Original subtitles

Humans typically adopt a command-and-control approach

to environmental problem solving.

"Here's the problem. We can engineer a way around it."

Technology is great in so many realms of human experience.

But when you try to apply

manipulation and control of ecosystems through technology,

you're often successful early on, but then problems creep in later on.

One of the things that our modern society has done

is to industrialize all the living things around us.

We have factories for living things.

And that includes fish.

Humans believe everything is for us, so if there are animals in the world,

surely they are for us and surely we should just do

anything we want with them or to them, and isn't that great?

Well, I don't quite see it that way.

Fish are wild animal populations.

They're not made to, or evolved to, or really capable of

being used at the rate that people use them.

The old myth of the Garden of Eden

is a place where everything was granted and everything was beautiful.

And then, because of human hubris,

we were doomed to a life of toil.

We are certainly casting ourselves out of the garden

and dooming ourselves to a life of toil

through our hubris.

This is a king salmon, but we refer to them as chinook salmon,

which is their more formal name.

The bath here which has carbon dioxide,

it anesthetizes the fish and knocks them out.

The guys are pulling the fish out

if they're ripe and they're chinook salmon.

And we spawn the fish by inserting a needle into their body cavity

which forces air in and pushes all the eggs out.

And then, after the fish have spawned here,

they go over to the other side of the table there,

and we're biologically sampling the fish.

Would you like to touch one?

Feels kind of slimy.

Coleman National Fish Hatchery is a mitigation hatchery.

We're here because of Shasta Dam being built in 1942.

So the purpose of Coleman National Fish Hatchery

is to mitigate for the loss of habitat due to Shasta Dam.

The creation of the dam prevented about 180 miles of river access

for the salmon, so here at Coleman National Fish Hatchery,

we raise fall chinook salmon, late fall chinook salmon and steelhead.

Our production goal here is 12 million, so we release 12 million,

and we're trying to get a one-percent return.

We would like 120,000 fish return.

Ninety thousand of that will be caught in the ocean

and in river sport fishery,

20,000 back to the hatchery, and then 10,000 back to Battle Creek.

Why do we need hatcheries?

Well, I think, you know, population's going up,

water's, you know, a concern,

and so if you still would like to see salmon,

I think you're going to need to have hatcheries, unfortunately.

It would be nice to think that there would be enough water

and environment to support salmon populations,

but without hatcheries, I don't think that would be a reality.

This is the Baker River Dam, 265 feet high,

which stops millions of salmon from returning to their spawning grounds

above the dam without help,

so the United States Bureau of Fisheries has stepped in and saved the day

by providing a free ride upstream.

It's the only way the salmon can be saved

from dashing themselves to pieces against the stonework far below.

Humans have always thought themselves

as superior to nature, you know.

It's got us into a lot of trouble.

When the Euromericans came,

they believed the natural world was a big warehouse

storing commodities that they were obliged to make use of, to take.

They asked Spencer Baird, the U.S. Fish Commissioner,

what could they do to ensure that the salmon runs would go on forever?

Baird told them, "You're not going to be able to protect the habitat

through regulations because they'd be unenforceable.

You're not going to be able to protect them from dams,

because progress is going to demand that dams be built."

And so he said, "What you need to do is take up artificial propagation."

The people that originally were the fish-and-wildlife scientists weren't.

They were agriculturists.

And since the 1800s, our fish-and-wildlife agencies

have been dominated by an agricultural mentality.

Just like a farm, you raise them, you put them out, you harvest them.

That's the basis for fish-and-wildlife management in the U.S.

for ages and ages.

The fact is salmon must spend part of their life out in the wild.

And it wasn't until, in the seventies, that we really started evaluating

what are we doing when we release hatchery fish into a stream?

The use of hatcheries was a promise that you could have salmon

and you could also have the benefits of developing the river.

Put that next to the fact

that 40% of the salmon are extinct in their historic range

and the rest are protected by the Endangered Species Act,

you would have to say that that story

didn't protect the things that we value, the salmon.

We've been relying on those same runs of fish,

those wild fish, since the beginning of time.

When your health is their health, right, you're married in that way,

and I think that union creates the sacredness.

To have that relationship with a single species is real special.

You think about the Sioux people and the buffalo back in the day

before everything was colonized.

But that relationship, unfortunately, was severed.

If we let these runs go, then they are gone,

and I do not think that we, as people who are on this planet now,

should be OK with allowing salmon to go extinct on our watch.

The average person, when they see a salmon,

they see a salmon, they see a finished product.

And it's perhaps at the end of their fishing line,

perhaps in a restaurant on their plate,

but they don't see the complexity of things

that went into making that salmon.

Salmon, I think, have the most complicated,

you could also say wondrous life histories of, I guess, any fish.

They start life by hatching from eggs in a stream.

And then they go out to the ocean.

When they come back, they're much, much bigger.

You're distilling the richness of the ocean

and enlivening it.

