The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  * * *

  Wade Loofbourrow guides the forty-two-foot Legend past Juneau’s enormous cruise ships and holds southward. We’ve got Taku Glacier shining in pellucid summer light and, on our right, Admiralty Island, a vast stucco of epic peaks and snows.

  Wade is a slender man in his sixties, with a steady hand on the wheel and a ready humor. He knows what he’s doing but doesn’t care who notices. He tells me he grew up all over western Oregon, adding, “And California, which I mostly detested.” Why? “A big percentage of the land there is privately owned.” Here, more than 90 percent is federal public land, including the Tongass National Forest (77 percent), Glacier Bay National Park (13 percent), Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, and other national assets.

  After college, Wade fished. Abalone, Albacore, crab, drag boats, halibut, lobsters, rockfish, salmon, Swordfish. “On a good day you’d catch maybe three Swordfish, but they averaged well over three hundred pounds—back then. That was before the long-liners started catching all those babies.” When his wife got offered a dental hygienist job in Juneau, they came for a look. “We went home to Oregon, packed up; that was that.” All that was decades ago.

  There were fewer people then. But there aren’t many now, either. In this 34,000-square-mile region live about 75,000 people, half of them in Juneau; most others live in towns like Wrangell and Petersburg. The rest of the place lies lightly trod. “Most of our wild fish and other animal populations are reasonably healthy,” Wade says brightly. “That’s why I live here.”

  * * *

  For ever-changing miles we move within one great panorama: pinnacles of rock, snow, and ice; a slow promenade of water, mountain, and sky. We’re traveling inside something vast that shimmers.

  In 1879, John Muir was perhaps the first person to venture here seeking to enrich only his spirit. “Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description,” he wrote. “In these coast landscapes there is such indefinite, on-leading expansiveness, such a multitude of features without apparent redundance … that all penwork seems hopelessly unavailing.”

  Ocean swell doesn’t penetrate these broad passages. The surface calms to a mirror dotted by raindrops. The green water is dark with dense pastures of single-celled planktonic plants thriving in nutrients washed off the land. In these straits, the land-sea embrace lingers before losing itself to the dilution of the open ocean.

  Above forested slopes, ragged peaks of rock and ice rear forbiddingly into and out of clouds. Muir wrote wryly, “The marvelous wealth of forests, islands, and waterfalls, the cloud-wreathed heights, the many avalanche slopes and slips, the pearl-gray tones of the sky, the browns of the woods, their purple flower edges and mist fringes, the endless combinations of water and land and ever-shifting clouds—none of these greatly interest the tourists.” He added, “Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at.”

  Wade points out the peaks and islands. I’ve got the map open and my binoculars out. The place feels new. These vast Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock forests rooted only about seven thousand years ago, as ice sheets retreated. Muir wrote, “The mountains, wrapped in their snow and ice and clouds, seem never before to have been even looked at.”

  The forested slopes tune my mind to a more peaceful frequency. I am “rejoicing in the possession of so blessed a day,” as Muir was moved to put it.

  There still seems here room enough not just for people, but for human beings. We see them in their crab boats, or trolling for salmon, or just poking around, like us. It’s not that the place is unpopulated. It’s that it’s multiply populated, by humans and by plants and animals that can take care of humans—and that can take care of themselves. Here, the web seems resilent, strong enough to regain a sense of future.

  True, this region has issues. But the fact is, the place still works. It makes its own case for itself. You don’t come here, look around, and ask, “How can this continue?” You just feel that it can.

  * * *

  But it wasn’t always thus. The story of Alaska is the tale repeated wherever European faces appeared: calamity to natives, fevers over furs, insanity over gold, oil rush, depletion, conflict, and all the wretched rest. By the mid-1800s, hunting and trapping had so deeply depleted the fur-bearing wildlife that Alaska turned into a burden for Russia. The United States had been steadily taking land in its westward march, and it seemed only a matter of time before this country, in the name of Moneyfest Destiny, would take Alaska. So, for about $7 million, Russia washed its hands of the place. At the time, it wasn’t universally viewed as a bargain. The deal was denounced as “folly” and a waste of public funds.

