Some of the world’s most famous conservationists have been
hunters. Teddy Roosevelt, John James Audubon, and Ernest
Hemingway each have the somewhat dubious distinction of
saving animals’ habitats to try to kill them. Pacific salmon
aren’t often mentioned alongside Roosevelt’s elephants or
Hemingway’s tigers, but in Tucker Malarkey’sStronghold
(Random House, $28), fish is the biggest game of all.
Malarkey’s protagonist is a charming misfit named Guido
Rahr, who also happens to be her cousin. A naturalist almost
as soon as he could walk, Rahr got hooked on fly fishing in his
late teens only to realize, to his horror, that the hydroelectric
dams, agricultural runoff, commercial fishing industry, defor-
estation, and climate change in the Pacific Northwest could
bring wild salmon to extinction.
And so begins a gripping chronicle that follows Rahr as he
slowly gained access to increasingly lofty ladders of power, first
in the U.S. and then in Russia, where he discovered the last
remaining, utterly untouched salmon habitats on the planet.
The stakes aren’t just sport fishing’s future, or even peo-
ple’s dinner. Salmon, it turns out, is a so-called keystone spe-
cies upon which entire ecosystems depend. “Without wild
salmon returning to the rivers of the Pacific Rim,” Malarkey
writes, “the vast ecosystems that relied on their rich
nutrient supply suffered. The impact moved steadily
up the food chain, from microbes to insects, grasses,
bushes, trees, amphibians, birds, mammals, and
people.” A scientist on one of Rahr’s expeditions,
for instance, discovered that a nitrogen isotope
unique to marine systems can be found in
2,000-year-old trees on the banks of salmon
rivers. “The salmon themselves estab-
lished these riparian forests with the
nutrient deposits of their carcasses,”
Malarkey explains.
In an attempt to save the
salmon that are left, Rahr
adopted a “stronghold”
approach to conservation.
Unlike most government-ledefforts, in which a species is protected only when it becomes
endangered (“the Endangered Species Act was not a conserva-
tion strategy,” Malarkey writes. “It was an emergency room.”),
Rahr set about protecting an entire environment to save a spe-
cific species. For Pacific salmon, that meant preserving rivers
in Kamchatka, Russia, just as the area began to open up to log-
ging, mineral extraction, and oil and gas drilling.
Malarkey plots Rahr’s exploits with the skill of a novelist and
the affection of a close relative; she’s factual, in other words,
but not objective. Of the distinction between fly fishing and
regular fishing, she writes that it’s “the difference between a
hunter who stalks his prey for days versus the weekend war-
rior who shoots from the back of a truck. One is fighting fair,
and the other is a kind of terrorist.”
No matter where you land on the question of rods, hooks,
and reels, the stories of needless destruction are appalling.
Malarkey describes poachers’ camps carpeted with carcasses
of discarded, rotting salmon killed for their roe, which in turn
is brined and eaten by Russian and Asian consumers. One
local activist came across poachers who’d laid a net across
an entire river. “On the riverbank and spilling into the for-
est,” Malarkey writes, “was a growing mound of gutted female
salmon. Thrown alongside, the males suffocated slowly.”
As a result, Rahr’s quest has a pathos not usually afforded
to fish, which to their detriment are neither cute nor cuddly.
The luminaries who’ve lent him support—retired Supreme
Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Tom Brokaw, Ted Turner,
and Intel Corp. founder Gordon Moore among them—are ren-
dered in near-heroic terms. Russian titans Oleg Deripaska,
Alexander Abramov, and Ilya Shcherbovich, who may be
controversial figures for other reasons, are here lauded for
chipping in to protect the Kamchatkan wilderness. Malarkey
isn’t blind to the fundamental paradox of conservation under
capitalism—the people with the means to effect change are
often the people who’ve benefited most from a country’s
destruction—but she remains relatively agnostic. Stronghold
is about saving salmon, not blaming the people who’ve
endangered it or harmed the planet in other ways.
For the time being, thanks to Rahr’s efforts, some of
those salmon are safe. He helped usher in laws that
restrict mining, logging, and hatchery fish production
in the Pacific Northwest; in Kamchatka, he helped
convert 2.7 million acres of salmon strongholds
into national parks, with an additional 4 million
acres proposed for protection.
For all that, the book ends on an uncom-
fortably ambivalent note. The planet’s
looming resource crisis, not to men-
tion future climate fluctuations,
don’t bode well for wild salmon—
or for humans, for that matter.
But the point of Stronghold is
that some things can be saved,
at least in part, if you know how
to fight for them. <BW>66
ILLUSTRATION BY DAN NELSONTo protect the overfished species,
one man is going on the offense
By James TarmyIs It Too Late
For Salmon?
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