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WORK TITLE: Kings of the Yukon
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.adamweymouth.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
Lives on a Dutch barge on the River Lea in London.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018073751
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018073751
HEADING: Weymouth, Adam
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670 __ |a Weymouth, Adam. Kings of the Yukon, 2018: |b title page (Adam Weymouth) jacket flap (Adam Weymouth is a freelance journalist who has written for a broad range of newspapers, magazines, and television… ; lives on a Dutch barge in London)
PERSONAL
Born 1984, in Salisbury, England.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Freelance journalist. Worked formerly as an environmental activist, for Plane Stupid and other organizations.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Guardian, Atlantic, and New Internationalist.
SIDELIGHTS
Adam Weymouth is a journalist and freelance writer. Born in Salisbury, England in 1984, Weymouth spent his early twenties pursuing environmental activism, working with organizations such as Plane Stupid. In 2009 Weymouth was arrested, along with 113 others, when a plan to shut down a coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar was uncovered. The charges were dropped two years later. During this time, Weymouth moved away from campaigning and direct action activism, turning instead to journalism.
It was freelance journalism that lead him to Alaska, where he sought out stories about natural resources. While there, he covered a story about twenty-three Yu’pik fishermen who had ignored a ban on catching king salmon, citing their traditional livelihood and culture as reasoning for fishing despite the restrictions. This event inspired Weymouth to return to the Yukon River to learn more about the salmon population and the culture of fishing. His book, Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North, documents this journey.
Weymouth’s investigation was a journey, both emotionally and literally, as a canoer traversing the entire 2,000 mile-long river. Wemouth’s trip begins at McNeil Lake, which is where the salmon ultimately return to mate, to the Bering Sea. This journey is the longest any species of salmon in the world travel, and the fish are, understandably, incredibly muscled creatures, and highly desirable to fishermen.
Throughout his four-month trip, Weymouth meets a variety of individuals, all connected to the king salmon. He meets Percy Henry, a Tr’ondek Hwech’in elder and one of two living speakers of the Han language. Henry describes the drastic changes in his tribe and on the land. He describes how life had not changed in thousands of years, until the Klondike Gold Rush in 1896. Dawson City, where Henry resides, spiked in population from 5,000 to 40,000 in one year. The gold-hungry newcomers needed food, and salmon populations dived as they were fished in droves. Currently, thirst for oil combined with the resulting detrimental lake and river pollution are greatly damaging the salmon populations in a similar manner.
Through interviews and history, the book highlights that there is a combination of factors contributing the decline in the salmon population. The book provides a lesson in the history of the salmon, of Alaska, and of fishing traditions. Elisa Segrave in Spectator wrote,”Adam Weymouth writes well. He is poetic, but also precise,” adding, “this is a rich and fascinating book.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted: “Weymouth keeps the pages turning to the very end.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Kings of the Yukon.
Spectator, June 2, 2018, Elisa Segrave, “Fish in Troubled Waters,” review of Kings of the Yukon, p. 37.
I am a writer, living on a Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. Please feel free to get in touch, through the newsletter or the buttons below.
The first book interview
Interview
Joy and despair in Alaska: Adam Weymouth on his 2,000 mile odyssey
Richard Lea
Weymouth spent months paddling through the wilderness in a canoe, tracking the mighty king salmon. What he found was an ecosystem – and a culture – under threat
@richardlea
Mon 28 May 2018 06.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 6 Jun 2018 08.05 EDT
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Kings of the Yukon author Adam Weymouth at work.
‘It’s an easy way to burn yourself out’ … Kings of the Yukon author Adam Weymouth at work. Photograph: Ulli Mattsson
The sun is shining on the rear deck of Adam Weymouth’s barge, and the hawthorn along the banks of the river Lea is bright with new growth. But despite the natural beauty all around him in this pocket of London, he’s finding it hard to believe we can avert climate catastrophe: “It’s just really hard to give a fuck.”
“Living where we do, even with the best will in the world and being as informed as you could be, nature is incredibly abstract,” Weymouth says. “When the shit hits the fan, we’re going to turn up the air conditioning. The bread might get a bit more expensive, but we’ll be all right for quite a while.”
This disconnect between our comfortable urban existence and the havoc it is wreaking on the environment propelled Weymouth into the far north of the Americas to paddle 2,000 miles through the wilderness by canoe on the trail of the salmon who swim through his lyrical debut book, Kings of the Yukon.
Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth.
“The Arctic is heating twice as fast as other places on the planet, and those changes are much more obvious,” he says. “You’ll meet a lot of people in Alaska who question why climate change is happening, but you won’t meet anyone who believes the climate is not changing, because it’s very manifest.” Alaska is also home to the most productive oilfield in America, Weymouth says, with few alternative sources of income: “It’s a very stark way of looking at what feels much more obscured in London.”
Every spring the king salmon – the biggest of the five species of Pacific salmon – swim up the Yukon to spawn in the waters of their birth. But a deadly mixture of ocean warming, early melts and commercial fishing has sent numbers crashing. Weymouth set out from the furthest end of their journey, Canada’s McNeil Lake, heading down towards the sea and the approaching salmon over tumbling rapids and winding flats, past spruce forests and grizzly bears. On the way he met First Nations elders who are wrestling with decisions about how many of the threatened fish they should catch, settlers from Maryland who are rebuilding after catastrophic floods and biologists struggling to understand the king salmon’s precipitous decline.
The global shifts driving all these changes are all too familiar for Weymouth. Born in Salisbury in 1984, he spent most of his 20s as an environmental activist, working with groups like Plane Stupid. In 2009, a plan to shut down the coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar saw him arrested alongside 113 others. His conviction for conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass was quashed two years later, after it emerged the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence from the undercover policeman Mark Kennedy, but he was already beginning to move away from direct action.
the Yukon River, seen in Alaska.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Living where we do … nature is incredibly abstract’ … the Yukon River, seen in Alaska. Photograph: Reuters
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“It felt like really important work,” Weymouth says, “but it was only nourishing one part of what I wanted to be doing. The writing and the thinking and the other parts of why I’d become interested in human ecology and the environment were falling by the wayside.” Not only did campaigning take up a huge amount of his time and energy, it was emotionally draining. “There’s a real exhausting cynicism about the world and its future that people almost get high on. It’s like a relationship that’s turned toxic – it’s hard to see any joy in it any more.”
We’ve lost 50% of our species in 100 years – will it just be that this is the baseline we’d like to preserve?
A narrowboat in London was a halfway house from which Weymouth could launch into freelance journalism, a route which saw him travel to Alaska in 2013, looking for stories about natural resources. He wound up reporting on the trial of 23 Yu’pik fishermen who had defied a ban on catching king salmon. As the salmon population crashed and restrictions were extended to cover the whole of the Yukon for the first time, Weymouth hatched a plan to travel the length of the river by canoe, charting how the changes in the environment are affecting the fish and the people who depend on them.
This slow journey, always coming from the nearest town upriver and heading to the next downstream, gave Weymouth a way of making connections with the people he met along the way, and helped break down barriers to communication.
“There isn’t a fantastic relationship between white people and indigenous people in the north of Canada and Alaska,” he says, “for very good reasons. Generally, the white people turning up are teachers or cops or some sort of government official, and generally with some sort of authority they’re quite keen on using.”
Ocean warming, early melts and commercial fishing have sent king salmon numbers crashing.
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Ocean warming, early melts and commercial fishing have sent king salmon numbers crashing. Photograph: Martin Rudlof/Getty Images/iStockphoto
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As he paddled down towards the sea, Weymouth discovered the fate of the king salmon in Alaska is “very much in the balance”.
“What really seems to have been affected at the moment is the salmon’s ability to deal with other issues [like climate change], because the fish have got a lot smaller,” he says. “If people can make decisions to build up the genetic stock and get larger salmon to lay more eggs, then hopefully they can weather the other changes that are happening.” But it could take 50 or 100 years of strict quotas or complete bans for the population to recover, long enough to have a devastating impact on the communities around the river and on indigenous cultures that have been living with the salmon for thousands of years.
Kings of the wild frontier
Adam Weymouth
Read more
The situation for the salmon may be critical, Weymouth says, but alongside the modern loss of biological diversity is also an extinction of culture that has received much less attention. “Why should people not be part of that ecosystem, why is the culture not part of what we’re trying to value and keep?” A lot of British nature writing seems “deliberately apolitical”, he says. “If people are brought in at all, it might be 18th-century poets who might have written about the landscape, rather than the people who were cleared off it or the people trying to make a living on it now.”