  Alaska’s land and wildlife management remain among the most successful in the world—if success is measured by saving all the working parts. Much of Alaska’s wildlife is in better shape now than it was a century or two ago.

  * * *

  Days later. Late afternoon. Heading north along Chichagof Island, our mood held effortlessly aloft by the continual spectacle of Admiralty Island’s snowy peaks across Chatham Strait.

  Off a big rocky point, the tide is turning slow pinwheels, with eddies collecting mats of giant rockweed called “popweed.” Two scarlet-billed Black Oystercatchers and two Wandering Tattlers comb the nearby rocks. The tattlers deserve special mention. They will fly nonstop across much of the Pacific Ocean, to winter on tropic isles. How they even find those tiny specks in the ocean is astonishing.

  Seeing a few salmon jumping in the rips, we slow to send them a message: “Please eat this herring.” We mail our weighted lines to forty feet. We need a fish to save us from our frozen food. Trolling so slowly we’re barely stemming the current, we slide along the tide, dreaming the boat toward the occasional leaping salmon. The salmon inflict an hour’s humiliation as fish squirt from the sea.

  Finally a rod comes alive, and soon I have the net around a gleaming Coho. Often called “Silvers,” their jade, turquoise, and silver blend subtly, lightening beautifully from dark back to pearlescent belly.

  Even for salmon, Coho show unusual determination in getting to spawning sites, fighting currents, and leaping falls that stop most others. Consequently, they spawn in twenty-four hundred locations in Southeast. Young Coho first taste saltwater several years after hatching, then stay at sea for about two years.

  It is one thing to learn that some salmon are called Coho, some Pink, and others Sockeye, Chum, Chinook, or Steelhead. To further complicate matters, most have two English names: Pink are also called Humpback, Coho are Silver, Sockeye are Red, Chum can be called Dog, and Chinook are King. Steelhead, which are seagoing coastal Rainbow Trout, were once categorized in the same genus as Atlantic Salmon and are now lumped in the Pacific salmon genus.

  They defy easy categorization because they’re really all wet colors on evolution’s palette. The tree of life’s salmon branch splinters to a spray of hundreds of races and forms, adapted to specific rivers and specific times. Because streams vary widely in flow, length, grade, and the height of falls that must be overcome, salmon vary. Some rivers host different races of the same species in different seasons—“the spring run,” “the winter run”—each tuned and timed to certain stream flow, temperature, distance to nesting reaches, and nesting conditions. Some races take months to reach their nesting areas. The young of some spend years in freshwater before going to sea.

  The potential to know salmon is as infinite as the mysteries they inhabit. Some salmon range from the middle of the Pacific to the Continental Divide, finding their way across trackless ocean to the mouths of their birth streams, then accomplishing upstream spawning migrations of over a thousand miles after they hit freshwater—and they’ve stopped eating.

  Depending on who they are, they may stay at sea from under one year (Pink) to seven years or so (Chinook). Those Pinks we saw at Anan Creek have the simplest life cycle. Soon after arriving in freshwater, they spawn in the lower reaches of streams. The young go to sea quickly after hatchi
ng. They’re the most abundant salmon in Southeast. Chinook salmon spawn in the most challenging rivers—long or steep—and so live the longest and grow the largest. In Southeast, almost all Chinooks spawn in the big mainland rivers, the Alsek, Taku, and Stikine. They’re called Kings because they sometimes attain sizes of over one hundred pounds. Pinks—like the ones at Anan—reach barely a twentieth of that.

  This Coho I’m burying in ice is, I’d say, ten pounds. When you cut these fish into steaks, your hands could hardly be greasier if you’d rubbed them in butter. That fat is the fishes’ rocket fuel, enough to propel their whole upstream run. That rich flesh is why, before Europeans arrived, the Pacific Northwest was the most heavily settled part of the Western Hemisphere.

  * * *

  Here, the situation with salmon is better than it’s been.

  In 1899, Jefferson Moser of the U.S. Fish Commission wrote that the Indians created rock corrals to concentrate fish for easier catching, but added, “The Indians appreciated the necessity of allowing the fish to ascend the streams to spawn, and therefore after obtaining their winter supply they opened the barricades.”

