Salmon Nation: People and Fish at the Edge

Salmon Nation takes you behind the headlines in the company of six knowledgeable guides to a deeper understanding of the most celebrated fish of western North America. Thoughtful essays by Native American writer Elizabeth Woody, fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich, journalist Richard Manning, former commercial fisherman Freeman House, and writer Seth Zuckerman trace the relationship between people and salmon from the days of abundance that sustained the Northwest Coast cultures to the troubled world of salmon today, and suggest a future of rivers restored and fishing livelihoods revived- a future still within our reach. Geographer Dorie Brownell's full-color maps of the state of Pacific salmon today, published here for the first time, offer a powerful "big picture" perspective that lends a new urgency to efforts to heal the breach between between people and salmon.

EDWARD WOLF first encountered salmon at age six, in the form of belly lox served in a delicatessen in Cleveland, Ohio. he is director of communications for Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon and author of A Tidewater Place: Portrait of the Willapa Ecosystem (Mountaineers books, 1993), a monograph about that region of southwestern Washington. His work for conservation organizations has taken him from the headwaters of the Amazon to the mouth of the Yukon River.

SETH ZUCKERMAN's writings on the relations between humans and the rest of the natural world have appeared in newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, and Sierra, among others. Since 1997, he has served as Ecotrust's circuit rider, covering issues of community, economy, and the environment along the coast from Anchorage to San Francisco for the on-line news service Tidepool.org. He lives on the Mattole River in northwestern california where he is active in watershed restoration.