Welcome

On these pages you will find information about the Salmonpeople Performance, the Citizen Stewardship Campaign and School Curriculum.

Pull down the menus above and read about the show, how to design a campaign in your community, or link academic excellence to community progress.

Why Salmonpeople?

Salmon have been on the scene here for 49 million years. People learned how to catch them 10,000 years ago. How to preserve them 5,000 years ago. We began seriously degrading their habitat about 150 years ago. We put them on the endangered species list 10 years ago.

This is not a story about salmon. It's about our own species. Salmon are the local teachers.

Fifty years from now our grandchildren will chuckle to think how hard our generation struggled to remember that economies are constructs of society nested within the ecological principles that guide every choice we make. Every choice is a natural resource choice. It's all interdependent. And that's the beauty of it. By the year 2050, perhaps sooner than that, nature's bounty will bloom all over again, this time in full partnership with the most clever of her creations. We are the bioneers of this effort.

To move our species from industrial cleverness to sustainable wisdom, there is much to be done.

I have made the choice to step into this current. I want to know my watershed address. I want to participate fully in the emerging narrative of our time. In the Pacific Northwest, we of Salmon Nation, live in the greenest region of the richest civilization in the history of humanity. We are in the process of creating a model for how to be stewards of the land we share with salmon, other species, and intimate, interconnected ecological systems. We are all interdependent. Salmonpeople. The world is watching us watch ourselves as we figure out sustainable solutions. Salmon adapted to ice ages, mountain building, floods and evolving predator-prey relationships. We can too. Salmonpeople.

In the history of our species, we have never before been confronted with a set of learning opportunities as exciting or as fateful as the choices that now confront us. It is a watershed moment for every living thing. And we're in charge of it.

Swim...