The Fisher King
Guido Rahr is on a mission to save the earth--one salmon at a
time.
by Chris Lydgate
It's a late October afternoon on the Oregon coast, and the sky
looks like a wet towel. There's a bite in the air, but Guido Rahr doesn't seem
to feel the chill or notice the drizzle that pockmarks the surface of the
Nehalem River. He is stalking his prey.
Standing in the bow of an 18-foot driftboat, clad in waders and
his trademark hat (a chocolate Stetson with an inch trimmed off the brim), he brandishes
his spey rod, whipping it back and forth, and casts the line into the river.
The water is black as licorice, flecked with a fine white foam where it bubbles
over the rocks and swirls past the tangle of dogwood and knotweed, spinach
green and beer-bottle brown, that crowds the bank. A freight train rumbles in
the distance, nudging a blue heron off its perch and into a lazy helix, its
outline smudged by fog.
This was supposed to be an educational trip, full of talk about ecosystems
and habitat restoration. But the boat is quiet--and the mood watchful, even
tense. The only sound is the lap of water against the hull and the triple
whistle of the rod whipping through the air. Suddenly the line goes taut.
Somehow, out in the middle of nowhere, without tracks, without bait, without
so much as a glimpse, Rahr has cornered his quarry. He reels in the line and
a gleam of mottled silver breaks the surface--a glistening 16-inch cutthroat
trout. He pulls the fish into the boat, gently disengages the hook and cradles
his catch in his hands, pointing out the bright orange slash that gives the
fish its name. Then he strokes its soft belly and tosses it gasping and wriggling
back into the river.
Widely regarded as one of the best fly-fishermen in the world,
Rahr has cast his line everywhere from the headwaters of the Deschutes River to
the steppes of Mongolia. He holds several world records. He's gone fishing with
newsman Tom Brokaw, actor Michael Keaton, Intel founder Gordon Moore and
novelist Thomas McGuane.
But Rahr is more than a sportsman--he's an evangelist. His mission
is nothing less than to save the Pacific salmon from extinction. And to do
that, he is challenging the conventional wisdom of the last six decades.
*
We're sitting in the snack car of the Amtrak Cascades train, bound
for Seattle, and Rahr is gazing out the window at the green ribbon of the
Columbia River, thinking about fish. With warm blue eyes, sandy hair and a
toothy grin, he radiates a boyish energy despite his 45 years. He wears Keens clogs
to work and totes a scuffed leather bag. He drives to the office in a 1990 VW
microbus that sometimes demands a push-start before sputtering to life.
Behind the rough-hewn exterior, however, Rahr is sharp as a buck
knife. He holds a master's degree from Yale in environmental studies and has
published several articles in scientific journals. He is the president and CEO
of the Wild Salmon Center and a prodigious rainmaker--over the last five years
he has raised $22 million for his crusade to protect the fish.
Salmon, perhaps more than any other creature, defines the Pacific
Rim. Its ancestors roamed the ancient seas when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Today its range extends in a massive arc from the redwoods of California up to
the icy streams of Alaska and across to the coasts of Korea. Because salmon is
anadromous--that is, it lives in the ocean but returns to the river to spawn--it
occupies a unique ecological niche, reinforcing and supporting scores of other
wildlife, including bears, seals, eagles and whales.
"Salmon is a keystone species," says Rahr. "It
holds everything else up."
Beyond its vital role in the aquatic ecosystem, Salmon is also
central to the cultural identity of the Northwest. For millennia, native
peoples from the Ainu of Japan to the Karuk of the Klamath River have depended
on salmon for survival. No other creature can rival its totemic significance
for the people and the landscape of the Pacific Rim. Oh yeah, it's an important
economic force, too--salmon and steelhead sport fishing in Oregon generates
roughly $700 million a year, according to a recent study by the Northwest
Sportfishing Industry Association, and that doesn't include the state's
commercial harvest.
The good news is that salmon is a powerful and resilient species,
thriving in many rivers across the Pacific. Out of the small number of stocks
that have been scientifically assessed, fully 77 percent are deemed healthy.
The bad news is that the future looks bleak. Global warming,
population pressure, mining, logging, dams and irrigation all strangle the
rivers that the salmon depend on. "We've hammered the forest, the land and
the water through a thousand cuts," says Rahr. In the 19th century, the
salmon run on the Columbia River was estimated at 10 million a year. Today, that
number hovers around 200,000. Each year, Rahr continues, the range of the
salmon retreats, like condensation on a windshield. Unless we can rebalance the
equation, the Pacific salmon will follow its cousins in the Atlantic into what
biologists call "population crash." (In 1975, biologists estimated
the number of full-grown Atlantic salmon spawning in North American rivers at
917,000. Today, there are fewer than 120,000.)
