By Kimberly Mayer, Journal contributor
In mid-May an event at Brickworks, San Juan Island, cosponsored by Friends of the San Juans and Salish Current, was titled “The Trees are Speaking.” The speaker was Lynda Mapes, author of a recent book by the same title. Every chair was filled when we arrived, so we quickly set up more. People poured in. As natural history and native cultures journalist for The Seattle Times, Mapes was speaking to the choir here. We are the people who show up for trees.
When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest I listened to KNOW, Seattle’s NPR news station, every morning while brewing my coffee. It was immediately apparent that legislation in this region tries to be guided by what is best for the salmon. The presumption being what is best for the salmon turns out to be best for us. OK, I thought. I get it.
Trees too have an enormous presence in the Pacific Northwest, more so than anywhere I’d ever lived. Suddenly trees were characters in our lives! I began reading a host of tree-themed or tree-centered books: novels like “The Overstory” by Richard Powers, and “Barkskins” by Annie Proulx; memoirs such as Hope Jahren’s “Lab Girl” and Suzanne Simard’s “Finding the Mother Tree,” Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees” (nonfiction) and “The Golden Spruce “by John Vaillant, an environmental true crime story, to name a few.
What I hadn’t considered was the sacred connection between forests and salmon, a relationship best explained by salmon forests. It’s so simple really. “Forests hold the soil and preserve the water and cool the streams; salmon (in migrating inland to their natal streams and rivers to spawn) bring home the nutrients from the sea that feed the forest and wildlife of the watershed,” explains Mapes. Salmon depend on cool and clean water in which to spawn. Tree canopy shade keeps the temperature cool while filtering various pollutants from the water. Because Chinook salmon die after spawning, their decaying bodies provide nutrients to the freshwater ecosystem, fertilizing the riverbanks of the forest.
And round and round it goes, the salmon and the forests. “If you want salmon, you need to protect the forest,” writes Mapes. An ancient relationship that falls on us today to preserve.
