HOW SALMON MAKE THE FOREST GROW
Adult salmon are “nutrient pumps”. They gather nutrients as they eat and grow in the ocean, then carry those nutrients upstream into the forest ... but only if dams do not block their way.
“We misperceive evolution almost completely. We think that those who exploit, or hyper-exploit, their surroundings are the ones who survive. There are certainly elements of competition within evolution. But those creatures who survive in the long run are the ones who thrive by improving their habitat, not by destroying it.”
--Derrick Jensen
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From a conversation with environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen. For the entire interview, please click on the link to the YouTube video below.
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HART HAGAN: I wanted to ask you more about salmon. I'm in the Eastern U.S., where we don’t have salmon. In your books, you have a lot to say about salmon. Other species don't just exist for our benefit. But salmon benefit the other species with which they are interconnected, such as grizzly bears, eagles and the forest.
The salmon runs are being harmed in multiple ways, not least of all by the dams that we have been installing for time immemorial. So what's the status of the salmon runs? What's Derrick Jensen's perspective on salmon? How are they beautiful? Why are they important? And what can we do?
DERRICK JENSEN: Thank you for saying that they exist for their own sake. I’m going to use some language that I don't really like. But we'll put an asterisk on all the bad language. I'm always kind of interested in what function something plays in its natural community. And again, it exists for itself. It’s like, Derrick, what function do you play in society? I mean, I actually exist for my own sake. I don't exist for something else, necessarily.
But I'm always really fascinated by questions like who breaks down bones? When you have a big elk femur, what happens to it? And in some places grizzly bears might do it. In some places insects eventually chew it apart. In some places, it's worn away by the wind.
What about hair? Hair is usually eaten by fungi eventually. You have a lot of hair out there. For example, a bear dies of a heart attack. What happens to the hair? It’s food for someone, who turns it into food for someone else, who turns it into food for someone else. That fascinates me.
So salmon are nutrient pumps for the forest and the beings in the forest.
We misperceive evolution almost completely. We think that those who exploit, or hyper-exploit, their surroundings best are the ones who survive.
There are certainly elements of competition within evolution. But those creatures who survive in the long run, are the ones who thrive by improving their habitat, not by destroying it.
So the question becomes, what do salmon do for forests and how do salmon make forests better places by their existence? One of the ways they do this is that salmon hatch in a stream. They live in that stream for a certain amount of time. And then after they grow to a certain age as freshwater fish, they let themselves be carried down by the current to estuaries and hang out there for a little while and convert from freshwater to saltwater fish. And then they swim out in the ocean.
They live in the ocean for maybe a couple years. They put on a bunch of weight and then they find their way back to their home. They will swim back upstream. Then they will lay eggs, and then die.
So they have acted as a huge nutrient pump, moving thousands and millions of pounds of flesh that was grown in the ocean back up into the forest and then they die and they're eaten by, let’s say, a hundred or more different species. Off the top of my head, there's black bears, grizzly bears, rats, baby salmon.
Speaking of baby salmon, 40 percent or so of their food is the previous generation of salmon.
Forests grow three times faster when there are salmon present, than when not. I don't like to say it that way. That's how I said it in “Endgame”, but I realized years later that that's the wrong way to say it because three times faster implies that “without salmon” is the default mode.
But there were salmon originally. What we should say is when you remove the salmon, you decrease growth by two-thirds. That's actually a more accurate way to say it.
They have found nutrients from the salmon in mountain goats. Mountain goats don't eat the salmon. An insect eats the salmon, then a bird eats the insect and poops it out. Fungi eat the poop. Plants feed off the fungi. And then a mountain goat eats the plant. That’s how a mountain goat eats a salmon.
Plus various creatures time their own behavior to the salmon runs. Bears go into torpor during the winter, partly because it’s cold, but partly because there’s not a salmon run right then. So the salmon run comes right when they are fattening up. This is pretty cool. There's something called hyperphagia.
Black bears normally eat about 5,000 calories a day. In the fall, they eat about 20,000 calories a day. And then when they come out of their hibernation, they're really hungry, and there's a spring run of salmon.
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For the entire interview, please click on the link.