Salmon return: A public conversation about the future of a Northwest icon

Metaphor, n. A figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance.

Many years ago a writer coined the phrase "river of grass" to describe the Florida Everglades. The evocative metaphor changed how people thought about a distinct portion of the nation's geography.

Everglades National Park was expanded, Big Cypress National Preserve was created and a grand-scale initiative to restore the ecosystem of the Everglades now is under way.

Such is the power of a just-right metaphor.

Could a metaphor do for wild salmon of the Northwest what river of grass did for the Everglades?

Try this: Salmon Return.

The suggestion comes from Frank and Deborah Popper, who caused considerable commotion more than 15 years ago in another region, the Great Plains, with another metaphor, Buffalo Commons.

The Northwest already has plenty of commotion. Billions of dollars have been spent to reverse declining salmon runs, with no guarantee of success. What's needed here is a new kind of public conversation about salmon and their place in our future.

As metaphor, Salmon Return could be the catalyst for such a conversation, reconnecting us to the astonishing narrative that is the salmon story, prompting us to think in new ways about our role as stewards of the place we call home.

First, you have to accept that metaphor as a planning tool is squishy. Buffalo Commons was never more than an idea; there was no plan, no specific proposal. The idea hinted at large-scale, long-term ecological and economic restoration.

Buffalo Commons was not popular among most people of the Great Plains, and neither were the Poppers, academics from the East Coast who visited the region frequently to talk about their idea.

The important point about the Poppers and Buffalo Commons is that the idea got Plains people thinking and talking in new ways about their future. Today, there is no Buffalo Commons in the Plains states, but there are thousands more buffalo on both public and private land than when the Poppers first stirred things up.

As the buffalo is to the Great Plains, so the salmon is to the Northwest, an iconic creature whose very existence is part of the history, culture and landscape of the region.

The Great Plains and the Northwest are flip sides of the demographic coin, population decline vs. growth. Imagining a future of restored prairies teeming with buffalo was not easy for residents of the Plains states, even as rural communities dwindled.

It is even bolder to imagine in a place of sprawling growth, traffic snarls and loss of native habitat the return of salmon to historic spawning beds in Northwest rivers and streams.

But stark loss demands bold imagination.

We tend to forget the scale of what has been lost. Salmon is readily available at fish markets and in restaurants, so what's the big deal?

The big deal is this: Pacific salmon have disappeared from 40 percent of their historic range outside Alaska. For every 50 salmon the Columbia River basin supported 150 years ago, today it is estimated to support about seven. Only one or two are wild, or non-hatchery-reared fish.

These figures come from a terrific little book, "This Place on Earth: Measuring What Matters," published this spring by Northwest Environment Watch (NEW), a Seattle-based nonprofit research and communication center.

We are measuring the wrong things, NEW argues persuasively. It lists a set of indicators that measure what matters most in the Northwest. The list includes life expectancy, income, growth patterns, vehicles, energy consumption. And salmon.

Why salmon? As NEW says, "Besides humans, no other creature penetrates the Northwest so completely." The salmon is to the entire Northwest what the spotted owl was to old-growth forests — a telling indicator of ecological health.

Like all of us, salmon live in the mountains, forests, deserts, farms and cities of the region. Like us, they rely on the streams and rivers, estuaries and oceans for sustenance.

To Northwest natives — true natives, those who were here before white settlers — the salmon was both dietary staple and cultural symbol.

A century and a half of cutting trees, damming rivers, building homes, pouring asphalt and raising fish in hatcheries has brought wild salmon perilously close to extinction.

The hatchery-raised salmon may be an acceptable substitute on the dinner plate, but in the natural world the difference is more than subtle.

Wild adult salmon return to their native streams to spawn and die. The salmon's journey to sea and back is more than a wondrous story, it is also life-giving beyond the species. Salmon carcasses feed well over a hundred different kinds of animals and tiny organisms at the bottom of the food chain.

