[Marxism] An excerpt from,Paradise Found

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/583402.html
Paradise Found
Nature in America at the Time of Discovery
by Steve Nicholls

For someone trying to earn his living from fish, Labrador must have 
seemed like Paradise indeed. The salmon runs in the White Bear River 
were so dense that George reckoned “a ball could not be fired into the 
water without striking a salmon.” Between June 23 and July 20 on one 
river he and his three companions killed 12,396 salmon, and they felt 
they could have killed thirty thousand if they had left their nets out. 
Elsewhere, fishermen only gave up catching salmon when they ran out of 
salt to preserve the fish. Whatever the modern community of Cartwright 
boasts about its salmon fishing, I doubt it’s anything like it used to be.

But Atlantic salmon, on both sides of the ocean, have had a hard time of 
it since George’s day. They disappeared totally from many rivers in both 
Europe and America. I remember the fanfares that greeted the first 
salmon for many years to brave the River Tees in Middlesbrough, in 
northeast England, the town where I grew up. The lower Tees is hemmed in 
by industry: a tangle of chemical works, steel foundries, and docks. 
They all emptied waste into the river, and although the upper reaches, 
with their bare gravel spawning beds, still flowed cool and clear 
through the dales of Yorkshire and Durham, the toxic concoction near the 
river mouth was as effective as any physical barrier in preventing the 
salmon from running upstream. And, to return to the rivers of their 
birth, salmon use the unique aroma of their particular river, 
percolating through salt water, drifting on ocean currents, to find 
their way. What rivers like the Tees and many others must have smelled 
like to the salmon’s sensitive nose is anyone’s guess. I spent many of 
my weekends watching birds on the Tees Estuary in the early 1970s, and 
the air there smelled bad enough to my insensitive human nose. To fall 
into the river around here meant a trip to hospital and an undignified 
encounter with a stomach pump. So any salmon foolish enough to come too 
close, even if it could have detected the delicate scent of Teesdale on 
the water, would soon have gasped its last.

Huge efforts have been made since then to clean up many of these rivers, 
and salmon have responded. Although most salmon return to the rivers 
where they hatched, a very small percentage—the Leif Ericssons of the 
salmon world—explore new territory. These pioneering fish can naturally 
recolonize rivers, even if all the river’s native fish have long since 
been eliminated. Thus, the first salmon in living memory returned to the 
Mersey, in northwestern England, in 2001. By then eighty to a hundred 
salmon per season were being reported in the higher reaches of the Tees, 
so presumably many more were running the gauntlet of the concrete and 
steel-fringed estuary. Similarly, salmon began to run once more in the 
rivers of Newfoundland and New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Quebec. But 
what happened to transform astonishment at limitless abundance into mere 
delight at the sight of a few hundred? It wasn’t entirely the fault of 
George Cartwright.

The problem is that there are lots of ways to kill salmon. Certainly, 
George and his fellow commercial fishermen contributed. Before the early 
1700s, there wasn’t much interest in actually eating the salmon, but 
they were hauled out of the river to feed hogs or dumped in their 
thousands on the fields as a substitute for manure. It’s often said that 
the first settlers in New England were shown how to grow crops by the 
Indians, who taught them to bury a fish as fertilizer in a mound of 
earth, before planting it with corn. If so, the Indians can have only 
stared on in disbelief at the profligate enthusiasm with which later 
settlers adopted this practice.

Then, after about 1700, Europe developed a taste for salted or smoked 
salmon. This huge market supported men like Cartwright in growing 
numbers, and by the end of the eighteenth century some estimates put the 
total salmon exports from North America in excess of 30 million pounds 
each and every year. Massive seine nets spread across the entrances to 
rivers mopped up most of the fish trying to enter. Often the numbers 
were so great that the nets simply burst. But being caught for human or 
hog consumption or as substitute manure wasn’t the only problem facing 
salmon.

To support the expansion of towns and cities along the east coast, 
rivers were being dammed and water mills built. Then, later, iron 
smelters and tanneries began to pollute the pristine waters. Finally, as 
the human population grew, ever-increasing quantities of sewage flowed 
into the rivers, so both physical and chemical barriers began to impede 
any fish that escaped the nets. The Connecticut River lost its salmon to 
a dam in 1798, presumably a cause for great celebration among the 
working people there, if they really were trying to avoid overdosing on 
fish. And still the problems for salmon mounted. Wood was needed for 
ever-expanding building, so sawmills sprang up to serve each new 
township. Great rafts of logs were floated down river and destroyed the 
gravel spawning beds. Any that survived often ended up buried in sawdust 
from the lumber mills. Salmon can only spawn in clean gravel, so the few 
that finally made it upstream usually found they’d made a wasted journey.

In the late 1800s, a new market, in tinned salmon, stimulated the 
fishery, and since most of the rivers near the big population centers in 
New England had lost their fish, the last wild rivers of the Labrador 
coast were soon being plundered. The writing was on the wall. A few 
farsighted people could see what was happening, though, as still happens 
today, no one took much notice until it was way too late. One of the 
most eloquent of these observers was an English visitor to Canada around 
1870 named John Rowan. “Thirty years ago, the salmon fishing in Nova 
Scotia was superb. But where nature is so bountiful in her gifts man 
rarely appreciates them. It would really seem that Nova Scotians hate 
the salmon. Overfishing is bad enough, but to shut the fish out of the 
rivers is little better that insanity.… By and by, when the forests have 
been destroyed and the rivers rendered barren, Canadians will spend 
large sums of money in, perhaps, fruitless efforts to bring back that 
which they could now so easily retain.” How right he was. In Great 
Britain alone, the cost of cleaning up just the sewage has climbed to 
over £30 billion. Industry has had to spend billions more to clean up 
its act.

But there’s one final twist in the salmon’s tale. Despite 
well-publicized returns to once-polluted rivers, Atlantic salmon 
populations have fallen dramatically over the last few decades right 
around the ocean. In November 2000, Maine, the only U.S. state with any 
remaining wild salmon runs, listed several of its distinctive genetic 
stocks as endangered. And not before time. As few as fifty fish may have 
returned to these rivers the year before. Six months later, in May 2001, 
the Committee on the State of Endangered Wildlife in Canada met to 
declare Atlantic salmon in the Bay of Fundy endangered.

Paradoxically, Salmo salar is much more common now than it ever was in 
the days of Leif Ericsson or George Cartwright, and it lives in many 
more places around the world, but these aren’t the powerful fish 
flashing silver through white water that fill the early accounts of the 
northeast coast. These are pallid ghosts, penned in the sea cages of 
salmon farms, fed bulk food and doctored with high-tech medications. 
These fish have never leapt up a falls in their lives. Yet they may pose 
a real threat to their wild brethren.

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