When the last of four dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California was demolished in October 2024, everyone who knew the river well had a question: How long would it take for salmon to reclaim the upper reaches they’d been cut off from for more than 100 years?
About 10 months later, when they began their fall migration, Chinook salmon immediately took advantage of their new river access, looking for places upstream to lay or fertilize eggs. But the fish still faced two intact dams and no one was sure if the salmon would make it through the fish ladders, structures designed for trout, a smaller species, to bypass the dams.
Then in September, a video camera caught them leaping up the ladders like pros.
William E. Ray Jr., chairman of the Klamath tribes, whose people used to rely on salmon for about a third of their diet, told me he was stunned to see the fish make it all the way to Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon in October. And they are back in the hundreds. Mark Hereford, an Oregon state fish biologist, told me he didn’t expect this magnitude of fish to return for a decade.
Salmon are tough, and they’re a reminder that although nature is sometimes very fragile, decades of conservation rhetoric have perhaps overstated that fragility. Nature can bounce back, often quickly.
From “The Lion King” to nature documentaries, we’re told that when you remove one part of a delicate ecosystem, the whole thing can come crashing down. There’s also the seemingly endless series of scientific reports about the decline of species, from frogs to birds, and the message that we are in the perilous, hopeless “sixth mass extinction” in which species are perishing at rates far above average.
Though the extinction rate for the past few hundred years has indeed been far higher than the average, out of some 1.8 million described species, humans have been the primary cause of fewer than 1,000 known extinctions since the year 1500. Claiming we are already in the sixth mass extinction event suggests that the threatened species are already doomed and there’s no possibility for them to recover.
Some species do require extreme measures to be saved, like the kākāpō, a charming green flightless parrot from New Zealand that can survive only on islands that wildlife managers keep free of predators. And for the roughly 16 percent of threatened species whose central menace is climate change, it’s a complex, global fight.
But many species and ecosystems can rebound even when we take relatively simple actions to protect them: Look no further than the bison, elephants, humpback whales, egrets, bald eagles and many others that have shown that recovery is possible.
In all the hand-wringing over the reported declines in insect populations, I have never heard anyone point out that many insects lay thousands of eggs and produce at least one new generation per year. Careful pesticide management, restoration of habitat — perhaps via programs that compensate farmers for this important work — can help revive them.
Entire ecosystems can recover quickly, too. In 2009, the ecologists Holly Jones and Oswald Schmitz calculated that two-thirds of ecosystems recover at least partly from major disturbances, and of those that do, nearly all can recover in an average of about 10 years. When humans stop activities such as logging, trawling and polluting, the water ecosystems immediately start blooming with life, although they may never be exactly the same as they once were.
Take the vast forests of the northeastern United States, which were cut down for agriculture and logging, then eventually grew back after farmers expanded westward. Today’s forests aren’t quite the same as the ones that were lost. They are missing chestnut trees and are home to coyotes instead of wolves. But they are still full of life.
That’s in part because nature doesn’t simply repeat itself. As each organism makes choices about where to live and eat and with whom to mate, it adapts and changes. Landscape changes can be challenging for us nostalgic humans, but we should appreciate them as expressions of nature’s vitality and intelligence.
For many ecosystems and species like the Klamath Chinook, the actions required are straightforward: Don’t build over or plow under their homes, stop shooting or poisoning them, and, wherever you can, blow up the dams. The rewards are great. Not only have the Chinook salmon returned to the Klamath River Basin, they may soon return to the dinner plates of tribal members, restoring a central part of their culture lost for over a century.
We should not give up on any existing species, nor should we allow ourselves to slide into a facile despair that nature is “doomed.” We should always look for ways we can help or, even better, get out of the way and let nature come roaring back.
Emma Marris is a writer and the author, most recently, of “Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World.”
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