Rahr takes a paper napkin and sketches out a graph of the salmon
population. He draws a slanting sawtooth curve--a series of spikes and wedges
that sink progressively lower with every passing year. Fish population levels
fluctuate naturally, he explains. Some years they're up; some years they're
down. But the overall pattern is clear: fewer and fewer salmon. As the wedges
grow deeper, the salmon in the most distressed rivers tend to wink out--go
extinct.
"Once they're down here, everyone goes, 'Oh, shit!'" he
says, gesturing toward the point on the graph where the curve crosses the zero
axis. "But by the time you get to that point, it's too late to do
anything. You've got to get ahead of the curve. Because salmon react to things
you did years ago."
"We're in this little window of time where we can still do
something," he says, as the train rocks back and forth. "But I don't
know if we can pull it off."
*
The Rahr family knows something about conservation, at least when
it comes to names. Rahr's father and grandfather were also named Guido, as is
his son. (It's pronounced "Geet-oh," by the way.) The eldest of five
children, Rahr grew up in Lake Oswego and spent idyllic summers in a family
cabin in Dant on the Deschutes river. When he was 11, his father took over the
family malting business, and the family moved back to Shakopee, Minn. Rahr can
still remember the way his heart sank when he first set eyes on his new home in
the flat, dreary plains of the Midwest, so different from the mountains and
rivers of Oregon. He didn't care about malt; what he cared about was snakes.
Ever since he can remember, Rahr was fascinated with the reptiles.
"I always had a snake around my neck," he says. The Rahr household
was constantly a-slither with bull snakes, boa constrictors, king snakes and
pythons. By the time he was 12, he knew the Latin name of all the reptiles in
North America, and most of the amphibians. He convinced his parents to send him
to boarding school in Arizona so he could hunt for his great obsession, the
mountain king snake. He kept several snakes--including a 13-foot reticulated
python--in his dorm room as an English major at the University of Oregon in the
early eighties. When he brought girls back to his room, he had to turn the
radio on to drown out the hiss of the rattlers.
Rahr was introduced to fly-fishing thanks to a family spat. When
he was 15 years old, he had the impertinence to take a spinning rod to the
family cabin on the Deschutes. A spinning rod uses a lure, which fly-fishermen
will tell you is about as sporting as using a machine gun to shoot deer. Lure
in hand, Guido proceeded to catch several trout right under the nose of his
aunts and uncles. They rained avuncular indignation down on his head and
insisted that he learn how to fish with a fly.
Fly-fishing, as Rahr discovered, is basically an adventure into
the preposterous. Fly-fishermen don't use bait or nets. The fly--a tiny speck
of feathers and thread--is only visible for a few feet underwater. To hook a
fish with a fly, you need to cast exactly where the fish are. Then you have to
land them with a lightweight rod and a line that can't withstand an out-and-out
tug-of-war. In the 19th century, most anglers thought fly-fishing for salmon
was like weaving a rope of sand. Many will tell you the same thing today.
"It's almost impossible," says Rahr. "To succeed,
you have to understand what's going on in the world of the fish."
Something about that underwater puzzle is hypnotic, even
seductive. Rahr felt an instinct, a sort of hunger, awaken inside him. He
became a fly-fishing fanatic. He fished further and further afield--British
Columbia, Alaska, Mongolia. He set several world records for catching big fish
on light lines. He taped a 12-part TV show titled On The Fly. After graduating
from U of O in 1985, he worked at Channel 12 (KPTV) for several months as an outdoor
reporter. Thanks to his mentor (and cousin), Spencer Beebe, he landed a job
with the Nature Conservancy working in the Mexican cloudforest. He obtained a
master's from Yale in environmental studies in 1994 and worked on salmon stocks
for Oregon Trout, a nonprofit that fights for cleaner streams and stronger
fish. Somewhere in there, he got a black belt in tae kwon do.
In 1998, Rahr decided to strike out on his own. He took the reins
of an obscure nonprofit named the Wild Salmon Center, whose assets consisted
of some tents and rafts, a logo and $25,000 in the bank. Working from an office
in his living room, Rahr hammered out a new strategy to save the salmon--concentrate
on preserving healthy rivers before they get sick.
*
Stepping into the Wild Salmon Center, located on the top floor of
the Ecotrust Building in the Pearl District, is like stepping into an
international airport. The brick walls are blanketed with maps of the Aleutian
Islands, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Korean peninsula and the islands of Japan, and
the conference room echoes with the syllables of English and Russian.
