Timber Wars Season 2: Salmon Wars

We hear the voices of tribal elders who remember Celilo Falls before The Dalles Dam silenced this sacred fishing spot. Many of the voices you hear in this episode were shared, with permission, by Confluence. Confluence is a nonprofit focused on the Columbia River system. The organization has collected oral histories from Native people, many of whom remember Celilo Falls before the dam.

Salmon hatcheries set up by the federal government prioritized ocean fishermen over river tribes and created genetically inferior fish. In this final episode, we visit a tribal hatchery to see how they’re doing things differently. And we’ll hear from 11-year-old Aiyana about how she thinks about carrying on her family’s legacy.

Salmon have been on the decline for more than 100 years. The federal government knows why. It knows who killed the salmon. And how. But for decades it’s been telling a tale of progress, and obscuring the ugliest truth. We’re going to uncover it.

Salmon used to be plentiful and they’ve been a staple of tribal diets for centuries. Since the early 1900s, salmon populations in the Columbia River have steadily declined thanks to overfishing, dams, habitat loss and warming waters. Hatcheries are one way the U.S. government has tried to make up for the loss of wild salmon. But it hasn’t worked. In this episode, we examine what the decline of salmon has meant for Columbia River tribes.

You heard from Randy Settler’s cousin, LiaDonna Lopez Whitefoot, in the most recent episode of Salmon Wars. She’s the one who was fearless in the face of a blockade of boats trying to block Native people from accessing fishing sites. She worked closely with Randy’s mom in the family fishing business. In this bonus episode, we’re bringing you more of her memories from that time, and of Randy’s mom, Mary, in particular.

Federal officials took away a way of life that had sustained Pacific Northwest tribes for centuries. So some tribal members became outlaws. During the 1960s and beyond, Native activists fought back against state and federal restrictions on their fishing rights – a period known as the “fish wars”. They held “fish ins” and fought for their rights in court. Randy Settler's parents won some major battles in the fish wars, but their methods were controversial even within their tribe.

To understand the war over salmon, we have to go back to 1855. That’s when chiefs from the Yakama Nation and other Pacific Northwest tribes signed treaties that are still used as the basis for laws and policies around salmon fishing. Some tribal members believe the Yakama signed a treaty under duress. In some ways, this document represents the first of a multi-generational series of promises the U.S. government made and broke. It also created a powerful legal framework the Yakama still use to advocate for fishing rights.

Host Tony Schick introduces us to Randy Settler and his family. The Settlers, members of the Yakama Nation, have been deeply affected by the Northwest’s salmon policies for generations. They lost their home, their primary food source, their ancestral fishing grounds. Randy and his parents went to jail for exercising their fishing rights. And they won some important victories along the way. Now, he’s passing the fight on to younger people in the tribe.

“Salmon Wars” tells the story of salmon in the Northwest in a way you haven’t heard before – through the voices of one Yakama Nation family who have been fighting for salmon for generations. We dig in to uncover who is to blame for the salmon vanishing, what can be done before it’s too late and why their disappearance impacts all of us ... coming soon.

What if, instead of competing with each other, trees work together? What if they even communicate? Renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has spent her life digging into the "wood wide web"—the mycorrhizal network of fungi and roots through which trees share resources and information. Her work has transformed the way we understand forests and inspired everything from the Tree of Souls in "Avatar" to the scientist character in "The Overstory." We talked with Simard about her new book, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," for her book launch at Powell's Books. Prepare to have the way you view forests and trees flipped on its head.

In 2020, wildfires swept across the West, consuming millions of acres of forest and destroying thousands of homes and even whole communities. And sadly, this is just the beginning. Fire is the future here in the West. But what we often forget is that fire is also the past. It’s what our landscape has evolved with. The tricky question is figuring out how we fit into that. So we wanted to bring you a bonus episode that dives into some of the reporting OPB has done around wildfire. Because, frankly, fighting over fire is really the new front in the Timber Wars. The battle lines are basically the same, it’s just the details of the argument that have changed. Now instead of jobs versus owls and old growth, the argument is over whether logging prevents catastrophic wildfires or makes them worse.

