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So as we plant trees and restore degraded stretches of Tarboo Creek, we’re aware that we’re fighting a thousand years of history. Restraints on salmon fishing have never been enforced effectively—except by the Ainu people who had lived on Hokkaido for millennia before the arrival of Japanese settlers, Native American tribes before contact with Europeans, and countries like Iceland.
In Puget Sound today, people get upset about the nearshore fishing—like the boat in Tarboo Bay—because they can see it. But we have only a faint idea of what fishermen are taking out in the open ocean. We can’t see them, though they can use sonar to see the fish. There are ongoing and bitter disputes between the United States and Canada over how many of which salmon species can be caught where—just as there were bitter disputes in the 1970s and ’80s between those two countries and Denmark, which claims jurisdiction over the Atlantic salmon living off Greenland’s coast.
The situation is becoming even more complicated as a result of uncertainty about what changing water temperatures and ocean acidity will do to salmon populations. Historically, salmon numbers in the Northwest have fluctuated in response to what oceanographers call the Pacific Decadal Oscillation—a natural twenty-to-thirty-year-long cycle in ocean temperatures. Things will be good for salmon in the Pacific Northwest for twenty to thirty years, then bad for twenty to thirty years. Another well-established pattern is that when conditions are good for the fish native to northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, things are tough for Alaskan salmon, and vice versa—though I’ve yet to see a good explanation for the contrast.
The current uncertainty created by climate change hinges on two of a salmon’s most basic needs. The first is healthy streams for nesting and rearing. Based on the ipcc’s projections for warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers in the Pacific Northwest, researchers are forecasting more winter flooding along with lower water levels and higher water temperatures in summer. Winter floods can excavate redds before young salmon fry hatch; high water temperatures in summer can stress juvenile salmon. The implications for breeding success in the Northwest are not good. But as the Arctic Ocean becomes more free of ice, salmon are beginning to colonize rivers that empty north of the Bering Strait. Salmon, like trees, are moving poleward. No one knows whether gained breeding habitat in the north will balance out lost breeding habitat in the south.
The second basic need is food once salmon reach the ocean. Prey density depends on the abundance of photosynthetic bacteria and algae in the water, which depends on the availability of nutrients. Most of the ocean is a desert, biologically, because it is so nutrient poor. Seawater lacks abundant nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron for a simple reason: when marine creatures die, their nutrient-laden bodies sink to the bottom. There, their remains are slowly passed around the diaphanous food webs that exist in the lightless, pressure-packed, and near-freezing expanses of the ocean floor. Eventually, one of three things happens. The atoms can be carried deep into Earth’s crust on a subducting plate, in effect disappearing forever. Alternatively, the carbon and hydrogen in the tiny corpses may gradually turn into petroleum, then be pumped out of the ground and burned in cars. The final option? An upwelling current can bring the elements back to the surface, where they can be used again by organisms.
The ability of water currents to sweep material up from the ocean floor to the surface depends, in large part, on changes in the density of water layers—how heavy water is per unit volume. In general, colder water is heavier than warmer water. So if the surface of the ocean cools, the water will tend to sink and be displaced by slightly warmer, slightly lighter, and much more nutrient-rich water from below. When this happens, production goes up. But if the surface warms, the top of the water column gets lighter and more resistant to upwelling, and thus nutrient poor. Production goes down.
Based on these patterns, climate change will probably be bad news, overall, for salmon and other fish populations. But things are complicated. In some places, winds are increasing due to warming air. Strong and sustained winds can move enough surface water aside to force water up from below, causing upwellings that increase productivity. And as the northern oceans warm, the distribution of copepods—tiny crustaceans that feed the fish that salmon eat—is changing. Warm-water copepod species are moving north, and in some regions overall biodiversity among copepods and other planktonic forms is increasing. It’s not yet clear how these changes will affect salmon and their prey.
The orca whales that feed on salmon also bear watching. Puget Sound’s orca pods were devastated in the 1960s and ’70s by captures for marine shows and aquaria—the tourist trade. Their numbers have rebounded somewhat since but are sensitive to changes in salmon abundance. They will be affected by climate change as well.
