I have continued to watch what’s going on with fisheries and I’ve realized that overfishing doesn’t come close to covering the problems that we’re actually facing.
I worked on commercial fishing boats in the 1960s and that’s all anybody was talking about then, but by the 1990s the general public was thinking about it, too. In 1997 I wrote a book about cod and it happened to be about the time that the northern cod stocks collapsed and people started really thinking about fishery management and overfishing. Why did you want to tell this story about salmon? The Revelator recently spoke to Kurlansky about the threats to salmon, why we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes, and the life history of what he calls these “extraordinarily poetic” fish. And it’s reminiscent of some of his previous hits including, Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas and Salt: A World History.
Salmon, Kurlansky’s 33rd book, is part natural history and part cultural history - there are even a few recipes. “Human inventiveness keeps proving inadequate for replacing the natural order,” he sums up. Along the way he reveals the role of salmon in historical and contemporary indigenous communities, the destructive march of industrialization, the complicated role of hatcheries, and the growing threat of climate change. Kurlansky takes readers on a long historical trip to communities throughout the northern half of the world - anywhere you can or could find salmon - to understand how the fish went from ubiquitous to imperiled. Some Pacific runs have disappeared, too, and most populations are greatly reduced. “Our greatest assaults on the environment are visible in salmon,” writes author Mark Kurlansky in his new book, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth and the History of Their Common Fate.įollowing decades of environment abuses, salmon populations in many places, especially the Atlantic, are in dire shape.
If you want to know how well the environment is faring these days, look to the fish.
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