I’ve pondered many mysteries standing in
a river how it can be ever-changing and
eternal all at once how in 1992 a lone
sockeye salmon named Larry could swim
900 miles up a river a river right here
outside of town to go home to spawn
alone without a mate just bond with how
somebody could chug 12 beers and think
that this river is the perfect place
through all the empties
still pondering that one I fell in love
with wild salmon when I was 2 my
memories around 10 my dad standing next
to me in the boat at first light and the
purple of the King’s Salmons side arcing
toward me as I was drawing it into the
net and the look on my dad’s face as he
watched me do it
and later the smell on my hands like
metallic sweetened grass and that night
my family chattering happily with lemons
mustard smudges on their faces and the
taste of the ocean in them or orange
flesh of the salmon no one really knows
why you’re called to a river but and I
took to it early on my dad brought me
into fishing and I was easily hooked but
for me it was about the experience the
mist coming off the river in the morning
the hot cocoa and the coffee
early morning from the thermos but most
of all it was the connection with my dad
with my brother and with this holy being
that comes to us from the sea under the
surface of the water and a connection to
that through a thin rod and a thin line
that directly connects me to it to this
this mysterious creature
that comes back to us to create new life
over and over and over again I wanted to
connect to that
and for time I did and then I lost that
connection and I nearly lost my own life
and in the end it was that same
mysterious creature that called me back
to life and that’s why now and
forevermore I will sing their song so I
spent my 20s as a wilderness fishing
guide in Southeast Alaska
I got paid to fish for salmon let me
repeat that I got paid to fish for
salmon dream job something changed me
though during this time I slowly
transformed from somebody that needed to
possess and dominate all these salmon as
they came to me one after the other and
I saw thousands of them I started
thanking every fish that came into my
boat I actually did this you could ask
my off bewildered guests as they were
standing next to me what the hell is
this guy doing but I did because I
developed this holy reverence for these
things and as this went on and towards
the end of that part of my career all I
wanted to do was figure out a way to
save the remnant runs that remain but I
just didn’t know how so flash forward to
2014 and I’m now ensconced in my career
as a storyteller and as a filmmaker and
I spent four years working on this story
that’s my best version of a love story
for a wild salmon it’s the best I could
I could do at the time it’s what I
needed to do and during all this time I
tried to come up with a call to action
to tell people to to do something that
would make a difference to help save one
salmon and so at the end of it all on a
particular Tuesday no fanfare whatsoever
it just kind of came to me and floated
in the window in order to save wild
I know what you’re thinking why would
you kill something that you want to save
doesn’t make a whole lot of sense I’ll
get there we’ll probably promise beyond
a spiritual physical and emotional and
cultural virtue that all these wild
salmon bring to us they’re just plain
cool they’re they’re shaped like a
bullet of muscle and teeth and blood and
they’re shaped perfectly absolutely
perfectly to survive and make their way
down the river streams from their natal
streams where they come from
to make it out into the ocean and swim
with powerful tail thrusts clear out in
this great ellipse of we don’t even know
how far yet we haven’t even tracked that
we don’t have a way to track that all
the way to arrive back at their River
their natal river where they came from
after they’ve gone through an entire
gauntlet of whales and otters and sea
lions and nets and fishermen like me and
sometimes like Larry to make it nine
hundred miles clear back up to the same
spot the exact spot they were born to
spawn and die and give life to new
salmon and new things and new creatures
to a hundred and thirty seven different
creatures their shape has given them the
ability to survive ice ages volcanic
eruptions even cataclysmic floods but
will it give them the ability to survive
us because what we do to salmon we do to
ourselves Bristol Bay Alaska is the site
of the last largest wild salmon
migration in the world it’s also site to
one of the largest open pit copper mines
its largest appositive of copper
actually in North America the pebble
limited partnership is a Canadian
corporation that has been trying for
many years to extract this copper from
this place which is seated in the
headwaters of where these salmon go to
if this went through it would require
tailings dam 700 feet high this just
tall as the Space Needle in Seattle to
