“The Earth Said Remember Me” by Jason Dove Mark

My new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet, centers on the ways in which ordinary forgetting is an accomplice to the destruction and demolition of the living world. The scientific name for this is “shifting baseline syndrome.” Most people know of it via the fable of the frog in hot water—the critter that, apocryphally, will boil to death as it keeps accommodating to ever rising temperatures. As I write in the Introduction: “All of it—the extinctions, the clear cuts, the wounds of the minds, the looming chaos of an atmosphere unraveled—can be trace to the ways in which we trick ourselves into believing it’s not really that bad because today is only a tad worse than yesterday.”

There are already enough books focused on the world’s environmental woes, so in The Earth Said Remember Me I focus on solutions. The book is a resistance manual for environmental defense, presented in the form of meditations and explorations. I offer readers a simple, four-part antidote to environmental amnesia. Go Outside. Bear Witness. Make a Record. Pass It On.

This excerpt comes from Chapter 4 “Pass It On,” in which I highlight how the oral histories of Coast Salish peoples have been at once an anchor and a sail in their efforts to restore salmon populations.

— Jason Dove Mark

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Jewell Praying Wolf James was set to go fishing, so if we wanted to talk, I’d have to meet him at the river. The previous few days had been packed with rain and the Nooksack was running fast and strong, the currents aswirl in a chocolate-milk-like flood. It was late autumn, and the cottonwood and willow were bare. Dogwood blared red. Snow geese and tundra swans scratched the sky in tattered Vs, southward bound.

The Nooksack River forms the eastern boundary of the Lummi Nation, one of the most populous Native tribes in the state of Washington. The reservation is located on a peninsula that elbows into Bellingham Bay, a slip of woods and wetlands fringed with gravel beaches. From Gooseberry Point—a place inhabited for thousands of years—the western horizon is crammed with forested mountaintops, every one of them an island. On that cool fall day, the river was busy with Lummi (pronounced lum-EE) fishermen. They zipped across the water in small aluminum skiffs setting drift nets to catch chum salmon on their spawning run.

I live ten miles from the reservation boundary, and I’ve often walked the riverbank there. I had heard Lummi folks refer to the place as “Stick’s Drag,” for the logjams that pile up at the river bend. Jewell had another name: “Outlaw’s Drag,” a memory from when state authorities hounded Native tribes to try to prevent them from exercising their treaty rights to hunt and fish. When he was a kid in the 1950s, Jewell remembered, there was a village on the riverbank—about twenty families, plus a couple of fish houses that bought and sold the catch. Jewell and the other children were paid a few pennies each to help pull the nets out of the water. “But I decided not to be a fisherman,” he told me, “because there were too many fishermen and not enough fish.”

Jewell had come to the river for some recreational fishing. The day before, he had filled a five-gallon bucket with ooligans, a small smelt that, deep-fried, make for a crunchy delicacy. Now, Jewell was hoping to repeat his performance. When I arrived, he was standing in the shallows in knee-high rubber boots, plying the water with a metal dip net attached to an eight-foot-long aluminum pole. He had cinched a rope around his waist and tied it off to a riverbank alder; falling into that cold, swift water would be trouble. His bucket held just three finger-sized fish.

Jewell, who also goes by the Lummi name tse-Sealth, was annoyed—less at the paltry catch than at the other ooligan dipnetters working upstream. The elders would not have been pleased. “You see the people dipping ooligans there? Well, this is the spawning grounds of the ooligans. They don’t go any further. And my grandfather says we never allowed anybody to drift in between the two bridges. They’re dragging their nets over the ooligans’ spawning grounds and so there’s hardly any ooligans, you see?”

For years Jewell directed the Lummi Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office, and as he took a break from dip-netting to eat a sandwich of salmon salad on wheat bread he launched into an energetic monologue about Native rights. Jewell briefly went to law school before returning to the reservation to assist the Lum-mi’s sovereignty advocacy, and he’s spent time in rooms at the White House and the United Nations. He has the affect of a seasoned litigator, his talk a whirlwind of statutes and citations and court decisions—all of it delivered with the heat of a preacher.

“I’m always an aggressive speaker when it comes to those issues,” he said. A leader from another tribal nation once called him “the angry voice behind the movement.” “I was aggressive as a child, and rather than turn that aggression inward, I’m going to turn it outward in defense of my people.” The passion has kept him youthful: though in his seventies, his hair, worn long in a braid, remains mostly black, touched with bright silver at the temples.

