next century. The surprises are as varied as the region itself, from the
dangerously delayed spawning of salmon in British Columbia to the
practically regionwide shrunken snowpack and perhaps happier
news—such as the discovery of a butterfly that has colonized Oregon
and Washington from the south as temperatures warmed.
“We’re seeing things that never happened before to our knowl-
edge,” says Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology
Institute in Redmond, Washington. “These things are consistent with
what we would expect in a world that is warming. It would be, in many
cases, surprising if this weren’t human-caused.
“When you think of the state of Washington, do you think of mar-
lin or yellowfin tuna? No. Well, starting several years ago, people
started catching marlin, which we think of as tropical and subtropical,
and yellowfin tuna off the coast of the Pacific Northwest,” says Norse,
adding that while the periodic climate shift known as El Niño was the
oft-cited culprit, a warming climate is making El Niño more severe,
more common, and longer-lasting.
Norse never expected marlin and tuna to arrive in the stereotypi-
cally cool, rainy region. “That is extremely peculiar,” he says.
A PROFOUNDCHANGE
Marlin and melting glaciers are concrete signs that things are chang-
ing, but they are not the only harbingers of things to come in a region
proud of its symbols—glaciers, orcas, mountains cloaked in fir trees,
and wild salmon. As writer Timothy Egan put it, “The Pacific
Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to.” Historically,
salmon journeyed upstream from the Pacific Ocean into the bowels of
the continent to spawn in rivers in Washington, Oregon, northern
California, Idaho, Montana, and Canada’s British Columbia.
The salmon have been significantly impacted by rising tempera-
tures, as have all of the region’s symbols. From the food
Northwesterners eat to the power that runs their cities, climate change
stands to profoundly affect the region. While no one can definitively tie
the current impacts to a human-caused, long-term shift in the climate,
Pacific Northwest 143