There are only 1.5M Atlantic salmon left in the world. And despite putting an end to commercial fishing, their numbers continue to dwindle. As a keystone species, the implications of their loss go far beyond not being able to order salmon for dinner. So, why are Atlantic salmon disappearing at such an alarming rate? What does their loss mean for other species? And how does it impact the rivers where they live?
Mark Kurlansky is a New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard award-winning author with a knack for seeing the broader implications of seemingly little things. He has written 33 books in all, including The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and most recently, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate. His forthcoming book, The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing is due out in March of 2021.
On this episode of the podcast, Mark joins Ross to share what inspired him to choose salmon as the topic of his most recent book and explain why climate change is catastrophic for the fish. He weighs in on the problems with salmon farming (be it inland or on the water) and discusses why hatcheries are not a viable way to enhance the salmon population. Listen in for Mark’s insight on how the disappearance of Atlantic salmon will impact other species and learn how to be a conscious consumer of the popular fish.
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Resources:
Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky
The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Mark Kurlansky, author of many books such as The Big Oyster, Cod, Salt, Paper, and most recently Salmon, A Fish, The Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate. Hi, Mark. Hi, Ross. How are you? I’m doing well. Wow. We got the landline right off the gate. Wait, watch this. It’s gone. Oh, wow. Did you unplug it?
Mark Kurlansky: No, I just lifted it up and hung it up. Wow. That’s quite a maneuver. Chances are it’s the Democratic Party. Oh, yeah. I think they’re pretty busy right now. Yeah, they call me. The various Democratic institutions call me quite regularly these days. Oh, okay. They’re asking you for donations? They are.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. Well, they’re going to have to wait because I want to talk about your books. You’ve written, I know this is a large number for someone listening, 33 books. I’ve only read five or six of them. First of all, is that an insult to you, Mark, that I’ve only read five or six? No, that’s great that you’ve read five or six. Yeah, I find your approach to history so accessible and especially for a popular audience. It’s a great way into these various subjects.
How do you choose to write stories the way that you do or write history the way that you do in that you’re zoomed in on something specific like a history of oysters or cod or salt or salmon and the way that human lives and societies orbit around them. It’s an interesting way of telling a story about The thing itself you’re describing, but also humans. How did that happen? It seems very unique to me.
Mark Kurlansky: Well, you know, writers write in the way they think and it just happens to be the way I think. I think about these things and I just see broad implications in seemingly little things. I always have and that’s just the way I work. There are some people Who are the opposite and look at huge things and whittle it down to something narrow. I just work in the opposite way. Not because I think it’s a great way to work or something, but it’s just the way I operate.
Ross Kenyon: So, okay, you’re thinking about oysters and you’re saying oysters are really delicious or really interesting or what’s happened to them? And then you dig into this story and you find all the connections to it and then you sort of zoom out from this thing?
Mark Kurlansky: Well... I mean, part of the way this works is for me, to turn something into a book, it has to have a great story because I’m essentially a storyteller. And if I don’t have a story to tell, I can’t do anything with it. So every book has a story. You know, it’s kind of like when I was a newspaper reporter, you know, you used to have all these irritating editors that would say, but where’s the story? It’s true. You got to find a story.
So oysters, I realized that by looking at the history of the oyster beds of New York City, you have the whole story of the urban pollution of New York. And by extension, everything we’ve done wrong with cities. So it’s another example of a narrow thing that gets to something much bigger. Yeah, I had no idea that New York and New York Harbor specifically was so known for oysters, nor how many there were and how much we’re missing out on. Most New Yorkers, when I wrote the book, most New Yorkers didn’t know this story, which is another thing that appealed to me about doing it.
And it’s funny how it came to me. I mean, it just came to me because the New York Times asked me to write a story about this. They asked in very vague terms. And as I looked into it, I thought, wow, New Yorkers know nothing about this history. New Yorkers don’t know anything about New York in general. They don’t know that they’re on the ocean. So it was a great way of getting at New York history, but also getting at broader issues of pollution and environmental destruction.