An ecosystem is a tapestry; climate change pulls at the threads.
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In the meantime, it’s become clear that the classic solution to declines in salmon populations—hatcheries—has failed. Hatcheries are located on or near salmon streams; the staff catch returning adults, strip them of their eggs and sperm, and combine the gametes in buckets. When the fertilized eggs hatch, the fry are kept in predator-proof pens and fed as much as they can eat until they are ready to migrate to the ocean. The idea is for artificial rearing to increase the survivorship of young fish and make up for the widespread loss of breeding habitat.
Hatcheries on the Columbia River released 4.5 million fry a year in the late 1890s and were cranking out as many as 120 million a year a century later. Still, runs crashed. Something was wrong with the promise that artificial rearing on an industrial scale would make up for the loss of spawning grounds to dams, channelization, and suburbanization. The story is the same throughout the Pacific Northwest, where an estimated 5 billion salmon are released from hatcheries each year. A 1991 assessment concluded that 33 percent of all historical populations were extinct and that half of the runs remaining in the region were endangered. The fish are gone from a third of the geographic area occupied in 1850.
Based on more than a hundred years of data like these, the claim that hatcheries can make up for habitat loss is false. Knowing what we know now, hearing someone advocate for hatcheries is like listening to a doctor advise a patient that it’s okay to eat junk food, abuse alcohol, sit all day, and chain smoke because we have state-of-the-art emergency rooms and icus that can solve any health problems that might result. But the jobs and sport fisheries supported by hatcheries have created a vested interest group that fights any attempt to close them.
Not only have hatcheries failed to solve the problems caused by overfishing and habitat loss, but also in some cases they have actively made things worse for the remaining wild populations. Salmon evolve rapidly in the hatchery environment, resulting in fish that are less well adapted to natural conditions than their recent ancestors were. In British Columbia, for example, Chinook salmon lay smaller eggs, on average, in rivers that are heavily supplemented with hatchery-produced young than do nonsupplemented populations in otherwise similar streams. Small eggs are favored in the hatchery environment, but larger eggs do much better in the wild. So crossbreeding between hatchery and wild stocks is making salmon less capable of living a natural life.
David Montgomery recognized the root of the problem: the success of hatcheries has always been measured in numbers of fry released, not the health of the populations they are supposed to be supplementing. The situation reminds me of farming in Wisconsin when I was growing up: the same newspaper’s front page would tout record corn production in bushels per acre but then profile families that were losing their farms due to the high costs of capital-intensive farming and depressed prices due to overproduction. We were using the wrong yardstick to measure success.
Hatcheries are also expensive. An analysis done in Oregon in the early 2000s estimated that each adult fish produced from hatchery-reared young cost at least $14 in years with good survivorship and up to $530 in years with poor p
roduction; a more recent analysis of hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin put the average cost at $73 per adult fish. If the money spent on hatcheries over the past 130 years had been spent on habitat protection and restoration instead, the situation would be far different today.
Commercial fishermen and fisheries managers are not stupid, and the industry and its regulators may yet find a way to manage salmon populations sustainably. One proposal is to allow individuals to own a percentage of the total allowable catch. The intent is to take the scramble out of the competition and the tragedy out of the commons. As an alternative or in concert, David Montgomery and others propose that salmon fishing be allowed only at river mouths, where the health of the runs can be monitored precisely. This is how the people of North America’s First Nations traditionally managed salmon populations; their system worked for more than thirteen thousand years. Iceland also manages its salmon runs on a river-by-river basis.
Something has to change, or the story of salmon in the Pacific Northwest will play out the same way it did in Europe, New England, the Maritime Provinces, and Japan. The old ways have failed.
Planting Season
It’s a great day when the trees arrive at the start of planting season. As you unload bundles of freshly dug bare-root plants, you never think of failure—of yellowed cedar saplings fried by an early spring heat wave or needleless Doug-fir killed by mice that gnaw a ring around the stem or saplings that simply fail and die for no apparent reason. Instead, you breathe in the delicious evergreen scent and imagine each tiny sapling as a towering spire, 250 years old and 4 feet in diameter.
