asking about self-identifying by the way for the record i did not necessarily oppose nuclear energy.

I wrote about people who oppose nuclear energy. Oh, okay. That's an important distinction. The reason I brought up being an environmental writer is I, if there's a, I don't mean this, I'm not directing this at you, but if someone identifies first and foremost as an environmental writer, and then they write about a subject like let's say i don't know they're writing about wild horses or they're writing about predators or they're writing about salmon um i'll often wonder is their subject is the subject

they've chosen to focus in on is it a is it a sort of proxy for something else that they're getting at or is the interest really on the thing they're focused on because i'll often find some writers will no matter what subject they're taking i know where they'll fall on it and i know what parts of it they'll accentuate because i know that they're not actually talking about the thing they're talking about they're talking about another thing and they're using the thing as a tool to raise a broader point i i usually do that i'm almost never talking about the thing i seem to be talking about and you're open about it yeah yeah i wrote a book about uh baseball in the dominican republic and uh well the eastern stars and it really wasn't about baseball at all it was about

the u.s relationship with the dominican republic yeah i got you yeah do you do you feel that when you're if you if you care if you're a writer, you have a certain amount of power as a writer, especially when you have an audience and you have an audience, and you're a purpose alarm of overselling a problem because it's more likely to drive an impetus for change? Or does part of you feel that, man, I need to be absolutely frank and truthful because I have to deliver truth? Yes. Or are you trying to drive action? And if you need to fudge truth to drive action, that's okay.

No, I'm not into fudging truth. I think that if you do that, you can rally a lot of people, but at a certain point, they're going to say, wait a minute, this guy's utter nonsense. I can't believe anything he says. To the best I can, I try to be truthful and I try to be reasonable. And this book, probably more than any other book, is making some fairly bold statements. And to be honest, it's because I am absolutely panicked about what climate change is doing.

The impact it's going to have, what it's going to do to our lives and to our children's lives is just so huge. And, you know, we're confronted with people who are not facing up to that. And so, you know, sometimes you just have to scream. Yeah, you say, I think that, like, you acknowledge some things. I guess you don't do what I was asking if you ever feel necessary to do because you acknowledge some things where you talk about how you cite these years in the past decade where there were record runs of Sockeyes, like these phenomenal Sockeye runs,

and that those phenomenal Sockeye runs coincided with the hottest years we had on record and i think other people might look and say well how could salmon in alaska suffer from warming temperatures if we used to have these massive salmon runs in california the sunshine state. I think that people can look at all this and probably talk themselves out of their seeming to be a problem. We're having like king salmon runs go down, but we're having these record pink salmon runs in some areas.

Like how can it all, how does it fit together in a way where people can't look at it and think that, ah, we're okay after all? If you talk to scientists, I mean, real scientists, which I love to do, and politicians and government people hate to do, the thing about real scientists is that they give you no absolutes. I mean, try talking to some epidemiologists about the coronavirus, for example. There's things we know, there's things we don't know. I mean, the most common answer you ever get from a scientist is maybe.

Yeah, it drives me crazy. Yeah. My brothers are both scientists, and I'll often ask them about their research. I'll ask them, what do you hope happens? Yeah, and you want them to lay it out there. You want them to lay it out there. They take that as an insulting question. What do you mean, what do I hope happens?

Right. Right. So it's very complicated. And, you know, one thing I can tell you, though, about, you know, warm years and good Alaskan salmon runs is last year there was a great Alaskan salmon run. And it was about the warmest year on record that Alaska ever had. And you know what? A lot of those salmon died. Yeah.

