It is possible to come home to a place you’ve never been.

I did, on a typically rainy early September weekend in the company of Smithers resident and ministry of environment regional fisheries biologist Mark Beere. We hunched quietly along the banks of the upper Zymoetz, watched Gitxsan dipnetters at Moricetown, hopped across the shallows of the Kitwanga, paid homage to the Babine. We cast furtive glances at a pair of sockeye on their spawning bed, cheered a dozen finned torpedoes defying a pool’s meager outflow, and stood knee-deep in current amid thousands of migrants insistent on some upstream destination.

Snapshots of my attention blended together like a flip-book story: tiny insects on a fish carcass, a porridge of flesh and scales on the earth, towering trees above the meadow, a community of animal tracks, clouds snagged on outcrops. The images were familiar—things remembered, things learned. Everywhere, around me and within, there was a tangible seeping; there was uptake.

My sense of arrival wasn’t rooted in any literal settling; I remained a visitor, based thousands of miles away, from a place where such natural abundance is preserved in historical portraiture. And it wasn’t just my fondness for the glorious tension intrinsic to autumn on a salmon stream, at once senescent and stirring. More than mere moments, more than their observation, it was a sense of deep reconciliation—of my attachment to the idea of a rich natural and cultural heritage with a life lived in the absence of the heritage itself. In the Skeena, I finally recognized my story.

Those first meanders along the river joined me to nine thousand years of people living along, working within, traveling through, drawing sustenance from, or somehow associating with the Skeena watershed, from Rupert to the Spatsizi, Telkwa to Kispiox. Today, our individual connections to this place are likely as different from each other as those of early settlements were to our modern communities. The pursuit of mere survival once bound people to a set of shared considerations for interacting with their environment; now, such unifying cultural contexts are less obvious, more variable. Conscious choices replace unconscious demands. We organize according to similar values and intentions, not common histories. Social structures continue to fragment and become more porous, with significant consequences for what we expect from the land and how we advocate for it. Yet, despite all this transformation, the river itself still sculpts our individual and collective experience within the watershed. Like those before us, we are here because it is here.

That it is here at all, that a watershed this size is still relatively intact at the start of the twenty-first century, is remarkable. That it remains biologically productive, persistently defying the northward progression of systemic collapses witnessed on the continent’s other great salmon-producing rivers, seems nothing short of miraculous. That such productivity continues to support the evolution of diverse ecological, economic, and cultural structures is practically an abstraction, especially to someone like me who knows such relationships only in the context of a lament for their passing and a nostalgia for their return.

For most of the last twenty years, I have lived on rivers while working as a guide, migrating seasonally between North America and destinations overseas. I was comfortable being everywhere, belonging nowhere. I eventually moved to the inland edge of the Pacific Northwest, along the elevated vasculature of the Snake and Columbia River systems, an alpine womb that once produced as many Chinook salmon as anywhere on the planet. Only suggestions of its former wealth remained, but I adopted, sold, and interpreted the storied iconography of wildness, the picture-perfect scenery, the gin-clear water of Salmon Rivers and Redfish Lakes. The narratives were compelling, and people paid us well to deliver them. I was young, well insulated from the burdens of conflicting education or experience, and each day’s dawn seemed perfect from my bedroll on my boat. I would see the pictures, read the books, and hear the accounts of what it used to be, when the kings of the sea would return to their mountainous throne. I had a vague sense that something was missing, but it was hard to consider a more complete version of a landscape I knew as a form of ideal. It was hard to understand that such aesthetic integrity could double as a thin veneer.

The richness of that past is an anecdote for much of my generation. Our timeline of memory begins just as that abundance was ending and, with it, the biological and cultural nourishment on which so much depended. My experience as a guide, and the connection I began making as a full-time resident, was as much a discovery of absence as a witness to plenty. At first there was no lens through which I could see my experience of working on rivers, facilitating what is now essentially a leisure pursuit, as a cultural remnant of once more robust and varied interactions with the land. I understood the concepts; I absorbed the importance of the fish to the biological integrity of watersheds and to the economic base of our rural communities. I got it, and I even got involved. I took the opportunity trips afforded to teach, to highlight the values that bind our experiences in these places. And I lobbied, I solicited, I proselytized, I rallied. On the river and off, I embraced the role of storyteller and the responsibility for helping to keep the river’s characters alive. But public engagement was my proxy for personal seeking, an attempt to resolve the paradox of identifying with a story that remains elusive and romantic yet was played out right here only moments ago. Though exotic, the story is, strangely, our own.

By now, the agents and effects of environmental degradation have become familiar to the point of cliché. In everything from beaver pelts to gold mines to trees to fish the cyclical booms of industrial extraction gave way to enduring busts. In particular, 150 years of overharvest and habitat destruction have made Pacific salmon as common to endangered species listings as they once were in coastal streams. Less appreciated is the degree to which these impoverished populations have also been the focus of 150 years of dedicated efforts toward their conservation—arguably now the oldest, most complex, and most expensive life-support and recovery project in history. The search for any missing heritage might well begin with the legacy of how we destroy, but it must grow to include an understanding of how we have tried to save.

By the time canneries appeared on the rivers of California, Oregon, and Washington in the late 1800s, the dramatic collapse of Atlantic fisheries had well established the vulnerability of seemingly limitless fish stocks. As mounds of surplus fish rotted on Northwest riverside docks, as industrial effluent polluted the water, as irrigation and railroads and hydraulic mines reshaped the rivers themselves, members of the public as well as politicians and corporate representatives expressed immediate and sincere concern for Pacific salmon populations. Early attempts at regulation included seasonal closures and gear restrictions, but the small scale and limited efficacy of the restrictions did not equal the capacity and efficiency of the expanding fleet. Within a few decades, production at every cannery on every river south of the Fraser had peaked and was in decline.

There was nothing inherently wrong with a conservation strategy based on restricting access or type of technologies used. Assessments of aboriginal harvest suggest that their collective annual take on the Columbia, using diffuse systems of governance and various mechanisms for selecting species type, size, and number of fish captured, met or exceeded the peak of the commercial fishery. A more fundamental question is whether the concerns of non-aboriginal interests were ever about the salmon themselves as much as about the value they generated—and how the perception of that value informed our approach to conservation and influenced its outcomes.

The transition from native to Euro-American fisheries, and from the corresponding gift-based society to a commercial one, involved more than a transfer of power from one economic structure to another or one culture to another; the salient transformation was from one value system to another. Instead of protecting salmon from being harvested unsustainably, the prevailing interest became protecting the harvest itself. Regulation and enforcement, with their implied limits, may have partly answered the question of how to make sure there are fish in the future, but they did not help answer the suddenly more pressing and relevant question of how to get the river to keep supplying a commodity for a growing global market. Included in the distinctions between feeding a family group, in perpetuity, and feeding the world, at a profit, are very different questions about what we wanted to save, for who, and how. Viewed in this context, it is easier to see that a century of regulatory failures were not just about the difficulty of establishing and implementing protections but with a more fundamental problem. Regulation and enforcement didn’t address our real concern about fish: how to get more of them.

One possible answer to the problem arrived in the United States from Europe, which having previously given us our cake now suggested we could eat it too. Experiments in fish propagation celebrated the potential for mass production of various species, including salmonids; the concept and methodology fit perfectly with an industrializing nation enthralled with its manifest destiny, the rise of its factories, the settlement of its frontiers, the triumph of its yeoman farmer. Fish culture was an opportunity to extend the conversion of wilderness to garden beyond the boundary of farm and forest, and estimates of limitless in-stream productivity reflected the euphoria with which it was greeted.

The timing of fish propagation’s arrival, so perfectly coinciding with the emerging crisis on North American rivers, was almost divine. No sooner had hatcheries offered a choice between the constraints of protection and the promise of production than they declared that choice false—we could have them both, protection through production. Fish propagation not only promised to mitigate the effects of harvest and habitat destruction and hydropower, it also effectively endorsed them—providing both a response to and a justification for utilitarian transformations of western watersheds. There was no evidence that propagation would work, little apparent consideration of what would happen if it didn’t, and it relied entirely on the presumption that extraordinary abundance existed in spite of nature’s variability, not because of it. Yet there was little hesitation. In response to evidence that careless development of river systems was killing the fish, well-intentioned people started removing the fish from the river; and salmon have literally been in our hands ever since.

I arrived in the Pacific Northwest 150 years downstream of this confluence where compassion, ingenuity, and hubris converged with misunderstanding. In that time, the blueprint for our intervention has become the scaffolding of our failure—a monstrous suite of creative, sophisticated, and expensive alternatives to salmon swimming up- and downstream. We supplant traditional cycles of reproduction and death by raising them in concrete hatcheries, piping them from reservoirs behind dams, implanting them with tracking devices, transporting them in trucks, feeding them in offshore pens, protecting them from natural predation, harvesting them in labs, and compressing and scattering their dehydrated remains in forests and streams starved for their missing nutrients. Nine hundred miles from the ocean, six thousand feet in elevation, exhausted and battered and just short of their destination, Idaho’s celebrated sockeye are scooped from the upper Salmon River and trucked 140 miles to a multimillion-dollar warehouse in the desert. Their eggs are stripped, their milt is milked, and the next generation of icons begins its life in a redd of Ziploc bags, aerators, and PVC piping. In flourishing black marker, a whiteboard sign on the wall calls out from the virtual world: “Welcome Home, Sockeye!”

