Customer Reviews

King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon

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Montgomery's book is centered on the notion that we are failing to learn from history when it comes to the Pacific salmon crisis. In England, eastern North America, and now the Pacific Northwest, human actions that inevitably destroy the "king of fish" have been repeated. Overfishing, blocking salmon from their spawning habitat, and causing the deterioration of habitat quality through pollution, land clearing, and simplification of the river are the culprits. Montgomery also tells why hatcheries are not the solution and never have been. He closes with a clear and, to me, indisputable analysis of what we must do to preserve and recover this most amazing of creatures. The book is quite accessible to a layperson; you don't need a scientific background, or even any knowledge of the problems facing Pacific salmon, in order to enjoy and learn from the book.

I read this book with great interest and I am saddened by what I learned. I was raised in a town on the Columbia River and as a young fisherman, heard stories of large historic Salmon runs described in near myth-like terms. Back then I was taught to blame the tribes, gill netters and other commercial fisherman for the diminished runs. If only the problem were that simple. As Montgomery clearly describes, through an interesting comparative analsis, Salmon runs have historically been driven into extinction, first in Europe, then England, then New England, and now the Pacific Northwest in more or less the same fashion. As the areas around native salmon waters became populated and developed, our society has made certain choices, economic v. environmental, which not surpisingly have nearly always favored the economic. As a result, salmon runs were decimated by the construction of dams, overfishing, pollution, misguided hatchery programs, the clearing and diking of streams, destruction of wetlands, logging practices, and simply by population growth and development, which Montgomery describes as a death by a thousand cuts. Presently, salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest are at just 6-7% of their historical numbers. As the region's population is expected to double within this generation, conditions will likely only get worse. While Montgomery identifies steps than can be taken to revive these runs, it seems doubtful there is enough public sentiment or political will to effect these changes. If anything, this books is a sad commentary on our society's ability to manage its resources. Salmon, which are a symbol of the great Pacific Northwest, will soon be gone for good.

Dr. Montgomery shows that if the toxic and human waste poured into the rivers of the industrial revolution did not poison Salmon, the incipient capitalist institution of commercial fishing would swallow most of them.. Montgomery quotes records from the holder of fishing rights on a specific part of the Thames river. The records of this particular holder shows he caught 66 salmon in 1801, 18 in 1812 and only 2 in 1821....by the 1960's, the annual salmon catch of England and Wales was a quarter of that a century earlier. He quotes an account of MP Robert Wallace about parliament blocking effective salmon protection laws at the behest of the commercial fishing industry, dam operators, etc.

He quotes accounts from the early 19th century including from Henry David Thoreau about the severe depletion of salmon stocks in Northeast U.S. rivers caused by the disruption of salmon spawning beds by the transportion of boats and logs down the river, dams, factory poisons and so on.

Salmon stocks continued to decline to near extinction in Eastern U.S. waters. The Danish government agreed to ban its fisherman from engaging in their highly destructive open ocean fishing off the coast of Greenland, where salmon from Britain, the U.S, and Canada often converge for their sojourns in the Ocean, in 1972. However Danes continued to fish heavily near the Greenland shore, and used vessels under other nation's flags to circumvent their salmon catch quota under the 1972 agreement.

Montgomery shows how salmon have been sacrificed since the Great Depression in favor of the dams which have provided water and electricity in the Eastern Pacific Northwest from the Snake and Colombia Rivers. In 1937, U.S. fisheries commissioner Franklin Bell let it be known that he wasn't going to strain himself too much on behalf of the Salmon. "Aside from blind restriction" of commercial fishing, he explained, "the protection of individual runs menaced by virtual extinction must be left to chance."

Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest thrived on salmon for subsistence, and to preserve the run, would commonly allow half of the run to pass through its nets. But with the coming of commercial fishing dominated by whites, Indian livelihood was wiped out. They could not compete in commercial fishing, lacking the wealth to purchase the sophisticated boats and nets increasingly becoming common. Indians became a racist scapegoat for the depletion of salmon stocks. He notes He notes though that state records that the entire Indian fishing catch from 1935 to 1950 was less than the total commercial catch during a typical year.