about the time I was taking this salmon
love movie out into the world the United
States EPA spent three years doing a
watershed assessment to try to tell
whether as a mine the size and scope of
the pebble mine could coexist with a
fishery like that in Bristol Bay after
three years of a scientific assessment
they decided that they could not and
when we ask these questions of ourselves
or do we want to survive do we want to
perpetuate the survival of wild salmon
in order to save ourselves I’ve had to
ask that question to myself it’s because
I took to drinking early on after the
hot cocoa after the coffee I took to
drinking alcohol at first it was a rite
of passage it was a way to fit in it was
a way to celebrate go to school
eventually it became a constant
companion it became a way to grieve and
deal with growing anxiety and depression
and at the end it became a way for me to
simply keep existing this all culminated
in 2016 in the first part of November
that year I found out at a span of five
days that my mom was diagnosed with
cancer
my grandmother Dorothy headed into
Hospice and I knew she was dying our
nation elected a new president and for
me brought a lot of fear and uncertainty
and I lost my connection to the star
light of the universe and my connection
to these wild beings fed up that really
transformed me as a young person and
this began a downward spiral for me
about a year ago the newly appointed
head of the United States EPA met in a
closed-door meeting with the president
and CEO of the pebble limited
partnership one hour after this meeting
the entire EPA was instructed to stand
felt helpless and hopeless at this point
I was I was drinking daily to obliterate
my feelings of sadness and I didn’t know
where to turn and after six months of
this I finally hit the bottom three days
after that meeting and after three days
after burying my my grandmother Dorothy
I checked myself into a hospital and
asked the people inside to save my life
and without them and subsequently the
people that loved me enough when I
couldn’t love myself I wouldn’t be here
speaking to you today after I left the
hospital alive I found I loved in and
for my wife that I never knew was
possible for the death she seemed to be
able to love and care for me through all
of this and for her and for those people
wild salmon have transformed me they
they called me to face my fear and in so
doing now I want to know how I can pay
it forward to them how I can share it
with you and in turn how you can share
it with the rest of the world we can
start by cleaning up the rivers we’ve
fouled here in the lower 48 I mean
there’s a lot of them the Elwha River in
Washington State is a beautiful example
of how this can be done two dams that
were no longer useful or taken out and
opened up hundreds of miles 70 miles to
be precise it’s not quiet hundreds but
seventy miles of pristine salmon country
I will personally pick up all the beer
cans many rivers I can find but what we
must do and what it’s more most
important is protect the wild systems
that remain the wild systems like the
eight beautiful wild salmon rivers in
Bristol Bay Alaska and in order to
protect them we need to eat wild salmon
and I know this seems just so
counterintuitive again why would you
kill something that you want to save but
here’s what we know wild salmon need
clean cold clear rivers in order to make
new babies and perpetuate life and if
they do that if we keep those rivers
healthy and if we keep demanding a
fishery like exists in Bristol Bay
Alaska that is managed absolutely
perfectly and we keep demanding wild
salmon on our plates will demand the
habitat sufficient for those wild salmon
to keep coming to our plates and feeding
us body and soul forever this can’t be
we need wild salmon
we need them to connect to that thing
which is bigger than ourselves we need
them to connect to that things that are
sacred in ourselves that we don’t see
every day
we need them to connect to each other
and if we do that and we eat wild salmon
together in this way it’s the most holy
form of sacrament I can think of we are
taking that those nutrients from the
ocean into ourselves and we’re sharing
them in community and that is a way of
finding peace and that is a way of
coming together and I can say with great
joy and gratitude that today my mom is
cancer-free and it’s been almost a year
so grateful for these wild beings from
the other side that it brought me there
and now we’re gonna watch just a few
images that really kind of help tell the
story for me about what these creatures
standing in a river brings more
questions than answers many days but the
answers are shrouded in mystery and that
River is eternal and it keeps flowing
through us and if we wait for them those
answers will come what I’ve learned is
that for me wild salmon are the way
shape and form of life and I choose to
live thank you
[Applause] [Music]