Each step is designed to replace components of a life history structured by tens of millions of years of evolution in environments now converted to other uses. Paradoxically, the more effort devoted to creating an automated and simplified ecology, the more entombed we become in a suite of complex relationships requiring extraordinary commitments of resources. What looked like a fish turned out to be an energy system, and we find ourselves caught in the gears of our thingamajig—the salmon we produce are increasingly dependent on our assistance, and much of our assistance makes the system less and less hospitable to salmon. In the Columbia River Basin alone, we spend $1 billion a year to perpetuate the original myth of protection through production. In the real world, Columbia River salmon populations have declined more than 90 percent, over a dozen stocks are extinct or endangered, and realistic hopes for recovery remain elusive if not impossible. Even our metrics of progress now measure a salmon almost unrecognizable from what we set out to save. Ironically, the result is perfectly antithetical to the environmental dynamism salmon need to express their special genius, the life history diversity that propelled them to colonize and transform nearly every freshet and backwater from ocean bottoms to mountaintops. At incalculable cost, we constructed a reality out of our illusions, and have forgotten which is which.

For a growing number of people from outside the region, the Skeena is a chance to remember. For different reasons, arriving from points diffuse, people broadly classified as tourists might increasingly represent a de facto community of seekers, engaged in a form of pilgrimage. But finding something sacred is not the same as finding something inviolable. The protections so far afforded the Skeena by combination of its geographical isolation, biological resilience, and effective defense by advocates are temporary and incomplete.

Already, pollution, intensive extraction by the logging, commercial fishing, and mining industries, and the development of rail lines and roads have left their mark on the ecology of the watershed. In turn, these changes continue to manifest as disruptions to the incumbent socioeconomic order. Reduced salmon returns have heightened tensions between stakeholders concerned about fish and access to their harvest. Consolidation of that access, to an increasingly commoditized resource, has concentrated economic and political power. Patterns from other rivers foreshadow familiar trends—toward a gradual transfer of accountability for management from specific individuals within the community to the more ambiguous framework of government and its proxy agencies, and the parallel transfer of the voices of protest to large coalitions of advocacy organizations. From my outsider’s perspective, which immediately recognizes the extraordinary in the Skeena, I can see with equally immediate recognition the tragically common—the markers along an arc that have led to similar outcomes all along the western edge of the continent.

But several important variables challenge the relevance of such comparisons. First, the suite of imminent threats to the Skeena’s integrity is arriving at the same time as the unequivocal results of a century of experimentation on rivers like the Columbia: there is no apparent way to subordinate the integrity of the system and retain its resilience as reflected in complex, abundant, and dynamic natural and human communities. This understanding confers the opportunity to discuss choices in their proper historical and bioregional context.

Second, the scale of the watershed is big enough to be internationally significant but small enough to accommodate direct discussions between stakeholders.

Third, communities remain extremely connected to their surrounding environments and engaged in deliberations affecting their future. Responsibility has not been completely divested to institutions outside the watershed; people still look to each other to supply and share information. Resources, and their management, have not become placeless—and neither has advocacy on their behalf. All of this suggests a powerful potential for self-determinism that is preciously rare.

Additionally, the significance of what is here ensures that conversations about the Skeena’s future will include supporting voices from well beyond its floodplain. The growing extent of Canadian and international interest in the Skeena is, in part, an expression of loss elsewhere. If our nature literally means our basic or inherent features, our innate or essential qualities, it more generally means who we are and, by extension, what inspires and challenges and nurtures. And those of us who have elsewhere lost something of our nature are compelled to leverage relevant lessons in the Skeena, where there is still a chance to preserve natural abundance and the robust cultural and economic expression such wealth endows. By communicating the patterns of loss and its consequences, nonresidents can help ensure that everyone knows what we’ve got here, certainly before it’s gone but perhaps without it ever going at all.

At the same time, visitors cannot fully know how much else is stacked among the logs on freighters in the Rupert harbor, caught up in the fish they hook and fight on the Bulkley, represented by the artistic and ceremonial expression of First Nations. Our vignettes of experience only partially connect us to the depth of history and meaning inherent to a life lived here. But as different as they may be, the perspectives of Skeena residents and outsiders are not unavailable to each other’s understanding or mutually exclusive of consideration in policy decisions. It is a situation ripe for sharing, for a kind of conceptual gift exchange such that we might broaden and enrich the story we tell here.

Central to realizing that opportunity is the importance of acknowledging how our understanding of the past and hopes for the future affect what we see and what we fight for. Our varied self-interests obscure important differences between what we want from the place and what it can provide. Lost in narrow battles over access to resources is the natural baseline: abundance is the default condition in the Skeena, not one teased out by increasingly complicated management regimes. Stripped of legacy allocations, existing claims, and future expectations is the watershed itself. Beginning there, with the voice of the Skeena as a biological system, might provide a basis for examining how modern communities and industries could organize themselves around that reality. Doing so would reveal stories that no longer fit our picture of the place, and need to be adjusted.

Those stories connect us to our ancestors, to each other, and to our environment; they define how we structure our communities and our work, which reciprocate by leaving their mark on us. Sometimes, these feedbacks are not as positive as we would hope, or, worse, they turn destructive. Loyalty to a story irrespective of how it fits into our understanding of the land and our relationships to it can have disastrous results. I live within such a commitment, unbroken despite 150 years of it steadily producing natural and cultural impoverishment from the wealth of the Columbia and the Snake. Diminishing abundance determines each new generation’s opportunities along my home rivers; these present opportunities become our memories of a collective past, and together they mark the boundaries of what we imagine it could be again. Short of a radical reversal, we will have few expectations for salmon in the Columbia beyond their mass production in facilities adjacent to the actual river.

But elsewhere and throughout the region, unlikely collaborations are telling different stories, insisting on renewal—of natural systems, of cultural potential, of legal and moral responsibility to indigenous peoples, and more. Examining formerly intractable problems, they are asking different questions, amending old stories, and reaching radically different conclusions with profoundly inspiring results. Hundreds of projects to remove dams and restore habitat while accommodating agricultural and power needs include historic agreements on rivers like the Elwha, the White Salmon, the San Joaquin, the Rogue, and the Klamath. With great difficulty, at great expense, often out of desperation, people are working to bring the wheel back around, to reclaim a place for our missing heritage in a more hopeful future.

On the Skeena, that future is now. Despite considerable effects from more than a century of the industrial economy’s insults to the environment and indigenous communities, much of the core of what we hope for is already here. This presents both opportunities and challenges. The Skeena’s relative abundance enables experimentation with ideas that might be ruled out in conditions of scarcity; it also masks the urgent need to develop policies, institutions, and economic and social structures that can evolve in response to the inevitable forces of change originating from within and beyond the watershed. This innovation will be not one big idea but many, a power distributed among individuals and groups suggesting, testing, modifying, and sharing. As in the case of salmon or any other example of successful diversification, many variations emerge from a few central themes, always adapting in response to feedback. There are, and must continue to be, innumerable voices expressing hope for this future and working toward its realization. In celebration of the ongoing conversation, here are a few of them.

Jim Norton is adventure capitalist and director of strategic partnerships for Ecotrust’s Natural Capital Fund. He is based in San Francisco. In addition to his current work for Ecotrust, he has been a professional river guide and naturalist for the last twenty years and continues to guide in Idaho and on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. He has also worked as a professional guide in China, Chile, and New Zealand. Norton has served as a screenwriter for a number of nature and adventure documentaries. Most recently, inspired by a lost heritage of abundance in salmon streams of his adopted Pacific Northwest home, Norton wrote and produced Salmon: Running the Gauntlet, which aired nationally in May of 2011 as an episode of PBS’s Nature. He received a BS in biology (Bowdoin College), but prefers the BS around campfires (everywhere).

I. The Mountain Goats Invite the People to a Feast

You can tell you’ve been closing in on the epicenter of Dimlahamid by the gradual ubiquity of hemlock and cedar along the main Yellowhead Highway as it unfurls westward through British Columbia, and by the snowy peaks of the looming mountains and the fireweed on the hillsides. You will swear you can smell the scent of salt air even though you’ve still got another three and a half hours to go before you’re at the coast. Everything is immediately and strangely discernible. You’re suddenly in the very middle of something very old and quiet, and at the edge of something very big and loud.

The roar of Hagwilget Canyon tells you that you are leaving the vast ranges of the Athapaskan language families, which reach all the way back to Hudson Bay, with linguistic cousins down among the Navajo and the Apache. These are the mountains and valleys of the people who call themselves Gitxsan, and they speak Gitxanimaax, which is the furthest upriver extent of several Tsimshian-related languages in a saltwater complex of tongues arising from Northern California and reaching all the way to Southeast Alaska. This is also where the old Roman Catholic influences of the continent begin to most noticeably bleed away into the Protestant missionary dominance of the coast that lies ahead. The Bulkley River boils through the canyon below you, emptying itself into the Skeena River just downstream, and up in the clouds above you is Mount Roche de Boule, which is Stegyawden.

By the time you’ve reached the little constellation of communities the locals today call the Hazeltons—New Hazelton, South Hazelton, Two Mile, Gitanmaax, Hagwilget, Old Town—everything gets impossibly jumbled and ragged. But this is also where everything starts to make perfect sense. This is where Dimlahamid was. They say it was like a vast city, a place that covered so much ground that a flock of geese could not traverse it without falling from the sky. Dimlahamid is where the world ends. Dimlahamid is where the world renews itself all over again.

Dimlahamid is where the story begins.

Up there in the peaks of Stegyawden, who knows how long ago, mountain goats once took the form of men. They invited the people of Dimlahamid to a great feast. It was a ruse to prepare for the avenging of an injustice that had been done to them by a group of young hunters years before. When everyone had settled down to the feast, a great one-horned goat appeared. The story ends with heaps of bodies at the foot of Stegyawden.

It’s a complicated story involving sacrilege and cruelty, but the thing to keep your eye on is that one young man was spared by the one-horned goat chief, and this man had been a boy when he’d spared the goat chief from slaughter years before. He’d marked the goat by rubbing its head in red ocher; that’s how he could tell it was the same goat. The moral of the story could be put this way: You do not want to mess with this place.