Washington State had always claimed that on traditional Indian fishing grounds based on treaties made regarding Colombian basin rivers in the 1850's, Indians merely had the same rights as whites to exploit salmon. But in 1970, federal district court judge George Boldt ruled that the treaties actually reserved for Indians half of the annual salmon supply. In 1975, the Supreme Court upheld Boldt's decision. In 1980, Federal Judge William Orrick declared that under the old treaties, maintaining decent habitat for salmon spawning fell to Washington state. Shortly thereafter a three-judge panel of the 9th circuit overturned the decision. The issue of maintaining the habitat has not been resolved. He points out that native Americans have not been given "special rights" in fishing, as white fisherman and the demagogues inflaming them have claimed but the treaties, signed as they were under pressure, were grants by the Indians to the White man on the Indian's land. Not grants by the white man to the Indian.

, Hatcheries were promoted as the catchall solution to salmon shortages. Huge investments were made in this new technology by Washington and Oregon governments beginning the late 19th century. However, writes Montgomery, in the long term, hatcheries have clearly failed. Salmon cannot simply adapt to any stream or river. They seem genetically programmed to operate in limited regions. Hatcheries salmon are selected from a very limited gene pool i.e. lack of genetic diversity and can produce defective offspring with their wild brethren. The hatchery salmon are found to be much more aggressive than their wild counterparts in eating up the food supply, thus making the wild ones lose out in the survival of the fittest. In particular hatchery fish, can introduce deadly diseases to their wild brethren. In the mid-70's a parasite from hatchery fish wiped out restored wild salmon stocks in Norwegian rivers.
By the early 1990's, while the Colombia river held an estimated 11 to 16 million salmon before the arrival of Europeans, by then it had dwindled to around 2 million wild fish. Yet the number of hatchery fish in the river was estimated at the time to be around a hundred million.

Likewise, on the East coast, salmon produced in "farms" i.e. maintained in cages at sea, sometimes accounted for the majority of spawning salmon in a river. An estimate of the National Research Council declares that 180,000 fish a year escape from their farms in Maine. They spread disease to wild salmon and mate with them, creating large numbers of genetically limited salmon. According to Montgomery, those 180,000 fish are ten times the number of wild salmon left in New England. In Europe, he notes, the amount of farm salmon being produced was 100 times the catch of wild salmon.

He advocates strictly enforced moratoriums on fishing, increased preservations of wetlands to allow for the creation of flood produced salmon-friendly side-channels, strictly enforced regulations on placing passageways for salmon in dams, regulations to prevent salmon waterways from being polluted and to make sure that salmon do not end up as carcasses on farmland after being swallowed through irrigation pumps. The economic actors involved continue to block serious efforts to protect the salmon as they always have. He notes how the Bush administration has blocked efforts to address over-fishing.

I can only add to what the three previous reviewers have said in praise of this book. I make my living through irrigated agriculture, and so am intimately involved in the myriad of issues surrounding the survival of these incredible creatures. Dr. Montgomery's book is a good introduction to basic salmonid biology (a topic most of the public, including "activists" are shockingly ignorant of), is blessedly free from jargon and acronyms, and recounts the sad history of our interactions with this fish without didactic and self-righteous screaming.

I read Mr. Montgomery's other book on dirt and so picked this gem up at the local library. I'm a sport fisherman in the PNW and so I care deeply about salmon and I recognize that as a fisherman I am part of the problem and as a homeowner I'm again part of the habitat degradation just by the mere fact I live here. So I am interested in ways that I can mitigate my impact and improve salmon runs. Well after reading this book I'm very depressed. It looks bad for the fish and it doesn't seem like the measures we are doing are anywhere near enough.

On the book, it's a bit dry being a history of fish book, but that salmon are over a million years old was something I didn't know. That salmon used to be all through out Europe and that the Dutch are to blame for being greedy with the open ocean fishing while others tried to restore their runs. It's all being played out again here in the PNW. That salmon are like weeds and will repopulate a river given any chance at all gives me hope but we are so destroying their habitat with endless strip malls, levees, and housing on flood plains. Maybe after the floods of 2008/9 people will finally understand that the word "flood plain" is descriptive of what happens and won't build there.

Anyway if you are a sport fisherman and want to argue about the treaties with the tribes, there is a good explanation of who granted who rights to fish, and where the fish went from that deal. And if you are a school teacher and want to set up some habitat, or hatchery there is some information there as well.

My only quibble with the book is that there are allegations that escaped Atlantic salmon from fish pens are breeding and will take over the native streams is misfounded. Atlantic salmon were introduced over 4 times in the PNW by people who wanted this to happen and it was always a failure. For whatever reason Atlantic salmon fry don't mange to come back. But that's a small point and Mr. Montgomery is a geo-morphologist not a fishery biologist. Still it's very interesting reading.