a river how it can be ever-changing and
eternal all at once how in 1992 a lone
sockeye salmon named Larry could swim
900 miles up a river a river right here
outside of town to go home to spawn
alone without a mate just bond with how
somebody could chug 12 beers and think
that this river is the perfect place
through all the empties
still pondering that one I fell in love
with wild salmon when I was 2 my
memories around 10 my dad standing next
to me in the boat at first light and the
purple of the King’s Salmons side arcing
toward me as I was drawing it into the
net and the look on my dad’s face as he
watched me do it
and later the smell on my hands like
metallic sweetened grass and that night
my family chattering happily with lemons
mustard smudges on their faces and the
taste of the ocean in them or orange
flesh of the salmon no one really knows
why you’re called to a river but and I
took to it early on my dad brought me
into fishing and I was easily hooked but
for me it was about the experience the
mist coming off the river in the morning
the hot cocoa and the coffee
early morning from the thermos but most
of all it was the connection with my dad
with my brother and with this holy being
that comes to us from the sea under the
surface of the water and a connection to
that through a thin rod and a thin line
that directly connects me to it to this
this mysterious creature
that comes back to us to create new life
over and over and over again I wanted to
connect to that
and for time I did and then I lost that
connection and I nearly lost my own life
and in the end it was that same
mysterious creature that called me back
to life and that’s why now and
forevermore I will sing their song so I
spent my 20s as a wilderness fishing
guide in Southeast Alaska
I got paid to fish for salmon let me
repeat that I got paid to fish for
salmon dream job something changed me
though during this time I slowly
transformed from somebody that needed to
possess and dominate all these salmon as
they came to me one after the other and
I saw thousands of them I started
thanking every fish that came into my
boat I actually did this you could ask
my off bewildered guests as they were
standing next to me what the hell is
this guy doing but I did because I
developed this holy reverence for these
things and as this went on and towards
the end of that part of my career all I
wanted to do was figure out a way to
save the remnant runs that remain but I
just didn’t know how so flash forward to
2014 and I’m now ensconced in my career
as a storyteller and as a filmmaker and
I spent four years working on this story
that’s my best version of a love story
for a wild salmon it’s the best I could
I could do at the time it’s what I
needed to do and during all this time I
tried to come up with a call to action
to tell people to to do something that
would make a difference to help save one
salmon and so at the end of it all on a
particular Tuesday no fanfare whatsoever
it just kind of came to me and floated
in the window in order to save wild
I know what you’re thinking why would
you kill something that you want to save
doesn’t make a whole lot of sense I’ll
get there we’ll probably promise beyond
a spiritual physical and emotional and
cultural virtue that all these wild
salmon bring to us they’re just plain
cool they’re they’re shaped like a
bullet of muscle and teeth and blood and
they’re shaped perfectly absolutely
perfectly to survive and make their way
down the river streams from their natal
streams where they come from
to make it out into the ocean and swim
with powerful tail thrusts clear out in
this great ellipse of we don’t even know
how far yet we haven’t even tracked that
we don’t have a way to track that all
the way to arrive back at their River
their natal river where they came from
after they’ve gone through an entire
gauntlet of whales and otters and sea
lions and nets and fishermen like me and
sometimes like Larry to make it nine
hundred miles clear back up to the same
spot the exact spot they were born to
spawn and die and give life to new
salmon and new things and new creatures
to a hundred and thirty seven different
creatures their shape has given them the
ability to survive ice ages volcanic
eruptions even cataclysmic floods but
will it give them the ability to survive
us because what we do to salmon we do to
ourselves Bristol Bay Alaska is the site
of the last largest wild salmon
migration in the world it’s also site to
one of the largest open pit copper mines
its largest appositive of copper
actually in North America the pebble
limited partnership is a Canadian
corporation that has been trying for
many years to extract this copper from
this place which is seated in the
headwaters of where these salmon go to
if this went through it would require
tailings dam 700 feet high this just
tall as the Space Needle in Seattle to
about the time I was taking this salmon