Pull in at a New Hazelton truck stop, and you can hear it in people’s voices. It’s the same back in Smithers as it is down at Prince Rupert. Ask about the place. People will start talking about the mountains, the salmon, or the forests, and right away in their voices you will notice a kind of inflection, something along the spectrum running from reverence to pride to melancholy. It’s not what you would call environmentalism. It’s gone beyond that now. Among the far-flung descendants of the people of Dimlahamid, so it is too now among the people who have only lately come to call the Skeena Country their home. White people are very much a part of it now. They’re not just umshewa, driftwood, anymore.

Everyone is connected. Everything is connected. Even if you add in the people of the Nass Valley to the north and the Kitimat Valley to the southwest and all the islands within a day’s sail of the Skeena estuary, there are still fewer than one hundred thousand people in the Skeena Country. Most people are clustered around the Hazeltons, Smithers, Terrace, and Prince Rupert.

More than anything else, the salmon connect everyone to one another as well as to the water and the land. The Skeena River is one of the most productive salmon watersheds in the world. After the Fraser Basin, it’s the second largest watershed in British Columbia. More than three hundred distinct spawning populations of all five species of salmon and steelhead breathe life into the Skeena’s eleven major tributary rivers, supporting a human economy worth more than $100 million annually in tribal, commercial, and recreational fisheries. The salmon form the currency among and between myriad species in the Skeena Country’s four main mountain ranges and seven distinct biogeoclimatic zones, from the upland boreal interior to the salt marshes of the coastal temperate rainforest. The salmon swim among and between everything, connecting the mountains to the sea and the future to the past.

Words like ecosystem might get you partway into understanding all this, but wilderness is where you’ll get lost. Every river confluence, every hillock, and every rock outcrop in the Skeena Country has its own story.

Ancient forms of tenure and title radiate outward from Dimlahamid in every direction: rank, name, fishing station, goat-hunting mountain, hillside berry ground, crest. Hawilamax is The Place They Throw Away Turnips. Anwaris is Place of Digging. There is a place called Angudoon, which is the short form for a name that translates more fully as The Steep Place on the Riverbank Where a Man Is Pulled Up with the Right Hand of a Friend. Every cranny and back eddy is accounted for in the deepest antiquity by means of matrilineal clan systems of ownership and succession, all codified in what the Gitxsan call ada’ox, and what their Bulkley River neighbors among the Wet’suwet’en call kungax, and replicated in similarly distinct ways among the Kitselas, the Kitsumkalum, the Gitxaala, the Metlakatla, the Nisga’a, the Haisla, and all the way out to the Gitga’at of Hartley Bay.

Each inch of ground is spoken for in intricate and often fiercely contested relationships among and between the people, the chiefs, and their clans. From as far into the northern interior as the eastern tributaries of Babine Lake, the crests of the house groups open a potlatch-box network of narrative trails, laws, obligations, and rights that spread like filaments in a web of family relations and ancient story-motif affinities, all the way to the outer coast. From the House of Many Eyes and the Birch Bark House around Moricetown, some event that may seem like a drizzle of rain if you’re just passing through will soon enough be noticed in tremors running through the Fireweed, Frog, Wolf, and Eagle clans, all the way out to the Killer Whale clan of Hartley Bay. Those people, way out there too, came from Dimlahamid.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, that peculiar inflection that you’d sometimes hear in the people’s voices was most acutely evident when the subject turned to the tumults overtaking the Skeena Country. You’d find yourself in conversations that required resorting to terms like ecological upheaval, catastrophic destruction, and malevolence. Almost overnight, industrialization projects worth $40 billion were either awaiting approval or were approved and permitted or well under way in the Skeena Country. At whatever stage, they were shaking the ground from the Upper Iskut to the Kitimat and from Old Kuldo to the Estevan Islands. Nobody could remember anything quite like it.

It was like something straight out of Dimlahamid.

II. The Return of the Medeek

In the Gitxsan ada’ox, the Medeek is a great bear spirit that arises from the depths of Seeley Lake, which nowadays is only a pleasantly reed-choked fishing hole and campsite just off the Yellowhead Highway a few minutes west of New Hazelton. The saga of the Medeek takes some long while to tell properly. The bear spirit engages the chiefs of Dimlahamid in an epic battle, destroying everything in its path. There are earthquakes and avalanches. Mountainsides collapse. Forests are uprooted. Eventually, the monster is driven into the Skeena River. The creature’s malevolence makes its way back into the forest, and the creature itself is said to have returned to its lair at the bottom of Seeley Lake.

The Medeek is also a phenomenon known to geologists and paleoecologists as a mysterious event that occurred some 3,500 years ago in the Hazelton Mountains. There was an ecological cataclysm of some kind—rivers changing their courses, massive debris torrents. There was terrible destruction. The one important difference between back then and the early years of the twenty-first century is that this time around, nobody quite knows how the story is going to end. Even from the narrowest economic analysis, nothing like this has happened in the Skeena Country since the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, the brainchild of the eccentric magnate Charles Melville Hays, connected Winnipeg to Prince Rupert in 1914.

Just as the Atlantic replaced the Mediterranean as the main sea of commerce after the voyages of Christopher Columbus, so the Pacific replaced the Atlantic, by the twenty-first century, as the planet’s primary thoroughfare for trade and industrial expansion. With the phenomenal expansion of Asian economies, suddenly it was significant that the Port of Prince Rupert lay closer than other West Coast cities to key Asian ports, thirty-six hours closer to Shanghai than Vancouver and sixty-eight hours closer than Los Angeles. Prince Rupert connected to three continental railroad networks. Los Angeles connected to only two.

When Canada’s newly minted Conservative government set out to transform the country into an “energy superpower” in 2006, it wasn’t just loose talk. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government intended to leverage northwestern BC’s Pacific advantage to feed China’s ravenous appetite for commodities.

Oil would be the top—but by no means the only—commodity on the list. Canada’s crude oil reserves are estimated at 173 billion barrels, behind only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela in proven reserves. Almost all of Canada’s oil is locked up in bitumen, otherwise known as the tar sands. Canada’s National Energy Board reckoned bitumen production would triple over the first three decades of the twenty-first century. The Conservative government intended to exceed even those expectations. What this would require, by the spring of 2012, was the enactment of an unprecedented omnibus budget bill in the House of Commons that introduced, amended, or repealed nearly seventy federal laws, mostly related to environmental assessment and fisheries habitat protection, along with the abandonment of federal control on greenhouse gas emissions.

What all that was largely intended to accommodate was a plan by the pipeline builder Enbridge Inc. to construct a $5.5 billion, 1,172-kilometer double pipeline punched straight through the heart of the Skeena Country from Bruderheim, Alberta, to awaiting supertankers at Kitimat. The largely Beijing-backed enterprise anticipated the crossing of perhaps 1,000 salmon rivers and creeks between the Rocky Mountains and the coast. It would mean 225 oil tankers every year, carrying unprocessed bitumen to refineries in California and China, traversing the tide currents and narrow passages of British Columbia’s fabled Great Bear Rainforest, and then out into some of the most treacherous seas on earth.

And that wasn’t even the half of it.

III. The Country of the Red Goats

The place the Skeena River begins is roughly six hundred kilometers upstream from saltwater on the western edges of the Spatsizi Plateau. Other creeks and streams flowing off Klappan Mountain go on to form the two other great undammed rivers of British Columbia’s northwestern quarter, the Nass and the Stikine. The territory is most closely associated with the Tahltan people, although the word Spatsizi derives from the Sekani term for “red goat,” which comes from the area’s plentiful mountain goats and their purported ages-past custom of adorning themselves in red ocher. Otherwise known as iron oxide, red ocher is used in the painting of pictographs and certain heraldic poles. It’s said to be something no self-respecting Nisga’a or Gitxsan medicine person would ever have been without. It is the thing the marked the head of the one-horned goat that invited the people of Dimlahamid to that feast all those years ago.

Because of its abundance of goats, grizzlies, moose, and wolves, and because it is home to the largest herd of Stone sheep in the world and the largest concentration of woodland caribou west of the Rocky Mountains, the region came to be called Canada’s Serengeti. Because it is where the Skeena, the Nass, and the Stikine arise, environmentalists call it the Sacred Headwaters. Because of all these things, an uproar greeted the news back in 2004 that Shell Canada Energy, a Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary, had moved into the territory.

Before the local regional district was even aware of it, Shell was already barreling ahead with plans to sink hundreds of wells to tap into coal-bed methane over an area of four thousand square kilometers of the Klappan Range. The wells would require hundreds of roads and pipelines. The whole project was based on the controversial method known as hydrological fracturing, or “fracking,” which usually involves the injection of toxic liquids to fracture deep coal seams to release the gas.

The Tahltan started out divided against themselves about it. Then there were road blockades. Tahltan elders were arrested on the blockades. Legal challenges were fought all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. It was a mess. It didn’t help Shell that company officials had no answers when anyone asked what the implications for the salmon might be. A wave of opposition arose—Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pembina Institute, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Sierra Club, and so on.

Then Shell had the misfortune of finding that the Sacred Headwaters were especially sacred to Wade Davis, the world-famous National Geographic explorer-in-residence who had come to his vocation in those mountains. Among Shell’s fiercest adversaries was a coalition of the Skeena Country’s commercial, recreational, and aboriginal fishing organizations, almost all the First Nations of the area, the local guide-outfitters, the Skeena–Queen Charlotte Regional District, the Kitimat-Stikine Regional District, and the Village of Hazelton.