I was giving a talk about this book to a grade school in Brooklyn. And I was talking about how they in time discovered that all of these cholera epidemics they were having originated from contaminated oyster beds because they were dumping raw sewage into the harbor. And how every time they had one of these epidemics, they traced it to an oyster bed, they would close the bed and there’d be all these articles from the newspaper, how terrible this is and how we really have to do something about it, but they never did anything.
And this one little boy said to me, isn’t this just like climate change? And yeah, that is the point.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the shape of these stories, in particular the ones in which you focus on living creatures rather than something like salt or paper, the stories have an arc that’s almost just already built in and what we expect, which is this You know, there was this prelapsarian period and then humans arrived or I should say Europeans arrived and ruined it. And then what do we do now? To what degree do you lean on that narrative archetype? Or is it even possible to escape that archetype because that’s just the way that it is?
Mark Kurlansky: That’s right. You can’t escape it. You can’t. I have really never found a better way of telling these stories than chronologically. And so when you go into the chronology of things, you’re doing the same timeline for a lot of things. It’s just the way it works out. Every time I start a new book, I say, well, maybe I’ll do something different this time and not do it chronologically. But no other way makes sense. No other way tells the story because, you know, what’s happening today is built from what happened yesterday.
Ross Kenyon: That makes sense. Well, how did you choose salmon as this latest topic or one of your most recent that you’re focusing on? How did you seize upon them?
Mark Kurlansky: It is my most recent book. In 1997, I wrote a book about cod. And this was at a time, by coincidence, I didn’t actually try to time it this way, but it happened to be when the northern Codstock, the most famous and abundant codstocks in the world, collapsed. And this huge cataclysm, and people started for the first time really thinking about fishery management and overfishing. By people, I mean the general public, because when I was a kid in the 1960s, I worked on commercial fishing boats, and the commercial fishermen were talking nonstop about overfishing.
But this is when the public started thinking about it, the late 90s. And they really caught on to it, and it kind of got stuck as this central idea of problems with fisheries. In the meantime, I’m following fisheries, cod and other fisheries, and I’m seeing that there’s something wrong here with this analysis, because, you know, you can Greatly reduce the amount of commercial fishing. In the case of the Atlantic salmon, almost completely stop commercial fishing, and it doesn’t solve the problem. So, therefore, there’s something else going on, and we need to talk about that.
And I thought salmon was the great way of talking about that because salmon being an anadromous fish that lives in both freshwater and Part of its life in the ocean, it gets hit by just about everything that we do wrong. And so it’s a really good way to see the depth of the problem. I mean, at this point, if you had a fishery where the only problem was overfishing, that would be great. That would be so simple relative to what’s really going on. But there’s a huge amount of things going on.
And it’s basically the destruction of the Earth. So in the case of salmon, You have to talk about dams and you have to talk about, so you have to talk about energy sources and you have to talk about deforestation and you have to talk about badly done agriculture and pesticides and irrigation and you have to talk about climate change and climate change and climate change. Climate change is the huge thing. You know, I was talking to somebody in Britain the other day, and they wanted to talk about the destruction of salmon farming to wild salmon stock.
And actually, it was this salmon farming group that was, they were trying to deny it. And of course, it’s absolutely true. But I said to them, but you know, it’s not the biggest problem. Climate change is much worse than what you guys are doing. So, you know, you have to look at all these things. When you get through looking at all these things, you’re looking at what we’re doing wrong with this planet and how we can save the salmon by saving the planet, or we can not save the salmon and not save the planet.
And that’s what it’s come down to.
Ross Kenyon: My understanding from reading the book is that you use salmon health and salmon fish stocks as an indication of environmental health generally, that they’re a good proxy for measuring general livability of the ecosystems because it has riverine and littoral and also just pelagic. Ecosystems are all related there. Is that right?
