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Imagine a river. Let there be 60,000 cubic feet per second of mountain water flowing between two brush covered banks. Imagine leaning against the rough bark of a pine and watching water riffle by like a long ribbon of gray silk. This river is both source and conduit of life. This river is a part of the hydrological cycle that makes life possible--the body of life, the lifeblood of the body.

Now allow your imagining to widen its scope, zoom out. See this river as one limb in a system, rivers running together, intermingling, trudging relentlessly to the sea. Call this system a watershed. Call it the Columbia Watershed, lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest.

Less than one-sixteenth of one percent of the world's water is contained in rivers and streams, and yet, without them, life as we know it would not be possible. Rivers shape us--we build our homes in their proximity, we rely on them for sustenance, and we seek them for recreation and solitude. Industrialization and a long history of human ingenuity have allowed us to use the world's rivers for navigation, irrigation, hydroelectricity, and dumping our refuse. However our use (and mis-use) of the river has come at a cost, a very great cost. This is a story of those costs.

The Columbia River and its tributaries drain the biggest watershed in the Pacific Northwest, over 260,000 square miles. The Columbia is a mighty river, one of the continent’s largest, (only the Mississippi, the Mackenzie and the St. Lawrence are bigger), and contains the highest hydroelectric potential of any watershed in the United States. From its headwaters the Columbia winds its way 1,214 miles to the sea. Of the immensity of the Columbia, Blaine Hardin states:

“For a principle river of the world, it has an astoundingly steep drop. The Columbia falls nearly twice as far as the Mississippi—in about half the distance. The greater a river’s drop the greater its power. Every half-hour the Columbia expends as much energy as was released by the explosion of the Hiroshima bomb. The river possesses a third of America’s hydroelectric potential” (Harden 1996).

The Columbia and its tributaries once boasted yearly runs of ten to sixteen million salmon. Now it flaunts the largest hydropower infrastructure constructed in human history and salmon stocks are on the brink of extinction. In 1997, only 1.1 million salmon returned to the Columbia Basin, and of these three-fourths were hatchery-born, competition for their wild brothers (Ryan 2000). Even numbers as staggering as these do little to bring home the immensity of the loss of our native salmon. These rivers are the circulatory system of the Northwest, its life-flow, and the salmon are its white cell count, an indicator of overall health. With its circulation pinched, the Pacific Northwest bioregion is in an ever-increasing state of dis-ease.

Salmon stocks in the Columbia Basin are in peril. Upper Columbia spring Chinook as well as the Sacramento winter run are listed as endangered. Spring, fall, and summer Snake River Chinook are threatened, and subsequently Salmon River runs have been diminished. Coho were once abundant in the Columbia Basin. They are now extinct in more than half of their historical range—the Upper Columbia and the inland basins of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon (Ecotrust 1999). Much has been written about the state of native salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Our knowledge of Oncorhynchus is increasing while salmon stocks continue to decline. This knowledge fills me with an unrelenting urgency, a fantastic panic. I write about salmon because I believe there is a deeper connection between native salmon and what is native in every American. If this connection can be illuminated, inattention will be impossible.

Blame for our silent rivers cannot be placed on any one human industry or activity in isolation, because many play a part. It is first and foremost a failed cultural ideology, a worldview that has never thought or acted in terms of entire systems, never acknowledged the intimate relationship between salmon and human, never looked beyond mere usefulness to a greater value. In the history of Western expansion, health and sustainability have never held primacy over expansion and bolstering private profit. I come to this writing with a thousand questions and very few answers. I come with a dream of rivers once again filled with salmon and a speculation that my dream of thriving fish is the same dream that we all share, only with different words. By understanding the salmon’s story, my own story becomes clearer. The American mentality and its consequent unseeing use of the Western rivers have proven lethal to salmon stocks and endanger those very values I seek to preserve. Health. Security. Wholeness.