So there was a good return, but a lot of fatality. Right. Yeah. Fatality before spawning? Yeah. If the water temperature goes above 68 degrees, they will not spawn. They can't spawn. They can't live

which of the salmon species seems to be the most dire you mean in the most difficulty yeah like like is it can't like our kings kind of the most screwed right now in the pacific not not because i was i was going to say atlantic salmon there's about a million and a half atlantic salmon left in the world how can that be true man and and you know when you think about 60 60 million uh running into bristol bay every june july uh one and a half million total atlantic salmon uh it's yeah there's more people there's more people in the puget Yeah, there's more people. There's more people in the Puget, you know, there's more people around Puget Sound than there are Atlantic salmon left in the world.

There are more farmed salmon in a good salmon farming operation than there are wild salmon in the world. Atlantic. Oh, man. Oh, it's depressing that part so they're they're the ones that are really in the in the deepest trouble uh as for other ones it depends where you're talking about but by and large king are not doing well you know chinook um is it well understood um you know i know there's probably like there's as you mentioned there's a litany of factors but is it well understood where if someone's going to say yeah yeah there's a dozen things but here's the real killer on king salmon like here's the real

problem with king salmon or kind of the main problem like like what is it well it depends where you're talking about i mean in the columbia river it's dams um you know the columbia river system used to be a great uh um king habitat yeah Most of it is black now. And in Northern California also. I've actually got a question about that, Mark. I grew up on the banks of the

Columbia in Vancouver. This is Phil, the engineer, ladies and gentlemen. He's been quiet so far. The engineer's acting up. I better pay attention. He's been diligently engineering till now. He's been saving acting up. I better pay attention. He's been diligently engineering until now. He's been saving it up. I grew up on the Columbia River, and we took multiple field trips growing up to Bonneville Dam. I didn't learn anything about hydroelectric power, but one thing they were always super excited to show us was the fish ladders.

And they've got big windows. You can look through at the ladders, and they were always trying to convince us, like, everything's fine. Look at all these salmon work pretty well it also depends on the dam I mean getting over the Bonneville is that the one you said you were on yeah it's pretty tough getting over that one these gravity dams

in the Pacific Northwest which are these are the largest hunks of concrete in the world. And it's pretty tough getting over them. Some of them work to a certain degree. Some of them are getting better. Some of them don't have them. A lot of dams don't have any ladders at all. And then, you know, nature has a kind of a nasty way of adopting to our inventions so uh most fish ladders uh you'll find lots of marine mammals hanging out there because that's a good place to get fish to eat uh and they're just uh you know they're just being set up for the slaughter there yeah it. It surprised me in your book.

It surprised me how you left the, how you seemed to leave the door open a little bit to doing some control on marine mammals, lethal control on marine mammals. Yeah, you know, look, the thing is, now that we've thoroughly screwed up the natural order, we're trying to make it work again. Yeah, for sure. We have to. We have to. And it turns out it's really complicated, you know, that everything has unintended consequences.

And it's just very hard to figure these things. As someone who has been, I mean, I write about it. This is my book. I know what it's like to be fishing for salmon commercially and watch, you know, in one case it was like four seals just eat our entire net. So, you know, you have to find a balance. But in the balance, you know, everybody loses a little and wins a little. I did some writing about wolves, the reintroduction of wolves, mainly in Idaho that I did it. And I have a lot of friends who are sheep ranchers. And, you know, so they hate these wolves and they're furious about this. But what I say to

them shortly before they take away my drink and ask me to leave is, you know, they're supposed to be there. You know, if you want to raise sheep in Idaho, you have to accept the fact that there is going to be a certain amount of predation. I mean, what happened in this country, you see it most in the West, but it was all over the country, is that they just had this idea, let's identify the predators and kill them, and then we'll be fine. And they did this at the request of the ranchers and the farmers, and they killed everything that was a predator, and it completely destroyed the balance of nature.

In a lot of cases in the West, the idea is, can't we just be the predator? So, you know, you get rid of everything that preys on ungulates and then, you know, hunters can go out and they can shoot deer and elk to their heart's content. But actually, you know, those herds are supposed to be controlled by wolves and bears and mountain lions. It's the way the thing is supposed to work. And certain types of, like willows, can't survive if there's too many elk, and then the birds that live in the willows can't survive.

