"Bruce Brown’s thoughtful study of the decline of the wild Pacific salmon shows that men conquered fish not with ‘ingenuity’ but with brute force, ignorance and greed. Within a few generations of human settlement, farming, timbering, and commercial fishing had reduced the wild chum runs on most rivers to trickles, and the giant Chinook were no longer to be found. As he documented in the course of three years of research on the rivers of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, the salmon are today dying out even in remote areas, their intricate ecology the victim of ocean trawlers, pollution from large logging concerns and the damming and diverting of rivers by power companies. . . . Neither sentimental nor simple, Mountain in the Clouds is a model of ecological history."
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New York Times Book Review