  In the late 1800s, new canneries deployed nets a mile long and erected permanent barricades that took every fish attempting to enter a stream. For them, there was no concept of “enough.” Getting more was always better—until they got nothing. Same old story, from Lazy Point’s little bunker factories to Alaska’s big old salmon canneries; you see it everywhere. Because salmon return to the stream of their birth, barricades destroyed streams’ entire lineages, leaving them fishless for many years to come.

  Moser again, after speaking with Tlingit and Haida chiefs: “They cannot understand how those of a higher civilization should be less honorable—as they regard it—than their own savage kind. They claim that … their streams must soon become exhausted … and that starvation must follow.”

  In 1884 Congress issued a mandate stating that “Indians … shall not be disturbed in the possession of any lands actually in their use or occupation or now claimed by them.”

  Everyone ignored it.

  Between 1906 and 1923, Congress attempted forty-two pieces of legislation to regulate the canneries. Cannery owners opposed each one; not a single bill passed. Tlingit and Haida ownership of salmon streams fell apart.

  By 1924, sixty-five canneries were operating 351 immense salmon traps. That year, Congress finally passed a law requiring that half the salmon be allowed to spawn.

  Everyone ignored it.

  In 1947, canneries shipped a record 4.3 million cases. Afterward, output plummeted so drastically that in 1957, President Eisenhower declared Alaska’s salmon a federal disaster.

  In ’59, Alaska gained statehood and banned the traps. Salmon began recovering. But by 1970, fishermen’s numbers had doubled. And foreign boats were fishing just twelve miles offshore.

  Salmon numbers plummeted again, sending shock waves. In 1972 the state created fishing permits and made them available only to individuals—not corporations. A series of measures pushed foreign boats out beyond two hundred miles (1976), ended high-seas drift-netting (1991), and dramatically cut foreign fishing on ocean-ranging salmon.

  Salmon populations increased. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Southeast Alaska’s catches grew from 25 million to over 180 million salmon, but fishing was closely regulated to make sure enough fish ascended the rivers. The increase was abetted by hatcheries managed to enhance wild runs, using mainly local fish as hatchery brood stock.

  Contrast: In the Lower 48, salmon hatcheries had been established to substitute for wild runs—mainly to placate salmon fishermen while logging and damming ruined salmon habitat. The slogan “Salmon without rivers” encapsulated the delusion. Most hatcheries in the Lower 48 produce fish using brood stock from distant rivers. Ill-adapted for local conditions and pumped out in densities exceeding the stream’s food supply, they compete with, and eventually eliminate, native salmon—then seldom sustain themselves. Now Washington, Oregon, and California have essentially no wild rivers—and essentially no salmon.

  Alaska has done much better. Result: Alaskan boats catch 80 percent of the salmon taken by fisheries on the entire west coast of North America.

  * * *

  Alaska may be the world’s best example of managing valuable wildlife to the benefit of regional jobs and prosperity. It stands as the world’s last great producer of wild salmon. In recent years, annual catches by Alaska’s commercial fishermen have averaged about 3 million Coho. Recreational fishers remove another 300,000. But the fish’s numbers seem stable. That’s because there’s so much remaining natural habitat: five thousand streams in Southeast Alaska support salmon.

  And that’s because there are people—but not too many people. There are few enough people that they can make a reasonable living with reasonable regulations. The natural resources can go around without going down. And so you get good habitat, high numbers of animals, people working and earning livings—resilience.

  Thoreau’s dictum resonates again: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Abundance begets abundance. And we don’t even need to “protect” it—just to avoid wrecking it.

  But south of Alaska, wrecking is more the rule. Dams have broken the backs of once-supple rivers. Reckless logging has sent the great conifer forests through the shredder, turning salmon streams to mud.