And then that enlivened distillation of the ocean propels itself

upstream against gravity.

Sometimes they go well over a thousand miles inland,

where, after laying eggs and creating the potential for a new generation,

they die.

And their carcasses feed dozens of kinds of animals,

get dragged deep into the woods.

The life cycle of the salmon is actually the transformation of the ocean

into living beings that come ashore

and become the biggest trees in the world.

Wild salmon represent something that is really important

to us as human beings.

You have Native American cultures here

that have evolved with the fish for 11,000 years.

You have, you know, families like mine

that fish for salmon and eat salmon

and think about salmon.

And then I think because this is the age of human impact,

that where there are wild salmon,

I think it represents our faith in Mother Nature

that we allowed that to happen.

I was born to fish.

All of my earliest memories revolve around fish in some way or another.

As a young adult, I built my whole calendar year

around the Skykomish spring fishery for wild steelhead.

And that really became my obsession.

I thought of hatcheries as something that actually kind of helped us as fishermen,

that there would be more fish in the river

and we were allowed to kill the hatchery fish, so that meant a meal.

I don't think I ever had one second where I thought about conservation at all.

I thought about getting enough money for gas and pizza

so that I could fish all the time.

What I didn't realize was that we were really at the tail end

of a long decline of wild fish.

In late 2000, they announced that the 2001 season would not happen,

that the state was going to close down that spring catch-and-release fishery

because there were so few wild steelhead fish

that even a low-impact fishing season could wipe out the last of them.

It was really like a gut punch.

I mean, I had built this whole life around this fishery and now it's gone.

So that was, in a lot of ways, a wakeup call.

I started doing some research, started reading,

started talking to people.

Talked to biologists, talked to fish managers,

talked to other fishermen, and I learned about the four H's:

hydro, harvest, habitat, and hatcheries.

This was sort of kind of the impacts on salmon and steelhead people talked about.

And so I used that as a guideline and I started thinking about the Skykomish,

and, you know, well, the habitat hadn't really changed over those ten years,

it was pretty good.

There is no hydro, there's no dams.

The harvest, as far as I could tell, had remained relatively constant,

and yet we had this plummeting number of fish.

And so the one constant that I found

is that a hatchery had been operating

for the entire duration of the decline of wild steelhead.

I think that was what started kind of my focus on learning more

about the role that hatcheries play in the decline of...

not just fishing opportunities but of wild fish populations, period.

When the dams came down on the Elwha,

it was the largest river restoration in history.

We spent more than $320 million to recover wild salmon.

But instead of letting them recolonize the river naturally,

the way they've evolved to do for millions of years,

we spent $17 million to build a brand-new hatchery.

So now we're operating not just one but two hatcheries

on a river that was restored for the benefit of wild salmon.

And we missed this huge opportunity to allow the river to return

to being truly wild.

Coho 92-88. No mark, no tag.

Coho 70-63. No mark, no tag.

This is a team of interns and staff.

They're collecting our long-term data on salmon use

of the Elwha nearshore.

We then take these data, compare them over the decade

that we've been recording the information,

and look at the evolution of the Elwha nearshore

as the dam removal progresses.

As wild fish now recruit into this nearshore area,

we see these large numbers of hatchery fish.

Our concern is that the hatchery species may be challenging the wild species

that are trying to recover.

They are vulnerable to these hatchery fish,

either through predation or physical displacement

or competition for resources.

The risk is that we're actually stunting the river's ability to restore,

because these fish that literally are the backbone can't restore

because they're being pressured by these continued hatchery releases.

I do think that humans by nature have an engineering aspect.

They like things to be orderly, they like things to be predictable.

So that's what hatcheries give people.

The flip side of that is wild, and wilding your watershed.

Chinook 152-146.

Wilding does have great uncertainty to it. That's how wild works.

Wild is scary, but it's a really important place in people's soul.

Did you guys see how we walked when we were walking up here

and we were walking along the... the trees,

so we could look back into these two redds here,

where we know fish spawn.

The males are the easiest to see, usually.

So if there's males on there,

more than likely there's going to be a female in there.

And then we'll sit there and concentrate 'cause the females are really hard to see.

They're like transparent half the time.

She's moving up.

She's straight between us.

You can see the tail.

Yep. Moving up.

She's digging.

Yeah, she's digging right there.

It's going to be pretty deep.

Typically, what we see in a female is about 4,500 eggs.

Then we'll do the males now.

We'll keep them separate, keep the milt separate from the eggs.

Then after we're done, we check them for a coded wire tag.

This is the part that has the coded wire tag embedded in the head.

And that would have information on the fish.

I know some people are going to view this as being brutal and barbaric,

but this is what it takes to collect our group stock at the Elwha facility.

It's a tool; we're a tool to help recover the stock.

When we miss a female,

we feel like we have failed the fish itself,

because we know that those eggs aren't going to survive as well

as it would at the hatchery.

