Salmon and the Salmonoid Family on the Fly — Part 3 of 3 · Part 1: Tad Murdoch · Part 2: David Hartlin
Mark Kurlansky has written 34 books, but the one that changed how we think about this fish is simply called "Salmon" — over 400 pages tracing the species from the Magna Carta's protections for English salmon rivers all the way to a warming Pacific Northwest. He didn't write it because salmon are uniquely threatened. He wrote it because salmon are a mirror: a fish that lives in fresh water and salt water both, and gets hit by nearly everything humans do wrong on the planet. The single biggest thing his research changed in how he talks about saving it, though, has nothing to do with dams, hatcheries, or nets. It's a mindset most anglers — and most people arguing about anything online — could stand to borrow.
The Old Way of Thinking
The instinct, when something's going wrong, is to find the one cause and the one villain. Overfishing killed the salmon. Hatcheries ruined the gene pool. Salmon farms are destroying the ocean. Each of those statements feels satisfying to say, because a single cause means a single fix, and a single fix means someone else just has to stop doing the bad thing. Kurlansky's research kept running into the same wall: salmon aren't declining because of one thing. They're declining because of nearly everything at once — damming, deforestation, agricultural runoff, carbon dioxide changing ocean chemistry, warming water, habitat loss — and treating any single cause as the whole explanation makes the real problem harder to see, not easier.
Saving salmon was never a fight to win against one villain. It's a system to fix — and the anglers who actually help are the ones willing to say "I don't know" and work with the people they'd rather just blame.
How This Plays Out on the Water
Someone online says all hatcheries are bad, full stop. Someone else says they're a fine fix, full stop. Kurlansky's own research refuses to pick a side — he's traced centuries of hatcheries failing because they ignored how genetically specific wild salmon are to their home river, and he's also seen one work, in a Scottish river where a new owner used a hatchery once to restart an extinct run, then let it go wild from there. The mindset shift asks "what's actually true for this river" instead of reaching for the universal rule you already believed walking in.
You believe catch-and-release is harmless, so you don't think twice about how long you hold a fish for a photo. Kurlansky doesn't buy the harmless story either — he's blunt that catching a fish has to cause some stress — but he still believes release is worth doing. The mindset shift holds both things at once: this causes real stress, and it's still the right call, which is exactly why barbless hooks and a fast release matter more, not less.
A salmon farmer, a logging company, a dam operator — the instinct is to treat them as the enemy to defeat. Kurlansky's reporting found the opposite works better: industry people are far more willing to engage with "here's how to fix this" than with "you have to stop." The mindset shift trades the fight you can't win for the conversation that might actually move something.
Common Traps
A single cause feels satisfying and gives you someone to be angry at. Salmon's decline doesn't have one.
FixAsk what's actually happening on the specific river or fishery in front of you, instead of reaching for whichever universal explanation you already believed.
Confrontation feels righteous, but it rarely changes behavior — Kurlansky found that framing a fix as "you have to stop" gets ignored far more often than "here's how to do this better."
FixLead with the fix you want, not the stop you're demanding. People can say yes to a fix.
After decades of reporting on this exact issue, Kurlansky's honest answer to a lot of hard questions is still "I don't know."
FixLet uncertainty be an acceptable answer, especially on a question as genuinely complicated as this one.
Author's Story & Key Insights
This one hit close to home for me. Where I fish, there's a stillwater community that's long run as a put-and-take fishery, and I've watched our local fisheries managers pour real effort into hatchery programs meant to repair what's been damaged over the years. Working through this conversation with Mark, I had to admit something I don't say enough: I'm not always seeing the results I'd hoped for, and I genuinely don't know what the right fix is for our water. That used to feel like a failure to admit. After this conversation, it feels more like the honest, useful starting point — the same one Mark's spent decades of research arriving at himself.
EP 105 — Mark Kurlansky, History of Salmon
Author Mark Kurlansky joins the Fly Fishing Insider Podcast to talk through the research behind his book "Salmon" — originally released February 9, 2021.
Next time you're in a hatchery debate, a salmon-farming debate, or really any conservation argument with another angler, try asking "what's actually true for this specific water" instead of leading with the rule you already believe. You'll learn more, and you'll probably end up arguing less.
Part 1 — The Mindset It Takes to Chase Every Salmonoid Species on Earth (Tad Murdoch)
Part 2 — How to Fish the Portland Hitch for Atlantic Salmon (David Hartlin)
Part 3 — What Mark Kurlansky Taught Us About Saving Salmon
Tight lines, everyone!
Reading about what salmon are up against makes you want to see a healthy run for yourself while that's still possible — that's exactly the kind of trip Frontiers Travel can help you build.
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