That's no accident. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of all
wild Pacific salmon spawn in Kamchatka, a massive Russian peninsula the size of
California but with a population of just 400,000. Largely undeveloped,
Kamchatka is the focus of many of the WSC's efforts. "It's like buying up
Microsoft at pennies a share," Rahr says.
At the heart of this approach is the recognition that not every
river is going to teem with fish. The demands of our civilization are simply
too great. We need dams to light our cities; mills to make our plywood; wheat
for our bread and cows for our butter. Choked by dams, logging and agriculture,
some rivers are basically a lost cause when it comes to salmon recovery.
Take, for example, Redfish Lake in Idaho's Sawtooth mountains. The
sockeye salmon was once so plentiful there that early settlers named the lake
for it. But that was before the dams. Today no fewer than 13 dams bind the 900
miles of river from the lake to the Pacific ocean--and the only sockeye left
are stocked there by the government.
"I'm not saying we should abandon the lake," Rahr says.
"I'm just saying we should focus our resources. Right now, we're pouring
money into places with the lowest long-term chances for salmon survival. We
need a better balance."
The traditional solution is to build a hatchery. But Rahr is
convinced that hatcheries actually make matters worse. Hatchery fish aren't as
smart or as tough as their wild cousins, he says, but their sheer numbers are
so overwhelming that they tend to drive wild fish out of the rivers they are
supposed to be saving. What's more, they interbreed with wild fish, diluting
their genetic diversity.
Furthermore, Rahr argues, rules and regulations governing recovery
efforts are backwards, since they revolve around the concept of endangered
species. When the EPA declares a particular run endangered, the government is
required to mitigate or recover. But by the time these efforts are under way,
it is difficult--and expensive--to reverse the trend. Salmon recovery efforts
in the Columbia River basin cost $600 million a year, and many biologists say
that has barely slowed the fish's decline. "Once you've destroyed a salmon
river, you can spend millions of dollars without any real success," he
says.
Rather than work on the "eleventh hour" cases, Rahr
seeks to protect at least one river in each of the 66 distinct "salmon
ecoregions" across the North Pacific [[see map]]. If these strongholds are
maintained, the theory goes, the fish can survive the intense environmental
pressure of the next 50 years, when the earth's population is projected to
swell to 9 billion people.
With a staff of 37 and a budget of $6 million, WSC is currently
working to protect rivers across the Pacific. With other partners, it bought up
land along the Hoh River on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, safeguarding a
watershed of 299 square miles. It pushed for a salmon refuge in Kamchatka's Kol
River, protecting 850 square miles of pristine waterway. Other projects include
the John Day, the Tillamook and several rivers on Sakhalin Island. Rahr even
persuaded the United Nations to get involved in salmon conservation.
"He's built the Wild Salmon Center into a formidable organization,"
says biologist Jim Lichatowich, author of Salmon Without Rivers. "If they
accomplish everything they've set out to do--and I've no reason to doubt that
they will--they'll make a major contribution to the salmon and steelhead."
*
Dapper in a red silk tie, a herringbone jacket and leather shoes
polished to a warm glow, Rarh stands before a small audience of millionaires.
The occasion is a cocktail party at the Seattle home of Sally and Bill Neukom,
the former top lawyer for Microsoft, and several luminaries are in attendance,
among them Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard and actor Tom Skerritt.
Rahr is fishing again tonight--but this time it's for money.
"Our world is changing," he begins, as his listeners
nibble at canapés. The truth is that he would rather be casting his fly on the
Nehalem River, but fishing and fundraising are not entirely dissimilar. His
audience tonight, like the salmon, is smart and wary. They're too sophisticated
to snap at the first line dangled before them. Most will probably never
contribute. But if he casts his rod in just the right place at just the right
moment, he might make that crucial connection.
Rahr's most successful fundraising technique is, in fact, to take
prospective donors on fishing trips--and then to leave them alone. "If
someone has a great experience on the river, the chance they'll help you save
it is dramatically increased," he says. "We've done well with people
who love rivers--even those who wouldn't call themselves
environmentalists."
The thrill of catching a wild fish in a wild river is a vital part
of recruiting donors because when you get right down to it, salmon are not
particularly photogenic. They aren't cute like panda bears or baby seals. You
can't really bond with them through the pages of a magazine. When you look at a
salmon, you don't want to cuddle it; you want to eat it. Salmon arouse an
older, more primitive instinct.
Rahr believes that wild fish are connected to a part of human nature
that is in danger of sinking beneath the foam of our lattes and the static
of our cell phones. It is the ability to read the flow of a river, to sense
the unseen, to lure and land an elusive prey undistracted by the background
chatter of modern life. If we lose that, we lose part of what it means to
be human. What drives him is not the hope that we can save the salmon. It's
the hope that the salmon can save us.