We brought the eggs in from the cooler.

Lay the buckets on the floor and then

divide the female for how many males we have.

Put the milt in there. Mix it. Let it sit for 30 seconds.

Mix them again, and then let them sit for another 30 seconds.

Then we weigh down 13 pounds into a bucket.

Let it drain all the ovarian fluid and milt.

Put them in iodoform for an hour

and then we'll lay them down till they eye.

That's effectively artificial spawning at a hatchery.

There's been a lot of effort over the last several decades

cataloging all of the genetic variation in populations of salmon

and their cousins, trout.

Salmon have developed an incredible amount of diversity

that allows them to be particularly successful

in the stream in which they were born.

A huge river system will have huge salmon.

Some of them used to run up to 100 pounds

in the biggest rivers that had the most challenging falls

that they had to jump over.

And then little coastal streams, they had mostly smaller ones,

even though it was the same species,

but they were genetically totally different.

Even in one river, where you have one species of a certain size,

you may have the fall run and the spring run of that species,

and those fish are completely different.

They don't interact or interbreed at all.

We've been stocking salmon since the time of Darwin.

When we first discovered how to take eggs and take milt

and combine them, hatch fish, put them back into fresh water,

we literally knew nothing of evolutionary ecology.

We would have been flying blind.

We now know that taking wild fish

and exposing them to a hatchery environment,

breeding them, hatching them, rearing them,

for any amount of time, really, changes the genetic makeup.

Fish are very complex critters

that have evolved in Mother Nature over thousands of years,

and there's things that happen in hatcheries

that don't put them through those pressures

that they face out in Mother Nature that makes them so they're a fit fish.

What happens is you create a genetically inferior fish

at the hatchery through all the domestication,

and then those fish go spawn with fish in the wild,

and that actually can degrade the genetics of the fish in the wild,

so they're not as fit either.

What we do with fish hatcheries

is the same thing as growing a chicken.

Economically it makes more sense to put a bazillion chickens in one place,

and that produces a really inferior chicken.

You know, if nature can produce X number of fish in a river,

let's dump more young fish in there.

And it's absolutely wrong.

It's not increasing our number of wild fish.

It's eventually going to extirpate all fish.

Life diversifies in order to survive.

And humans do the opposite:

we simplify, in order to make things easier for ourselves.

And by imposing simplification

on a world that has taken millions of years to so wondrously diversify

is a violent act on life itself.

Well, the fish toss is, is that we take the fish that return to the hatchery,

so these are all the fish that were raised in the hatchery.

We have this tote of fish,

and I think there's probably a couple hundred fish in each tote,

and they get frozen to a solid block and we just drop them down

and break them up and refreeze them so they don't stick together no more

and prep them for all the school groups.

There you go.

Can you guys say good morning to Sheila and Emily?

Good morning.

We talked about the five reasons why we're doing this a little bit ago.

Does anybody remember those? Yeah.

The trees.

The trees. What about the trees?

The trees need the nutrients.

The nutrients, right?

We partner with the Nisqually Indian tribe,

who provides the carcasses from their hatchery program,

which used to be considered a waste product.

They're actually full of marine-derived nutrients,

because when they leave the river system, they're about yea big.

When they come back, they're just carrying so much goodness from the ocean.

So we teach this concept to the students.

The chinook and steelhead in this watershed are threatened species,

so we inspire them to take action by getting these carcasses

back into the upper watershed, which is actually very nutrient poor.

-Can I get something? -This one's cool.

What about this? Is that a big one or little one?

I'll just get this one.

OK, let me get the tail. It's been severed, OK?

Salmon, I think they are very important for the ecosystem.

Many animals eat them.

Well, 138 vertebrae animals eat the salmon, specifically.

I like the salmon-tossing idea, I think it's a good help.

But, at the same time, I don't think it's the best idea.

The ecosystem runs a specific way for a specific reason.

We can try and help them by reducing pollution,

but I don't think that we should directly interact with the salmon wildlife

and all that wildlife

and let them run by themselves and make their own adaptations.

The conversation is, are there any wild salmon left?

Show me a wild salmon,

show me, you know, an abundant number coming back of wild salmon,

and we just don't see it here in the Nisqually.

As much as I'd rather have wild salmon, our hatchery salmon are important

to us continuing our culture and our traditions.

You know, for us, this is our church.

You know, this is our medicine here, being on this river,

and I think people have a hard time understanding that,

because this is what our ancestors did since the beginning of time.

You know, they fished, they hunted, they gathered.

They protected what we have, and that's how we lived,

and now we're in 2018, our salmon are depleting.

These are the raceways I was telling you about.

Three hundred thousand in each one.

Yeah, ten.

So that's a lot of fish.

He's going right now, pulling all the dead ones out.

We're managers as Native American people.

That's what we do when we manage, but we also have to adapt to the times.

People have a tendency to get enamored with what they wish was

instead of what is.