The elegiac tone that fills Kings of the Yukon, the sorrow at the loss of culture and nature in the wilderness, is an unavoidable reflection of life in the 21st century. “How will we feel the lack?” Weymouth asks. “We’ve lost 50% of our species in 100 years – will it just be that this is the baseline we’d like to preserve?” There is beauty to be found even in the heart of the city, he says, but positive signs such as the recent upsurge of interest in plastics and veganism seem like fleeting glints against a background of almost overwhelming gloom.
“Finding a balance between the joy and that despair is very important,” he says. He lifts his gaze to the sunshine rippling across the glinting surface of the canal. “It’s a very easy way to burn yourself out, just thinking that everything is fucked.”
Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey is published by Particular.
Adam Weymouth
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Adam Weymouth will on at 1pm on Sunday 22nd July in the Arcadia Tent. Book tickets here.
A captivating, lyrical account of an epic voyage by canoe down the Yukon River.
The Yukon River is almost 2,000 miles long, flowing through Canada and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Setting out to explore one of the most ruggedly beautiful and remote regions of North America, Adam Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this untrammelled wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon’s inhabitants have long depended on the king salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever.
Weymouth’s searing portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world. Kings of the Yukon is an extraordinary adventure, told by a powerful new voice.
Adam Weymouth’s work has been published by outlets including the Guardian, the Atlantic and the New Internationalist. His interest in the relationship between humans and the world around them has led him to write on issues of climate change and environmentalism, and most recently, to the Yukon and the stories of the communities living on its banks. He lives on a 100-year-old Dutch barge on the River Lea in London. This is his first book.
Adam Weymouth’s Kings of the Yukon details his canoe trip from the source of the 3,200-kilometre-long Yukon River all the way to the sea. The main purpose of this grand journey was not hedonistic exploration—but rather an intimate, hands-on method to investigate the plight of the iconic chinook salmon that have plied this watercourse for millennia.
This brilliantly written book not only educates the reader on the chinook and its importance to the Yukon’s ecosystem, but is also a heartfelt look at the lives of those who live along the river. I cycled the frozen Yukon in the winter of 2003, but never got to know the locals like Weymouth did. He hung out with folks he met along the way sometimes for days, learning how their existence is intertwined with that of the chinook. From Andy Bassich, a homesteader who moved up from the “lower 48” and now stars in a reality show called Life Below Zero, to Mary Demientieff, an indigenous woman whose spirit shines through a life of hardship, we get a deep dip into some amazing life stories.
Adam Weymouth
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Like the seemingly insurmountable challenge the chinook face swimming thousands of kilometres dodging nets, sport fishermen, eagles and umpteen other obstacles to get to their spawning grounds, the lives of the people along the river are similarly fraught with difficulty. Through restrained and thoughtful prose, Weymouth allows the reader a window into their day-to-day existence as they struggle to make ends meet in one of our planet’s last frontiers.
Though salmon are the focal point, the book also spins a fabulous adventure story. If you were ever curious about what it takes to paddle the entire Yukon, Weymouth paints a vivid mental picture of the ups and downs of spending months outside in the elements on this historic waterway—much of it with his partner Ulli, who joined him for the majority of the journey.
Ultimately, Kings of the Yukon gives us hope that the fractured chinook resource and the hardy individuals that depend on it will continue to see a way through. It’s a fresh and energetic look at the delicate balance between our modern world and the ancient pulse of nature.
Interview with author Adam Weymouth about his journey down the Yukon and the writing of his book Kings of the Yukon:
What inspired you to journey down the Yukon and write about the plight of the chinook salmon?
In 2013, I travelled in Alaska for the first time, working as a journalist. In the town of Bethel, I came across the story of 23 Yup’ik fishermen accused of fishing chinook salmon whilst a ban on them was in place. The ban had been implemented following a recent crash in their numbers, but the Yup’ik had chosen to fish in spite of it, as the annual harvest of the salmon is as much cultural as it is a way of obtaining food. They defended themselves in court as having a right to practice their traditional livelihood. Yet they were found guilty, the state proving that they had due cause in protecting the extremely vulnerable chinook. Two different ways of understanding the world were being forced up against each other. I wrote a piece about the trial, which ran in The Atlantic. Back in England, I kept an eye on events: in 2014, and again in 2015, a ban was placed on chinook along the entire Yukon river, in both Alaska and Canada, an unprecedented move. I felt that there was a larger story to be told.
