A River Starves Through It: Salmon, Forests, and the Collapse of Life

Why Our War on Ecosystems is a War on Ourselves

Introduction: A River of Blood and Loss

Imagine a river so thick with salmon that the water itself seems to shimmer, the silver bodies of fish slicing through the current in a desperate, timeless migration. Eagles scream overhead, diving to snatch writhing bodies from the torrent. Bears stand knee-deep in the rush, tearing open bellies, scattering pink flesh across the banks. The forest drinks this feast—leaves stretching higher, trees growing thicker, roots sinking deeper. In death, the salmon become the forest, their ocean-born bodies dissolving into soil, nourishing the roots of cedar and spruce.

This was once the story of the Pacific Northwest. This was life—a system that knew its parts, that pulsed with a rhythm of birth, death, and rebirth. But that world is gone. Now, the rivers are silent. The silver rush has faded to a few struggling fish, battered against the concrete faces of dams, torn by turbines, poisoned by runoff. The eagles starve. The bears search in vain. The forest grows thin and weak.

The collapse of the salmon is not just an ecological tragedy—it is a message, written in the blood of a dying species. It is a reminder of something our civilization has forgotten: that life is a system of relationships, not a stockpile of resources. The salmon are not just fish. They are trees. They are eagles. They are soil. They are us.

But we, the self-proclaimed apex of life on Earth, do not see this. We see only objects, commodities, numbers on a balance sheet. And so we take without giving. We dam the rivers to light our cities, we clearcut the forests for paper and profit, we poison the waters for the convenience of chemicals and crops. And as the rivers die, as the forests wither, we tell ourselves that we are "developing" the world.

In our madness, we have forgotten a truth older than our cities, older than our religions, older than our species itself: A system cannot survive when it destroys its own foundations. The death of the salmon is the death of the rivers. The death of the rivers is the death of the forests. The death of the forests is the death of us all.

And yet, as the world collapses around us, we cling to the lie that the solution is more technology, more profit, more industry. We speak of "sustainable development" as we tear the planet apart in search of the last scraps of life. We dress our destruction in green slogans, pretending that we can consume without consequence.

But there is no green future on a dead planet.

This is the story of the salmon, but it is also our story—a story of life, and a story of death. A story of a world that once knew the sacred dance of interdependence, and a civilization that is too arrogant, too blind, and too greedy to remember.

I. Salmon: Lifeblood of Forests and Streams

The Pacific Northwest was once a world of abundance, a place where the line between land and water blurred beneath the silver tide of salmon. Five species—Chinook, Coho, Pink, Sockeye, and Chum—pulsed through the rivers and streams like blood through veins. But salmon were never just fish. They were bridges between worlds. They were the ocean’s gift to the forest, carriers of life from the deep to the mountaintops.

A. Salmon as Nutrient Carriers

When salmon die after spawning, their decaying bodies release a cascade of nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon—into the surrounding ecosystem. These nutrients are not just washed away. They are devoured by insects, absorbed by riverbank plants, taken up by trees whose roots dig deep into the nutrient-rich soil. Studies have shown that trees near salmon-rich streams grow three times faster than those without them. These are salmon-fed forests, their towering canopies written in the bones of a million dead fish.

But this gift is not a one-way transaction. The forests repay the salmon, shading streams with their branches, cooling the waters, providing shelter for young salmon as they hatch and grow. The roots stabilize the banks, preventing erosion, while the leaves that fall each autumn feed the insect life that the young salmon depend on. This is a relationship, a living system of giving and receiving.

But industrial civilization does not understand relationships. It sees only resources.

B. Feeding an Entire Ecosystem

The gift of salmon is not just for the trees. Over 66 different vertebrate species in the Pacific Northwest depend on salmon in one way or another. Bears are the most obvious, dragging the writhing bodies onto the banks, tearing them apart and leaving half-eaten carcasses to rot, feeding insects, fungi, and scavengers. Eagles scream from the treetops, diving to snatch fish from the shallows. Wolves, too, have been known to fish, and even mountain goats—creatures that never touch the water—receive the benefit of salmon through the nutrient cycle.

This is not just a food chain. It is a web, a dance, a gift economy. Salmon feed the bears, who feed the forest, who shelter the salmon. And at the center of it all is a gift that no creature could repay but which all have the humility to receive.

All except one.

C. Indigenous Wisdom Ignored

For thousands of years, the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest understood the sacred relationship between salmon and the land. They honored the fish as sacred beings, treating their return as a ceremony, their bodies as sacred gifts. There were rules—never take more than you need, always leave enough for the next generation. Because they understood that they were not just taking fish—they were borrowing life.

