What Is The Theme Of Mountain In The Cloud By Bruce Brown Salmon

Mountain in the Cloud by Bruce Brown is a book outlining the cold hard truth about what we as human beings have done to salmon in the place that we call home. The wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest went from ruling the rivers, to rarely being seen. Bruce Brown gives clear reasons to the slow yet steady disappearance of wild salmon in the PNW and the consequences of such a thing, but also brings awareness to the larger picture of what's going on in the natural world. The main argument Brown makes throughout the entirety of the book is that wild salmon are going extinct due to human causes. He makes a point at the beginning that back when the white man first settled in the Northwest, the abundance of salmon was so great that it was able

For example, “on the Columbia river, which 100 years ago boasted the largest runs of Chinook, Coho and steelhead on the face of the globe, these same fish have declined to the point of receiving serious consideration for the federal government’s threatened or endangered species list.” The deterioration of the wild salmon, according to Brown, is from logging, overfishing, hatcheries, and dams, basically all human related activities. Logging and clear-cutting damages all habitats and “literally flattens many creatures chances for life.” For the salmon it causes blockades that disrupts the fishes migrating patterns, or ruins their spawning grounds all together simply from trees being dragged across the stream beds. Many fish, have died because of this but logging isn’t the only problem. Brown makes another point that the wild salmon could probably make a comeback on their own, even with the logging and dams damaging their habitat, they wont be able to “rebuild [their population] if not enough fish return from the ocean to spawn.” The salmon have been majorly overfished because there was really no limit

The book had a great impact on the Elwha River and “was cited, both as an inspiration and as cold, hard evidence, by the first advocates for dam removal.” This lead to one of the biggest events in US history, which was the removal of the Elwha Dam about 30 years after the book was written. Brown mentions many ways to fix the ever growing problem at hand, and at the time, most seemed very radical. Yet, on September 19th, 2011 the demolition of the dam began and was the “largest dam removal in history.” The dam had been built in the early 20’s and remained there, blocking the flow of the river for about 100 years before it was finally taken down. The projected restored the natural habitat of the river and opened it up to its original course from the Olympic Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When Mountain in the Clouds was written, the removal of a huge dam that’s been around for years seemed impossible. Even the author, Bruce Brown, said “I can’t say I thought I’d live to see the day” which goes to show how radical the idea was when he wrote it so many years ago. The fact that his book brought about the removal of the Elwha dam is a significant thing and is important to the future of conservation. Mountain in the Clouds showed clearly the problems that are occurring and opens peoples eyes to