Even worse for Shell, as things turned out, there was Shannon McPhail, editor of the Kispiox Valley Community Newspaper, circulation: fifty. “A gossip rag,” McPhail calls it proudly. McPhail is a big-voiced, big-hearted, fourth-generation Kispiox Valley jane-of-all-trades with two small kids and a husband who works as a high-pressure welder, two weeks in, two weeks out, in the tar sands of Fort McMurray. She grew up one of four kids in a log house her parents built with trees they cut from their own homestead below Sedina Mountain, just a few kilometers south of the old family place at Telegraph Ranch on the Kispiox River. She was raised on mountain goat meat and wild sheep meat and moose meat, and she didn’t exactly “travel in the same circles” as environmentalists.

When McPhail first heard about Shell Energy moving into the headwaters back in 2004, she was twenty-nine, job hungry, and favorably disposed to whatever the company was up to. She had no time for the conservationists in Smithers and Terrace who were raising alarms about what coal-bed methane drilling might mean for the salmon. “I said, ‘You dirty, rotten, dope-sucking, tree-hugging hippies. This is another Chicken Little case of the sky is falling. Well, the sky has been falling, according to you guys, for the last hundred years, and lookit, it’s still up there.’ ” When McPhail first got “active” on the Shell file, it was “to actually shut up all the naysayers,” as she put it. She ended up as the executive director of the Hazelton-based Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, the fiercest frontline outfit fighting against Shell.

McPhail’s turnaround involved a sharp and painful learning curve. First, she learned that Shell hadn’t talked to any of the locals and wasn’t even offering the locals any jobs. The more she learned about the project, the harder it was to support it. The more questions she asked about it, the less she liked. Surely there would be a proper environmental assessment before Shell started drilling thousands of gas wells? No. Had anything like this been done before in a wild salmon environment? No. Where would the pipelines go? They didn’t know. Had there been any cumulative impact mapping? No.

“I sat there, and my whole foundation, like, everything that my life had been built on, as far as thinking that everything was okay, just got shattered. Because I didn’t believe that corporations and governments would ever make such terrible decisions and that they always had people’s best interests at heart,” she says.

The regional district didn’t even know that Shell was already drilling test wells. The provincial energy and mines ministry was supposed to be overseeing everything, but the ministry had no answers either. The federal fisheries and oceans department insisted there was nothing to worry about—there weren’t even any salmon up there. But the Tahltan elders said there were. Ancient gaff hooks had been found up there.

“I was totally naïve,” McPhail remembers. “I had no idea how conservation or environmental campaigns worked. But I knew that once the people of the community knew what I knew, they would not stand for this. Like, you know, once people got the information that I had, they’d be just as pissed as I was.”

Soon McPhail’s group got involved in a joint project with the Tahltan elders. The main thing they set out to show was that there were indeed salmon up there in the red goat country. By the summer of 2006, they had their evidence: salmon scales collected, spawning fish photographed. Chinook, coho, and steelhead. “Nobody knows what happens in the upper Skeena, right?” McPhail laughs at the memory of that day. The salmon had beaten the odds and changed the nature of the game.

But it was a small victory; the Medeek had not been driven back into the depths of Seeley Lake. Not by a long shot.

IV. Suddenly, Speaking with the Same Voice

By the summer of 2012, work had already begun on the massive Red Chris mine, a huge open-pit copper and gold mine covering several thousand hectares of the Todagin Plateau in the Sacred Headwaters territory. Imperial Metals was investing $500 million in the project, an amount matched by provincial and federal contributions of another $500 million in funding for the Northwest Transmission Line, a hydro line that was expected to serve Red Chris and also open up the region to the potential of several more megaprojects. Todagin Mountain is home to the world’s largest concentration of Stone sheep, a distinct genetic variant of wild sheep most closely related to the Snow sheep of Siberia. Imperial Metals was expecting to employ at least two hundred workers to remove 30,000 tons of metal a day for twenty-eight years, starting in 2014.

The edge of the Red Chris pit lay just 20 kilometers from the Tahltan village of Iskut, a community divided against itself over the project along lines similar to the divisions that had initially wracked the Tahltans of Telegraph Creek, on the Stikine River, over the Shell megaproject. Nearby, Fortune Minerals was planning to turn Mount Klappan itself into an open-pit coal mine. Fortune was planning to take up to three million tons of coal every year from a 15,000-hectare lease, an area larger than the city of Vancouver.

Elsewhere, Avanti Mining Inc. had pumped $70 million into its effort to reopen a molybdenum mine at the ghost town of Kitsault on Alice Arm, north of the Nass River. South of Telegraph Creek, Copper Fox Metals was planning a molybdenum, copper, silver, and gold mine that would directly employ 800 workers. NovaGold’s copper-gold Galore Creek Mine, in a roadless area 150 kilometers northeast of Stewart, was well on its way to hiring about 1,000 construction workers to get the mine up and running. Galore expected it would need 500 workers to run the mine, which could have a life of at least twenty years.

Down in Kitimat, Rio Tinto Alcan was pouring $3.3 billion into its massive aluminum smelter to boost production from 280,000 to more than 400,000 tons per year. Then there was Kitimat Clean Ltd. and its out-of-left-field $13 billion refinery proposal to refine the bitumen Enbridge intended to pump to Kitimat from Bruderheim, Alberta.

That’s not to mention all the natural gas projects. Kitimat LNG was roaring ahead with a $6 billion plan to export 200 million tons of liquefied natural gas per year from a massive LNG plant and terminal it was hoping to begin building at Kitimat and nearby Bish Cove. The Douglas Channel Energy Partnership was planning a smaller plant and terminal nearby, just south of Moon Bay. A Shell Canada joint venture with PetroChina, Mitsubishi, and the Korea Gas Corporation had its eyes on another LNG plant and marine terminal in Douglas Channel, and that one project came with a promise of 5,000 construction jobs for five years. Then there were all the pipelines and tankers that would be required to carry all that natural gas from the gas-producing areas of BC and Alberta and then to markets offshore.

That’s before we even get to the implications of the Enbridge Inc. double pipeline carrying condensates eastward and diluted bitumen westward across as many as 1,000 salmon rivers and creeks, and the 200-plus giant oil tankers that would result every year. The politics of it all were just as confounding in the Skeena Country’s settler communities as in the aboriginal communities. But it was different from the logging-versus-wilderness battles of the past. The lines weren’t forming up so predictably, with “Indians” and “environmentalists” on one side and “rednecks” and backhoe-operator politicians on the other. Something different was happening.

“In a meeting, you would have people who normally couldn’t sit in the same room with each other suddenly speaking with the same voice,” says Bulkley Valley settler Monty Basset. Bassett, sixty-five, is not much like Shannon McPhail. He’s not quite the dope-sucking tree-hugger McPhail used to rail about, but Bassett came into the country as a hippie back-to-the-lander from Wyoming during the Vietnam era. He ran cattle, raised hay, and eventually raised five daughters on the Telkwa High Road above Smithers.

“It’s universal up here, because the one thing that’s going to carry through from Shell to Enbridge, it’s water. It’s not only the lifeblood of our systems and our cultures and all, it’s the lifeblood of everything.” It’s how it came to pass that so many diverse voices came together in the uproars over Shell’s coal-bed methane plans. The same thing blossomed in response to Enbridge.

It’s how it came to pass that Smithers, the largely resource-dependent community of 6000 people, ended up pretty well united against Enbridge (a municipal council resolution formally opposed the project) despite its promise of thousands of construction jobs. The old divisions had broken down so much that by November 2011, Smithers’ voters had elected Taylor Bachrach, a thirty-two-year-old former communications director with the Sierra Club of BC, as their mayor. He had a five-year-old and a three-year-old. He was part of a wave of young people who had been moving to Smithers not just for the work but because of where it is, and what it was becoming. “When you have a bunch of people who want to be together in place,” Bachrach told me, “you have a categorically different conversation than when you move to a place temporarily because that’s where the job is.”

This wasn’t antidevelopment rhetoric. There’s a deep desire for industrial development and jobs around Smithers. But what kind of development? “We need to make sure, as a community and as a region, that we stick together and we take care of each other, and we come out the other end stronger than we were when we went into it,” Bachrach said.

V. The People of the Cane

The Great Bear Rainforest is a labyrinthine convulsion of archipelagoes, inlets, and steep-walled, mist-occluded rainforest valleys from Cape Caution at Vancouver Island’s northern tip through the lower Skeena to the Alaskan panhandle. The “Great Bear” in the name of the region is the creature known as a “spirit bear” in the English language. It’s the same ghostly being some Tsimshian people understood to be an animal with the power to vanish from its form as a bear and then reappear transformed into a man. It is a subspecies of black bear, Ursus americanus kermodei, famous for the genetic eccentricity that gives it occasionally such oddly pale colors that it can manifest as almost completely white. Modern science has proved that the bears do become invisible, in a sense, to salmon: their success rate in catching salmon in shallow streams, in daylight hours, is perhaps 30 percent greater than that of their black-cloaked cousins.

But the place that people from away have chosen to imagine as the primeval Great Bear Rainforest wilderness, and that the Canadian government agreed to raise protections for in 2009, once lay within the most densely populated culture area north of the Valley of Mexico and west of the Great Lakes. With human settlements going back 9,000 years, the Great Bear Rainforest is one of the oldest areas of human habitation in North America. People were fishing here long before the ancestors of the pyramid builders were skiffing around in reed boats at the mouth of the Nile River, and until only recently the Great Bear Rainforest was alive with a crashing and a clanking and a whirring at the zenith of the industrial revolution.

The Union Steamship Company once boasted twenty regular ports of call in the Great Bear Rainforest. As the Age of Steam gave rise to the Oil Age, the region was called the Jungles, and generations of loggers and sawmill workers lived and toiled in it and took out the biggest and best and most easily felled timber until the rest was barely worth the bother.

