Is It Too Late to Save Wild Salmon?

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Some of the world’s most famous conservationists have been hunters. Teddy Roosevelt, John James Audubon, and Ernest Hemingway each have the somewhat dubious distinction of saving animals’ habitats to try to kill them. Pacific salmon aren’t often mentioned alongside Roosevelt’s elephants or Hemingway’s tigers, but in Tucker Malarkey’s Stronghold (Random House, $28), fish is the biggest game of all.

Malarkey’s protagonist is a charming misfit named Guido Rahr, who also happens to be her cousin. A naturalist almost as soon as he could walk, Rahr got hooked on fly fishing in his late teens, only to realize, to his horror, that the hydroelectric dams, agricultural runoff, commercial fishing industry, deforestation, and climate change in the Pacific Northwest could bring wild salmon to extinction.

And so begins a gripping chronicle that follows Rahr as he slowly gained access to increasingly lofty ladders of power, first in the U.S. and then in Russia, where he discovered the last remaining, utterly untouched salmon habitats on the planet.

The stakes aren’t just sport fishing’s future, or even people’s dinner. Salmon, it turns out, is a so-called keystone species upon which entire ecosystems depend. “Without wild salmon returning to the rivers of the Pacific Rim,” Malarkey writes, “the vast ecosystems that relied on their rich nutrient supply suffered. The impact moved steadily up the food chain, from microbes to insects, grasses, bushes, trees, amphibians, birds, mammals, and people.” A scientist on one of Rahr’s expeditions, for instance, discovered that a nitrogen isotope unique to marine systems can be found in 2,000-year-old trees on the banks of salmon rivers. “The salmon themselves established these riparian forests with the nutrient deposits of their carcasses,” Malarkey explains.

In an attempt to save the salmon that are left, Rahr adopted a “stronghold” approach to conservation. Unlike most ­government-led efforts, in which a species is protected only when it becomes endangered (“the Endangered Species Act was not a conservation strategy,” Malarkey writes. “It was an emergency room.”), Rahr set about protecting an entire environment to save a specific species. For Pacific salmon, that meant preserving rivers in Kamchatka, Russia, just as the area began to open up to logging, mineral extraction, and oil and gas drilling.

Malarkey plots Rahr’s exploits with the skill of a novelist and the affection of a close relative; she’s factual, in other words, but not objective. Of the distinction between fly fishing and regular fishing, she writes that it’s “the difference between a hunter who stalks his prey for days versus the weekend warrior who shoots from the back of a truck. One is fighting fair, and the other is a kind of terrorist.”

No matter where you land on the question of rods, hooks, and reels, the stories of needless destruction are ­appalling. Malarkey describes poachers’ camps carpeted with carcasses of discarded, rotting salmon killed for their roe, which in turn is brined and eaten by Russian and Asian consumers. One local activist came across poachers who’d laid a net across an entire river. “On the riverbank and spilling into the forest,” Malarkey writes, “was a growing mound of gutted female salmon. Thrown alongside, the males suffocated slowly.”

As a result, Rahr’s quest has a pathos not usually afforded to fish, which to their detriment are neither cute nor ­cuddly. The luminaries who’ve lent him support—retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Tom Brokaw, Ted Turner, and Intel Corp. founder Gordon Moore among them—are rendered in near-heroic terms. Russian titans Oleg Deripaska, Alexander Abramov, and Ilya Shcherbovich, who may be controversial figures for other reasons, are here lauded for chipping in to ­protect the Kamchatkan wilderness. Malarkey isn’t blind to the ­fundamental paradox of conservation under ­capitalism—the people with the means to effect change are often the people who’ve benefited most from a country’s destruction—but she remains relatively agnostic. Stronghold is about saving salmon, not blaming the people who’ve endangered it or harmed the planet in other ways.

For the time being, thanks to Rahr’s efforts, some of those salmon are safe. He helped usher in laws that restrict mining, logging, and hatchery fish production in the Pacific Northwest; in Kamchatka, he helped convert 2.7 million acres of salmon strongholds into national parks, with an additional 4 million acres proposed for protection.

For all that, the book ends on an uncomfortably ambivalent note. The planet’s looming resource crisis, not to mention future climate fluctuations, don’t bode well for wild salmon—or for humans, for that matter. But the point of Stronghold is that some things can be saved, at least in part, if you know how to fight for them.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, James Gaddy

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.