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.
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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