Sometimes a fish is more than a fish. Consider, for example, what we can learn from the King Salmon featured on today’s #stampoftheday. A 3-cent stamp issued on November 9, 1956, it was the third in a what turned out to be a 22-year series emphasizing the importance of wildlife conservation. Viewed from the lens of today, the stamp also is a warning about the need to protect those fisheries and, in doing so, to reverse a host of practices that threaten much more than those fish.
The danger signs are particularly compelling because salmon are amazing creatures. Born in fresh water, they migrate to the ocean and then return to spawn in the same streams in which they were hatched. As Mark Kurlansky, author of “Salmon: A Fish, The Earth, and The History of Their Common Fate,” which came earlier this year, has noted, “it’s just one of the most incredible animals in the animal kingdom. It’s extremely beautiful and has this incredible lifecycle that sounds like it was written by a Greek tragedy writer.”
Salmon were once ubiquitous in the northern Atlantic ocean. Historians estimate that in the 18th century as many as 500,000 fish annually swam up Maine rivers to spawn. But damming and pollution associated with the state’s paper and lumber industries put an end to that. As a fast way to illustrate the salmons’ demise, Kurlansky detailed the fish’s appearance on White House menus over time. John and Abigail Adams loved the fish, and often served it at the newly built White House in the late 1700s. In 1912, Karl Anderson, a Maine fisherman, sent one of that year’s first salmon to run up the Penobscot River to President William Howard Taft. According to an account of a talk Kurlansky gave about his book in Maine just before the pandemic, this started an annual springtime tradition, which was ironic, because Taft backed large hydroelectric dams on the Penobscot that helped destroy Maine’s salmon runs. By 1947, commercial salmon fishing in Maine had ceased, so President Harry Truman’s salmon came from a recreational fisherman. In 1954, Maine’s returning salmon population was so meager that President Dwight Eisenhower had to wait a full two months into the season for his salmon dinner. And after that, the tradition of sending early wild Atlantic salmon to the White House came to an end.
Kurlansky, who in the 1990s wrote a best-selling book about cod that detailed how overfishing had led to the demise of the once abundant Grand Banks fishing grounds, became interested in salmon because “it’s pretty easy to manage a salmon fishery, because they’re very predictable.” In fact, the salmon fisheries of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are indeed managed well and have produced record salmon runs. Rather, he warns, those fish are threatened by pollution, bad farming practices, urban sprawl, deforestation, dams, and especially, climate change. I started to realize that everything that we’re doing wrong with the planet is being done to salmon.”
The climate change impacts are particularly sobering. As Kurlansky noted in a 2020 podcast, “What’s going on is that that carbon dioxide loves water. So about a third of the carbon dioxide that’s produced at land ends up in the ocean, and the hydrogen level of the water, which reduces the ability to grow things, so zooplankton and small fish that cod and salmon depend on are no longer there….The ocean is losing its ability to feed the animals that live in it. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever learned.”
While we have tried to repair damage by building hatcheries and turning to fish farming, Kurlansky warned in his Maine book talk that these efforts won’t be sufficient. “If you don’t fix the environmental conditions that killed off the wild salmon in the first place,” he said, “these replacement fish aren’t going to be any better equipped to survive.”
And, he has warned, “If the tenacious salmon can’t survive industrial waterway pollution, bad agricultural practices, widespread pesticide use, blocked waterways, massive deforestation, urban sprawl and climate change, climate change, climate change. neither will we.”
In the end, Kurlansky argues, “What needs to be done to save the remaining wild salmon is the same list of things that needs to be done to save the earth…We have to take on the issue of carbon in a much more basic way. Really changing the way we live on the planet and eliminating fossil fuels, which we could do, would be a good start. It’s quite remarkable to think that if you were in Indiana and you’re driving a car and emitting carbon, about a third of that carbon is going end up in the ocean. It turns out that carbon dioxide is very attracted to water. So it’s our whole lifestyle-even if we don’t live near the ocean-that is killing the ocean.”
In addition to reducing carbon emissions, he writes, “there is a longer list of actions that need to be taken to save the salmon. This list includes stopping deforestation; putting an end to suburban sprawl; stopping the killing of bears, wolves, beavers, eagles, and other wild species; putting an end to both land-based and marine pollution…”
The task is daunting. But, as a famous Jewish maxim teaches, we are not obligated to complete the work, we cannot refrain from stating it. And Kurlansky offers an interesting suggestion for how we can get up the courage to do the needed work.
“Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘Who hears the fishes when they cry?'” Kurlansky notes. “Maybe we need to go down to the riverbank and try to listen.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, try to listen, and work for peace.