The internationally bestselling author says if we can save the salmon, we can save the world

Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Award, American Society for Environmental History

A photo essay describing a young native Alaskan boy fishing for salmon on Kodiak Island as his ancestors have done for generations.

This beautiful and definitive guide brings together the world's lead leading expert on North American trout and salmon, Robert Behnke, and the foremost illustrator in the field, Joseph Tomelleri. North America is graced with the greatest diversity of trout and salmon on earth. From tiny brook trout in mountain streams of the Northeast, to cutthroat trout in the rivers of the Rockies, to Chinook salmon of the Pacific, the continent is home to more than 70 types of trout and salmon. How this came to be, how they are related, and what makes them unique -- and so breathtaking -- is the story of Trout and Salmon of North America. The more than 100 illustrations of trout and salmon by Joseph Tomelleri showcased here exhibit a genius for detail, coloration, and proportion. Each portrait is made from field notes, streamside observations, photographs, and specimens collected by the artist. The result is a set of the most accurate and stunning illustrations of fish ever created. Robert Behnke has distilled 50 years of his research and writing about trout and salmon in completing this book. No one understands better than Behnke the diversity and conservation issues concerning these fishes or communicates so lucidly the biological wonders and complexities of their particular beauty. Also included are more than 40 richly detailed maps that clearly show the ranges of populations of trout and salmon throughout North America. An irresistible delight for anyone who appreciates natural history, Trout and Salmon of North America is a master guide to the natural elegance of our native fishes.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and a former private investigator dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told. A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on North America’s dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different. In Salmon Wars, investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring readers to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon are crammed into parasite-plagued cages and fed a chemical-laced diet. The authors reveal the conditions inside hatcheries, where young salmon are treated like garbage, and at the farms that threaten our fragile coasts. They draw colorful portraits of characters, such as the big salmon farmer who poisoned his own backyard, the fly-fishing activist who risked everything to ban salmon farms in Puget Sound, and the American researcher driven out of Norway for raising the alarm about dangerous contaminants in the fish. Frantz and Collins document how the industrialization of Atlantic salmon threatens this keystone species, endangers our health and environment, and lines the pockets of our generation's version of Big Tobacco. And they show how it doesn't need to be this way. Just as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation forced a reckoning with the Big Mac, the vivid stories, scientific research, and high-stakes finance at the heart of Salmon Wars will inspire readers to make choices that protect our health and our planet.

Nautilus Award Silver Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment In search of a new story for our place on earth Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture’s tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon—weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of our horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it, and considering how this enriches our understanding of humanity in the process. Being Salmon, Being Human is both a philosophical and a narrative work, rewarding readers with insightful interpretations of major philosophers—Descartes, Heidegger, Abram, and many more—and reflections on the human–Earth relationship. It stands alongside Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, as well as Andreas Weber’s The Biology of Wonder and Matter and Desire—heralding a new “Copernican revolution” in the fields of biology, ecology, and philosophy.

Introducing Alaska’s answer to the Pioneer Woman: Two sisters share their remarkable life story as fisherwomen of the Aleutian Islands—plus 50 sustainable seafood recipes that honor the beauty of wild foods. Share in the remarkable and wild lives of Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton, the Salmon Sisters, who grew up on a homestead in the Aleutians where the family ran a commercial fishing boat in the Alaskan sea. Their book reveals through stories, recipes, and photography this outward-bound lifestyle of natural bounty, the honest work on a boat's deck, and the wholesome food that comes from local waters and land. Here are creative and simple ways to enjoy wild salmon, halibut, and spot prawns, as well as simple crafts and ideas for exploring the natural world. The sisters are committed to sustaining and celebrating the seafaring community in Alaska, and their business of selling products related to and from the ocean donates a can of wild-caught fish to local food banks for each item purchased. “To flip through the pages of Emma Teal Laukities’s and Claire Neaton’s new cookbook . . . is to be whisked away on an adventure in the country’s northernmost state.” —Martha Stewart

The essential guidebook

Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon. House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature. House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary. Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.