So nature is a very complicated thing. And you have to do it very carefully. I think that in some cases you can make arguments for some killing of marine mammals. These arguments have to be Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with

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Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. I was surprised to see that you had, I haven't found where you, you double down on this, but you suggest that saving salmon would involve stopping the killing of

bears. And I was curious are in, in coastal areas that have salmon runs to, have you seen evidence of over harvest of bears somehow impacting no oh no i haven't even even in the so that was just like an add-on thought yeah the kamchatka um statistically has the the largest uh brown bear population uh per square mile of any place in the world i mean it's just loaded with bears and you're out fishing and there they all are uh oh no when i say over harvest you mentioned that we need to stop killing bears in order to save salmon over harvesting the

bear like are humans over harvesting bears to the detriment of salmon like i don't understand that i don't understand what what backs that up um i say that yeah really in the prologue in the prologue i was just curious what that what the what you meant by that um well i mean the the the primary cause of of uh the killing of bears is the destruction of their habitat um oh no i got you uh i don't think that bear hunting so you mean killing bears through just habitat destruction yeah yeah eliminate them because then that trickles down obviously the sentence was about stopping uh the killing of many animals including beavers wolves bears yeah well you know um these are all different cases be Beavers would be the most drastic. I mean, beavers were slaughtered for their pelts at one time. Yeah, we almost ran out of them. Right, right.

Which is not the case with bears. Yeah. But you have to be extremely careful. I mean, I have to admit that I don't understand bear hunting hunting i don't know why anybody wants to shoot a bear i could explain it to you someday uh you i mean do you eat it oh yeah yeah yeah yeah you like it i do well i like depends what they've been eating i don't like the um you don't like the brown bears because they taste fishy because they've been eating. I don't like the... You don't like the brown bears because they taste fishy because they've been eating salmon.

I've never eaten one. Yeah. Oh, you're talking about black bears. Yeah. Yeah, well, they're better because they eat berries. The ones that are eating berries are quite good. The ones on the coastal areas where they've been feeding on some dead sea lion they found for a month are a little bit touchy.

So I much prefer to go find the ones up in the higher elevations but uh we don't need to i don't want to spend too much time on that but this whole thing about beavers and bears and wolves um was i was really talking about a historic thing uh none of those are huge practices now, although wolves would be if you let them. Yeah. You have a chapter called The Problem with Solutions. I think that's right, The Problem with Solutions. Yeah.

Tell me, like, I could see someone saying, well, if we can produce them in hatcheries why don't we just make millions and millions of salmon and turn them loose and who the hell cares that's what was said originally where does that fall apart in in france when they first started doing hatcheries that's exactly what they did they they uh petitioned the government they said look we found this huge solution you know how the salmon are all dying because of all these nets across the river and everything don't worry about it anymore we can make more um can you date that mark because that's what i like really struck me is how long we've been at this hatchery thing i i not off the top of my

head it's stated in the book it's uh 18th century oh hold on they're trying to early 19th century i think okay they were trying to propagate salmon in the early 1800s yes huh yeah and why does it not like why is it not what's wrong with that what is it is it effective or is it not effective and if it's not why is it not effective? And if it's not, why is it not effective? Okay, complicated question. I kind of fought with my publisher, Patagonia, about this because they were much more anti-hatchery than I am. Okay. The problem with hatcheries, there are several problems.

