Environmental Conservation & Protection of Plants & Wildlife, Ecological Management & Studies, Fisheries & Aquaculture, Natural Resources - General & Miscellaneous, Fish - Miscellaneous

A Common Fate

Name: A Common Fate
Author: Joseph Cone
ISBN: 9780805023886

by Joseph Cone

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Overview

Though life on earth is the history of dynamic interactions between living things and their surroundings, certain powerful groups would have us believe that nature exists only for our convenience. One consequence of such thinking is the apparent fate of the Pacific salmon - a key resource and preeminent symbol of America's wildlife - which is today threatened with extinction. Drawing on abundant data from natural science, Pacific coast culture, and a long association with key individuals on all sides of the issue, Joseph Cone employs a clear narrative voice to tell the human and natural history of an environmental crisis in its final chapter. As inevitable as the November rains, countless millions of wild salmon returned from the ocean to spawn in the streams of their birth. In the wake of an orgy of dam building and habitat destruction, the salmon's majestic abundance has been reduced to a fleeting shadow. Neglect is the word the author uses to describe more recent losses, "by exactly the ones - state and federal fish managers - who should have acted." To signal a new awareness that action is needed, scientists charged with restocking the Columbia River Basin are receiving significant support, while ordinary citizens are beginning to recognize the relationship between cheap power and the absences of chinook, coho, sockeye, and other species from the coasts of Oregon and Washington and from Idaho's Snake River. As desperate as the salmon's future appears, the book is not an elegy for a lost resource. Instead, it bears witness to hope. In addition to concrete plans for the wild salmon's renewal, the reader will hear a growing chorus of informed individuals of differing values and beliefs who recognize that our fate is inextricably bound to the salmon's; for many it is a new understanding.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The efforts of professional and volunteer environmental groups to save the salmon populations are chronicled here by Cone, a staff member of the Oregon Sea Grant, a research project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University. Salmon numbers, the author stresses, have declined sharply owing to habitat loss and damage, inadequate passage and flows regulated by hydropower, agriculture and logging projects. Throughout 1990 and 1991, in an unprecedented public forum, federal and state agencies, utilities and environmental groups met in Portland, Ore., to formulate a program. Among the movers and shakers in organizing the meetings were Gordon Reeves (Forest Service), Willa Nehlsen (Northwest Power Planning Council) and Bill Bakke (Oregon Natural Resources Council). Publication of Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads by the American Fishers Association, a study that grew out of these meetings, has helped influence public discussion, according to Cone, but the forum's report to President Clinton failed to spur Congress to allocate funds to implement the group's proposals. This forceful book could have an impact. (Feb.)

Library Journal

Pacific salmon are born in a river or stream, swim out to the open ocean where they may live for up to six years, and then as adults leap up rivers and waterfalls to return to their natal streams to mate and spawn. The subtle relationship between salmon and their habitats, which makes this migration possible, has been gradually degraded as a result of logging, the construction of dams, and water pollution. Cone, a science journalist and author of Fire Under the Sea (LJ 7/1/91), recounts the battles between ecologists, biologists, and conservation-minded lawyers and the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management over the protection of the dwindling salmon population. Detailed descriptions of coho salmon spawning surveys, a historical account of the 19th-century fur trade, the development of the salmon canning industry, and a discussion of traditional Indian hunting and fishing customs are interspersed with biographical material on several activist scientists. For specialized collections in fisheries, public policy, and local history of the Northwest. (Photos not seen.)-Judith B. Barnett, Pell Marine Science Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Kingston