There's a certain segment of the people of this area

that want to blame hatchery fish for the decline of wild fish.

The biggest problem is too many people.

And salmon and humans don't coexist real well.

We're going to build our houses along the rivers you need,

we're going to build our towns in the estuaries you need,

we're going to log the forests you need.

We're going to take our drinking water out of the river you need.

We made that deal a long time ago.

We made the compromise already,

and by saying that you don't need hatcheries

to provide some sort of fishable abundance,

you're saying you're going back on that deal.

There's a lot of runs in the northwest right now

that if it wasn't for hatchery fish, they'd be extinct,

because their progeny are hatchery fish.

Where those fish have blinked out, they use hatchery fish to bring them back.

I would like to see us make hatchery fish as much like wild fish as possible.

I'd like to see us make them do as little harm to wild fish as possible,

and I'd like to replace habitat, replace culverts,

do everything you can to reduce the human footprint on salmon habitat

and make sure that hatchery and wild fish both are here forever.

It kind of offends me when people say that I don't care about their habitat

or I don't care about conserving them.

Hunters and fishermen and sportsmen

have always been at the front of conservation and habitat reforms.

If there's a problem, we notice it

and we like to address it, not just whine about it.

The reason that I'm involved in conservation efforts, when I was younger,

is because I was hoping I'd see a result.

But as I get older, I'm starting to think that's less and less likely

because again we don't seem to, as a society,

be willing to address the real issues.

Nature's gone.

You're viewing this through some Disneyland idea

that we can still do all this bad stuff and recover salmon.

Nope.

The southern resident killer whale population

that I've been studying for 42 years began a serious decline around 1995.

There was almost a hundred whales.

But we're down to 74 right now.

Salmon and orcas are just predator-prey. They're like that.

If you have a decline in the food, you have a decline in the whales.

Most of those fish right now are hatchery produced

and they're getting smaller and smaller every year.

They averaged 22 pounds, and now they're averaging 8 and 10 pounds.

The wild runs are being exterminated by the hatchery production.

And the whales will follow the wild fish to extinction.

The icon of the northwest is starving.

A mother orca whose calf died after birth

is still carrying her baby 17 days later.

Researchers say that they're now concerned for the mother's health.

We had this whale coming in.

Had a brand-new baby; one of our colleagues saw it,

took a picture of her,

and by the time our boat got there 30 minutes later, she was dead.

And the mother started pushing the dead calf around.

OK, toward her, toward her. Go ahead.

And baby in mouth. Yes.

There it was.

Yeah. See if she does it again.

Yeah.

Well, she pushed this dead baby for 17 days.

You know, it was a tour of grief that went on and on and on.

We want to welcome you

to our last task force meeting for this year.

Governor Inslee convened this task force

to save the southern resident killer whales.

The easy fix that our own Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife says,

"Oh, well, we'll just increase hatchery production by 50 million fish."

Well, wait a minute.

Why don't you look at what's happened with hatchery production

and see that it's not working?

And you want to do more of what doesn't work?

Nobody wanted to hear "stop fishing." That was almost untouchable.

It wasn't about whale or fish requirements.

It was all about commerce.

Everybody wants to save the whales.

Nobody wants to change our own way of life.

It's a very difficult choice for our society

to look at what we're doing,

what we have done over the years in terms of fisheries management,

and change the paradigm.

I didn't realize until about a month had passed

how depressed I was.

I'm seeing all this before my very eyes and documenting it.

And that's the part that is troubling to me, is that, uh...

I'm going to be in charge of keeping track

of the extinction of these animals.

But if it's a lesson to our society, that, hey, we've got to change,

maybe that's what I have to do.

We're going to die of a loneliness of spirit,

with all the creatures gone.

Every year, Idaho Power partners with other biologists

to raise and release 6.8 million chinook and steelhead.

The next generation of fish needs next generation ideas.

Our innovative approach maintains abundant fish populations,

giving anglers a chance to land brag-worthy steelhead.

Fish on.

Hatcheries are pawns in a game of political power.

The whole thing is about money.

Fishing is a huge industry

and every state is competing with each other for those dollars.

It's not about conserving our resources, it's perverting our resources

on a short-term bet to get tourist dollars in.

In fact, federal dollars to support fish-and-wildlife agencies

is based on how many license sales there are in each of those states.

The internal finances is that it provides power and wealth

to the agencies themselves.

To build a new hatchery, it's millions and millions of dollars

of high extensive automated piping and flow systems,

so you have lots of temperature control on lots of different fish-rearing stations

so that you can raise different species up to different sizes

and maximize production.

We've got the water costs, electrical costs,

building maintenance costs

and just the feeding costs for the fish,

so we're looking at plus-or-minus $20 million

in assorted costs throughout a year.

It's a major business and there's portions of that business

that 20-plus employees are doing year round.

Hatcheries are a perfect example of political pork.

They spread the hatcheries around their state.

They're in almost every county of the state.