In the final months of the Trump administration, there were a flurry of environmental rollbacks that hearkened back to the Timber Wars, including changes that would make it easier to log old trees and a huge reduction in the area protected for the northern spotted owl. So we wanted to bring you an episode from another podcast, "How to Save a Planet," that helps explain environmental rollbacks like these in light of one of the big ideas we explored: how did environmental laws go from bipartisan agreements to a wedge in the culture wars. And while we looked at this idea as it related to the Endangered Species Act and forests, they explore it as it relates to climate change. The episode is called “Making Republicans Environmentalists Again.” For more on this episode of "How to Save a Planet," hosted by the journalist Alex Blumberg and the scientist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, including a reading list, check out: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/gmhwdon/making-republicans-environmentalists

If you’ve been enjoying Timber Wars, there’s a new show you should check out. It’s about a weird and wonderful bird: the greater sage-grouse. You’ll find these creatures in wide open sagebrush country, trying to hang on alongside oil and gas drilling, recreational activity, development and ranching, which puts them right in the center of a controversy that has a lot in common with the fight over the spotted owl. The host, Ashley Ahearn, recently moved to sagebrush country to try to better understand rural America and what this weird, troubled bird can tell us about ourselves and our relationship with the natural world, and we wanted to bring you her first episode. You can find the rest of the series by searching "Grouse" in your favorite podcast app.

In 'Timber Wars,' we've talked about how the northern spotted owl took the blame for a lot of other things that cost jobs and hurt timber-dependent towns, like automation and international competition. Well, there was another huge thing the owl took the fall for—something that cost timber towns even more money than locking up the national forests, at least in Oregon. In a year-long investigation, OPB, the Oregonian, and ProPublica explored how Wall Street real estate trusts and other investors gained control of the state’s private forestlands—and how they’ve profited at the expense of rural communities.

Is the Northwest fatally divided, or can we overcome our differences and work together? We tell the story of one group of loggers and environmentalists who have found some semblance of common ground. But it didn’t come easy. And no one knows how long it’ll last. If you want to learn more about the Timber Wars, you can find the additional reading list we mention, plus a transcript for this episode, at: https://www.opb.org/article/2020/09/01/timber-wars-trailer-episode-guide/

Before the Northwest Forest Plan had a chance to succeed, Congress seized upon the threat of wildfires to create a loophole and throw the plan out the window. With old growth once again being logged, the fight to defend it grew both more mainstream and more violent, seeding the tactics for many conflicts to come, from environmental to anti-capitalist movements.

The Timber Wars grew so hot that one of President Clinton’s first acts in office was to fly half his cabinet to Portland to resolve the conflict. The result was the Northwest Forest Plan, the most sweeping conservation plan in U.S. history. But it might never have happened if not for some behind-the-scenes dramas that played out in a Capitol Hill bathroom-turned-office and a presidential lunch buffet.

Mill City was one of dozens of flourishing timber towns, where a job in the woods or at the local sawmill could support a good life. But protests and court cases upended that, leaving locals to ask: are owls more endangered than loggers?

Throughout the 80s, environmentalists lost in the woods and in the courtrooms. There just weren’t many laws that protected trees. But there were laws that protected animals. And the idea started to percolate: what if they could protect the old growth by protecting an animal that depended on it. Depending on who you are, the northern spotted owl is either the hero of this story, or the villain. And the Endangered Species Act is either an incredible conservation tool, or a hammer that smashes rural economies. But those beliefs miss the fact that it was a single sentence in an entirely different law that locked up the forests. How a reclusive bird halted the march of chainsaws. For a transcript of this episode, go to: https://www.opb.org/article/2020/09/22/timber-wars-episode-3-the-owl/

For most of America’s history, trees were seen as crops, and the plan was to log the country’s last virgin forests and make them de facto tree farms. We see forests very differently today. How did things change so quickly?