I have always been inspired by long, slow journeys overland—in 2010, I walked from England to Istanbul. It is a way of travelling that allows you to meet local people, of stringing their stories together by way of chance encounters rather than planned meetings. It is a way of trying to understand the places that they live in, the elements that constitute their lives. And I started putting together plans for a canoe trip down the Yukon as a way of researching the impacts of the decline of the chinook.
The lives of the salmon and the people you met along the Yukon are deeply intertwined—who’s the most memorable character you met and why?
Mary Demientieff is an 80-year-old Athabascan woman who still spends every summer at her fish camp, several miles downriver from the village of Holy Cross. Raised in the orphanage at Holy Cross by nuns, her life has spanned Alaska’s modern history, from a traditional childhood living off the land to the iPhone that she had today. She had 12 children, and now has hundreds of descendants spread out across the state. Despite the aches that she now feels, she still makes the journey to her fish camp every summer—for her it is impossible to imagine a life where the catching of salmon is not integral. She welcomed us with such warmth and hospitality, full of joy for a life that must have been unimaginably hard at times, and yet borne with such lightness and spirit. I think about her often.
Adam Weymouth
Adam Weymouth
What was the most difficult part of the journey?
We spent a long time before the trip worrying about a bear attack, or capsizing, or having some accident miles from help, but in the end it was something as simple as the rain that got me down. Summers in the north can be baking hot, but there were weeks at a time when there was nothing but rain: lighting fires with wet wood, pulling on wet clothes every morning, bailing water all day from the canoe. It can be hard to keep your spirits up when everything is soaked for days.
What was the best part of the journey?
All of the salmon! Whilst now in decline people are still fishing, and everyone we spent time with was keen to share what they had, smoked or barbecued, deep orange and dripping in oil. People would approach our canoe in their speedboats, just to hand some dried salmon over to us. The meals that we had, sharing fish, swapping stories, are some of the best that I’ve ever had, and made it clear to me how wrapped up food is with culture and with place.
What were some key pieces of equipment that helped you successfully complete such a long river trip?
I became very attached to the canoe—a bright yellow, 18-foot boat made by Clipper. It is a wonderful way to travel, feeling the river through the hull, the simplicity of the single paddle—riding out waves on difficult crossings or sitting back and drifting for hours, reading, letting the river take you. The canoe allows for all sorts of luxuries: fresh food, a fishing rod, even a couple of chairs. Those little additions made being out for four months much more manageable.
And the tent: we took along a Campfire Tent made by a company called Frost River, based on an old gold prospector design and popularized by Bill Mason in the 1970s. It is 26 pounds of canvas, not much use for hiking, but for a canoe trip it was perfect. Cool in the heat, waterproof in the downpours and spacious enough for us to wait out storms for days on end. There are multiple ways of setting it up: you can even use the canoe to reflect the heat of the fire and warm the tent at night.
You spent a long time in the wild in order to write this book—did the journey have any profound personal effect on you?
Yes, but not in the ways I had envisaged. Like many people that live in big cities, I had a romanticized idea of the wild, gleaned from books and wildlife documentaries, and that was what drew me to the North. Certainly, being out for weeks on end without seeing a road or a person felt special in a world that often seems crowded. But the experience wasn’t categorically different to places that I have been to in the UK, places where there are signs of human habitation, yet equally beautiful. I came to see the notion of the wild as problematic, wrapped up in notions of the frontier and somewhere that was supposedly uninhabited before white settlers came. To feel that our “wilderness experiences” can only come when the places are devoid of people is a particularly Western notion, blind to history and blind to places that can have an equally profound impact on us despite bearing the marks of human habitation.
You live in London, one of the biggest urban centres in the world. Now that you’re back home, do you miss any aspect of life on the Yukon River? Conversely, when you were on the Yukon, what did you most miss about home?
I live on a boat, albeit a bigger boat than a canoe and so although I live in a city there is not a complete disconnection from the journey down the Yukon: I still have to haul my own water, make a fire each night and worry about leaks. That said, compared to the city’s pace there was a wonderful simplicity in those months spent on the river, a pleasing monotony that came from cooking breakfast every morning on a fire, packing the canoe, paddling all day and setting the tent at night. I had time to learn birdsongs, visit with people for hours on end, to catch a fish for dinner. Time is a luxury in London, in the endless light of an Alaskan summer, I had it in abundance. Did I miss London whilst on the river? Not really. Perhaps the radio in the morning.
