BIG RIVER

The great river system of the Pacific Northwest is home to a clash between nature and industrial civilization—with the salmon its tragic victim—according to this vibrant photographic meditation.

Photographer and biologist Moskowitz and nature writer Pearkes survey, in words and images, the enormous Columbia River Basin, stretching from British Columbia to Nevada and from Montana to the Pacific Ocean, its many rivers now punctuated by dozens of dams. The book opens with an expansive essay by Pearkes on the Basin’s natural and human history, including the ancient geology and glaciology that forged its rugged landscape, the evolution of salmon and their epic upriver migrations from the sea to spawn in the freshwater streams where they hatched, the Indigenous cultures that shaped themselves around the salmon runs, and the modern project of damming and rationalizing the rivers for the purposes of flood control, navigation, irrigation, and electric power, which blocks salmon runs in the process. She concludes with an intricate consideration of the present-day struggle between native tribes and eco-activists trying to restore salmon runs and competing agricultural-industrial interests, and she highlights some hopeful recent compromises. Pearkes’ prose is lucid and full of compelling scientific and historical detail, but it also conveys a deep spiritual connectedness. (At a tribal salmon ceremony, she writes, a fish “darted unexpectedly in my direction and grazed my calf, then disappeared into deeper water. A bolt of pure energy charged through me. Over the next few days, I dissolved into a weeping mess.”) Much of the book is devoted to Moskowitz’s color photographs, which illustrate Pearkes’ themes with a visual counterpoint between nature and civilization, including sweeping vistas of winding river valleys, lush coastal rain forests, snowy peaks, and meadows dappled with wildflowers. But this arcadia, Moskowitz shows, is blighted by brutalist concrete dams, barges chugging up canals, forest slopes gouged by clear-cutting, and vast industrial farms; in one resonant juxtaposition, irrigation sprinklers spray a mono-crop while smoke from a distant wildfire dims the sun.

A thought-provoking and visually stunning portrait of an embattled paradise.