Making Salmon

An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis

For one of my classes we have to send out an E-mail discussing that week's reading before class. Here's this week; tell me what you think.


The only other environmental history I've read is Mark Fiege's "Irrigated Eden," and that was just this week. My thoughts on Taylor's book, then, are a bit more comparative. Without saying too much about Fiege, the two authors take very different views about human intervention in nature. For Taylor, industrialization is almost purely detrimental. Humans throw the environment off its natural equilibrium and the results are nearly irrevocable. Fiege, on the other hand, includes humans as part of the environment. They do not destroy nature but alter it, and nature eventually finds its balance again. Reading Fiege first, coupled with Taylor's activist tone, made me question Taylor's assumptions about the immediacy of environmental danger.

Also, Taylor uses salmon to "illustrate the distribution of social power in society, the social and environmental consequences of policies, and the internal contradictions of salmon management." (11) In that sentence alone it is interesting to see society hinted at three times, and environment once; "salmon management" is the afterthought. There are a number of places in the book where it seems the priority is people, not place or thing. One thing I thought about this week was whether history without humans is possible. Is a purely environmental history achieveable? If a tree falls in the woods and it's not a human's fault, can we write about it?

Even when Taylor does not discuss the actions of people, nature takes on some human characteristics. Fish struggle to survive and reproduce, die slowly and painfully, and are exploited much like whites exploited the natives. To natives, coyotes are tricksters and foxes are crafty. (28-9) There is a "fish culture." (130) Ultimately the salmon need someone to "speak" for them because locals "resent . . . their cultural irreverence." (248) Salmon even have "schools."

That was a long setup to a bad joke. Still, I think it's an interesting question.