They target them on key members of the state senate

and the state legislature.

As a result, they buy the support of that local person.

These hatcheries are a subsidy to commercial fishermen,

recreational fishermen, and it's being paid for

by all the taxpayers.

I think one of the main reasons why it's important

that people understand what's going on

is just purely the waste of their money that's happening.

In Washington state alone, there are 174 hatcheries

producing more than 190 million salmon every year.

On the west coast, over 90% of the "wild-caught salmon"

you find in markets actually came from hatcheries.

Between California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho,

citizens pay for the release of almost 280 million fish per year.

Last year, between the United States, Canada, Russia, Korea, and Japan,

five billion salmon were released into the North Pacific.

When I wrote my first book,

the Bonneville Power Administration

was spending about $140 million or $150 million

on their program.

Since 1982, they've spent 15 billion.

The General Accounting Office

did a survey and they showed that hatcheries consumed 40% of that.

The big question is,

who pays for the raising of the fish and who gets the benefits?

Fish that go out of the Columbia River circle around Alaska,

some fish even as far as Russia.

Their survival rate goes down to .001 or so.

Some of those fish, we figure, cost over a thousand dollars.

The Entiat Hatchery on the upper Columbia was producing spring chinook salmon

that were costing $68,031 per harvested fish.

State and federal agencies plant more than a hundred million rainbow trout

in waters across the United States every year.

In some of our most protected wilderness areas,

places high in the mountains

where you're not even allowed to ride a mountain bike

or pick a wildflower...

taxpayers spend money every year to drop millions of non-native fish

by airplane or helicopter, just so visitors have something to catch.

Billions of dollars of citizen public money is spent

to support something that clearly does not work.

We're on a path to where there eventually will be no fish,

and we will have spent billions of dollars to get to that point.

The ironic thing is that fish know how to do all this.

They know how to live in those environments, they know how to reproduce.

So if we allow fish to get back to being fish

and doing what they do in those environments,

in pulling back some of our infrastructure, restoring streams,

we reap the benefits free of charge.

The concept in the earliest days of settlement in the west

was that there was a God-given right to take from it what we could.

Times change, needs change.

Understanding of our place in the universe changes.

And the world's becoming a smaller and more crowded place.

But this understanding that we have to take care of the land,

that it's not infinite, it won't continue to produce and provide for us

unless we look at it and manage it responsibly,

that is a relatively new concept.

Managing our water resources is important in our agricultural pursuits,

but also this water has tremendous values to this fishery.

And this fishery is one of the great fisheries in the world,

and our local economy is based on that.

So for us to succeed, we need our community and our river systems

to be as healthy as possible.

Going back a ways, this is really the place in Montana

where the concept of a wild fishery started.

There were hatchery-raised fish that were put in here

based on the idea that the more fish we had in the river,

the more fish would be caught by fishermen,

the better our economy would be.

Then lo and behold, they discovered something very surprising.

We were doing estimates now on the Madison,

and we were seeing a lot of young brown trout in the lower river,

but the next year they would be gone.

One of the first things I kept seeing is

we stocked the best waters.

The waters that had the best fisheries

were the ones where we were putting catchables.

I proposed a study.

Leave Norris alone, don't stock it.

We'll take Varney, not stock it,

and take O'Dell Creek, which has never been stocked.

Let's stock it and see what happens.

The first year that we didn't stock Varney, the upper river,

the population of brown trout doubled.

And, of course, when we stocked O'Dell Creek,

the population halved.

We didn't know we were doing damage.

We figured, well, there's two out there and we put two more in,

we've got four fish now and that's better than two fish.

Well, that's not the math that works in reality.

Once that information became available through the Madison-O'Dell studies,

that maybe our dollars were being lousily spent,

in fact, we were destroying what we were trying to protect,

well, they said any waters that had self-sustaining trout populations

could not be stocked, period.

And it came policy.

Shortly after that program was initiated,

you saw the population of this river just skyrocket with wild fish.

We started our fly shop in 1979, a few years after the hatchery program

was dissolved on the Madison River.

And we were fortunate to catch that wave of a wild trout fishery.

We saw an increase in the number of anglers that came to Montana,

came to the Yellowstone area, and specifically southwest Montana,

to experience those wild fisheries.

And that's what really kicked in the fly-fishing businesses at that time.

People are more attuned to a healthy river

because they see what's happened here.

They see the whole cascade of everything that benefits

because of a wild trout fishery, including a local economy.

The one thing that came out of this to me

is the change in behavior of the humans

when they saw that they weren't going to be given fish,

that they become more vigilant.

And habitat becomes more important

when they realize that's how they get their fish.

As most of you already know,

we had a major eruption occurring at 8:32 approximately this morning

on Mount St. Helens.

It does appear that the northwest flank of the mountain seems to be gone.

When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1981,

there was a massive explosion that tore off about 1/3 of the top of the mountain.

Most of that effluent went down the Toutle River Basin.