I mean, the problem, the original problem was that the fish don't live. And that was because the eggs didn't come from the river that the fish were being released in. So they weren't suited for that habitat. But if you take a river like the Columbia or some of the polluted industrial rivers of England and you make a bunch of hatchery fish and you release them in those rivers, you will get nothing because the same things that destroyed the wild fish will destroy the hatchery fish. So you have to fix the habitat before a hatchery can do any good. Another problem is that hatchery fish seem to be, and there's some room for debate

about this, but they seem to be somewhat inferior fish, less survival skills. So when they mix with wild fish, they're sort of dumbing down the species. That's why having 95% of the Japanese wild fish have some hatchery DNA in it is a cause for concern. There's a lot of hatchery. You know, you'll often see these stories about somebody who went to some salmon, some fish store, a bunch of fish stores, took a bunch of fish that were being sold as wild, wild salmon, tested their DNA and found out they weren't wild. And then everybody says, well, these guys are a bunch of crooks. Not necessarily. A lot of fish that is a lot of salmon that is supposed to be wild has a lot of hatchery DNA in it because it's crossed with it with hatchery fish. That's why they invented this new phrase, wild caught.

Oh, that's interesting. They're not going out on a limb. They're saying it was caught in the wild like a wild fish. We don't know what its DNA is. Yeah. Because, you know, fish, commercial fisheries can't be testing the DNA of all the fish. You mentioned habitat. Why is it the reluctance of people over these centuries now to not accept that habitat is probably the main problem? Because it's costly to fix and it sometimes means changing your economic activities. I mean, if the habitat is being destroyed by a dam that's providing your electricity

or it's being destroyed by a factory that's creating wealth and jobs, people aren't going to want to mess with it. That's getting back to my idea that you just have to change your whole concept of economic development. What was the heyday of dam building? Like what years? The Depression, the New Deal. Yeah.

You know, Roosevelt put this out as a wonderful thing, and Woody Guthrie sang a song to the dam building on the Columbia. I mean, Woody Guthrie, the man of the people, wasn't this great? They're building dams to block the Columbia. Man, it would have seemed that he would have been a pro salmon guy. You would think so. He probably would be today. Well, the reason I'm asking that question is I think I've always been curious about

a lot of things that happen in history. We now like to sit and look and think about, oh, they were so stupid, right? They were so rapacious and horrible right but it was the people that were doing these things were it was us right it was us it was us in earlier form when they were getting when they were building those dams do you know was it well understood what this would do what was someone saying you know know, um, I'm all for it. Let's let's generate tons of electricity. Let's become a dominant, uh, power.

We'll come a dominant military power because we can smell aluminum and, and build an air force and on and on and on. But this means salmon are screwed. Did someone say that? Was it known? Someone said that. and those are the people that we call indians uh-huh the native tribes said that a lot like they looked and said i just have a feeling that when you block this river off it will mean that these fish can't go up there

anymore this is this is not you know high-tech science to realize that if you have a fish that has to run the river and you block the river, you're going to destroy the fish rights. Yeah, but what was the conversation? Well, it's going back to what I was saying before. The conversation was we're developing the economy. It's the depression and we're creating jobs. And like tough shit. It was like tough shit it was like tough shit to the to the fish right right we're making we're we're making new england a prosperous

place you know we're we're uh britain is going to dominate the industrial revolution uh but it was but you feel i mean it came like saying the same thing but you feel that someone that it was in the it was it was part of the calculus. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's like when someone starts smoking, right? I don't I don't think they say like I'm going to start. I don't think they really conceptualize it. They're not like I'm going to take up smoking. I do realize that this will mean I will die younger of lung cancer, i'm committed like they're not doing it that way but how could people not have done it that way

with salmon do you know there's a republican congressman in indiana i can't think of his name who said that you know people are going to have to um uh die from the coronavirus and that's just you know that's just what we have to do to get the economy moving. It doesn't surprise me that someone would say that because I think people have similar conversations about, you know, I think you could say the same thing, like people have an appetite for alcohol and people want to be able to drink alcohol.

But we lose, I don't know what it is 50 000 people to alcohol related deaths every year and we accept that because some of us it's really important for us to have a beer at night or it's really important for us to go out and have a glass of wine so we will take the fact that we will have massive amounts of highway fatalities from alcohol. We will have massive amounts of domestic violence from alcohol. And we will have child neglect because of alcohol. And financial destitution for people because of alcohol. Because when I go home at night, I like to have a cold beer.

