In King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon, author David Montgomery analyzes the decline, in many cases the near extirpation, of once-abundant salmon fisheries in Great Britain and northern Europe, in New England and Canada, and in the Pacific Northwest. First published in 2003, the book is still fresh and relevant, an engrossing read, chock full of information, and ending with practical insights and a call to action.
The key theme of King of Fish, which the author thoroughly documents, is that the historic decline of salmon stocks has not occurred because people didn’t know any better or because they just didn’t care. Instead, the depredation of the fishery happened despite the best efforts of thoughtful people and bodies politic to protect and preserve them. How could this be?
When fisheries management and conservation have clashed with financial interests in development and exploitation, the salmon have consistently lost – not every single time, but often enough that the incremental and inexorable accumulation of individual short-term decisions has eroded and whittled away salmon populations and habitats to the point that they collapsed.
Montgomery demonstrates through numerous examples that you can literally bank on the economic value of fish harvest or hydropower or irrigation or any number of other ephemeral interests to outweigh the uncertainties and risk-based arguments on the other side.
There is a systemic imbalance in these interests that all but guarantees that the fish will lose whenever decision making is left to local interests. There are only two notable exceptions: pre-industrial Britain, when royal authority provided a respite from overfishing, and Alaska, where federal regulation has provided a significant measure of protection for salmon interests.
Montgomery sums it up neatly: “One of the most obvious lessons of past experience is that local control rarely protects salmon over the long run without direction from a higher authority, whether the king, a federal agency, or, as for Native Americans, the Creator through deeply ingrained cultural practices.” (230) That is the lesson taught by the global history of salmon. Will we learn from it?
The King of Fish is just as informative and thought provoking today as when it was first published. And its core lesson that laws and regulations, and centralized authority to back them up, are needed to restrain unfettered exploitation of natural resources, has applications far beyond salmon. It is the story of conservation writ large, with obvious analogies to effective public policy on climate change, fracking, wilderness preservation and a host of similar issues.
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