At their end-of-life journey, wild salmon fertilize the woods, supplying nitrogen for streamside trees and shrubs. In Alaska, Sitka spruce grow more than three times as fast along spawning streams as on streams without salmon.

Under provisions of the federal Endangered Species Act, numerous salmon populations throughout the Northwest have been listed as endangered. The consequences of protecting salmon reach deep into the region.

Cities must factor fish habitat into policies ranging from subdivisions to roads to wastewater.

Last year in Oregon, water was denied farmers in the Klamath Basin. This year, a revolt is simmering in Okanogan County over a new state law that requires landowners to install culverts to ease fish passage.

Once a venerable icon, the salmon is now more political football, the centerpiece of battles pitting farmers, ranchers, foresters and developers against government agencies and environmental advocates.

This spring, in search of a better way, I drove to Duvall, past the burgeoning subdivisions of East King County, across a few salmon streams, to the funky office of Washington Trout, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and recovering native fish and the ecosystems they depend on.

Out front is a tiny retail shop. Behind it is a warren of offices, lab equipment and a meeting room filled with maps and project plans.

Scientists work here. They research wild-fish populations and habitats, and advocate for better land-use, salmon-harvest and hatchery management. They also develop model habitat-restoration projects.

I came to see Joanne Hedou, outreach coordinator for Washington Trout. It's her job to merge the work of scientists with the interests of the public. That means getting beyond the drab and lifeless language of policy and science.

Since she is not a scientist, she starts on the people side of the equation. "People have lost their connection to nature. It's an object out there," Hedou said. Policy debates only reinforce that.

Hedou helps people reclaim the connection they once had with nature, a connection that was forged through experience. One example is a fund-raiser she arranged this spring, featuring David James Duncan, author of "My Story As Told By Water." Duncan, a Portland native now living in Montana, is as fine an example as you'll find of the use of language and personal experience to illuminate the wonders of the natural world.

Remember how it was to explore a stream? The delight of cold water on bare feet, the thrill of spotting a fish, the desire to see what's around the next bend? You didn't have to know anything about ecosystems or riparian habitat to love the stream and the slimy things you found there.

Hedou wants to revive memories of time spent in nature and put them to work in the effort to save wild salmon. Like the Poppers, whose work she was unaware of until I mentioned them to her, Hedou looks to language and literature, not laboratories and legal briefs.

The Poppers call this "soft-edged planning." They turn to language and literature to navigate regional change, ultimately honing their work into metaphor.

Their metaphor for the Northwest, Salmon Return, implies not only return of the fish, but of the healthy ecosystems that all species, especially humans, need.

It fits nicely with language already in use, such as Salmon Homecoming and Salmon Sanctuary, a new initiative of the Cascade Land Conservancy to protect the best remaining salmon habitat in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.

Like "river of grass" or "Buffalo Commons," Salmon Return appeals to the intuition. It means different things to different people, and that is the point.

Metaphor is a tool for exploration of the future precisely because it is ambiguous. It is the antithesis of data-driven, science-based policy.

Ambiguity can drive you crazy, or it can, as the Poppers suggest, be "fruitful" and "practical."

The toughest thing to wrestle with is how to use metaphor as a tool. There is no handbook. Certainly the Poppers don't have one. It is about getting a different kind of language, "softer" language as they say, into the public conversation and letting the discussion and decisions develop on their own. That's what happened in the Great Plains over 15 years where public agencies, ranchers and tribes have all been involved in growing buffalo herds. It is the organic evolution of an idea, rather than the process-driven development of a plan.

As a literary device, metaphor creates space for reflection. It reaches people in a way that more formal, rational approaches may not.

Metaphor is more poetry than policy. If any critter deserves poetic reflection about its future place in the region, surely it is the most courageous of them all, the endangered wild salmon.

Mindy Cameron's column usually appears alternate Wednesdays in The Times. E-mail her at mindycameron@earthlink.net or write her c/o The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.