Salmon Without Rivers: A History Of The Pacific Salmon Crisis

Author:   James A. Lichatowich
Publisher:   Island Press
Edition:   None ed.
ISBN:  

9781559633611


Pages:   336
Publication Date:   01 March 2001
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

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Salmon Without Rivers: A History Of The Pacific Salmon Crisis


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Full Product Details

Author:   James A. Lichatowich
Publisher:   Island Press
Imprint:   Island Press
Edition:   None ed.
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.300kg
ISBN:  

9781559633611


ISBN 10:   1559633611
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   01 March 2001
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

A rough trip through evolutionary time; humans enter the Pacific Northwest; the rise of the salmon-based economies; the first salmon management; conflicting economies; birth and growth of the salmon canning industry; Indian fishermen displaced; controlling the harvest; the fishery moves to the ocean; hatcheries in the United States; fish culture moves west; acclimatization - playing God with ecosystems; the political tool; science and salmon management; different roads to restoration; the road to extinction; building a new salmon culture.

Reviews

Lichatowich provides a critical perspective on salmon hatchery successes and failures, and his book of captivating stories provides a fascinating, readable, and chilling wake-up call to how humans have mismanaged their natural heritage. -- CHOICE


A careful account of the making of an environmental crisis. Few people know the biology of the anadromous salmon as well as Lichatowich, a government fishery scientist who has devoted more than three decades to studying the fish in the Pacific Northwest. Lichatowich offers a brief but thorough natural history of the seven species of Pacific salmon, an ancient creature whose lineage can be traced back more than 400 million years. Those species have met with near-extinction in just the last 150 years, a time coincident with the arrival of Euroamericans into the Northwest and their employment of wide-scale, destructive environmental practices that displaced the long-evolved salmon-based economies of the Northwest's indigenous peoples. Lichatowich points out that what underlies the salmon crisis is not so much an easily identifiable and corrigible single cause as a set of related issues: deforestation, poor stream management, overfishing, and habitat destruction. Habitat degradation, he writes acutely, has not simply been a long-overlooked by-product of our industrial economy. It has been the direct result of the large-scale ecosystemic simplification that is a central and guiding vision of that economy. That oversimplification, he argues, has led to the false view that salmon are best grown in hatcheries, like so many hothouse flowers, rather than allowed to flourish in free-flowing rivers, a habitat that itself is increasingly rare, replaced by dams and reservoirs. He examines the long battle to preserve the Northwest's watercourses, noting that as early as 1928 the state of Oregon unsuccessfully proposed that its rivers be deemed fish sanctuaries and protected from commercial development. We simply cannot have salmon without healthy rivers, he closes by observing - and making those healthy rivers will involve restructuring the economy of an entire region, an unlikely prospect. Environmentalists will find much of value, if little comfort, in Lichatowich's pages. (Kirkus Reviews)


Lichatowich provides a critical perspective on salmon hatchery successes and failures, and his book of captivating stories provides a fascinating, readable, and chilling wake-up call to how humans have mismanaged their natural heritage. --CHOICE


Author Information

Jim Lichatowich has been a fisheries scientist for twenty-nine years, working for most of that time in salmon management and research in Oregon and Washington. He is a member of three independent teams of scientists investigating the salmon crisis, and has written numerous scientific and technical papers on the history, current status, and future prospects of salmon. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications including Trout magazine, Peninsula magazine, Riverkeeper, and Shirkin Comment.

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