  The widening salmon collapse is frosting Southeast Alaska’s windows with its breath. Just across the Canadian border, the Yukon News reports that the Stikine River’s King Salmon fell by half in the last few years; the Sockeye run fell by half in a year. Most of the Stikine flows through British Columbia, but its mouth opens in Southeast Alaska. Other west Canadian runs are reportedly down 80 percent in the last decade. Newspapers bewail plummeting salmon runs in the mighty Fraser River. Canada’s west coast salmon farms—established mostly since 1990 to raise Atlantic Salmon—produce parasitic sea lice that kill hordes of young wild salmon. (Alaska strictly outlaws salmon farms.) Bears are going hungry on some Canadian rivers. Salmon-eating Killer Whales are abandoning coastal regions. After eagle numbers around Vancouver dropped by half in a year, volunteers discovered hundreds of eagles at a garbage dump, scavenging for anything edible.

  Because streams deprived of the nutrients that had been brought by millions of salmon can no longer support as many juvenile fish, salmon decline becomes a death spiral. So, with typical “after it’s gone” inanity, some government agencies are trying artificial fertilizer “briquettes” or actually bringing in dead salmon by helicopter and truck. They hope to mimic what salmon brought so naturally, for free. Good luck.

  Southeast Alaska remains a special place. But the parts of the Pacific Northwest that lie south of here once had bigger forests, bigger rivers, and even more salmon. Anything that can be loved can be lost.

  * * *

  The situation with logging here, too, is better than it’s been.

  In 1900, naval officer George T. Emmons described Southeast Alaska to Theodore Roosevelt as “one immense forest of conifers.”

  Once upon a planet, the largest-treed, densest forests in the world stood from northern California through Southeast Alaska, and they, perhaps more than anything, delineated the “Pacific Northwest.” The world’s other temperate rainforests can quickly be summarized: a tiny bit on the Black Sea (long gone), a tiny amount in Ireland and Scotland (long gone), tiny areas in Iceland (oddly enough, and long gone), a little in Norway (remnants remain), and western Patagonia (smaller). Temperate rainforests on the west coast of New Zealand and in Tasmania are shrunken and riddled with invasive species. Chile has significant tracts left, though their flora and fauna are very different. And that’s it. British Columbia has been sliced to ribbons, and south of the Canadian border, saws have felled 95 percent of the original forests. Southeast Alaska holds half of the original Pacific Northwest forest area, and about a third of the world’s remaining temperate rainforest.

  But as we travel north of Ten
akee Inlet, the clouds pull their skirts up on jaw-dropping clear-cuts spread along Admiralty Island’s west coast. And Chichagof Island’s plush and solemn forests give way to broad swaths of gray stumps and dirt running for miles along northern Chatham Strait. “Absolutely stripped,” Wade sneers. “You see shit like this, and, well—this is what the Natives do to lands they got.”

  Native lands, yes, but not really owned by Natives. This is corporate logging. After years of fighting over encroachment on Native land, the Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 awarded Alaska’s original peoples about 12 percent of Alaska. But it canceled Native land titles and created Native corporations instead. Meaning: Native individuals own not land but shares of corporate stock. Like all other corporations, Native corporations “must” maximize profit. Turning trees into corporate cash greatly increased Natives’ monetary wealth but radically changed their relationships with family, community, land, and wildlife. Native corporations own less than 5 percent of the land in Southeast, but they’re responsible for half of the clear-cutting here.

  The other half? After World War II, the U.S. Congress wanted to keep a rebuilding Japan away from the Soviet Union and lure it to Alaskan wood. So it guaranteed an immense quantity of timber to two pulp mills (one Japanese-owned), which monopolized the region’s logging from the 1950s until the late 1990s. Massive taxpayer subsidies let them cut a centuries-old tree from public land for the price of a cheeseburger. Many trees were pulped to make cellophane, rayon, and throw-away diapers. “Right over there in Hoonah,” says Wade, pointing, “for years and years there was always a Japanese ship loading whole logs, craneload after craneload after craneload. That’s where this whole forest went.”

  Alarmed communities who didn’t want their forests and salmon streams turned to mud finally banded together with conservation groups and went after the subsidies. They campaigned for years. In 1990, the Tongass Timber Reform Act killed the guaranteed timber cut and subsidy. It saved a million acres of prime forest and world-class fish streams (including Anan Creek, which was scheduled for clear-cutting); plus, it saved the bears, eagles, deer, hunting, fishing, rational logging, and everything else that comes with them.