Jewell’s uncompromising advocacy for Indigenous sovereignty also comes in the form of storytelling. He is the master artist of the House of Tears carvers, a Lummi collective that specializes in creating massive totem poles that fuse art and activism. Over the decades, Jewell has carved poles to oppose tar sands mining, to try to liberate an orca held captive at an amusement park in Florida, and to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks—a pole that stands in the Congressional Cemetery.

While non-Natives commonly refer to the carved artwork as totem poles, Jewell prefers “story poles.” I had first seen one years earlier, when I met Jewell as he was preparing to take a twenty-five-foot-tall story pole carved from a four-hundred-year-old cedar on a cross-country trip to oppose extractive projects like oil and gas pipelines. Painted in turquoise and red, gilded with copper, it was a polyglot of symbols from various cultures: bear, salmon, orca, moon.

“It’s a collection of stories from around the world,” Jewell told me at that time. “It basically shows that red, black, white, and yellow were all Indigenous. At one time, we were all extremely connected to the earth and taught our children how to care about the environment we live within.” Along its journey, crowds of people came to see the pole and lay their hands upon it, the carving acting as a kind of megaphone broadcasting messages of resistance to environmental destruction.

Now, on the banks of the Nooksack, Jewell had another story to share. He lit up a cigarette and I noticed that the fingers of his left hand were dotted with the blue ink of a homemade tattoo: L-O-V-E.

“I used to be head of [Lummi Nation] fisheries. From ’79 to ’84. When I was fisheries director, the fishermen were upset because I had to close down the spring Chinook fishing, because there was hardly any spring Chinook. I was only twenty-six at the time, but I had enough sense to know that we can’t keep destroying the population without consequences.”

The Lummi fishermen were livid. “They felt like I was an asshole, that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

There was a big meeting. Jewell got up and, in front of everyone, told the story of Salmon Woman. The legend is a foundation of Lummi culture, and Jewell’s capsule version of the story goes something like this:

The People were starving and so Raven, which is the leader, found Salmon Woman when he was lost in a fog. And Salmon Woman, knowing the People were starving, gave her salmon children to Raven’s people. And she sang a song to lift the fog and have her children follow her to the rivers. She brought the salmon to the rivers. Once she did, the People were able to survive. All Salmon Woman wanted was for us to respect her children. So we’re supposed to return their bones to the water and as a consequence their spirit would return to the house of the Salmon Chief, and then they would come back next year.

The fishermen weren’t having it. “We’re hungry!” they yelled. “We’ve got to feed our families, you bastard, and here you are standing there and telling us children’s stories!”

Jewell thought he’d have a minute to interpret the tale’s mean-ing: the necessity of protecting the salmon, protecting the river, protecting the spawning beds. But the crowd was getting rowdy. It was becoming, he said, a “let’s hang him type of moment.”

Then an elder, the late George Cagey, got up to speak. He told the room, “You’re right! We have the right to take those spring Chinook. Let’s go to the river and take those spring Chinook. And when we take everyone last one, let’s go to the spawning beds and stomp on the eggs.” Everyone in the crowd hung their heads, went home, and accepted the fisheries’ closure.

“He made them realize what the story was all about,” Jewell said. “It’s our duty to protect the salmon and the habitat.”

***

The Pacific Northwest salmon are the stuff of legend. They are also a textbook-worthy example of environmental generational amnesia. To read the salmon literature is to enter a library of shifting baselines, to see, once more, how easily the meaning of scarce can shrink even as the definition of abundant shrivels.

For thousands upon thousands of years, they came by the tens of millions from the sea to the rivers: Chinook, coho, sockeye, pinks, chum. Every creek across greater Cascadia had its own genetically distinct population of salmonoid, the fish home to their one stream and no other. It was a vast wheel of life churning between salt water and soil, the nutrients of the ocean cycled upstream to feed the forest and all its inhabitants. After spending their adult years in the Pacific, they navigated back to their natal waters by using the planet’s magnetic field like a compass as well as by scent memory. It was Proust-like—the fish returning to their childhood home by the lure of smell.

When the first Europeans arrived at the Salish Sea—the inland salt waters that stretch from present-day Olympia, Washing-ton, to Campbell River, British Columbia, and which includes the Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Strait of Georgia—they were gobsmacked by the fairy-tale beauty. Glacier-armored peaks towering above primordial forests, meadows dressing the riverbanks. “The country before us exhibited every-thing that bounteous nature could be expected to draw into one point of view,” British navigator George Vancouver wrote upon his arrival. A century later, John Muir called the sea “the Mediterranean of the North American continent.”