It should also be remembered that there were once more than eighty cannery towns between the Kwagiulth waters around Cape Caution and the Nass River, near the ancient Nisga’a town of Gingolx. Aboriginal workers formed the central division of a cosmopolitan Great Bear Rainforest proletariat that brought in Japanese immigrants, Chinese immigrants, Hawaiians, Orkney Islanders, Englishmen, Americans, Finns, and on and on. The industrial revolution clanked and whirred away, devouring whatever it could refine and process and merchandise. Entire cultures went into its gaping maw and came out the other side forever changed.

For the Gitga’at people of the Tsimshian community of Hartley Bay, the initiation into this new world occurred in a utopian New Jerusalem of about 1,100 Tsimshians at Metlakatla, after the name of the Tsimshian village that had been there on Pike Island, at what is now the northern entrance to Prince Rupert Harbour, from time out of mind. Its cavernous Anglican church was the largest church west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. Its streets lit with gas lamps to brighten the twilight gloom, Metlakatla boasted a sawmill, a printing press, a cannery, a textile factory, and merry-go-rounds for the children. By the late 1860s, Metlakatla’s primly uniformed Tsimshian police were patrolling the inlets for rum runners. Its brass band entertained visiting dignitaries. Its choir, renowned for its renditions of Handel’s Messiah, occasionally toured the United States.

The Holy City of Metlakatla was established at a time of apocalyptic upheaval, smallpox, spiritual malaise, and cultural collapse among the Tsimshians. Founded by the slightly mad English missionary William Duncan, Metlakatla came to an abrupt demise brought on by the provincial authorities’ nervousness about the community’s power and the Anglican church authorities’ absurd doctrinal disputes with Duncan. In 1887, almost the entire community set off in canoes and small sailboats to establish New Metlakatla in Alaska. By then, there wasn’t much left of the Gitga’at people, one of a dozen Tsimshian communities that had been swept up in Duncan’s utopian fervors.

When Duncan and his followers left for Alaska, the Gitga’at returned to their home waters in the islands around the mouth of Douglas Channel, but by then there were only twenty-seven Gitga’at left to start anew. Instead of settling back down at the old village of Laxgal’tsap near the Quaal River, they chose a cove a few kilometers away, better protected from the winds, at Hartley Bay. About two hundred people live there now, out of a band membership of roughly seven hundred. It’s a pleasant place, distinctively riven with a network of boardwalks that lead from the dock to all the houses in the village.

While much of the story of Metlakatla has been disremembered in the salal and skunk cabbage of those strange times in the late nineteenth century, it is the memory of a much older city that lives on in the meaning of the name the Gitga’at give themselves: the People of the Cane. It is an antique translation into English that refers to the “canes,” or poles, by which the people once navigated their canoes. It’s a river-canoe method, for shallow water. It comes from the time the people lived up the Skeena River, at Dimlahamid.

During a visit with her in the summer of 2012, the eight-six-year-old Hartley Bay matriarch Helen Clifton wouldn’t venture a guess as to how long ago that was. Clifton, from the Killer Whale clan, said she reckoned it was definitely thousands of years ago anyway. The memory of it persists in the way that the Gitga’at will present their killer whale crest, in blankets and on carved posts, with a fireweed plant coming from the killer whale’s blowhole. The fireweed harks back to their origins in Dimlahamid and also signifies the persistence of a close affinity that binds the Gitga’at Killer Whale clan with the Gitxsan Fireweed clan.

In Hartley Bay, there is little nuance on the subject of Enbridge. The project would mean more than two hundred oil tankers coming out of nearby Douglas Channel every year, each oil tanker the size of the Empire State Building in New York. For the Gitga’at, there is nothing to discuss. The only answer is no. It doesn’t take long to understand why. Spend a few minutes at the Hartley Bay dock, and you notice people coming and going in small skiffs and old fishing boats, heading out to set crab traps or coming back with halibut or salmon. First and foremost, it’s about food. It’s simple. “Everything that we have comes from the sea,” Clifton told me. It’s about innumerable and unquantifiable economic, social, cultural factors. It’s about the “spirit bears” too. “Who’s going to speak for them?” It’s certainly not just about the Gitga’at people: “It’s our white brothers and sisters that live in British Columbia, that live along this coast. And they love this coast. They’re no different than we are. They love it the same as we do.”

It’s a story about the fur trade, the rise and fall of the salmon canneries, the highways, the railway, the collapse of the forest industry. Until only recently, the Gitga’at had managed to adapt to the vast transformations wrought by colonial settlement, and rarely was anyone without work and wages. Even after the salmon canneries shut down, the Gitga’at could rely for sustenance, as they always had, on the bounty of the sea. In Hartley Bay, Enbridge was seen as a direct threat to everything that remained.

The anxiety and the dread in Hartley Bay were not just about the threat of a catastrophic bitumen spill. They were about the disruptions and hazards those huge oil tankers would cause in local waters. What about everybody’s crab traps? What about ship wake? Where would anyone set their halibut lines? Even if the Enbridge project got stopped in its tracks, when you added up all the production from the proposed liquefied natural gas plants, you got 1,000 tankers a year coming out of Douglas Channel. Accidents happen. On March 22, 2006, in the middle of the night, the BC Ferries ship Queen of the North ran aground and sank at Gil Island with 101 passengers on board. All but 2 passengers were rescued, and it was the people of Hartley Bay, in their small boats, who were first on the scene. The eventual verdict was “human error.” Humans make mistakes.

“Everybody’s going to have to alter their life course around the tankers,” thirty-one-year-old Hartley Bay guardian-watchman Mathew Danes told me. “We’re going to have to stop harvesting food. Our seaweed camp is right close to the area. Our seaweed camp is right close to the potential tanker route. There’s really nothing we could do. . . .

“These whales can’t say no. All the creatures in this land can’t say no. We’ve got to kind of protect that. We’ve got to say no for them.”

VI. Back Upstream

The banks of the Babine River have a lovely appearance at this place and a most wonderful sight met our eyes when we beheld the immense array of dried salmon. On either side, there were no less than 16 houses 30 x 27 x 8 feet filled with salmon from the top down so low that one had to stoop to get into them and also an immense quantity of racks, filled up outside. If the latter had stood close together they would have covered acres and acres of ground, and though it was impossible to form an estimate, we judged it to be nearly three quarters of a million fish at those two barricades . . . though the whole tribe had been working together for six weeks and a half it was a wonder that so much salmon could be massed together in that time.

That’s from Dominion Fisheries officer Hans Helgeson’s journal notes from his 1905 reconnaissance on the Upper Skeena watershed. He was on an assignment for the coastal fishing companies, although officially dispatched by Ottawa, with orders to dismantle the ancient upriver tribal fisheries. His job was to clear them away so that all the clanking and whirring of the coastal canneries could take their place. The work took a few years and no small amount of dynamite, but eventually you could wander such ancient fishing towns as Kisgegas on the Upper Skeena and you would think you were in untouched wilderness. You couldn’t even tell where the graves were. You could walk the bright streets of Prince Rupert and marvel at the ingenuity of an industry, built as though out of nothing.

For the first seven decades of the twentieth century, thousands of gillnetters, trollers, and seine boats roamed the coast, through bumper runs and collapses and from peak years to vanishings. The fishing effort for Skeena salmon centered almost entirely on mixed-stock net fisheries at the river mouth and the saltwater approach areas. The Skeena’s sockeye abundances continued in a long and slow decline, until by the early 1960s the catch was down to a third of what it had been when the century began. In response, the coastal fishing companies convinced the federal fisheries department to apply the worst and most costly remedy: a massive enhancement project in the construction of artificial spawning channels at the Pinkut and Fulton Rivers, far upstream, at Babine Lake.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. The catch data showed a turnaround—a clear incline in Skeena sockeye landings—but the Skeena’s commercial salmon fisheries were by then wholly unsustainable. They were mixed-stock fisheries almost wholly reliant on the sockeye spawning channels at the Fulton and the Pinkut. The Skeena’s prized steelhead runs, most of the Skeena’s thirty distinct and wholly wild sockeye populations, and the Skeena’s coho runs were getting ground up in the gears. All those ancient salmon runs were flickering out like stars in some distant galaxy, one after the other.

For years, everyone in fishing was at everyone else’s throats—the aboriginal fishermen, the sports fishermen, the commercial fishermen. Ottawa tried to manage the fallout with hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into fleet restructuring plans and fishboat buyback schemes, but it was too late. The advance of aboriginal fishing rights cases, the sudden ubiquity of farmed salmon on world markets, a Canadian public that had lost its patience with unsustainable fishing practices—the antiquated coastal salmon-fishery edifice was simply collapsing under the weight of its own absurdities.

“A lot of people don’t understand how emotional and sometimes how vicious it was,” says Bruce Hill. He would know. A veteran of pretty well every major environmentalist battle in the Skeena Country over the past thirty years or so, he’s had an eagle-eye view of the struggles it took to bring the Skeena’s salmon runs back from the brink. He came into the country from the United States, mostly Michigan by way of Southern California, during the same northward hippie migration that brought Monty Bassett to the Bulkley Valley. He raised two kids with his wife, Anne, as a logger, small sawmill operator, and homesteader in the eastern reaches of the Wet’suwet’en territory. He came into his stride as a steelhead guide based mostly out of Terrace, quickly emerged as the loudest noise coming out of the Steelhead Society, and by the early 1990s was heading up its Wild Steelhead Campaign, which was at the leading edge of the salmon wars that so transformed the Skeena fisheries.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, something almost unimaginably heartening was under way in the Skeena Country. The salmon and the steelhead were all doing more or less pretty well—or at least the drastic declines had been reversed, and some runs were showing signs of recovery and stability. And up where Hans Helgeson had found such immense volumes of salmon being trundled into smokehouses on the Babine River in 1905, the “wonderful sight” he beheld could be seen once again. Near the Babine people’s old mother village of Wu’dat, at the site of the great k’oonze, the fish weir that Helgeson described in his journal, the place was a hive of activity. The old wooden-stake weirs were gone but only to make way for steel and aluminum. By 2011, the Skeena’s upriver salmon fisheries were home to the second largest commercial sockeye fishery on Canada’s west coast.