But then came civilization. Then came greed. Then came the machine.

The newcomers did not see sacred beings. They saw flesh. They saw profit. They saw a commodity to be harvested and sold. Rivers that once churned with the silver thrash of life were soon clogged with fish traps, their waters choked with nets. The forests that shaded the streams were clearcut, the mountains scarred by mines, the rivers chained by dams. What was once a gift economy became a zero-sum game, a race to take as much as possible before it was all gone.

And now it is nearly gone.

We did not just kill the salmon. We broke the relationships they carried. We broke the cycle of life that they fed. We broke the world they made possible.

But still, we pretend to be confused. We call it a “mystery” that the forests are dying, that the rivers are warming, that the bears and eagles grow thin. We ask, “What can we do to save the salmon?” as though we have not spent two centuries killing them.

If we truly wanted to save the salmon, we would start by saving the forests. We would tear down the dams. We would tear down our arrogance. But we do not. Because we are not a part of this system. We are a machine, a thing that feeds on life but cannot give it.

And so we watch the rivers empty. We watch the forests wither. We watch the bears starve. And we pretend that this is progress.

II. Shifting Baselines: Forgetting What Once Was

We have killed so much that we no longer remember what life looks like. When our grandfathers spoke of salmon so thick you could walk across their backs, we dismissed them as storytellers, victims of nostalgia. When photographs showed Chinook salmon the size of grown men—80, 90, even 125 pounds—we told ourselves that nature must have exaggerated, that the stories were just as bloated as the fish. We have forgotten what abundance is, because we have become a culture of scarcity—an empire that calls devastation normal.

This is the reality of shifting baselines. The concept is simple: Every generation measures the world’s health by the conditions they first encounter. But if each generation is born into a world that is already diminished, then they do not know what has been lost. They see a few struggling fish and call it “normal.” They see a river choked with silt and call it a “healthy stream.” They see a dying forest and call it “old growth.” They do not know that they are living in the ruins.

A. The Vanishing Giants

In the early 1900s, the Chinook salmon of the Pacific Northwest were giants. Fish 70 to 80 pounds were common. Fish over 100 pounds were caught with awe, but not surprise. These were living embodiments of the wealth of the oceans, predators and prey both, the final burst of life that returned from the deep to feed the rivers that birthed them.

85lb Chinook Salmon circa 1925

But now those giants are gone. In 2017, a 50-pound Chinook was called “massive.” This was not a cause for celebration—it was a confession. It was an admission that we have erased the past so thoroughly that we no longer recognize our own losses.

The reasons are many: We killed the largest fish first because they were the most valuable. We dammed the rivers they needed to spawn. We logged the forests that cooled their waters. We poisoned their spawning grounds with pesticides and industrial runoff. We even changed the climate itself, warming the rivers, lowering the oxygen levels, making survival impossible for all but the smallest and weakest.

And so, the giants died. And when they were gone, we forgot that they had ever existed.

B. What Happens When We Forget

But this is not just a tragedy of lost memory—it is a catastrophe of lost life. Smaller salmon are not just a symptom of collapse. They are a guarantee of it. Because size matters. Large female salmon produce more eggs, and their eggs are larger, richer with the nutrients that the next generation needs to survive. They are more genetically diverse, able to spawn with multiple males, ensuring the resilience of the population.

But when we slaughtered the giants, we left only the small and the weak to spawn. Over generations, we bred smaller, weaker fish, ones that mature faster, die younger, and produce fewer eggs. What we called “fishing” was really artificial selection—a slaughterhouse of evolution, where strength was punished and weakness rewarded.

This is why we now live in a world of stunted, struggling fish, where a 30-pound Chinook is a prize, and a 50-pounder is a legend. We have forgotten that we were once part of a world of giants.

C. The Cost to Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs)

But this collapse does not end with the salmon. It spirals outward, a web of starvation that pulls at the entire ecosystem. The Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs), a critically endangered population of orcas in the Pacific Northwest, evolved to hunt the giant Chinook. Their bodies are built to hunt, their societies built around the chase. But now, there are no giants left to hunt.

Today, they chase smaller, weaker salmon. The energy they burn in the hunt is barely replaced by the meager meals they find. Mothers starve as they nurse their young. Babies die before they can learn to swim. We have even seen the spectacle of a grieving mother carrying her dead calf for 17 days, her mourning made visible, a silent scream across the seas. We called it a tragedy. But it was a mirror.

