Salmon NationEdited by Edward C. Wolf and Seth Zuckerman,Ecotrust, 1999, 80 pages This essay is excerpted from the new book Salmon Nation: People and Fish at the Edge, published by the environmental group Ecotrust. Thirty percent of the world's salmon now come from hatcheries, but wild fish account for only another twenty to thirty percent. Almost all of those wild fish come from waters around Alaska and British Columbia, northern waters where runs are mostly intact. These are the waters from which we harvest volumes comparable to those native people caught for thousands of years, that is, in those places …

One does not expect enlightenment from a barber shop conversation, but there it was. I'd always had hunches about the nature of demographic change in Western mountain towns, nasty hunches, hunches counter to the conventional wisdom that immigration was motivated by the newcomers' love of the land, so the newcomers would become allies in environmental struggles. Nothing, however, explained my skepticism, other than the simple fact that the political struggles of my place steadily grew harder and meaner, despite the newcomers. The woman in the barber shop was prattling on about the charms of Missoula, Montana, my hometown, her new …