Mark Kurlansky: Of course, you get all the other things that, you know, if you talk about the health of the river, then you got to talk about The animals would live on the river and you got to talk about the mammals and the insects and the other fish and marine mammals. And, you know, it’s what they call a keystone species. All the way going all the way back to Darwin, they talked about how every species counts on there being a lot more healthy species around. And every time you lose a species, that threatens other species, which is...
Come to be known as biodiversity. Darwin didn’t use that word. It started with E.O. Wilson in the 80s. But the biodiversity is a very important thing to think about. But not all species are equal. Some species are more important than others. And if you lose salmon, you’re losing a lot, a lot of different species.
Ross Kenyon: And it seems like within salmon itself, not only are there different species, but many of them you detail are very specific to specific river systems, right? And we’ve lost a lot of that as time has gone on.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah, well, that is how salmon survive because salmon are just the most incredible, remarkable animal and One of the things that’s remarkable about them is their ability to adapt to their environment, which is to say to their river. All salmon are born in one river or another, and they are adopted. I mean, their DNA is suited for the problems of that river. You have a river with a lot of waterfalls, and they’re going to be great jumpers. Is it fast water or slow water? So that you have Two salmon of the same species in two different rivers, their DNA is going to be more different than yours than mine.
Wow. I always think the other person is thinking, hey, wait, how do you know what my DNA is? Yeah, first of all, how dare you? Second of all, how does that work? Great. The point is that this unusual degree of variation in salmon within the same species is And, you know, there’s some arguments about when does it become so different that it’s a different species?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m very curious about that, too. I live in Seattle. Nori is based in Seattle. We’re salmon fanatics here. I like to fish for salmon when the various seasons come, assuming I have enough money in the bank account to cover it at that moment in time. But we have things like you can go down to the Columbia and you can fish Chinook when the season comes or last year I fished for Coho. But coho, did you have a good time fishing coho? I did.
I thought it was a lot of fun. Yes, they’re a very popular salmon to fish because they’re very prone to take your fly fishing, right? No, this was drop line.
Mark Kurlansky: Oh, then that’s a whole other thing. But when you fly fish, salmon become particular. But coho are one of the least particular of the salmon. And they’re very playful. Well, they’re not playing. They’re trying to survive, actually. But I mean, they’re very athletic.
Ross Kenyon: But you just, I didn’t know this. And it makes sense. And I’m amazed that I’ve never made this connection before. But when salmon are swimming upstream to breed, they’re not eating, which is why they have all the fat stored, which is why we want to catch them when they’re going to breed. But why are they eating things if they’re not actually eating? Is it play? Or is it just instinct? Or what is happening? Do we even know?
Mark Kurlansky: No, this is a great unanswered question. We know that they don’t eat once they enter the river for ages, centuries actually. People have investigated this by taking salmon and opening their stomachs and finding no food in it. So we know that they don’t eat once they enter the river. And the natural order has a reason for that because these fish have become voracious eaters at sea. And if you have this large voracious sea animal enter the river, the river’s going to be Eating out in a matter of a week or a couple of weeks.
I mean, they would eat everything, including young salmon and trout and everything. So the way nature deals with that is they stop eating. So then there’s the question of why do they take artificial flies? And there’s a lot of theories on that, but nobody really knows. Some people think that it’s just some childhood memory of being in a river and But if that’s true, then why don’t they eat real flies? They never eat real flies, only the artificial ones. So some people think that it’s just that these things are just weird and annoying looking to them, so they grab at them, which is why salmon flies are always much more fanciful and imaginative, colorful and outrageous than a trout fly, which usually just looks like some little insect.
But we don’t really know. My favorite explanation was this wonderful woman that I fished with in the Blackwater. She’s a guy on the Blackwater River in Ireland. And, you know, she puts on a little weight from time to time. And so she’s always dieting. And she said, well, you know, I’m not supposed to eat chocolates. But every once in a while, you know, a dish of chocolates is passed in front of me and I just grab one and eat it. Maybe that’s as good an explanation as any.