After planting about three thousand one-or-two-year-old trees and shrubs in the winter and early spring of 2005 with help from our plant-a-thon friends, we’ve been adding about five hundred more each year. Many of the plants are bare-root stock purchased from a nursery run by the nonprofit Washington Association of Conservation Districts, but on occasion we grow our own or dig little firs and cedars from our land for transplanting.
We sometimes get our trees with nwi’s annual order from the big nurseries, our hundreds to their thousands. nwi’s field crews and plant-a-thon parties have replanted more than 240 acres in the floodplain just downstream from us on a long-defunct dairy farm. The group purchased the land using grants from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service program that funnels money from excise taxes on fishing equipment and motorboat fuel into preservation of coastal wetlands. It’s a way for the beneficiaries of healthy fish populations to help make sure those populations stay healthy.
When we pick up bare-root saplings from the nurseries or dig our own little trees, the first step is to store the plants until they can be planted out, by covering the bare roots with soil or sawdust or wood chips. When they are heeled in in this way, lines of rust-and-black vine maple and red elderberry alternate with emerald sprays of western redcedar and Douglas-fir. The plants come from the supplier wired into bundles of twenty-five or fifty, so the deciduous shrubs poke up from the ground like bristle brushes; the conifers form fragrant bright-green mounds.
In many years, we also harvest alder pull-ups—pencil-thin red alder trees, 2 to 3 feet high. When the soil that little alders are growing in has been thoroughly wetted by winter rains, you can pull the entire plant, roots and all, right out of the ground. If you can find an old logging road where alders have seeded in recently, you can collect bucketsful in minutes.
Red alders are a pioneering species—meaning they can take the high temperatures, dryness, and poor soil quality that prevails on sites opened by windstorms, fires, logging, or construction. The reason they can cope with poor soil quality is that their roots are decorated with little orange baubles that fix nitrogen. Inside each of these nodules are millions of symbiotic bacteria from the species Frankia alni that convert molecular nitrogen from the atmosphere—dinitrogen or N2—into what a biochemist would call reduced or fixed forms of nitrogen, like nitrate (NO3), nitrite (NO2), or amino groups with the chemical formula –NH2. Although molecular nitrogen is superabundant (N2 makes up most of the air we breathe), chemically it’s so stable that it’s almost inert. Nitrogen atoms can only participate in key chemical reactions—like the ones that build the proteins, rnas, and dna that make life possible—after they have been fixed. The fixation process is impressive biochemistry: it depends on breaking the strong, rigid triple bonds that glue atmospheric nitrogen (N=N) together and substituting single bonds to hydrogen or carbon atoms, like H–N–H. Human chemists couldn’t come up with an efficient way to do this on an industrial scale until the 1910s; the scientists who did the key work won Nobel prizes.
Frankia and other nitrogen-fixing bacteria do this chemistry with a sophisticated complex of enzymes collectively called nitrogenase. Keeping this machinery humming is an expensive, energy-demanding process for the bacterium and is rarely possible without help from a photosynthetic host providing the requisite power supply. So in many cases, a plant partner like red alder pipelines a steady stream of energy-rich sugars in exchange for little jewels of reduced nitrogen from Frankia. The arrangement means that alders have a ready supply of fertilizer manufactured in their roots. It’s a business partnership that has endured for millions of years.
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We’re trying to reforest land that was wooded for millennia but has been cleared of trees for at least 120 years. A photo of the Tarboo watershed taken in the 1890s shows the aftermath of the initial cut: people scratching out a living on homesteads surrounded by muddy fields dotted with the charred snags of old-growth trees, with intact forest receding in the background. The scene reminds me of roads I’ve walked in Ecuador and southern Mexico where the initial deforestation is just being completed. There, destitute families of squatters live in shacks, trying to grow maize on steep slopes or raise a few cattle in pastures where shade is provided by one or two big trees—relicts from the rainforest.