The k’oonze was one of a series of aboriginal upriver fisheries that were breathing life back into the ancient practice of live-capture, stock-selective, species-selective salmon fishing. Fueled by court decisions that began, in the 1990s, to assert the aboriginal right to fish, the fishing effort had been slowly shifting back upriver to where it had been for all those millennia.

“You got to watch out for the bears though,” said Quentin William, a nineteen-year-old from Fort Babine who showed me around Wu’dat. The upriver-migrating salmon corral themselves in a series of cage-like structures at the Babine Fence, where they can be counted and harvested by dipnets. The rest—Chinook, steelhead, coho, and pink salmon, and the occasional chum or Dolly Varden—can be released by simply opening a cage door. As for the bears: “They tend to break into the smokehouses and take what they need,” William laughed.

One of about twenty people from nearby Fort Babine on the fence crew the day we visited, William was working eleven-hour shifts at $17 an hour, pushing bin trolleys, 150 fish a trolley. He liked his work, a lot, and it was good and hard work. The crew was pulling about 7,000 sockeye a day to be loaded into totes and trucked to Prince Rupert. A separate crew was running fish back to the smokehouses at Fort Babine.

By the end of the 2012 season, the Skeena’s marine fisheries—the conventional commercial salmon fisheries at the Skeena mouth and in the approach areas—caught 507,022 sockeye. The “inland,” upriver, aboriginal commercial catch accounted for another 329,541 sockeye. The new regime was giving the lie to the arguments against reviving the upriver fishery, arguments that were of a piece with the old fallacy that it’s either jobs or the environment, industry or nature, that there would have to be a trade-off between the fishery’s economic viability on the one hand and biological diversity on the other.

The Skeena’s coho, Chinook, steelhead, and small sockeye runs were benefiting enormously from scaling back the mixed-stock marine fisheries. No surprise there. But the economics of the upriver fishery revival were especially interesting. Against decades of argument, the upriver salmon were not commercially “worthless” after all. On the Bulkley River, the Wet’suwet’en dipnet fishery was earning higher returns on smoked pink salmon than coastal fishermen were getting for pink salmon sold for canned product. The upriver-caught sockeye did lose some value; in 2012, while 39 percent of the Skeena’s commercial sockeye catch was taken in the upriver fisheries, the value of the catch came in at only 26 percent, or $1.9 million. But the capital costs of the upriver fisheries are a fraction of the costs of maintaining a saltwater fishboat fleet, and the wealth spreads itself around more equitably.

Most of sockeye caught in the 2012 “fishboat fishery” around the Skeena mouth were scooped up during a single week of seine fishing and three gillnet-boat openings involving about 350 gillnetters. The upriver fisheries operated for nearly two months, supplying fresh fish to North American markets all that time, and the earnings went to First Nations communities with few economic options available to them.

The Skeena’s main upriver fisheries were the Gitxsan “midriver” beach seine fisheries, the dipnet fisheries at Kisgegas on the Upper Skeena and at Moricetown on the Bulkley, the Babine Fence fishery, and beach seine fisheries in Babine Lake. In the Babine fisheries, roughly eighty local aboriginal people were employed through the summer in a fishery that returned $1.4 million in wages and profits. In the Gitxsan fishery, which took in only about a quarter of sockeye caught in the Skeena’s upriver fisheries in 2012, roughly $460,000 was spread among eleven crews, with an average of seven people per crew.

Most of the midriver fish were going to the Canadian Fishing Company for processing in Prince Rupert, while the Lake Babine Nation had made arrangements with Canfisco and with Raincoast Trading in Delta, on the Fraser River, for the fresh, canned, and frozen market. And this is where the economics gets really interesting.

People will pay a premium to know that the fish they’re buying do not come from a clanking old fishery that’s mining the remnants of the planet’s marine life. Raincoast Trading specializes in sustainably caught fish, marketing a line of salmon, tuna, and sardine products that has earned accolades from Greenpeace and won the backing of the Vancouver Aquarium’s consumer-education Ocean Wise program. Though operations are suspended, the small River Wild plant, in Terrace, recently produced high-end salmon jerky and smoked salmon sourced from selectively harvested fisheries, including the Babine fishery and the Gitanyow fishery at Meziadin, on the Nass River.

In the middle it all was Greg Taylor, a former fishing-industry executive who started out when he was twenty-five at the old Cassiar Cannery at the mouth of the Skeena—established 1903—and went on to serve as a key architect of the new world arising from the old-time industry’s ashes. Cassiar was the last of the grandpappy canneries to shut down, in the 1980s. By then, Taylor was working as the chief buyer for Ocean Fisheries, a major coastal player, and for a time he was also president of the Northern Processors Association. Taylor was one of the few who could see the writing on the wall. “I was the first guy ever to buy in-river commercial fish, in 1994,” Taylor remembers proudly. “You can imagine what a pariah I was.” The way Taylor put it to me one night over a beer in Smithers, rebuilding the industry from the pilings up wasn’t just commercially smart. It was morally necessary. “The way I saw it, we could promote conservation, and we could rectify an evil. We could actually advance a new and more thoughtful approach to managing salmon in the Skeena system. That’s why I stayed involved,” he said.

Taylor reckons the future is in the kind of fishery that unfolded on the Babine River and along the shores of Lake Babine in 2012. “What the Lake Babine Nation is doing is not just extractive. They’re building capacity to have a whole operation that handles harvesting, processing, and marketing. The vision is they’ll have their own fishing company that not only turns a profit, but successfully brands its own product.”

VII. “Things Can Be Done Differently”

In the Nass Valley is a broad volcanic plain that is unlike any landscape in Canada. In the Nisga’a account, it was formed as a consequence of an apocalyptic battle brought against humans by animals. Molten fire burst from the mouth of a volcano to avenge the tormenting of a salmon by a group of young boys, and the lava flows were stopped only by the intervention of a great-beaked supernatural being. The eruption happens to mark the very moment in time that Europeans first came within sight of the Upper Nass Valley. It was in the month of August 1775, aboard the Spanish ship Sonora, roughly one hundred kilometers to the west of the Nass mouth, at fifty-five degrees seventeen minutes north. Captain Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra made note of the spectacle. His crewmen “suffered from the heat” of the event, which “lit up the whole district, rendering everything visible.”

It’s a rare occasion for such apparently unconnected forces of nature and human history to collide with such drama. But as the twenty-first century ticked over into its second decade, once again not even the uplands and coastal forests of the Skeena were safe—not with the threat of massive tankers, filled with bitumen, rolling down Douglas Channel and running aground on reefs. Place-names like Kitamaat, Burns Lake, Two Mile, and Telkwa were suddenly mentioned in the same breath as Beijing and Ottawa. The Skeena watershed suddenly sat in the middle of everything, at the vortex of world-devouring convulsions. Terrifying things will sometimes appear on the horizon as though straight out of ancient nightmares. All of a sudden your immediate surroundings have become part of a new and wholly strange cartography.

But locals had found a new voice is this epic struggle. That deep, old connection to this place was sustaining them, allying them, unexpectedly, in the fight of their lives.

“If we fought bitterly with each other,” says Bruce Hill, referring to salmon wars past, “when it comes to protecting the overall interest of salmon and wild salmon in this watershed, we come together quite effectively and stand shoulder to shoulder to protect salmon habitat in the long term.”

For his daughter, Julia, a conservationist who’s supporting campaigns throughout the watershed, it’s not about saying “no” to development. It’s about slowing down a bit, making careful decisions, and taking care to develop natural resources in ways that don’t require the sacrifice of the Skeena Country’s values. The key is ensuring that salmon and people can co-exist in healthy ways. It’s not terribly complicated. There are fewer than one hundred thousand people in the region, and they’re all still connected to the salmon in one way or another. “Whether it’s direct or indirect, we’re all connected to that, and that’s incredibly unique,” she says. “So we have a unique opportunity. We haven’t fucked it all up yet, entirely. So we are in a place to show the rest of the world that things can be done differently.”

In the Sacred Headwaters, the pressure of those usual alliances produced a measure of hope in late 2012. After a long series of reviews and moratoriums, Shell agreed to forgo all development rights in the region. Even more astonishing, the anticipated victory of BC’s anti-Enbridge opposition New Democrats failed to materialize in the May 14, 2013, provincial election. Even so, two weeks after her incumbent Liberal Party pulled off its historic upset, BC Premier Christy Clark made it plain that there was no way that Enbridge Inc. was going to get her government’s support, after all. The BC government’s requirements for environmental protection had not been met, and so Victoria “cannot support the issuance of a certificate” for the pipeline, Environment Minister Terry Lake declared.

“The BC government has done the right thing by rejecting the Enbridge pipeline for the company’s failure to protect the environment,” Art Sterritt, executive director of the Coastal First Nations, told reporters. “Coastal First Nations are celebrating this victory today by reaffirming our unequivocal opposition to oil tanker traffic on BC’s North Coast.”

A completely new mindset was beginning to take hold in the countryside. “When we look at things, we don’t look at the environment for the sake of saving the environment,” says Shannon MacPhail, the fourth-generation Kispiox Valley rancher turned activist. “In any decision, you have to look at community, the environment, and the economy, and they all have equal bearing. “If you’re going strictly for economy, the communities and the environment pay. All three have to be incorporated.”