I kind of like it.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe so. Yeah, you detail this loss of diversity within salmon as a family and this process of trying to recover them. For instance, almost all of the salmon, if memory serves, in the UK and I imagine in Europe broadly or a good chunk of it is farmed and there isn’t these specific river ecosystems, even for people who live on them, where salmon is commonly eaten.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah, there are only... About a million and a half Atlantic salmon left in the world. Some people have estimated up to 2 million or even a little more than 2 million. But, you know, when you consider that over 60 million sockeye will come into Bristol Bay the month of June, we’re talking about very few Atlantic salmon left. And basically, the commercial fishing of Atlantic salmon has been stopped. So that In Europe, in Ireland, or Scotland, or Norway, these countries where salmon is a real part of the culture, all anybody’s eating is the farm salmon.
Sometimes they will allow a fisherman to take one. But, you know, I’ll tell you, I’ve only once tasted a wild Atlantic salmon that I caught. Because usually, you know, you put them back. And you won’t find them in the market. You go to a market in Scotland or Norway and there’s not wild salmon or farmed salmon. There’s no such labeling. It’s just all salmon and it’s all farmed. How did that happen? One of the positive things that can be said about farmed salmon is that by providing people with this salmon, which is their traditional food, they have been much more open to closing down the commercial fishery.
Supposing down the commercial fishery match, you never again ate salmon. That would be a much bigger thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I can imagine. So I was going to ask you, were you disappointed in researching salmon that there wasn’t a really strong Basque angle? Well, I’m disappointed that the rivers aren’t in better shape. Yeah. I just love in all your other books, there’s like, oh, the Basques were involved here too. Seemingly, they’re all over the place.
Mark Kurlansky: Well, they were. There just isn’t much salmon left. And even in northern Spain and southern France, it’s not so much in Basque rivers. It’s in Galicia. It’s really the main place at the moment. But salmon in Europe had a much wider range than it does today.
Ross Kenyon: I really want listeners to be able to walk away and understand the arc of the story of Atlantic salmon and how we got to a place where in the store, they aren’t even labeled because it’s assumed that they’re all farmed. And there’s a million and a half to two million Atlantic salmon.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah, it’s catastrophic. And here’s the most frightening thing about it. I talked to all of these Atlantic salmon fisheries, river managers, and people dealing with Atlantic salmon, And they all say the same thing. They say that the salmon are born, they develop to smolts, they go out to sea, and most of them don’t come back. The rate of return, the percentage of salmon that go to sea that return to the river to spawn is getting smaller and smaller. So you have a situation with Atlantic salmon where there’s no overfishing, there’s almost no commercial fishing at all, and yet the stock is getting smaller and smaller because they’re not making it back from sea.
The reason they’re not making it back from the sea is climate change. It’s carbon emissions, carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide loves water. And something like a third of land-based carbon dioxide ends up in the oceans. And it changes the chemical composition of the oceans in a way that stymies the growth of a lot of things, of coral, which isn’t particularly relevant to this conversation, but also to zooplankton and capelin, which is the principal food of salmon. And they’re just not getting enough. They’re not these...
Are not growing to the size they used to. And so the Atlantic Ocean is no longer having the capacity to feed all of the animals that live in it. Now, in really a number of decades of writing about environmental issues, this is the scariest thing I’ve ever learned. I mean, if oceans cannot feed ocean life,
Ross Kenyon: we’re sunk. We have some of that in the Pacific too, where in Seattle, we’ve had various salmon seasons either shortened or even canceled for recreational fishing because the orcas are starving and they don’t have salmon to eat.
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. And of course, you have climate change and all its issues in the Pacific. But for some reason, it’s much more drastic in the Atlantic. In a lot of ways, they tell me that the Gulf of Maine is the fastest warming area. The Atlantic is warming faster than the Pacific is. And, you know, rivers are warming too. Alaska has been having very warm summers, and this is disastrous because that’s their spawning season. If the river temperature goes above 68 degrees, salmon won’t spawn.