Great book to learn about world-wide history and the salmon's demise repeated over and over country to country. Sad story because people do not have the political will to do the right thing. #1 problem--overfishing. Can't blame me with my limited catches!

This is a very depressing book, because the author does such a thorough, comprehensive job of describing the global death of a beautiful and naturally sustaining resource. The author is a geologist who studies the shape of land, and in studying rivers learned about salmon. He went out and documented the world-wide demise of salmon, due to technologically advanced human greed. The whole book is filled with X amount of fish spawning under Native American fishing practices, X number of dams and changing of streams, X amount of fish taken out of the streams by Europeans, and voila, what a shock, X% fewer fish return to spawn each year. And, almost the worst for me is that this story is global and has already played out many times before. Not only are we greedy and stupid, but blind, too. We humans have done this before again and again, and just keep on doing it:

"The English, in transforming the economic profile of their island, sacrificed their salmon for the modern age of the industrial revolution. New Englanders, too, traded salmon for a tamed landscape better suited to support their agricultural needs and industrial aspirations. The feverish rush to extract gold from riverbeds destroyed much of California's salmon. Even before the promise of cheap water and electricity drove the construction of dams that impeded the migration of Columbia River's salmon between the sea and their spawning grounds, most of the Columbia River's huge chinook had already been canned and shipped east. At the same time, the Pacific Northwest's ancient forests, which structure salmon habitat were cut over and converted to timber plantations." (page 229)

The PNW Native Americans revered the salmon. When Europeans over-ran them and took their land, the one non-negotiable part of the hand-over was the tribal right to fish salmon, rights which exist to today. The natives' fishing practices include taking 50% or less of salmon runs, the Europeans take 90%. Other changes by the Europeans hasten the demise. Hatcheries destroy native stock with disease. Dams keep salmon from returning to their spawning grounds. Logging destroys the spawning rivers that remain.

Very interesting book, but depressing.

Easy to read. A history book. Gives you a flavor of the debate. Cons: biased. Does not tell you that salmon stocks are resilient, if you give them a chance. Filters the positive. For example, that hatcherys are not all bad, though it's true historically they started out as a way to supplement commercial fisheries. For example, that roughly as many salmon stock (a river by river analysis) surveyed in Alaska are increasing as are declining (about 6% each) while the rest is stable. True, that is Alaska and the book is primarily about the Pacific NW, with digressions about Atlantic salmon and the salmon formerly found in Europe.

Prose is well done, conversational. Perhaps a bit of the author's ego can be seen when he talks about his interaction with his beloved dog a lot. But this is not a dry, scientific tome,and most readers are better for it.

You can also get hard info on salmon off the web, just by searching the web, but this book packages this info, filters it somewhat to give a weepy, sad conclusion, and is more interesting to read than a dry report. Book has an excellent illustrated family tree of Salmon too, which is worth the price of the book.

Recommended as a dreary but not entirely inaccurate portrait of salmon.

Salmon was once one of the commonest fishes in Europe, swarming up the Thames and the rivers of Gaul in Roman times. Laws to protect the fish date to 13th and 14th century England and Scotland: establishing the fishing season, and regulating the weirs. However, the Industrial Revolution brought about industrial pollution, and modern times brought trawlers catching the fish in massive numbers near Greenland, which caused European salmon to almost go extinct; only Norway, Ireland, Iceland and Scotland still have significant runs of wild salmon. The same happened with the salmon runs of New England: they nearly disappeared because of overfishing, pollution, and logging (which clears logjams, which hold in place gravel, which allows salmon roe to develop). The same is in the process of happening with Pacific Northwest salmon. Salmon hatcheries were thought to be the solution; the problem with them is that hatchery salmon are not used to surviving in the wild; releasing them into rivers, says Montgomery, is like dropping a bunch of suburban American teenagers in the middle of the Congo. In the 1930s, the Columbia River and the Snake River were dammed for irrigation and to produce electricity (useful for making aluminum, used for making airplanes during World War II); which caused the fish population to plummet: even if adult fish can go upstream for breeding, juvenile fish are adapted to go downstream through a rapid current, not through a series of placid lakes punctuated by dams. Only one sockeye salmon appeared in Idaho's Redfish Lake (which was once red with fish) in 1992, braving 13 dams on its way from the Pacific Ocean; nicknamed Larry, the fish was clubbed and its milt was used to fertilize hatchery eggs; in 2009, there were 28 fishes. The solution is fishing that is more sustainable, more restrictions on pollution, and possibly removal of some dams. If this is not done, Pacific Northwest salmon will go the way of Caspian beluga sturgeon.