Adam Weymouth
Adam Weymouth
Why should people care about the future of these salmon? Are you personally hopeful for the future of the species?
We are asked to care, so often, about so many species that are teetering on the brink, that to worry about yet another one can feel overwhelming. But the chinook is so wrapped up in peoples’ lives and also in the ecosystem that its disappearance will have profound consequences. So many species depend upon the salmon: bear density can be 80 times higher along streams where the salmon are plentiful, and as the salmon carcasses decay into the soil, the minerals in the fish make their way into the vegetation, so that the nitrogen and phosphorus found in trees along the river banks can be traced to the bottom of the ocean.
It is an interesting time to be writing about the chinook. I am used to covering environmental stories that seem like lost causes, but the salmon are not without hope. Strict conservation measures in the past couple of years are starting to make an impact—the challenge comes both in enforcing those measures for long enough to allow the population to stabilize, and in conserving the chinook whilst allowing the cultures that depend upon the fish to flourish. How those decisions are navigated will determine the fish’s future, and only by involving all those voices with an interest in the chinook’s future will an adequate solution can be found.
You spent much of the journey paddling with your partner Ulli. Spending that much time in a canoe with someone can often be a strain—how did it work out with you guys?
Sure, there were times when we were tired and tetchy with each other—18 feet is a small space to be in with anyone for months. But we both got a huge amount from the trip, and having always travelled by myself before, I’ve really enjoyed having someone to talk about the memories with this time around. In the evenings, Ulli did much of the work around the camp to allow me the time to write, and I’m not sure how I would have managed it without her. She also had connections to some of the women on the river, such as Mary, which would have been very different had I been there by myself. It was a very special journey to share. Since we’ve come back from the trip we’ve had a baby, so we must have done something right.
Any hot tips for someone thinking of paddling the Yukon River themselves?
Take it slow! If you want to get from the source to the mouth it will take at least a whole summer, maybe more. Allow yourself enough time and food and paperbacks to wait out the bad weather—any difficulties we got into came from having to head out onto the river when the conditions weren’t good because we were in a rush.
Dan Maclean’s book Paddling the Yukon River and its Tributarieswas immensely helpful in planning the journey, as were the outfitters Kanoe People and Up North Adventures, based in Whitehorse, and the maps of the river by Mike and Gillian Rourke.
Adam Weymouth
Adam Weymouth
Is there a message you want people to take away from your book?
We are fundamentally part of the natural world. The environment is not a problem out there, elsewhere, to be fixed—it is a part of us, and as it changes, we change. If the salmon are affected, the people are affected; as people change, so does the landscape. That was clear to me on the Yukon, where these relationships are stripped back to their roots, and whilst those connections are more obscure in cities, their importance is the same. We cannot tackle the problems that the environment faces without tackling equality and poverty, and we cannot continue the degradation of the natural world without also degrading ourselves.
Read Previous Blogs by Frank Wolf:
Print Marked Items
Fish in troubled waters
Elisa Segrave
Spectator.
337.9901 (June 2, 2018): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Kings of the Yukon:
An Alaskan River Journey
by Adam Weymouth
Particular Books, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 269
'Help!' I thought, when I read the Author's Note. 'It's about salmon, and I hate fishing.' But by the first page I was hooked. Adam Weymouth
writes well. He is poetic, but also precise.
His subject is the return of the 'king' salmon to their birthplace and final destination, the north ridge of McNeil Lake in Canada.
These fish are many pounds of muscle, toned
from years of swimming headlong into Pacific
storms, and their flesh is as red as blood.
They force against the Yukon's current,
shouldering their way upriver, setting their
fins like sails. Eventually they will push thousands
of miles into North America's interior.
They will reach mountain lakes; they will
reach the clouds.
Weymouth canoes along the Yukon--at almost 2,000 miles, the longest salmon run in the world--starting at McNeil Lake (the salmon that return
there will have travelled further than any on the planet) and ending at the Bering Sea.
On his four-month odyssey (his Swedish girlfriend joins him) he meets a varied cast, all intimately involved with the salmon, some descended
from ancient tribes. One such is Percy Henry, a Tr'ondek Hwech'in 'elder', one of two surviving speakers of the Han language. Weymouth writes:
'Before 1897, life had not changed significantly for the Tr'ondek Hwech'in for several thousand years.' In 1896, gold was found, and within three
years, around 100,000 prospectors came to the region--the Klondike Gold Rush. For the first time, 'the flesh of the Yukon king was given
monetary value when it was sold in camps. Many men had arrived, woefully unprepared, and many were starving to death.'