love movie out into the world the United
States EPA spent three years doing a
watershed assessment to try to tell
whether as a mine the size and scope of
the pebble mine could coexist with a
fishery like that in Bristol Bay after
three years of a scientific assessment
they decided that they could not and
when we ask these questions of ourselves
or do we want to survive do we want to
perpetuate the survival of wild salmon
in order to save ourselves I’ve had to
ask that question to myself it’s because
I took to drinking early on after the
hot cocoa after the coffee I took to
drinking alcohol at first it was a rite
of passage it was a way to fit in it was
a way to celebrate go to school
eventually it became a constant
companion it became a way to grieve and
deal with growing anxiety and depression
and at the end it became a way for me to
simply keep existing this all culminated
in 2016 in the first part of November
that year I found out at a span of five
days that my mom was diagnosed with
cancer
my grandmother Dorothy headed into
Hospice and I knew she was dying our
nation elected a new president and for
me brought a lot of fear and uncertainty
and I lost my connection to the star
light of the universe and my connection
to these wild beings fed up that really
transformed me as a young person and
this began a downward spiral for me
about a year ago the newly appointed
head of the United States EPA met in a
closed-door meeting with the president
and CEO of the pebble limited
partnership one hour after this meeting
the entire EPA was instructed to stand
felt helpless and hopeless at this point
I was I was drinking daily to obliterate
my feelings of sadness and I didn’t know
where to turn and after six months of
this I finally hit the bottom three days
after that meeting and after three days
after burying my my grandmother Dorothy
I checked myself into a hospital and
asked the people inside to save my life
and without them and subsequently the
people that loved me enough when I
couldn’t love myself I wouldn’t be here
speaking to you today after I left the
hospital alive I found I loved in and
for my wife that I never knew was
possible for the death she seemed to be
able to love and care for me through all
of this and for her and for those people
wild salmon have transformed me they
they called me to face my fear and in so
doing now I want to know how I can pay
it forward to them how I can share it
with you and in turn how you can share
it with the rest of the world we can
start by cleaning up the rivers we’ve
fouled here in the lower 48 I mean
there’s a lot of them the Elwha River in
Washington State is a beautiful example
of how this can be done two dams that
were no longer useful or taken out and
opened up hundreds of miles 70 miles to
be precise it’s not quiet hundreds but
seventy miles of pristine salmon country
I will personally pick up all the beer
cans many rivers I can find but what we
must do and what it’s more most
important is protect the wild systems
that remain the wild systems like the
eight beautiful wild salmon rivers in
Bristol Bay Alaska and in order to
protect them we need to eat wild salmon
and I know this seems just so
counterintuitive again why would you
kill something that you want to save but
here’s what we know wild salmon need
clean cold clear rivers in order to make
new babies and perpetuate life and if
they do that if we keep those rivers
healthy and if we keep demanding a
fishery like exists in Bristol Bay
Alaska that is managed absolutely
perfectly and we keep demanding wild
salmon on our plates will demand the
habitat sufficient for those wild salmon
to keep coming to our plates and feeding
us body and soul forever this can’t be
we need wild salmon
we need them to connect to that thing
which is bigger than ourselves we need
them to connect to that things that are
sacred in ourselves that we don’t see
every day
we need them to connect to each other
and if we do that and we eat wild salmon
together in this way it’s the most holy
form of sacrament I can think of we are
taking that those nutrients from the
ocean into ourselves and we’re sharing
them in community and that is a way of
finding peace and that is a way of
coming together and I can say with great
joy and gratitude that today my mom is
cancer-free and it’s been almost a year
so grateful for these wild beings from
the other side that it brought me there
and now we’re gonna watch just a few
images that really kind of help tell the
story for me about what these creatures
standing in a river brings more
questions than answers many days but the
answers are shrouded in mystery and that
River is eternal and it keeps flowing
through us and if we wait for them those
answers will come what I’ve learned is
that for me wild salmon are the way
shape and form of life and I choose to
live thank you
[Applause] [Music]
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