Terry Glavin is an author, journalist, blogger, occasional activist, and teacher whose nonfiction has earned more than a dozen writing awards including the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, the British Columbia Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence, and several national and regional magazine writing awards. He is the author of seven books and the co-author of three. Terry has worked as a reporter, columnist, and assistant city editor for the Daily Columbian and the Vancouver Sun and as a columnist for The Globe and Mail, the Georgia Straight, and The Tyee. The founder and editor of Transmontanus Books (New Star, Vancouver), Terry is an adjunct professor in the Department of Creative Writing (MFA) at the University of British Columbia and a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines as diverse as Canadian Geographic, Vancouver Review, Democratiya, National Post, The Globe and Mail, Seed, Adbusters, and Lettre International (Berlin).

Gary Fiegehen has been photographing the BC landscape and working with First Nations for over thirty-five years and has contributed to numerous magazines, books, and environmental campaigns. His work has also taken him to Russia, China, and the United States. From sweeping aerial shots to detailed images that evoke an inner stillness, Fiegehen’s work reflects the countryside, the wilderness, and the animals and people who inhabit those places. Fiegehen supported the Nisga’a Nation in attaining the first modern-day treaty west of the Rockies. His photography is featured in the NISGA’A TREATY GALLERY, a permanent installation in the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, BC. His work is also featured in the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre in Whistler, BC, and represented in the British Museum, London, UK; The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC; and appeared in a major exhibition in Canada’s Museum of Civilization, Hull Quebec.

Editor’s note: Wade Davis’s piece here, from his book The Sacred Headwaters (Greystone and David Suzuki Foundation, 2011) centers around Ealue Lake, in the heart of the headwaters region that feeds the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass Rivers and is home to his longtime Native friends, Alex Jack and Oscar Dennis.

Oscar Dennis’s mother, Mary, once told me that the measure of a Tahltan was not the color of skin or the makeup of the blood but the manner in which a person treats the land. She shared this thought at a wake, as she and James buried a son. I think what Mary meant was that in a sense we all have a chance to be Tahltan, not by ethnicity or by co-opting a heritage that is so powerfully and uniquely theirs, but simply by expressing in spirit and commitment a loyalty to place.

When I first knew the Stikine, I attended a gathering at Iskut as the community rallied against BC Hydro’s plans to flood the grand canyon of a river that runs through the lives of every Tahltan man and woman. A young back-to-the-land hippie stood up and in what he took as a display of solidarity declared that if these dams got built he would just have to leave the country. Right after him a Tahltan youth rose and with immense dignity turned to the previous speaker and said, “Partner, that’s the difference between you and me. If they build these dams, I’ll still be here.”

For nearly thirty-five years, the Stikine has called me home, and for much of that time, ever since we bought our place at Wolf Creek, it has actually been home, even as my work has taken me throughout the world. The poet Gary Snyder, asked how a person could best protect the environment, replied, “Stay put.”

The moment that I knew the Iskut Valley would always cradle my family came late one evening in the summer of 2010. My younger daughter, Raina, had gone out on the lake in an old wooden canoe and had not returned by dark. Not a week before, several world-class kayakers just back from a successful descent of the Stikine canyon had flipped that very canoe, and I had fished them out on the verge of hypothermia. So I decided to take out a motor launch and see what had become of her.

Raina has a very special attachment to the lake and to all of the Stikine country. From the age of three, she had traveled the rivers with us, down the length of the Turnagain to the Kechika and the Liard, down the Taku from its headwaters at Sheslay past the Nahlin to the Inklin and Nakina and beyond to the sea. By seven she had been up and down the length of the Stikine and from our lodge had explored all the ridges from Todagin to Cold Fish and far beyond. At ten she eagerly guided guests up the trail to the summit of Sky Mountain, a faint track through the bush that intimidates many an adult client.

In the old days, Tahltan men and women often took in, and raised, children from other families; it was a natural adaptation for a hunting culture. Alex Jack never had his own kids, but he and Madeline brought up several nieces and nephews. But there was a strong sense that certain children would always remain by a parent’s side. Of Raina, Alex often said, “She’s the one gonna stay by you.”

When she was five, Raina disappeared from our property. I searched for several hours before finding her far up the creek, dressed in her favorite purple bonnet and work gloves, kneeling by a dead black bear cub as she tried to stroke it back to life. I immediately looked for the boar that had undoubtedly killed the cub and now, though she did not know it, threatened my daughter. When I later recounted the story to Alex, he took it as a sign, of what I was never sure.

It was a beautiful night, with bright stars overhead and a sliver of a moon in the eastern sky over Spatsizi. I hazarded a guess that Raina had gone to her favorite place on the lake, a rocky bluff directly across from our lodge. Sure enough, I found the old chestnut canoe tied up to a snag at the base of the game trail that skirts the trees and rises through the rocks to reach in a few minutes a promontory with a surprisingly expansive view across the lake. Although it is only perhaps a hundred feet above the water, the shift in perspective is quite dramatic. In daylight it causes our lodge to appear almost as a dream, nestled in the forest along the far shore, with the great flanks of the mountains rising behind.

Raina was sitting alone, staring out to the lake. When I reached her I saw that she had been crying, and when I asked the obvious question, she replied, “Daddy, this is my home. This is the vortex of my life. It is so beautiful. This is where I want to live and where I want to die.”

In that moment, even as engineers and drillers went about their business at the Red Chris site not three miles away from where we sat, I promised Raina that we would never abandon this country and that even if the mine went ahead, we would wait it out as a family, along with the families of our Tahltan friends in Iskut. I might not be around in thirty years to celebrate the return of silence to the lake, but she would be, along with her sister, Tara, and their children, and in time their children’s children.

This is what Mary Dennis meant, and what the elders have been saying all along. When company officials confronted the blockade in the summer of 2005, Mary swept them back into their vehicles with these words:

Great Spirit! Come on! Pray for our people, my children, my daughters, my sons, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. They’re crying because their hearts are broken. It’s tearing out. And also me. I’m speaking to the mining companies. I’m a Tahltan woman. I can go into the bush and cut my own wood and make my own campfire and set my own tent. I’m a hunter. I shot many moose and caribou. I’m a trapper. I skin whatever I catch. I live off of this land. I taught my children to live off of this land. We depend on this land. We must save it for our grandchildren. That’s why what I am doing today. And I will continue doing it as long as I’m here. I am proud to be who I am. Meduh! Thank you.

Wade Davis is an ethnographer, anthropologist, writer, photographer, filmmaker, and Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. A native of British Columbia, Davis’s work has garnered numerous awards, including: the Explorers Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Samuel Johnson Prize (the most prestigious award for literary nonfiction in the English language), and the David Fairchild Medal (the most prestigious award for botanical exploration). He has published 15 books, over 200 scientific and popular articles, and his photographs have appeared in some 30 books and over 100 magazines. Davis has traveled across the globe, producing work from East Africa, Nepal, Peru, Australia, and Vanuatu, among various other places. When not in the field, he and wife Gail Percy divide their time between Washington, D.C., Vancouver, and the Stikine Valley in Northern British Columbia. They have two daughters.

Accomplished wilderness guide and traveler Carr Clifton is widely recognized for his distinctive and artistic landscapes of remote regions. A native Californian, his work has brought him around the world from the Alaska to the Amazon. Clifton is a professional advisor for Outdoor Photographer, member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, and his photo credits number in the thousands. His photography has been displayed at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, The Nikon House, and the San Diego Museum of Natural History, among others. Clifton received the Theodore Roosevelt Founders Medal for outstanding expeditionary achievement, and he holds a degree in commercial photography from Colorado Mountain College.

At a recent conference in Smithers, people gathered from throughout the watershed and the region to discuss various issues related to salmon and steelhead habitat in the Skeena. Speakers from government, advocacy, First Nations, and scientific communities shared elements of their experience with subjects as diverse as salmon life history, constitutional case law, and the effects of climate change on water flows. Visuals included a chart titled “Defining Salmon Biodiversity” showing thirty-two ecotypic zones with distinct borders and coloration, hosting special populations of “conservation units.” And one participant walked us through a new ecosystem-based management handbook, a detailed template for conservation inspired by recent success in securing protections for the Great Bear Rainforest.

Each presentation distilled specific expertise and expressed a commitment to applying it on behalf of salmon. Collectively, the information reflected our considerable interest in the Skeena and the sophistication of the tools and process by which we seek to understand it.

The breadth and depth of existing knowledge about salmon is impressive. The extent of ongoing research and inquiry is encouraging. We have learned a lot about the fish themselves—their life cycles and life histories, who they are and what they do and what they need and where they go. And we have a seemingly ever-increasing appreciation for their extraordinary diversity, how they have evolved to express many different traits and behaviors, and how these physical and behavioral characteristics are manifestations of the diverse aquatic and terrestrial environments with which they interact. As examples of ecological reciprocity, salmon have no equal; they are a part of the Skeena, and the Skeena is a part of them.

In addition to the data itself, research has given us new methodologies and technologies with which to monitor conditions, observe juvenile out-migrations, estimate adult returns, and enumerate many different elements of our environment. The capacity to examine these local variables is helping us consider not only the nature and intensity of changes to conditions in the Skeena but also their connection to significant climate-related effects and other extraregional and global phenomena. Not surprisingly, organizing the vast quantities of data collected by limnologists, biologists, hydrologists, climatologists, ecologists, and countless other specialists is proving as complicated as the environment itself.

The panoply of advocacy groups, government agencies, and multilateral agreements, within the watershed and beyond, interprets this information and works to translate numbers into meaning. Whether used to justify new harvest regimes or to propose expanded habitat protections, statistical fragments become purposeful narratives. The empirical converted to the notional. The Departments, Ministries, Coalitions, Forums, Treaties, Agreements, Policies, Working Groups, Unions, Committees, Foundations, Initiatives, and Campaigns are a form of kinship, our contemporary clans. Without question, this is a powerful distribution of engagement—concentric communities of people with common goals, empowered with information and the opportunity to share it.