Look at this, it doesn't even look like the same country.

I can't believe I used to camp up in this area.

This doesn't look like anyplace I've ever been before.

The consequences at the river were startling.

The upper canyon of Toutle was totally de-vegetated.

There were chasms of volcanic effluent.

Anything living in the stream was virtually destroyed.

It brought back a sense of hopelessness.

At that point, there was the feeling that evolution

and recolonization of rivers may take tens of thousands of years.

As a result, that meant that no more hatchery fish were put into it.

What became evident in the Toutle River system

is that the steelhead in particular came back above what they were

prior to the eruption five years later.

By seven years later, they more than doubled.

So those first years at the Toutle River were a prime example

of what wild fish can actually do

in the most absolute adverse conditions,

if they are not constrained by having to intermix with hatchery populations.

Unfortunately, as the Toutle River began to show that it can produce fish,

back we went to the hatchery programs again.

Hatchery numbers went up, wild fish went down.

Same old story.

Loss of faith in nature is the problem.

Nature knows how to make fish work.

The best thing that we as human beings can do

and that the salmon and steelhead ask of us...

"Just get out of our way."

Salmon famously have to fight their way upstream to spawn,

but thanks to hydroelectric dams, that's become increasingly difficult.

But don't worry, because as we found out recently, America is on it.

I'm Ben Tracy in Washington state,

where we're going to introduce you

to a pretty sweet piece of technology known as the salmon cannon.

In your darkest moments of despair,

when you see a world torn apart by war,

I want you to remember that video and think,

"We can do great things."

We can do great things!

Humans believe we can do anything and everything all the time,

and that "can do" spirit has gotten us far and made a lot of changes in the world,

certainly made a lot of us able to continue living

at gigantic population densities.

But it has its limits, and we don't understand anything about those limits.

An example of a good myth is Icarus.

Icarus was a tinkerer and he wanted to free himself

from the bounds of Earth and gravity, he wanted to fly.

So he made wings, he made wings of wax.

And he flew.

Because he didn't sense any limits, he flew too close to the sun.

The sun melted his wings and he came crashing down to earth.

So the greater truth in that is,

beware of hubris.

Exercise some humility.

And be careful when you're tinkering.

I'm 55 years old now.

I've been living with my salmon fishing all my life.

I've tried to follow my heart.

I mean, I'm not rich in money.

But I've had 6,000 days on salmon rivers all around the world,

which makes me rich in a different way.

The salmon fishing in Norway is central to all the small towns

that are located on the river, and in the old days,

the salmon used to be the thing that was feeding the people.

It's special, special to Norway.

Now it's also special in the other way because the second biggest industry

is this fish-farming thing that is now...

it's threatening to kill what's the original fish.

We were so stupid, I was so stupid,

because when they started fish farming, I thought,

"Hey, this is the solution to everything."

We farm the fish and they don't have to kill our wild fish,

they don't have to kill the fish I want to fish for,

and the stocks will go up and all will be fantastic.

In very short time, we learned that the sea lice

were killing the wild smolt living in the river.

Fewer fish were coming up.

You know, they say that one of these farms out here,

they produce as much shit than the whole town of Oslo,

and they just leave it in the fjord.

When it's polluted enough, you move to another location

and you can pollute another place.

Then there are more fish escaping from Norwegian fish farms

than all the Norwegian wild salmon rivers produce.

And they mix with the wild stock.

And they destroy the unique DNA of the fish.

Alta's got the biggest Atlantic salmon in the world.

There are more 50-pounders caught here than anywhere else.

There's quite a big difference on the river that I see today.

The DNA on the Alta salmon is not like it was before.

I see no difference between a fish farm and a hatchery fish.

Because of gene pollution.

You get escapees from these fish farms, sometimes millions of fish escape.

And then they breed with wild fish, dumbing down the genes.

We're reversing natural selection.

We're devolving these fish.

I really always wanted to see... see one of these farms.

We got into our wetsuits...

then we jumped into the sea.

And we sneaked up to one of these farms.

I knew I was going to see a lot of fish.

But I didn't think it was going to be that bad.

It was so full of sick fish.

They had fungus. They looked like S's.

There were wounds big as my hand.

Nobody should eat this.

You show this to the moms that want to feed their kids with this.

They will never buy one of these fish.

It was like, if you should walk into a farm

where you have cows that would have big wounds bleeding

and lying down, barely breathing.

Who would eat that?

No one, but these things are happening under the surface, you know?

Nobody knows about this.

The thing is, we lost one thing here and we lost respect for the ecosystem.

We're the guys that should protect the rivers,

protect them from all kinds of farms and hatcheries and all this.

My responsibility is not to feed the people in the world, OK?

If I have a responsibility,

it is to say when I see things are wrong with what I like

and what I love, and that's the rivers and salmon.

Solution is there.

And that is to get these into the closed tanks.

If it will double the price of the salmon, it's worth it.