So sure, we do that all the time. Yeah. It's no different. different well it is kind of explain how it's explain to me how it's different when you go home and have your beer that's really not causing somebody to beat their wife you know no but we're we're taking the thing that we know like i have alcohol in my house to deal with you have to deal So you have to deal with alcohol and people's ability to use it in a better way. Yeah. I think we've pretty successfully proven that banning alcohol doesn't work. And I don't know that banning travel works. It works, but I think that...

Banning cars. Think how many lives we would save if we banned cars. Exactly. Exactly. But I can't get behind it. Let's get back to salmon. At the end of your book, a buddy of mine, a guy I work with, Sam Lundgren, he knew we were going to be talking, and he had...

It was a sentence you used in your book, Cod cod that he wanted me to ask you about where he says that you wrote about how most fishermen cannot stop fishing like acknowledging that it's like this it's a compulsion it's like a compulsive behavior yeah it's because if you are a commercial fisherman, that is a life that you love, and there's no substitute for it. There's nothing else you can do. What does a commercial fisherman do instead of fishing? There's nothing else like it. And it's a fisherman's entire identity. Do you think that that identity...

I mean, so much so, the fishermen, they have trouble relating to people who don't fish. I mean, I can't tell you how it has changed my whole relationship as a journalist with fisheries, the fact that they know that I've actually worked on commercial boats. They accept that they'll be more likely to talk to you. Right. Right.

When my cod book came out, it came out at the same time as Sebastian Younger's The Perfect Storm. And we did a TV show together in Rhode Island. And then we were kind of walking out to the parking lot, and he was saying to me, you know, when I saw him in the book, I just couldn't get anybody to take me on their boats. Well, how do you get people to take you on their boats? And, you know, he just is a nice guy. You know, he looked like a rich guy in this very fancy car.

What could I say to him? I guess, yeah, that's true, man. A way that, and I think we all do it where, like, even if you imagine as a writer, when you're talking to someone who might get your antenna might be up, you know, you're not sure about them, what their motivations are. But then they say some little thing that reveals some intimacy with your industry,

some intimacy with your craft. You do, your guard goes down. Right. But it's Your guard goes down. Right. But it's also, I mean, I think it's true that I do have an understanding and an empathy for commercial fishermen that a lot of writers don't have. I mean, I think that this, I think that overfishing is sometimes a problem, but it is, it is pounced on much more than it should be because these are marginalized blue collar workers uh and people don't really understand them or what they're doing and it's so easy to say oh you know here's the problem these guys and and you know to call a fisherman

greedy is so absurd i mean take a look at what they have how greedy could they be yeah that's a good point you're so greedy you want to just work your ass off all the time to every year worry about whether or not you're going to make a living right and the next thing you know you're going to want to have a house to live in you know all while you're covered in fish slime right i think that people think of like hatcheries and fish farming often in the same sentence you know i imagine a lot of people don't even really understand what the difference is but explain for people like what fish farming is and the term that people use like sea cattle or sea grazing. I can't remember what expression.

And how fish farming impacts salmon. I said sea cattle, but I may have made that up. Oh, okay. I liked it when I saw it. Yeah, I mean, the difference between farming and hatcheries is that hatcheries are trying to work with the wild stocks. Farming is something completely separate. Farming is a way of producing an alternative product that's, I mean, it was started in the 1970s in Norway by guys who thought they were coming up with a low-cost sustainable product. And the first problem with it is that it's not so sustainable if you're feeding them wild fish.

So, you know, they take factory trawlers, the worst kind of fishing, they scoop up all the stuff, grind it up into meal to feed the salmon in the farm, then when you eat a farmed salmon, you're killing more wild fish than if you just ate a wild fish. Fish farmers have been trying to deal with that. They've lowered the percentage of fish in the food. It's down to about 50%. And there's all kinds of really kind of high-tech experiments, soldier fly and all sorts of ways of trying to get other protein to do this differently. The problem is that the consumer tends to find that the more actual fish is in the feed, the better they like the fish.

