GREED AND WASTE-HALLMARKS of SALMON DEMISE
Experimental beach seine set-up to catch chum salmon in the Fraser River in 1997. The seine is drawn to shore and the non-target fish- including the endangered coho-are lifted out and returned to the river unharmed. This was a cooperative project involving the Katzie First Nation and some non- native commercial fishermen.
What does history say about the survival chances of the coho?
Over the last century and a half, a combination of "White Man" (Western European immigrant), greed and technology has wiped out run after run of salmon, from California to Alaska.
While the First Nations peoples of the coast called themselves "Salmon People" and treated the fish with reverence and respect, the European immmigrants called themselves rulers of all other forms of life and treated the salmon with utilitarian contempt.
By the 1870s, the once mighty salmon runs of California's Sacramento River were destroyed by rampant over-fishing and the fouling of spawning grounds by hydraulic gold mining and logging. The canneries and the fishermen simply packed up and moved north to the next salmon stream, and on it went.
The destruction began at about the same time in BC, and was almost as thorough. Even before the devastating era of chainsaws and bulldozers, BC logging companies despoiled salmon habitat with dams and log runs, ripped out spawning gravel for roads and deforested steep slopes to smother salmon streams with silt.
"It was a time of the independent, 'rational' man, the free enterpriser," wrote R.J. Childerhose and Marj Trim in their book "Pacific Salmon" (Douglas & McIntyre, 1981). "Interests-in this case mining, logging and fishing-were allowed to conflict. The excuse was 'jobs and money'."
Little has changed in the last hundred years. "Jobs and money" are still the excuse of politicians and industrialists who preside over the ravaging of our most vital natural resources for quick profits.
A century ago, salmon cannery operations on the Fraser River were scenes of appalling waste and horror. The red-fleshed sockeye was preferred, but the nets didn't discriminate-so untold thousands of dead chinook, coho, chum and pink salmon were dumped back to rot in the river.
There were so many fish that it was common to simply slice fillets from the sides of the sockeye and discard everything else. When canneries couldn't keep up with what the fishermen brought in, whole boatloads of salmon were dumped at the docks.
Often the tides and westerly winds would keep the thousands of tons of rotting fish and entrails in the river. For some 30 km of its length, the Fraser's banks were sometimes lined with stinking windrows up to a metre deep and six metres wide during the major salmon runs. Farmers with strong stomachs picked up wagonloads of the mess and ploughed it into their fields.
"A century ago, salmon cannery operations on the Fraser River were scenes of appalling waste and horror."
A few years later, when the cannery operators and fishermen paused from their orgy of greed and death long enough to look around, they noticed that the runs of salmon-for some reason-were sharply declining.
Government, they whined, should do something. Government took 20 years to react, and then churned out a set of regulations that were largely ineffective. Doesn't that have a familiar ring to it?
In the times of plenty, before the "White Man", every fishing nation along the coast had some words akin to those of the Kwakiutl Nation's "First Salmon Ceremony": "O Supernatural Ones, O Swimmers, I thank you that are willing to come to us. Don't let your coming be bad, for you come to be food for us. I beg you to protect me and the one who takes mercy on me, that we may not die without cause, Swimmers."
So important were the Swimmers to the native people that in some cases anyone found doing anything that interfered with a salmon run was put to death.
The white immigrants came to "tame the wilderness" and turn it into something resembling the tamed but depleted regions they had left behind. It was, say Childerhose and Trim, "a golden age of capitalism, of unfettered free enterprise. Profit was sacred. Did nature no exist but to serve Man?"
Have we really learned anything since then? Now that the great silvery schools of coho salmon have dwindled to the very brink of extinction, do we have the technical and moral tools to bring them back?
