Items related to Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
Synopsis
An environmental organizer and former commercial salmon fisherman describes the process through which a determined group of local activists worked to save one of the last purely native races of salmon in California, in the process revealing much about the region's natural history, as well as social and philosophical issues. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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Reviews
Although this is his first book, House displays a talent for lyrical writing combined with an ability to present information clearly. In the early 1980s, House became involved with several residents who were concerned with preserving the King Salmon, a fish native to the Mattole River, which runs through the westernmost watershed in California. He explains how the salmon have just one chance at reproduction. The female salmon swims upstream and builds her nest for depositing eggs, which are then fertilized after the male releases his sperm. This natural process has been thwarted over decades by an unregulated logging industry, whose companies built roads that contributed to the landslides that destroyed the equilibrium of the watershed, pouring rock, soil and debris into the river. House, a former commercial fisherman, and other activists began by building weirs that trapped the salmon. After House realized that their dedicated group could not, singlehandedly, save the salmon or the river, he built a coalition of residents committed to restoring the damaged river and its banks. House details how longtime community residents and more recent arrivals learned to compromise around a common goal. His inspired and well-written account of environmental activism is a terrific introduction to an ethic he calls "bioregionalism."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Efforts to save a run of wild salmon in northern California, and by extension to formulate a bioregional ethic for living with the land, sympathetically told by participant House in his first book. Back in the 1970s, as House remembers it, the ranchland around the Mattole River started to experience an influx of counterculture youths, of whom he was one. The newcomers spent ``a great deal of time trying to forge a new sort of relationship to the living processes of their home place,'' and the Mattole salmon became a symbol for them, as it had been for the native residents, providing an intimate link to place. And the fish was in jeopardy, indeed the whole watershed equilibrium had been thrown out of whack by a variety of forces: logging and mining interests and the habitat degradation they wreaked; the neglect of state and federal agencies whose job is protecting the environment; and misguided acts to improve fish stocks. House describes in neat-handed detail the efforts to restore the salmon through collection, incubation, rearing, and release; he outlines the newcomers jousting and cooperation with government officials and long-established neighbors; and their abiding curiosity about and respect for their natural milieu. It is an admirable endeavor, and House tells its story with care and delight, even though his writing can be loose and repetitive and strewn with near-misses (``The encounter is so perfectly complex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objective reality of its own''). He also has the occasional, irritating habit of telling readers how they experience nature (``When we glance at a stream in passing, we see it as it is in the moment''maybe, maybe not). But no one can fault House's urge to concoct a sane and healthy economic relationship with his home place, one deeply immersed in its natural processes and patterns, and which he explores with such empathy and conviction. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
House, a former commercial salmon fisherman and cofounder of two watershed restoration groups in Northern California, presents a personal tale of self-discovery as he recounts the efforts of the Mattole River Valley community to save wild salmon in the region through various habitat restoration activities. While many excellent books on the plight of salmon are already availablee.g., Upstream: Salmon & Society in the Pacific Northwest (National Academy, 1996) is a thorough and well-indexed reference to salmon ecology and fisheries, and Judith Roches First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim (Univ. of Washington, 1998) presents Native American rituals and folklore relating to salmonTotem Salmon meets a different need as an eloquent combination of history, biology, and politics. Well researched and informative, it is also a delight to read. An appropriate addition to both public and academic libraries.Barbara Butler, Oregon Inst. of Marine Biology, Univ. of Oregon, Charleston
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Wild salmon, once so abundant that they supported much of Pacific Northwest culture, are now vanishing and being replaced by human-raised fish. House and other locals strove to save one strain of salmon in one northern California river. They encountered logging companies and farmers who refused to believe that what they did for their livelihood had anything to do with the salmon's decline. They encountered state fish and game department officials who refused to believe amateurs could succeed where they, the professionals, had not. House occasionally waxes overly poetic, yet he well communicates his and his companions' understanding that small ecological victories are accomplished by getting up at midnight, finding a wild salmon or two in their traps, fertilizing the eggs on their own, and then waiting as long as four years to see whether their efforts have succeeded. Rather than a book enthralled with the beauty of nature, this is a book about spending long days and nights with little or no pay to make one's corner of the world a little bit better. Jon Kartman
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Totem Salmon : Life Lessons from Another Species
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Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
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Hardback. Condition: Good. A grave and delightful book, both personal and cosmic. -Gary Snyder, author of The Practice of the Wild Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon. House writes from streamside: I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait. Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature. House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the happiness of the state show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary. Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things. Freeman House, a former commercial salmon fisherman, is cofounder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group and of the Mattole Restoration Council. He lives in Petrolia in the Mattole River Valley of northwestern California, and this is his first book. Seller Inventory # 00102709248
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Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
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Hardback. Condition: Good. A grave and delightful book, both personal and cosmic. -Gary Snyder, author of The Practice of the Wild Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon. House writes from streamside: I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait. Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature. House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the happiness of the state show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary. Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things. Freeman House, a former commercial salmon fisherman, is cofounder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group and of the Mattole Restoration Council. He lives in Petrolia in the Mattole River Valley of northwestern California, and this is his first book. Seller Inventory # CIN0807085480G
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Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
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