So this is something they're working on. They've improved, but they've got a ways to go. That's an interesting thing about fish farming. I don't know that I haven't given a lot of thought to it until recently around an issue around Manhattan, like just like bait, like fishing bait and fish feed that you think if it's farmed,

it must not be killing fish. Right. But to hear about the quantities of, it must not be killing fish. Right. But to hear about the quantities of fish it takes to feed the fish. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So they're trying to lower that. And then they have the problem of escapes.

And, you know, that's just a problem that some of the farmed salmon get out of the nets either by accident or sometimes they'll just hop out. I've been to fish farms where a salmon just leaps out and somebody says, ooh, grabs the net and throws him back in. But almost all farmed fish is Atlantic salmon. So if Atlantic salmon escape in the Atlantic, they will crossbreed with wild Atlantic salmon. So if Atlantic salmon escape in the Atlantic, they will cross breed with wild Atlantic salmon. This is very bad because, you know, in farming, you eliminate a natural selection. You replace it with a human selection. It's like cows, you know. Cows don't have anything natural about them. Everything's been chosen by, by, by farmers and biologists, you know, so you talk about don't feed the cow GMO food. The cow's GMO, it's a genetically modified cow.

And same thing with salmon. So, you know, they, they have chosen their genes, they have bred these salmon for one thing, one thing only, to grow very quickly so that it just, you know, less expense raising them to market size. They have no skills. They have no, you know, they can't find the river of their birth. They have no river of their birth, but couldn't if they did. They have, you know, none of all these extraordinary abilities that a wild salmon has. They are just a fast-growing moron. So now they're getting out and they're breeding. How does the breeding happen if they can't find a river?

Well, they can find a river. It's just not the river of their birth. They'll just go up a river, and if there's a female there, you know, if it's a male and there's a female there digging a red, they'll deposit their milt on it. Or if it's a female, we'll will dig a red and a wild male will salmon if they see a nest they go for it. So they still do have the urge to run up a river at some point. Yeah. But it's just any river.

So this is going to dumb down wild Atlantic salmon. Now, in the Pacific, most of the farmed salmon are also Atlantic, and it's a hard rule of biology that different genara don't crossbreed. So an Atlantic salmon and a Pacific salmon are two separate genara, so they won't breed. So it's not really as big a risk as people get very excited when there's escapes of farmed salmon in the Pacific,

but most of the time they just disappear because what's going to happen? They're not going to crossbreed with the wild. All they can do is set up their own Atlantic salmon, but since they're all dumb fish, they're not going to compete with the wild populations and they'll probably die out. But it's a huge problem in the Atlantic. And then there's the problem of sea lice. Sea lice is a crustacean that attacks salmon and, you know, these lice are traveling all over the ocean. They'll find a salmon or two.

But then when you have this fish farm with a million salmon in one cage, you know, it's like leaving honey out for the bears, you know. All the lice will just gravitate to the farm, and they won't limit themselves to the farm. Of course, if there's any wild salmon there, they'll attack them also so that there's a huge sea lice problem. And, you know, fish farmers are trying to deal with this. They found certain species of fish that eat sea lice and they've used them but you know they they use so many of them that they started overfishing them they started to disappear so what do they do they're fish farmers they start farming these other species to eat life no kidding

really yeah uh the fish they're using to eat lice off salmon are a fish that they were going out and catching they were yeah but they did the resource they depleted it then they started farming them but they don't seem to be able to come up with enough of them to handle the lice oh it's just like some stuff is just never an end to it man man. Right. So there's a lot of problems. And, you know, a lot of people like this idea of moving the fish farms inland in enclosed spaces so that there's no escaping and no sea lice can get into them. Like basically making a hatchery for eating fish. Well, it's more confined than a hatchery, and they're raising them to full size. So what this means is it means tremendously increasing their carbon footprint, because the original idea of farmed salmon was that they used the energy of the current in the

ocean. They didn't use any energy. Now they're getting into all of the problems that environmentalists oppose in cattle farming. You know, the- Nutrient loads and- Yeah, all of that. And I found it funny that there's environmentalists who oppose cattle farming but want to bring salmon farming on land. So I don't think that that's the solution. Most fish farmers don't think that's the solution either.

