The Russian River represents one possible future—perhaps the most likely one—for many other rivers on the west coast of North America: They will have hatchery salmon or no salmon at all. In this heavily developed watershed, climate change is already escalating droughts, fires, and floods, providing a preview of what may be in store for other regions. As wild stocks decline due to environmental change and other pressures, the hope is that facilities like Warm Springs, often described as “conservation hatcheries,” can keep salmon runs intact until their habitats are restored. It’s a task that sometimes verges on the impossible. As Mariska Obedzinski, who has led California Sea Grant’s coho monitoring program in the Russian River for almost 18 years, puts it, “It can feel like one step forward and five steps back.”
Hatcheries hold up a mirror to the stubborn belief that salmon can exist without intact habitat. On the west coast of North America, they have been used for over a century to supplement wild salmon in places where logged, dammed, and developed watersheds can no longer support abundant runs. But can salmon raised in captivity really replace wild ones? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for years, and, full disclosure, I once coauthored an opinion editorial with a consortium of salmon conservationists encouraging the British Columbia government to restore fish habitat, rather than build more hatcheries.
Today, trains just have a number. Or a departure time. But some railroads are trying to give named-trains a new chance.
There is, of course, “Eurostar,” the popular train between London and Paris via “the Chunnel.” There’s also “Thalys” from Paris to Brussels and Amsterdam, and “Lyria,” a super-fast service from Paris to Switzerland using French TGV’s.
Do novels, those great vehicles of democracy and generosity, really change the way people think? Is love, as Hannah Arendt believed, not just apolitical, but anti-political? What is to be done with desire that is prohibited? Should adult happiness always be sacrificed on the altar of children? (Lupton, unfashionable to the last, thinks not, and I’m inclined to agree with her.) Like Jane Austen, to whose novels she gives particular attention, she can be both kind and caustic. In the cause of fathoming how to live life to the full, she spares neither herself, nor anyone she has ever read, no matter how brilliant.
Rebecca Stott’s superb third novel, Dark Earth, dramatises the parallels between archaeology and historical fiction. Stott is a renowned historian, but in this excavation of London’s deep past she has created something radically new and beautiful, a book that retells a period of our national past that straddles the line between history and myth.
Part rom-com, part psychological profile, part redemption tale, Community Klepto is a swift read, but don't let its digestibility fool you. Ann's world is one you can chew on again and again without losing its flavor; if anything, repeat tastings – like a fine wine or one of Willy Wonka's Everlasting Gobstoppers – reveal brand-new flavors to savor. The cherry on top of it all? Ann's judgmental inner monologue is absolutely hilarious.