So, you know, that’s another reason why climate change is catastrophic for salmon. You know, of course, it changes not only spotting patterns, but migratory patterns of fish if the water temperatures are changing and the salinity is changing because ice caps are melting. So you have predators in places where they shouldn’t be, like striped bass way, way in the north of Canada, feeding on salmon fry in the rivers. That’s not supposed to happen.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Well, I walked away from your book thinking more about dams because we’ve done some podcasting on this back in the day, but it’s been a while. Hydroelectric power is normally seen as green energy and as this environmentally friendly option. And you detail that this is really not the whole story and people shouldn’t just default to that clean energy story. Would you agree with that summation? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s clean and it’ll just destroy the planet anyway. Yeah, if we don’t fix climate change, it doesn’t matter if the salmon can run in the rivers.
Mark Kurlansky: Right, right. It’s true that it’s not putting out the carbon emissions of fossil fuels, but it’s blocking the rivers and killing them. So it is not nearly as successful an environmental response as the alternate energies. Of course, you know, you run into all this stuff. I was talking about that in Maine. I was giving a talk in Maine, and I was talking about that. And this guy comes up to me afterwards, and he said, yeah, well, you know, he’s got a summer home on this island off of Maine, and they built a wind farm there.
And he’s got pictures, and he showed me the pictures. He said, isn’t this awful? You know, this is terrible. This is what wind energy does. So I said to him, what, you’d rather live by a dam? That amount of concrete and steel and aluminum, not nearly so scenic. No, just the largest blocks of concrete on Earth.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, just those. Well, someone listening might think that, well, these salmon stocks are dying. Clearly the solution is we just do hatcheries and we find auxiliary ways to enhance the species population and steward them. You’re going to slap this idea down too, I imagine. I am. Okay, slap away.
Mark Kurlansky: A couple of problems with this. One is that the reason the salmon is disappearing is the destruction of their habitat. So if you’re able to create new salmon, and, you know, in the 18th century, in early 19th century, when they first started developing this whole thing of hatcheries, they were very excited about it. And they actually said, you know, we don’t have to worry about overfishing or any of these problems anymore, you know, because we can just create as many fish as we need. But if the habitat is unsuitable, it doesn’t make any difference what fish you put in the river.
They’re not going to survive. And hatchery fish have a very poor survival record, partly because the rivers aren’t suitable, also because it’s extremely difficult. As I was saying about how you have to have just the right DNA for each river, it’s extremely difficult to recreate fish that are the exact right DNA for each specific river. You can’t just, as they did think at one time, you know, create a bunch of hatchery salmon and sell off the eggs and put them in a bunch of rivers. It doesn’t work.
Ross Kenyon: Could it be done more specifically than that? Where just the salmon that have the DNA for the river, you could release those eggs and maybe it would work out?
Mark Kurlansky: That has been done sometimes with success in rivers and Where dams have been taken down and where pollution has been cleaned up. But if you haven’t solved these problems in habitat, the archery fish aren’t going to do any better than the wild fish. In fact, they don’t do as well. They aren’t as strong.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. And if you’re including in this habitat issue, climate change more broadly with the food that supports salmon, yikes is all I got to say, Mark. That sounds not very optimistic.
Mark Kurlansky: No, it’s a huge problem. The only good news I have is that there’s a lot of people that realize it’s a huge problem. Some rivers are getting cleaned up. Some dams are being taken down. I’d like to say there was a lot more being done with climate change. This pandemic is good for climate change. It’s greatly reduced the carbon emissions. You know, I look at this pandemic and I think, I see how People in general, not everybody, but people in general have pulled together.
They’ve said there are things we’ve got to do and let’s do these things and tremendous cooperation and tremendous sacrifice. Why haven’t we been able to do that with climate change? Climate change is actually a worse catastrophe than the pandemic. And I think the reason is when the pandemic, you’re saying do something or you may die this month. And with climate change, You know, you could have a good 15, 20 years before you die. But, you know, the earth is being destroyed and we have to address it.
