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.

"Examines Western culture's ... 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"--Amazon.com.

"Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. As fish are enrolled in new regimes of marine domestication, traditional distinctions between fish and animals are reconfigured, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal welfare legislation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Australia, the author traces farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial practices, and shows how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and alien in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to the economic context of industrial food production as well as the mundane practices of caring for fish, it offers novel perspectives on domestication, human-animal relations, and food production"--Provided by publisher.

Though life on earth is the history of dynamic interactions between living things and their surroundings, certain powerful groups would have us believe that nature exists only for our convenience. One consequence of such thinking is the apparent fate of the Pacific salmon--a key resource and preeminent symbol of America's wildlife--which is today threatened with extinction. Drawing on abundant data from natural science, Pacific coast culture, and a long association with key individuals on all sides of the issue, Joseph Cone's A Common Fate employs a clear narrative voice to tell the human and natural history of an environmental crisis in its final chapter. As inevitable as the November rains, countless millions of wild salmon returned from the ocean to spawn in the streams of their birth. In the wake of an orgy of dam building and habitat destruction, the salmon's majestic abundance has been reduced to a fleeting shadow. Neglect is the word the author uses to describe more recent losses, "by exactly the ones--state and federal fish managers--who should have acted." To signal a new awareness that action is needed, scientists charged with restocking the Columbia River Basin are receiving significant support, while ordinary citizens are beginning to recognize the relationship between cheap power and the absences of chinook, coho, sockeye, and other species from the coasts of Oregon and Washington and from Idaho's Snake River. As desperate as the salmon's future appears, the book is not an elegy for a lost resource. Instead, it bears witness to hope. In addition to concrete plans for the wild salmon's renewal, the reader will hear a growing chorus of informed individuals of differing values and beliefs who recognize that our fate is inextricably bound to the salmon's; for many it is a new understanding.

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.

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

The narrative spell cast over politics and society Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first-century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products: luxury brands trade on embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on Hollywood-conceived computer games, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic. This “storytelling machine” is masterfully unveiled by Salmon, and is shown to be more effective and insidious as a means of oppression than anything dreamed up by Orwell.