But, you know, maybe there's some ideas in there that work. I don't understand why they can't stop escapes. I mean, just, I don't know, make higher walls on the pens or something. There was a big escapement and i remember in puget sound when i was living there and it was it was i think it was storm related yes a massive one and they tried to get all the fishermen fired up to go catch them and people were catching them like crazy yeah but you know when people got very excited, I heard people comparing it to the Exxon Valdez oil spill and all these things. But what happened to those fish? I mean, the ones they didn't catch.

They're gone. Nobody knows. They died off. Farm salmon can't make it. The only way they can make it is to reproduce with wild salmon, which they can't do in the Pacific. When, uh, when you were finishing your book,

when, when, when was the pub date? What's the pub date of your book? It was March of this year. So yeah, it just came out. So you finished it probably a year ago.

Uh, maybe, maybe more. Yeah. I don't remember. When, uh, when you got it done it done did you i'm sure you were happy to have finished a book just because it's like as a writer and making a book regardless of the subject and how you might impact that subject um it just feels good to finish them

right to get them out yeah but it's. It's actually my 33rd book. And my response to finishing it was to start working on my 34th book. But when you finished it, were you just knowing the enormity of the problem? If you imagine ahead 100 years, it just looks really bad for salmon, especially as you lay it out. When you finished it, were you, you know, like catatonic from the depression of it all? No, because I'm just not. I'm not like that. I just, I can't believe that we're just going to sit around

and let the earth perish. I think that we will get together and do things to fix these things. And that's why I write a book like this to promote this happening. And that's why I write a book like this to, you know, promote this happening. And I think it can happen. And I, you know, I have a daughter who's 19 in college and those kids are fantastic. They're so aware of environmental problems and so pissed off at how we've handled things and determined to do it better. There's hope for the world.

There are programs that are taking down dams. There's a tremendous number of rivers whose pollution has been cleaned up. We aren't without hope. We just can't sit around and say, oh, I'm sure it'll be fine. We have to make it happen. Yeah, the things that we've restored, we restored at great cost. Well, that's one of the problems is that tearing down dams, it turns out, is incredibly expensive.

Yeah, and it comes with its own risks. Yes, and you really have to kind of rebuild the river after the the dam comes down it's not like you know you kind of think in your mind you take down the dam and then the water rushes out and you're back to what you had before but so much changed because of the dam that you know you have to you have to get a gravel bottom on the river again because salmon won't live on a river that doesn't have a gravel bottom on the river again. Salmon won't live on a river that doesn't have a gravel bottom. If it all gets silted over because of this release from tearing down the dam,

you got to do something to fix the bottom. I used to live in a community and I'd lived there for quite a while while there was a statewide and i'd live there for quite a while while there was a law a statewide and also very local you know dialogue around removing a dam in town and um some of the people most adamantly opposed to removing the dam were the fishermen because there had been a lot of um mining upstream on this river and there was a lot of heavy metal and toxic sediment that had built up behind that dam where the dam was kind of an extinct dam it was just the whole reservoir had filled in with toxic sediment and there was a bitter pill of the dam should come down but we need to know that you're going to stir this stuff up and a lot of this shit's going to get sent downriver.