This is crazy. Come on.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of the simplest stories to tell about climate change is about humans and the discount rate. And the farther away something is, the less people care about it. I think that’s pretty. Yeah, I think that’s certainly a part of it.
Mark Kurlansky: I mean, I’m hoping, and this may be way too optimistic, I’m hoping that, you know, we get past this pandemic thing and that people look back at it and they’ve learned something about the way we have to work together to solve problems and maybe apply that to climate change. I don’t know, might be too optimistic, but.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe. I think some of this imminency gap, you might say, is being addressed by flooding and tropical storms and hurricanes. And if Seattle loses salmon or doesn’t have salmon, there will be a revolution, I think. Stuff like that makes a big deal to people and it’s very immediate as opposed to some- Yeah, it’s
Mark Kurlansky: not just that you won’t have salmon. You won’t have bears and you won’t have otters and you won’t- You know, the rivers will be dead. Salmon feed the rivers. They will die without it. Yeah, I suppose we only think about it, the rivers feeding the salmon. You think if we lose this keystone species, what do our rivers look like without salmon? Yeah, I mean, for one thing, you know, part of the pattern of nature, this business of the salmon spawning and dying, when they die, they feed the river with nutrients.
Hmm. If there aren’t those salmon to die to feed the river, there are just lots of animals that won’t survive.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I’m going to set aside the climate change thing for a second, which I’m allowed to do because the podcast is called Reversing Climate Change, and I promise we’ll get back to it. But just as trying to be a conscious consumer, trying to make my dollars Should I be fishing for salmon? Should I be buying it at the store? Should I be maybe choosing a, like, I don’t even know. What’s an alternative to salmon? Salmon’s so rich and so fatty and so delicious.
What do you, you can’t just get like farm tilapia. That’s a sad substitute. But what do I do?
Mark Kurlansky: You know, people are always asking me this. There’s always asking, should I just stay away from wild salmon and just eat farms? And it’s just the opposite, actually, if you’re concerned about the environment, eat wild salmon and not farm. There are most of the wild salmon that are caught these days, especially where you are, is well-regulated fisheries, mainly in Alaska. And this stuff is by and large done right and is an example of a good sustainable fishery, which does Deserves to be rewarded with your business.
So by all means, eat wild salmon. And I should... And it’s not like, you have to understand, it’s not like if you eat too much of it, then the salmon will run out because that’s what a sustainable fishery is. It’s the amount that is harvested does not reduce the amount of the total stock. Kids ask me that all the time. It’s very funny. They say, well, if we eat all the sustainable fish, there won’t be any sustainable fish left. Oh, yeah. No way.
That’s not what sustainable means.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a paradox. Yeah. Okay. I understood. Is it okay for people to recreationally fish for salmon? You think it’s the same principle?
Mark Kurlansky: Sure. I mean, those fisheries are, the sports fisheries are well regulated too. Almost entirely catch and release. You get into All kinds of issues about catch and release. But I can tell you that people who say that fish that are caught and then released will die anyway, they’re wrong. Maybe some do. When you stress a fish, they put out a lot of lactic acid and it could kill them. You know, you can release the fish and it’ll swim away merrily and two hours later it’ll be overwhelmed with lactic acid and die.
This is a small percentage of the fish that are released. Anyone who’s a sports fisherman knows this because, you know, you catch fish that have marks from lines and from hooks and things and you can see that they’ve been caught before. So catch and release works. There’s a whole other issue of, You know, is it a mean thing to do? I don’t know. A lot of Native Americans really dislike catching these, but they just like fly fishing. They just like sports fishing in general.
I think it’s disrespectful to nature to be playing with these animals, but catching them for fun instead of for food. Can’t really address those issues. But from an environmental point of view, there is nothing wrong with fishing for salmon if you Follow the rules.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, I guess that is good then. There’s some good news in there. And I also love that twist where I do think that many people listening heard all that you were saying and thought the best way to preserve salmon fisheries is to refrain from their consumption for wild salmon. And you telling them the opposite of that. Do you just love that writerly little twist there, Mark?
