A beautifully done book - on a subject that, conventionally
presented, would rate a yawn from 99 percent of the reading public:
the destruction of the Olympic Peninsula's wild salmon runs through
environmental degradation (logging, dams, pollution) and,
inseparably, the recourse to fish hatcheries as a remedy. The
latter constitutes the ecological news, provides the salient
political and economic insights, stirs the deepest apprehensions:
are we replacing wildlife, here as elsewhere, with inferior
substitutes? Hatcheries, Brown gradually discloses, were offered as
an alternative to fish ladders, at dams, which would have enabled
the wild salmon to reach their spawning grounds; but not only were
hatcheries unable to replace the fish lost, hatchery salmon
displaced wild salmon - through spreading disease, through direct
competition for food, through ("most pernicious") destruction, by
interbreeding, of the genetic diversity intrinsic to the salmon's
migratory existence and stream-by-stream adaptation. Meanwhile the
Washington State Dept. of Fisheries' budget and power came to
depend on building a hatchery system, not on protecting the wild
salmon runs; and - a secondary theme - the interests of commercial
fishermen, in mere quantity, supplanted the treaty-rights of the
Peninsula Indians, in half the wild fish. To convey the loss, Brown
proceeds stream-by-stream. On the Queets, he and two companions
search for Chinook, largest of the Pacific salmon - and he
discusses the impact of clearcut logging and offshore trolling. On
the Elwha, where the Chinook were once the largest of all - the
strength of the rapids, in one section, probably acted as a
natural-selection mechanism - no Chinook are left. On the
Humptulips and around Greys Harbor, logging and pulp-mill pollution
leave "dead fish, running into the millions"; now, Brown notes,
Weyerhauser is moving to the Philippines. Two passages stand out as
antithetical and complementary: a description, by flashlight, of
pink salmon spawning on the Gray-wolf; and the concluding
suggestion, with reference also to the Atlantic and wild English
salmon, "that industrial society extends and consolidates its
control by creating scarcities that can only be met by entering the
money economy." Comparison will be made (by others than the
publisher) to John McPhee. Each of McPhee's books, however, chiefly
whets one's appetite for the next. Brown, resting less on
personalities (though key figures, including Dixie Ray Lee, are
deftly pinioned) or prose-style (though he's a clean,
unpretentiously expressive writer), conveys an immediate, equal
concern for the fate of the wild salmon and the-reasons-why.
(Kirkus Reviews)
It is now more than ten years since Bruce Brown began the Olympic
Peninsula wanderings that led him to write this powerful account of
how greed, indifference and environmental mismanagement have
threatened the survival of the wild Pacific salmon and, as a
result, the region's ecology and its people. Acclaimed by critics
who likened it to Coming Into the Country by John McPhee and Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring, Mountain in the Clouds has become a classic
of natural history. As the struggle to protect Northwest salmon
runs and the urgency of the fight against environmental
deterioration escalates, Mountain in the Clouds remains an
important and illuminating story, as timely now as when it was
first written.
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