But by the afternoon of the Smithers conference’s second day, my admiration mixed with something else. I groped for definition; concern, fatigue, anxiety all failed as appropriate appellations for a vague sense of dislocation. As the succession of PowerPoints, graphs, and charts coalesced into a body of work representing years of committed research, data collection, and analysis, I felt specifically enlightened but broadly overwhelmed. Each presentation was a kind of short story, discrete and comprehensible; bound together, they were an anthology of the ambiguous and perplexing.

The more I heard about salmon and their habitats, the more it all suggested that a proper validation of our understanding required acknowledging the limits of our understanding. “Salmon” consistently defy characterization as an entity and instead affirm themselves as a network of relationships of previously unimaginable complexity and depth. We resolve the pictures in our study pieces only to find they form a puzzle without edges.

Extrapolating meaningful trends from our data is particularly difficult in the context of a resource whose natural baseline is startling year-to-year variability, and we can have little confidence that the time frames or area proportions at which we examine the system reflect those on which it is operating. And so I walked out of the Hudson Bay Lodge feeling that hidden somewhere in the space between these scales of perspective resides the central challenge of our time: how to simultaneously express the wisdom and humility required for cultivating an enduring prosperity within the inherent richness of our world.

Though people disagree profoundly about the causes of recent declines in various salmon runs, we share an angst over their effects. Fights over allocation, chronically dysfunctional government institutions, wildly differing interpretations of collections of statistics, and the attenuation of indigenous cultural narratives are responses to scarcity, expressions of a loss of control, and the antithesis of the aboriginal gift-giving culture that dominated for millennia and that derived from rituals of abundance. Desperate, we continue to search for solutions.

For over a century, on systems throughout western North America, we have applied our increasingly sophisticated understanding of ecological health and salmon life history to the problem of their decline Along the Columbia and countless other formerly abundant wild salmon streams, we have rationalized the enigmatic, partitioned the indivisible, and simplified the complex. Confidence in our understanding of parts has become a conceit that we can optimize the whole.

But the uncomfortable reality of managing a resource as dynamic as salmon is that there are probably no static regulatory structures appropriate from one year to the next, much less one decade to the next. Compared to the wildly conditional nature of a system in a state of continuous evolution, fixed management programs quickly ossify. Like a wiggling subject under a microscope, salmon systems move quickly out of the narrow, defined boundaries of our lenses. Our science, our policies, our economies, our communities, our hopes, and our expectations apply overlapping filters, each attempting to view a part of the system from a certain angle but collectively obscuring the true nature of the subject.

Furthermore, the amount of information to gather, assimilate, and integrate into policy is growing exponentially, whether because of our ability to imagine new areas of study, our ability to measure variables, the interconnectedness of variables that are increasingly transregional or global in scope, or all of the above. At the same time that we are designing management regimes dependent on such specialized research, governments continue to downsize personnel and budgets necessary for collecting and evaluating the information.

Despite these limitations, our economic systems continue to demand predictable regulatory structures from our governments, our governments need the data on which to base their estimations, and research looks for a biological consistency found only in the salmon’s certain indifference to it all.

This approach conflicts with the protean reality of salmon populations and has disappointed our hopes for their sustained, abundant harvest. In ever more urgent and expensive efforts to control salmon systems, we have restricted the very diversity of life histories that are the heart of their transformative abundance. The graveyard of policies that sought to reduce natural resource management to math problems holds more than a century of catastrophic failures—from maximum sustainable yield (MSY) to catch per unit effort (CPUE) to individually transferable quotas (ITQs) to Uncle Sam’s Fish College and the hatchery system in the United States.

These models originated in snapshots of data representing highly variable interactions between innumerable contingencies over arbitrary time frames. They were ambitious proposals to manage an unpredictable future by basing policies on a fixed interpretation of a continually changing reality. They didn’t work.

Ironically, a frequent response to natural resource decline is to cling more tightly to the agents of that decline. Even as they break, our technoindustrial creations and management structures become more rigid, like a splinted wound. We guard them as precious and grant them more autonomy in an increasingly circumscribed system, resulting in a narrowing of options for fish and for people. Expectations are passed on intact, but the underlying reality might have dramatically changed in a way not immediately apparent or acceptable to stakeholders. In this disconnect is the source of so much of our history of conflict about salmon.

In the Skeena, there remains an extraordinary opportunity to choose something different. The willingness of stakeholders within the watershed to combine science with stories, linear assessments with nonlinear knowledge, the quantitative with the qualitative, the analytical with the intuitive, and the extraregional with the indigenous will have much to say about whether the application of the wisdom on display at the Smithers conference is flexible and adaptable enough to be relevant as we move forward.

Although perhaps less tangible, these more expansive frames confer a respect for the integrity of the whole. How do we reconcile the sense that we need radical change with the instinct to act incrementally, to leave options open? How do we make sure that we place the risks of management policies on our social and economic institutions rather than transferring them to the habitat? What are the consequences of failing? If a new regulatory structure doesn’t work, and the environment itself suffers, the intensity and permanence of impacts might eliminate possible alternatives. How do we preserve the full range of opportunities, the freedom to imagine how we might choose to interact with our land in subsequent generations? How do we make sure to capture what is good in holistic intent about “integrated planning,” “ecosystem-based management,” “egg to egg planning,” “watershed governance,” and “collaborative monitoring” without actually becoming more ambitiously reductivist and losing connection to the enigmatic whole?

One way is to design our regulatory structures to be responsive and flexible while applying the best available science with humility and caution. In doing so, it is important to recognize that knowledge fragments are how we understand portions of the world, but they are not how it functions in its entirety and still less how it should be managed. No matter how well understood a given diagnosis, prescriptions derived from it are bound to fail unless they take into account the full range of dynamic and unpredictable conditions we struggle to understand and predict.

An example from the Smithers conference of how our scientific understanding might affirm the need for humility, caution, and adaptability in our decisions was Jack Stanford and Jeff Anderson’s discussion of global warming trends on autumn low flows in the Skeena. Stanford and Anderson stated without equivocation that climate will become—is already—a huge factor, catalyzing feedback loops that we are only just beginning to imagine, much less understand. As minimum temperatures increase much faster in winter than in the rest of the year, the accelerating effects of changes to ice and snow cover, hydrology, vegetation, and insects will manifest in unpredictable ways. The mechanisms of change are not regional or hemispheric but global, operating on amorphous, ominous-sounding cycles—Pacific Decadal Oscillations and El Niño Southern Oscillations—as perplexing as they are significant. Relative to the magnitude of these influences, the Skeena simply isn’t big enough to self-buffer. Stanford and Anderson succinctly but pointedly summarized the implications of the uncertain nature of inevitable transformation on management policy: “We absolutely must be as charitable as possible.”

Another way to resist the telescoping of our view of the Skeena is to keep in mind that even as—especially because—we have ever more capacity to examine things up close, we should work to make sure our lens doesn’t become exclusively small.

There are many expressions of what we know about the Skeena other than what can be plotted, shaded, and correlated, including things we can’t measure. This information has been part of First Nations communities for millennia. Comprised of replicated observations over many generations of time, these knowledge systems are not only inherently scientific; they also represent our only connection to the deep time on which most ecological systems operate.

Equally meaningful, they also encompass the culture of respect that evolved among people as a function of profoundly intimate experience with the environment around them. This was not just a form of ritual, it was an application of effective governance. Information is shared as a narrative covering many aspects of life in the watershed, not exclusively packaged as discrete data sets. We can promote and maintain this paradigm, where the results of formal research are incorporated into a broader sense of place that includes indigenous understanding and oral histories.

Accepting that the Skeena has a purpose beyond our expectations, and a complexity well beyond our convenient simplifications, we can remain conscious and celebratory and accommodating of the mysterious unfolding of life within its watershed.

The language of this accommodation is a language of magic, poetry to accompany our prose. Along with “assess,” “design,” “implement,” “monitor,” and “revise,” we need to feel, gape, wonder, exalt, and be mystified. In addition to polygons and bubble diagrams, there will be ceremony and art; in addition to units and pieces and bar graphs, there will be ongoing celebration of the continuum found only in clear streams of fresh meltwater shaded by moss-covered spruce trees. In addition to advocacy handbooks, there will be the organic, personal, and messy collaboration of people listening, talking, proposing, rejecting, accepting, creating, and working toward a vision for a shared future specific to the changing conditions in their common home.

The voice of the Skeena will be fully expressed only through evolutionary significant units and salmon kings, in conference rooms and around campfires. It will be expressed in the Tyee test fishery, at Kitwanga and Babine counting fences, and in ancient songs reminding us simply that our boxes are full. Empirical understanding will be tantamount to emotive celebration—of the glorious riot of life in the Skeena that needs nothing, wants nothing, other than to be free.

Jim Norton is adventure capitalist and director of strategic partnerships for Ecotrust’s Natural Capital Fund. He is based in San Francisco. In addition to his current work for Ecotrust, he has been a professional river guide and naturalist for the last twenty years and continues to guide in Idaho and on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. He has also worked as a professional guide in China, Chile, and New Zealand. Norton has served as a screenwriter for a number of nature and adventure documentaries. Most recently, inspired by a lost heritage of abundance in salmon streams of his adopted Pacific Northwest home, Norton wrote and produced Salmon: Running the Gauntlet, which aired nationally in May of 2011 as an episode of PBS’s Nature. He received a BS in biology (Bowdoin College), but prefers the BS around campfires (everywhere).