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. No, there are good sustainable wild salmon fisheries. There’s There’s larger arguments about farm salmon,
Ross Kenyon: but wild salmon is pretty good. With farm salmon, one of my colleagues, Alden Donnelly, she lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and she has often detailed for us a series of fights about whether salmon hatcheries were on the water or inland. I know that makes a relatively big difference. Is that the case? By hatcheries, you mean farming? Is there actually a distinction? I’m not clear. Yes. Okay. Yeah.
Mark Kurlansky: Hatcheries produce eggs to plant somewhere. Farming produce fish to sell. Open pens at sea versus inland farming. And I’ve been doing a little more research on that recently because it’s a little more developed than it was when I was writing the book. But, you know, it’s one of these funny things where you’re trading environmental issues. Oh, no. Yeah. Because, you know, so the people doing the inland farming, they say, oh, this is good. This is environmental solutions. You know, this is a good way of doing it.
And, you know, everybody forgets that in the 1970s, when the open pen farming began, they were saying the same thing. There was good sustainable fishing and a good alternative to wild salmon and will help save wild salmon and a good thing for the environment. You know, everything starts off well. Farmed salmon creates a whole bunch of problems for wild salmon. They attract sea lice, these little crustaceans. And if you attract one or two, that’s natural. But, you know, if you have a million salmon in pens, you know, it’s like leaving honey on the floor and being surprised that you have ants.
You just get huge amounts of lice and the lice will also go on to attack The wild salmon, and that’s a problem. And they escape from pens, and that’s a problem. Although people where you are don’t seem to realize that it’s a different problem in the Pacific than in the Atlantic, mainly because most salmon that is farmed is Atlantic salmon. Now, you know, interestingly, I have this idea that nobody else has ever signed off on. But, you know, if you just farmed Atlantic salmon in the Pacific and just farmed Pacific salmon in the Atlantic, that would be a good thing because there’s a hard, fast rule in biology that animals of different genera don’t interbreed.
That’s why we don’t have cat dogs, you know. Atlantic salmon and Pacific salmon can’t interbreed. So when Atlantic salmon escape from fish farms in the Pacific, people have these visions of them breeding with Pacific wild salmon and destroying the wild stock. That’s not going to happen. It’s impossible. The only thing that could happen is that they could colonize and start Atlantic salmon colonies that would compete. But if we believe what we keep being told about the problem of wild salmon, of farmed salmon, that it is biologically weaker than wild salmon, that a farmed Atlantic salmon colony is not going to be able to successfully compete against the wild salmon in the Pacific and will die off.
And in fact, it appears that most of the large Salmon escapes. I mean, a lot of people are really mad right now, but it’s true. A lot of the really large salmon escapes on the West Coast, nobody knows what happened to those salmon. They appear to have all died off. Now, in the Atlantic, you have a big problem because the wild salmon are Atlantic, and the farm salmon that escape can crossbreed with the wild and produce a kind of a dumbed-down salmon. I mean, a farm salmon is a dumbed-down salmon.
It doesn’t have many skills or survival skills. Basically, the only thing they were bred for was to grow really fast. So they’re just like big dummies. You don’t want this to interbreed with wild salmon who have all these special and remarkable skills. Does selection take place at that fast a pace where they can be dumbed down that quickly? Yeah. Well, there’s some controversy about how quickly that can happen, but yeah, because you’re not, you know, a generation or two, because you’re not talking about evolution, you’re talking about interbreeding.
If you take a poodle and a Labrador, it’s not that over generations they will evolve into a Labradoodle, it’s that you’ll get Labradoodles right away if you interbreed them, which I’m also against, but that’s another story. You’re anti-labradoodle? Yeah, because I’m a poodle lover.