Because the orcas are not just another species on the brink. They are our reflection. They are what we become when we destroy our own sustenance, when we turn abundance into absence, when we forget that life is not just a series of parts but a living, breathing system.

We have starved the orcas, just as we have starved the forests, just as we have starved ourselves of meaning and connection to the living world. And as the whales die, we look for someone to blame, someone else to punish—never realizing that the murderer is staring back at us in the mirror.

We did not just forget the salmon. We forgot ourselves.

III. The Logic of Industrial Civilization: Systemic Suicide

We tell ourselves that we are an intelligent species. We look at the ruins of dead civilizations—Rome, Mesopotamia, the Maya—and whisper that we are different. We have technology. We have science. We have learned. But the salmon tell a different story. The rivers tell a different story. The scorched forests and starving whales tell a different story. We are not different. We are a machine of consumption, a blind engine that devours the world and calls it “progress.”

A. The Machinery of Death: Dams and Development

It begins with a dam—always a dam. Civilization’s first instinct is always to strangle the river, to take a thing that is alive and turn it into a tool. The Pacific Northwest is scarred with these concrete nooses: the Grand Coulee, the Bonneville, the John Day—gray monoliths that rise out of the rivers like tombstones.

But what is a dam, really? It is the end of a river pretending to be its master. It is a monument to the idea that nature must be tamed, that life must serve the machine. But a dam does not tame a river. It murders it. It stops the salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. It turns rushing waters into stagnant pools, where silt and toxins accumulate. It creates a graveyard where a river once lived.

But dams are only the beginning. We do not stop with strangling the rivers. We clearcut the forests that shade them, so that the waters warm and choke with debris. We mine the mountains, leaching poisons into the streams. We build cities on the floodplains, where our sewage and chemicals bleed into the spawning grounds. We even drain the wetlands, the lungs of the rivers, where young salmon should find shelter and food.

And then we pretend to be confused when the salmon die.

But we are not confused. We are liars.

B. The Profit Motive Over Life

The lie is the same in every industry, in every market, in every boardroom: We are told that the destruction of nature is “necessary for progress.” We are told that the death of rivers and forests is a “trade-off” for economic growth. But who is doing the trading? Who is doing the growing? The answers are always the same: Corporations grow. Profits grow. The power of the rich grows. Life does not.

In the Pacific Northwest, the timber companies call the clearcuts “harvests,” pretending that they are farmers rather than executioners. The fishing fleets call themselves “sustainable” as they drag nets across the ocean floor, suffocating anything that cannot escape. The energy companies speak of “renewable hydropower” as they suffocate rivers beneath concrete.

But this is the logic of industrial civilization: Anything that can be exploited must be. Anything that can be sold must be. A river is not a living thing—it is “water storage.” A forest is not an ecosystem—it is “timber stock.” A salmon is not a sacred gift—it is “fisheries revenue.” And so the world becomes a catalog of dead things, to be taken, consumed, and discarded.

This is not intelligence. It is madness.

IV. The Consequences: The Death of Everything That Matters

We pretend to be surprised by collapse. We act shocked when species vanish, when forests burn, when rivers dry to dust beneath a rising sun. But there is no mystery here. The world is dying because we are killing it. The salmon are just one of a thousand casualties, one piece of the web we have severed and cast aside. But the death of the salmon is the death of everything that matters—because it is the death of the relationships that make life possible.

A. Starving Forests, Starving Whales

When the salmon disappear, they do not just take their flesh with them. They take the forests. They take the rivers. They take the sky.

The trees that once grew strong on the blood of fish now stand thin and brittle, their roots clawing at starved soil. The rivers, stripped of their silver tide, grow shallow and warm, choking with silt, no longer stirred by the thrashing of millions of returning fish. The bears grow gaunt, their ribs pressing against their matted fur, their cubs starving before the first snows.

The eagles scream over empty waters. The orcas swim in widening circles, burning precious energy in a hopeless search for prey that is no longer there. Mothers starve while trying to nurse their young. Calves die before they have names.

This is the collapse of an ecosystem, the unraveling of a system that was once so abundant that its wealth spilled out onto the banks and flowed through the forest canopy. And yet, for all the suffering it brings, this is only the beginning.

B. Spiritual Collapse: Loss of Reverence for Life

The destruction of the salmon is not just an ecological crime—it is a spiritual one. For the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, salmon were not just food. They were sacred beings, gifts from the deep ocean that taught the laws of life: that all things are connected, that life is a gift to be given and received, that what you take must be returned.