What's the price of an ecosystem? What's its worth?

Skagit 911. What is your emergency?

My husband and I are on our boat in Eagle Harbor,

and the middle fish pen is breaking apart.

It's huge, and the whole thing is buckling.

There's a forklift that looks like it's about ready to go in the water.

Looks pretty dramatic to me.

Well, what just happened was that there was a catastrophic failure.

One of the net pens off of Cypress Island completely imploded.

The fish that escaped are Atlantic salmon.

They're not Pacific salmon.

We're talking 305,000 exotic species

are now polluting Puget Sound.

These fish are going to be entering into our rivers,

competing with our wild fish in the spawning grounds,

competing with them for food,

bringing diseases and parasites and viruses to these wild fish,

and it's a disaster.

When I heard that 300,000 Atlantic salmon escaped

into the ocean environment, I immediately kind of dropped everything

and knew that this was something that I needed to go and document,

because I knew that no one else was getting the underwater side of things.

Diver in!

I didn't expect to see the level of destruction that I saw.

Uh, the pens were totally split open and completely destroyed.

There were holes all through them that the Atlantic salmon had escaped from.

Then there was a few fish left,

gasping, caught in the nets.

But other than that, the fish were gone into the marine environment

and clearly unaccounted for.

Galactic Ice, Galactic Ice, Galactic Ice.

We ask that you remove your diver from the water immediately.

This is classified as trespassing.

We suggest you please halt these operations.

Cypress Fish Farm, over and out.

It was an extremely charged scene.

It seems like it's a big secret what's going on under there,

and the last thing that these companies want

is people to go under and actually see what's going on,

because then these stories that they're telling the public,

it's so easy to poke holes in them when you get footage

of what's actually going on on the farms.

The concept of an emergency response plan

is, it's a bit humorous.

It's basically, "Tell the commercial fishers and the recreational fishers

to go out and fish because now we have more fish for you."

It's like telling the people when the Exxon Valdez spilled...

"Free oil! Go collect it!"

Every single day, our public trust is being undermined

by the pollution that these pens are putting into our sound,

the viruses and parasites, pharmaceuticals that are going into our waters.

The industrial model is to make as much money as you can

as quickly as you can, regardless of the environmental consequences.

What we're seeing today, what we've seen over the last couple of days,

are those environmental consequences coming home.

It turns out that Washington is the only west coast state

that allows open-water net pen salmon farms.

To me, it's really an outrage that this is even allowed.

You know, I think anybody who's concerned with the state of the environment

and our planet thinks about the future, and especially if you have children.

You start to feel like, OK, what's the world going to be like for them?

It feels really important to me that they participate

in protecting their own future.

We're so busy these days that to be unified on these things,

whether it's fighting to make sure that there are salmon in the future

or going out to catch fish, those become really precious times

for a dad who's watching his kids grow up really fast.

We thought we'd go out there with a few boats

and wave some signs around and protest it.

But it turned out that people from all walks of life

that use the sound or enjoy living near a healthy sound,

were also outraged.

The Suquamish tribe was there to protest.

There were commercial fishermen there. There was a whole fleet of kayaks.

There was a lot of sport fishing boats.

I mean, there was even a guy on a Jet Ski carrying a sign around.

We spent the few days ahead of time making some signs to carry

and laughed about sort of what we would say and what the slogans were.

But underlying it all, I think the kids feel like

they're able to participate in the things they care about.

I think we made our point because now here we are months later,

and there's actually three pieces of legislation that are pending

affecting net pens.

Wild salmon are threatened by these sorts of facilities.

The day-in-day-out impacts to our magical, majestic Salish Sea

cannot go unchecked.

It is unconscionable that when we are spending tens and tens

of millions of dollars to protect and recover wild salmon,

we would allow an invasive species to be introduced to our ecosystem.

Mr. President, there are 35 yea, 12 nay, 2 excused.

Having received a constitutional majority, second substitute Senate bill 6086

is declared passed; the title of the bill will be the title of the act.

The Yurok belief is that we have been here since the beginning of time.

At one point, this Earth was a lonely rock in the universe floating by itself

and it began to get sad and its tears became the ocean

and it finally came to be what we have today.

The Wah-gay, the spirit people, started creating this world.

And one of the things they had done was made a relationship

between us and the salmon.

And the salmon were put here so they could sustain us

and that we would always have a food source

and that way we'd always live and we would always be prosperous.

We also have a story of, if we don't take care of this world

and there are no more salmon,

then there will be no more need for Yurok people.

The 2002 fish kill was really like the canary in the coal mine.

It was a low-water year, but ag got their water.

If you divert that much water and flows get so low on the planet,

you will have some kind of major fish disease outbreak.

That's exactly what happened.

Seventy thousand adult salmon died, all within the Klamath River.

The dead fish were lining the banks, you know, three, four layers deep.

And it smelled like death.

In a wild river, nothing like that happens, right?