Well, that's going back to what I was saying about hatcheries. The first thing you have to do is restore the habitat of the river or it all does no good. I mean, you take down the dam and then the the the salmon are going to swim upstream and spawn in the toxic area no that's not going to happen either uh so every decision every decision has a painful part to it yeah yeah yeah mark what's your uh like favorite bright spot that gives you hope after working on this project and knowing all so much about it? What stands out as a success or a win right now that gives you a little hope? Well, a number of things.

I mean, these projects taking down dams. There's a big one in California. There was the LY in Washington, the Penobscot in Maine. These are huge things that are being done. And, you know, the way in which they were done is very impressive. I mean, the Penobscot happened because a whole coalition of environmentalists and fishing people and state government and federal government and Native Americans and all these different groups got together to make this happen. And when I see something like that happen, I think, wow, you know, we can do it.

Also, you know, there was a poll. I love this. There was a poll in, you know, the Oregonian, the newspaper in Portland. And so the Oregonian did this poll in which an overwhelming majority of people that they asked in Oregon said that they considered saving salmon in the Columbia River more important than any economic activity for the river. That's interesting. I wonder if you had run that poll in other parts of that state i think

you'd have seen dramatically different results perhaps well yeah yeah yeah you know you like you get nowhere you get nowhere in in idaho because they've built their whole economy on being a seaport for grain um which was made possible by dams. And so many people are economically hitched to that system that it's basically what it comes down to is them and some fly fishermen. I don't want people to think they can skip reading the book because of this conversation, so I need to point out to people that we have not covered the saber-toothed salmon uh yes but don't cut don't cover it an extinct an extinct bygone

fish called the saber-toothed salmon and i'm not telling you if it's coming to your neighborhood or not hit people hit people with another thing or two that uh another titillating item or two that they'll encounter in your book when they go read the thing for real um i mean the the uh the whole um saga of the connecticut river which I guess I'm partial to because I was born on it, but one of the greatest salmon rivers in North America, and they've spent billions trying to make it come back. And they can get the fish in the river, they can get them to spawn, and they can get the young to go out to sea, but they don't return and yet every once in a while somebody will be in some little tributary and find find a salmon really yeah just wandering around he's like where is everybody

oh it's dismal you know uh i mentioned earlier going up the great lakes and we had our you know our kind of make-believe salmon there but the you would now and then catch one up in a farmer's drainage ditch and when you kind of like looked at a map you'd realize the number of wrong turns that that fish had made. It just kept getting worse and worse. Well, you know, it's like, you know, biology got off there because they weren't supposed to be there in the first place. Oh, you can hardly blame him. He's like, dude, I'm a stranger around here, man. I don't know what's going on.

You can get a lot of recipes from the book. And you can get a lot of recipes from the book and you can get a lot of uh native american recipes from alaska that will absolutely horrify you yeah but also on that is um it's it's it's it's exhaustive not exhausting but exhaustive in that um just like how native americans caught fish how they the mechanics of it so many did with it you know i mean it's it's a really it's it's there's a lot there it's it's well worth the read we kind of focus here in this conversation on an element of the book and it's a big element and it's the driving force of what's there but everything is very richly contextualized and every um every part of this is poked and prodded and explained and it's not just meant to it's not a book that's just meant to deliver this awful news to you but it it's meant to paint this really like lush,

elaborate portrait of a beautiful collection of animals. And so I would urge people to go out and check out the book again, salmon by Mark Kurlansky made available by Patagonia books, which I, which I by Patagonia Books, which that's not been your publisher in the past. No, no. You can, because since we're all buying things online these days, you can get it from Patagonia or you can get it from Amazon,

but you can get it from your local bookstore too. People don't realize that most independent bookstores have their own online service that's pretty efficient. And you can go online, pick the bookstore you like, and they'll order it and ship it to you. All right. Mark, thanks for coming on. We'll plan one in the future when your next book comes out. I don't want to tell people what your next book is.

I don't want to blow it for you. But when that comes out, we'll... Okay. There's a lot we can talk about in that one. We'd like to have you back on. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks, Mark.

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