But those teachings are drowned beneath the roar of chainsaws, the hum of turbines, the growl of diesel engines. The wisdom of the salmon is replaced by the logic of profit, the knowledge of interdependence replaced by the illusion of control. A sacred world becomes a dead world, a collection of empty symbols with nothing behind them.

We do not just lose the fish. We lose the stories. We lose the ceremonies. We lose the understanding that we are a part of this world, not its masters.

And when we lose this, we lose ourselves.

C. A World That Will Not Recover

We tell ourselves that extinction is temporary. That ecosystems will “bounce back.” That technology will solve the problems we have created. But the death of the salmon is not just another environmental problem—it is the collapse of a living system, a network of relationships that cannot be replaced.

When a species goes extinct, it is not just a number on a list. It is the end of an ancient story, a silence that ripples outward, leaving a void in the world. It is a breach in the web of life, a tear that cannot be mended. And we are not just talking about the salmon.

We are talking about the forests that die without their nutrients. We are talking about the orcas that starve without their prey. We are talking about the rivers that slow and wither without their silver tide. We are talking about a world of ghosts—hollow forests, empty rivers, silent skies.

And we are talking about ourselves—because we are not separate from this collapse. We are a part of the system we are destroying. We are the bears that starve. We are the orcas that scream. We are the starving forests, the empty rivers, the poisoned soil.

But we do not see this, because we do not know how to see. We look at the world and see only objects, only resources, only commodities. We do not see the web of life. We do not see the system. We do not see that we are cutting the strands of our own survival.

And so we keep killing. We keep burning. We keep damming and logging and mining and poisoning, because we do not know how to stop. We tell ourselves that we are “saving the planet” as we pave over the last wild places. We write laws to protect the rivers, but leave the dams standing. We declare the salmon “endangered,” but do nothing to save them.

This is not ignorance. This is not a mistake. This is the final stage of a culture that cannot live without destroying. This is the death of everything that matters.

Conclusion: Defend or Die—The Last Run

There is no time left for half-measures. No time left for compromise, for polite debates, for wishful thinking. The world is dying because we are killing it. The salmon are gone because we have stolen their rivers. The forests are thinning because we have bled them dry. The orcas are starving because we have taken their food. We stand in a world of ghosts—a dying planet pretending to be alive. And the only question that matters now is this: What are we going to do about it?

You cannot negotiate with extinction. You cannot reason with collapse. You cannot beg for mercy from a machine that exists only to consume. And industrial civilization is a machine—a death cult that feeds on life, that rips forests into lumber, rivers into reservoirs, living beings into commodities. It will not stop until there is nothing left, because it cannot stop.

But you are not a machine. You are not a cog in this system. You are a living being, part of a world that was once thick with life, a world that breathed, a world that roared with the silver rush of salmon, that rang with the cries of eagles, that stood thick and green beneath the shadows of ancient trees. That world is dying. But it is not yet dead.

And so you have a choice. You can stand by, a silent witness to the massacre, a ghost among ghosts, pretending that you are powerless. Or you can choose to fight.

But to fight, you must begin with a truth: This system will not stop destroying life until it is stopped. It will not save the salmon. It will not save the rivers. It will not save the forests, the whales, or the soil beneath your feet. It cannot. It is a machine of death, and it will devour everything unless we tear it apart.

This means that you must decide which side you are on. You cannot serve both life and death. You cannot speak of “sustainability” while working for the industries that poison the waters. You cannot speak of “conservation” while excusing the companies that strip the mountains bare. You cannot speak of “hope” while you watch the rivers die.

If you stand with life, then you must stand against the machine. You must tear down the dams. You must defend the forests. You must protect the rivers, not just with words, but with your body, with your courage, with your life. You must remember that a system is more than the sum of its parts. You must remember that salmon are not just fish—they are trees, they are bears, they are rivers, they are you.

You must remember that life is a gift—a gift that can only be received by giving. The salmon teach this. The forests teach this. The rivers teach this. Even the starving orcas teach this, their hollow eyes a warning of what we become when we forget.

But most of all, you must remember that this world is worth saving—not because it is beautiful, not because it is sacred, but because it is alive. Because it is everything. Because without it, we are nothing.

So choose. Stand by and watch it die, or rise and fight for life. Be the river. Be the salmon. Be the bear. Be the forest. Be everything this machine despises—wild, alive, defiant. Be the voice that speaks for the voiceless, the hands that tear down the walls, the heart that refuses to be conquered.

This is the last run. The waters are thin. The forest is starving. The orcas circle, empty-eyed. The machine is winning.

But it has not yet won.

So fight. Fight with everything you are. Because if you do not, you are already dead.