Ross Kenyon: Ah, yeah. Wow. You’re, yeah. Poodle miscegenation. That’s what you stand against. Okay. How about that? Okay. That makes sense to me. Mark, what’s next for you? Are you able to tell us what’s the next book in the works?
Mark Kurlansky: Oh, yeah. I mean, they’re more than in the works. I have a book coming out in March called The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing. It’s about the history and culture of fly fishing. Why do we do it? Why have we done it? How did it come about? How is it developed? I mean, when you think about it, it’s a pretty dumb way to catch fish.
Ross Kenyon: Well, part of this is probably Norman McClain, but I think this sort of spiritual, like the elegant nature of the cast, there’s something that has a bit of that sort of spiritual flair to it or something. I don’t know if that was, is that just me applying this in 2020 or has it always been like that?
Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. Well, you know, the idea of fly fishing is that it’s a very difficult way to catch a fish. And so you have to really Come to understand the fish and you have to. And yeah, I mean, casting itself is this very graceful, rhythmic thing. I was always amazed. I have a daughter who’s a ballet dancer. And from the time she was really small, she was a better caster than I was. It’s something that takes a great deal of grace and a sense of rhythm and timing.
And it’s a beautiful thing. The Norm MacLean book is great because it catches a lot of that. The movie, which is also great in a lot of ways, but the way Brad Pitt is shown fishing, you’re never going to catch a trout like that. Looks great, but that’s not how it works. Hollywood, just misleading people about fly fishing, that’s terrible. Well, you know, films are visual, and so they did something that just looks great. I mean, a cast is actually... A much more simple thing, but they wanted to make it look great.
Ross Kenyon: Is this a personal interest of yours, or do you think that has some ramifications for climate change or environmentalism broadly?
Mark Kurlansky: Well, it is a personal interest of mine. I mean, I have fly fished for many years all over the world. I think, just a personal thing, I think everybody should take their kids fly fishing. I think fly fishing teaches you to understand and appreciate nature. And I think we would all be better people if we were all fly fishermen. Which is not to say that all fly fishermen are good people. There are people who say that, but come on. I mean, Francisco Franco was an avid fly fisherman.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, Mark, I think that’s a good place to put a pin in it for now. Tell me one more nice thing about fly fishing real quick.
Mark Kurlansky: Well, the flies themselves are beautiful, fascinating things, and you can lose yourself in tying them. Once you start tying flies, it’s hard to put them down. It’s just a great handicraft. So the whole thing is just, it’s a very enjoyable experience that gets you closer to nature and deeply involved in the history of fishing.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, listeners, they know by now that craft is important. Soul feeding and a good thing to do, maybe tying flies. Maybe that’s the thing you’ve been looking for. And you can take a leaf out of Mark Kurlansky’s book here and give that a try. Well, thank you, Mark. It was a lot of fun chatting.
Mark Kurlansky: You can tie flies and if they don’t work well, you can still go out and buy them. They’re not very expensive. Sorry.
Ross Kenyon: One more thing here. I went fly fishing in Montana once, I think as a teenager, early 20 something. And I don’t remember catching anything. How do you just start? It seems like a specialized esoteric field of knowledge.
Mark Kurlansky: I’ll tell you the secret to starting. Hire a guide. Hire a guide. Okay. Yeah. I mean, even if you’re not starting, if you’re fishing somewhere Where you’ve never fished before, so you don’t know anything about the river or the fish or the insects that are hatching there or anything. Hire a local guy who knows. You can also talk to people in the local tackle shop, which is an argument against tying your own flies. You go to the local shop and they’ll tell you what works in that river.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, fair enough. I’d like to get into that, actually. Well, thanks for being here, Mark. It’s my pleasure. Links to all of your many books are in the show notes. Definitely recommend checking them out. Salmon, A Fish, The Earth, and The History of Their Common Fate is of particular interest to this audience, although I learned a lot from many of these books. And if you like the show, would you please write us a review on Apple Podcasts? It only takes 30 seconds if you open up that podcast app on your iPhone and write us a review.
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