Weymouth meets the 89-year-old Percy in Dawson City--present population 1,375. During the Gold Rush, it had escalated from 5,000 to 40,000
in a single year. Today, oil is the draw. Percy grieves that
In Alberta they're squeezing oil out of the
sand. Now they've poisoned the big river. The
sea is dying. When you see those big whales
come ashore to die you know there's trouble.
They got no place to go. I shouldn't just say
white people, but they cause a lot of trouble.
The dollar comes before anything. The fish
didn't change. We change.
Weymouth is too intelligent to write a simple critique of humans tampering with nature. But one can't help drawing conclusions from his
interviewees about greed, stupidity and unnecessary interference.
Stan, originally a gang member in Boston, came to the Yukon in 1970, aged 20. He describes the fish wheel, a device long used by biologists to
study salmon. A 2007 study showed that those fish that had 'spent time incarcerated had a reduced migration rate and were more likely to be
recaptured further upriver, disoriented, injured, sometimes dying'. Stan designed a more humane version, but fell foul of the Alaska Department
of Fish & Game. The state refused to use his figures. The ADF&G established rules to prevent overfishing but, according to fluctuations in the
number of fish each year, had to keep altering them. Even before 'outsiders' got involved, historically there were bad years. After its blanket
fishing bans in 2014 and 2015, the ADF&G has tried to let people fish for themselves, while remaining conservation-minded. As Weymouth
admits: 'No one is pretending that managing salmon is simple.'
This is a rich and fascinating book. We learn that grizzlies sometimes mate with polar bears; that America bought Alaska from Russia in 1867;
that salmon definitely feel fear and pain; and that Scottish salmon farmers have increased their use of chemicals. Dickens, writing in 1861 on
'Salmon in Danger', claimed that early in the 19th century, the fish sold in Billingsgate market were caught only a few miles from London Bridge-
-3,000 salmon a year--but within 25 years the Thames was empty, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And Weymouth's terrific account of the
2009 flood, caused by the break-up of ice in the Yukon, is so vivid it reads like a thriller. But I did wish for a better map.
I shall let Stan have the last word. 'When the world comes to an end, the fish will recover just fine.'
Caption: Midnight sun on the Yukon
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Segrave, Elisa. "Fish in troubled waters." Spectator, 2 June 2018, p. 37. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543465233/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a587252f. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543465233
Weymouth, Adam: KINGS OF THE YUKON
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Weymouth, Adam KINGS OF THE YUKON Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 5, 22 ISBN: 978-0-316-39670-7
An analysis of the long history and perilous future of king salmon as well as an assessment of how the fish's vitality directly correlates to that of
Alaska as a whole.
Given the subtitle of the book, readers could be forgiven for expecting a straightforward travelogue. While that's certainly part of it--debut author
and London-based environmental writer Weymouth canoed roughly 2,000 miles down the famed Yukon River, "the longest salmon run in the
world"--the narrative is largely about the fish itself and the people in the villages along the way who rely on it for sustenance, physically and
economically. The king salmon is undoubtedly in decline, in both sheer numbers and average poundage. Many readers will assume that climate
change is to blame, but the author discovered that the real reasons are much more complicated and go all the way back to the discoveries of gold
and oil, when the wild Alaskan frontier became more commercialized and domesticated. Throughout the book, Weymouth introduces us to a
memorable cast of colorful characters, including numerous Native families and some reality TV stars (the author posits, only half-jokingly, that
Alaska has more per capita than any other state). Readers will also encounter a number of lively history lessons of salmon, the Native peoples of
Alaska, and the state itself. As he writes, "the history of the salmon is the history of this land....[The Yukon] intimately connected the lives of a
Tlingit Indian at the river's source and a Yupik Eskimo on Alaska's coast, two thousand miles away, even before these people were aware of each
other's existence. It is a link to peoples' ancestors and their hope for their children's children."
In this timely story "of relationships, of the symbiosis of people and fish, of the imprint that one leaves on the other," Weymouth keeps the pages
turning to the very end.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Weymouth, Adam: KINGS OF THE YUKON." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959759/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23e29d8f. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959759