Most of all, the newcomers marveled at the fish. The once-great salmon runs of Europe were nothing more than relics; the salmon fisheries of North America’s Atlantic Coast would soon fall, too, smashed under the heel of nascent industrialism. But in the Pacific Northwest plentitude remained. When Lewis and Clark arrived on the Columbia River in 1805, they wouldn’t even attempt to estimate the salmon: “The number is incredible to say.” In the 1840s, a pioneer in what today is Oregon wrote, “I never saw so many fish collected together before.” The settlers were astounded by the fishes’ size as much as by their sheer numbers. Hundred-pound Chinook were not uncommon; “June hogs,” they were called.

It didn’t take long for amazement to curdle into avarice. Within just a few generations, the settlers transformed the sea’s natural wealth into cold, hard cash in a spasm of destruction. The first white settlers had shown little interest in salmon (their attention was focused on otter furs and land grabs) but with the invention of fish canning their hunger fell on the sea. The largest salmon-processing facility in the world sprang up in the Fairhaven district of Bellingham—not far from where I live today—and by the turn of the last century it was annually packing five million one-pound cans of salmon. As lumberjacks converted ancient groves of cedar and fir to board feet of lumber, the hillsides lost their footing and suffocated the spawning streams with silt and mud. At the river mouths, pulp and paper mills asphyxiated the coastal waters with sawdust.

The truly fatal blow arrived in in the mid-twentieth century in the form of hydroelectric dams. Concrete curtains descended across Cascadia. On the Columbia River, the Grand Coulee Dam was completed in 1942 without any fish ladders, annihilating a thousand miles of spawning habitat. After dams went up on the Yakima River, the number of annual sockeye spawners collapsed from some six hundred thousand to scant thousands. The great wheel of life between headwaters and ocean was jammed shut.

For more than a century, people in the Pacific Northwest have been worrying about the unmistakable decline of salmon. Then each new generation redefines “decline” downward. There’s always something worse than worst.

The Pacific salmon population collapsed by 50 percent between 1849 to 1980, around the time Bruce Brown wrote a book called Mountain in the Clouds in which he bemoaned that the likeliest place to find a wild salmon in Washington was in “the state archives.” Since then, twenty-eight species of salmon and steelhead have been placed on the endangered species list. In his 1990 paean to Cascadia, The Good Rain, Timothy Egan laments how the sockeye runs on the Fraser River had fallen from a historic high 40 million to a mere 2 million. Thirty years later, the 2020 sockeye run on the Fraser was a measly 280,000 fish. His-tory repeated itself—and then it compounded.

The ever-present state of emergency seems to have anesthetized our discernment. How else to explain a celebratory Seattle Times article about the return of five thousand Chinook to the city’s Lake Washington? “A splendid abundance,” the newspaper called it, even though the figure was a small fraction of the historic high. Some years ago, the Associated Press trumpeted that the fall Chinook on the Snake River had made a “comeback.” The run was about seventy-five thousand; the run in the 1930s was more than six times larger.

Recall that the concept of shifting baseline syndrome sprang from fisheries science. The latest peer-reviewed evidence comes from the salmon-spawning rivers of Idaho, where many runs are classified as endangered or threatened. The Chinook population in Idaho rivers is about 3 percent of what it was in the 1950s, and the government fisheries managers have set 10 percent of the 1950s baseline as their recovery goal. But, according to one group of government scientists, in the 1950s the fish numbers were just one-third of what they had been in the 1880s. “Even modest increases in salmon returns are incorrectly interpreted as ‘record runs’ despite being far below historical abundances,” the researchers warn.

It all comes back to memory. In Salmon, Mark Kurlansky spends nearly four hundred pages detailing the long train of abuses the fish have suffered and then, at the very end of the book, indicts shifting baseline syndrome as a main culprit pre-venting real restoration. “If the goal is to get a river back to its disastrous level of 1950 or even 1850, the salmon will not be restored. The problem is that no one remembers the abundance of salmon before the Industrial Revolution and so they cannot aspire to it.”

When a fraction of a fraction is considered success, the definition of environmental restoration has been rendered into garbage. It’s as if you awoke from horrible car crash to be consoled by the doctor that you’ll only be paralyzed from the neck down: it might be survival, but you’d never call it recovery.

Excerpted from The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet. Copyright (c) 2026 by Jason Dove Mark. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Jason Dove Mark has served as editor-in-chief of Sierra and editor of Earth Island Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Atlantic. He lives in Bellingham, WA.