In Puget Sound, the early white settlers were focused on farming. They felled trees in lowlands, where the ground was relatively flat, and burned the downed trunks to clear fields. There was some commercial logging, but it was concentrated close to the coast. In those days the timber had to be pulled by oxen or horses to big rivers and floated down to the sea, or pulled to the ocean itself, where the logs were assembled into booms and towed to the nearest mill. The process of pulling downed logs from a forest to a yarding area, where loads are organized into decks for longer-distance transport, is called skidding. The steep sections of the street called Yesler Way in downtown Seattle were a skid road for a waterfront mill in the city’s early days; the prostitutes and penniless men who lived along it helped inspire the term skid row for slums throughout the United States.
A later photo, from the 1930s, shows our place and surrounding valley still treeless. By then virtually all of the Puget Sound lowlands had been cleared by commercial logging operations. The companies had long since abandoned animal power; instead they moved the downed logs with cables attached to huge steam-powered engines called donkeys. The donkeys pulled the logs to yards where they could be loaded onto railcars and taken to the mill.
That 1930s-vintage photo of our place also shows a cedar shake mill in operation. Western redcedar is the preferred wood for the shakes and shingles used in roofing, as well as clapboards for siding and material for outdoor decks, because it’s so rot resistant. But only old-growth cedar has no knots and thus can be used for shakes and shingles. The location of the mill seems odd, then, because there are no big trees in the picture. It’s possible that the raw material for the mill came from forested land miles away and upslope; by then the big companies were cutting up the sides of the Olympic and Cascade mountains and trucking logs down. But there may have been local sources as well: cedar could have been scavenged from stumps and the odd downed log left from the original cut or harvested during the early days of tractor logging. When the first tractor crawlers were available, independent operators called gyppos used them to reach old-growth trees in inaccessible areas tha
t had escaped the initial cuts in the late 1800s. The gyppos would run the tractors up streambeds, cut the big trees that remained, and then skid the logs back down the creek. Stream channels were also the preferred skid road in the horse-and-ox days. Both eras were dark days for salmon streams—the animals and logs and tractor treads would tear up the channels, and then winter rains would erode the bare hillsides and fill gravel beds with sediment.
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The deforestation of the Tarboo Valley from 1880 until 1930 is a speck on a map—a tiny data point in a trend that began three thousand years ago and continues today. In the Bible, Psalm 92 says that the righteous shall grow like a cedar; Isaiah 41 and Ezekiel 17 maintain that God planted cedar in the wilderness and the mountains. None of the verses kept the trees from being cut—King Solomon built his temple from the cedars of Lebanon. Throughout the Mediterranean, tree felling and grazing by goats have kept landscapes treeless for millennia; the cedar of Lebanon adorns that country’s flag but is endangered there. By the Middle Ages the axmen had moved north: cutting to convert land to agriculture and for firewood and charcoal production was clearing Europe of trees. Old-growth forests were essentially gone from that continent by the late 1600s.
After Columbus and the Mayflower, the wave of deforestation jumped the Atlantic and swept across North America. Settlers led; large logging companies followed close behind. Between them, virtually every large stem in the United States was cut in less than three hundred years. As the Englishman Michael Williams has documented in his seminal book Americans and Their Forests, the process started in New England, progressed to the Lake States, moved to the Deep South, and then jumped the Great Plains to the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. Almost 40 million acres of American forests were converted to farmland between 1850 and 1859; from 1860 to 1880, 5 million acres were cleared in the state of Wisconsin alone. Over a quarter of Ohio’s counties were 80 percent cleared of forests by 1880; ten years later, half of all the counties in that state were essentially deforested. The “inexhaustible” pineries of the Lake States—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—were gone, for all intents and purposes, by 1900. Thanks to inefficient rafting and saws, the practice of cutting large trees 4 to 6 feet from the ground, and forest fires that burned out of control, much of the wood was wasted. In Wisconsin, so many branches and other types of slash were left on the ground after logging that when it dried and fires swept through, the heat was intense enough to vaporize the organic material and kill the microorganisms in the soil—effectively sterilizing it. The cutover land still hasn’t recovered.
Saving Tarboo Creek Page 7