That is not a natural thing.

The future, if it goes unchanged,

it is going to be the destruction of salmon species

on the west coast of the United States.

The tribe voted not to have a commercial salmon season this year

because of the low projected numbers.

And the subsistence amount was the lowest I think I've ever seen.

Tribal members used to live almost solely on returning fish runs,

and now this year we get less than one fish per person?

How can you possibly look at that

and not realize that there is a gigantic problem here?

These reductions of the salmon runs, the big picture is,

is they're affecting our health.

We know those omega oils, those omega 3s and 6s in salmon

are very heart healthy.

That's why we have a lot of elders that live to ripe old ages.

But the point is, is that, what's going to happen down the road?

What's going to happen to our people?

When your society, when your culture, when your belief

is connected directly to the world around you,

when you're raised with the sense that you are a part of everything

in your surroundings and your natural environment,

it does something to your community's psychology

and mindset when you start to see

that world crumble and break.

As the decline of the salmon runs come back,

you can see a direct correlation with the decline of us as a people.

It's just a disruption of the whole sort of cycle of the tribe

and what we do as a people...

because that fishing isn't there.

And I think when that happens, then all of us feel pain.

You know, it's like we grieve for that.

A lot of times when you're grieving or when you're hurting over something,

you turn to drug and alcohol.

And so we're seeing spikes in drug and alcohol rates.

There's an opioid crisis on the reservation right now.

There's a suicide crisis on the reservation right now.

All of these things are connected,

in part because when you take away the river,

you take away the fishery, you take away that core component

of who we are as a people and then it kind of falls apart,

and people start getting in trouble.

That's where we are now, and that's why you have

all those other sort of issues arising in our community.

Go, boy!

The traditional game of sticks,

it's actually one of the few pieces of Yurok culture that never went away.

You have a stick and you have a tossle.

Take the tossle and make it go through the goal,

and you do that any way you can.

Today we play of no hitting with the stick,

no stabbing, no eye gouging and no choking.

Other than that, everything is game and everything is fair to play.

If you can take it, you can give it out a little bit, you get to play.

It teaches those lessons in life,

that it's important to Yurok to be tough, to be respectful,

and to fight regardless of what the size difference is.

I think it lends a lot to why, when we get into conflicts,

or when we get into fights like the dam,

we don't care who the biggest, richest man in the world who owns it,

because we'll play up every day of the week.

We don't care.

Hey, hey, ho, ho, Klamath Dam's about to go!

Hey, hey, ho, ho, Klamath Dam's about to go!

Un-dam the Klamath! Bring the salmon home!

Un-dam the Klamath! Bring the salmon home!

We all kind of came back together and decided

that this was one we were going to fight.

The FERC license for the dams expired.

There was this opportunity to pursue dam removal.

And so that's where the fight went.

Federal, state and local lawmakers

has come up with a way to do what Congress could not:

get the water and the fish in the Klamath River flowing freely again.

We're starting to get it right

after so many years of getting it wrong.

This is the crown jewel of salmon country.

This is it right here.

The people want it to be wild.

They want it to be what it was before the dams,

before colonization, before agriculture.

The work that the tribe is doing is to redirect the energy

to a place where we're focusing on that comprehensive restoration

to get the wild runs back,

as opposed to agreeing to some kind of short-lived political compromise,

like the hatchery ideas, that really just put Band-Aids

on, you know, gaping wounds.

The approach is, we're here forever,

and we want those wild salmon to be here forever,

and that's what we're planning for and that's what we're working on.

Having a wild river,

having the wild salmon, it puts the community back together

and it gives them purpose

and it allows us to fulfill that initial promise

that we made to the Creator, right, about taking care of this river

and living in a balance with us.

And when you do that as a people, you feel good.

That's like the ultimate self-determination,

that's the ultimate sovereignty, is to be able to live in a way

that is consistent with your own cultural values.

And that's what we're fighting for.

You could say that everything we learn,

we learn from the stories that we are given.

You could also then say that all the problems we have

are symptoms of stories that were wrong,

stories we told ourselves and stories we passed on,

where we misunderstood things deeply.

If hatcheries were successful and were addressing the situation,

we wouldn't be having this discussion today.

The underlying causes of the problems are still there,

and after all these years,

we're still having to put fish out there every year to keep them going.

Perhaps it's time to pull back and question,

is this the right path forward?

How far do we go to manufacture wildness

before we realize what we're really doing

and think about alternative approaches, like protecting and restoring wild things?

There's no right way to do the wrong thing.

The right thing is to work on our rivers that we've destroyed

and turned into sewers and dammed up and fix that,

so that we have wild fish.

This little issue is just a reflection of what we're doing to the whole planet.

It's more than just our relationship with fish.

It's how we're trying to control nature rather than work with nature.

A life without wild nature, a life without these great iconic species,

is an impoverished life.

If we lose all wild species, we're going to lose ourselves.