Mapping As If Place Mattered:
The Lands and Waters of Salmon Nation

A region defined by natural boundaries

Each drop of rain is a starting point for seeing the shape of our region in a new light. Raindrops build streams, and streams are nudged this way and that by the contours of the land. Separating one stream network from the next are hill and mountain crests, the backbones of the landscape. When we trace those ridgelines around the streams, our maps reveal a jigsaw pattern of drainage areas: watersheds. Piecing those watersheds together into a coherent whole, we arrive at a larger geography defined by the life and culture it supports: our bioregion, Salmon Nation.

All along the Pacific Coast of North America from the California redwoods north to the Arctic Ocean, any summertime stream that carries more than a couple of garden hoses' worth of water is probably home to at least one species of salmon. The first people of this region were wealthy thanks to the salmon. More recently, scientists surveying the importance of this fish to our flora and fauna have declared it a keystone of regional health.

But beyond salmon, we are bound together in this region by other issues, by water, by power and trade. We face common problems, share common interests and look to each other with a common history. Salmon Nation is a place where the economy is not in conflict with the ecological health of the land. It is a place where we not only live, but thrive.

Welcome home.

Download the Lands and Waters map
[1 meg pdf]

The lines on the map may vary, but the idea remains the same: redefining our landscape to respect its natural borders. By doing so, we might come to see ourselves as citizens of another kind of nation, and think twice about the importance of our daily decisions in caring for it.

Gathered below are a variety of bioregional visions. We're already starting to see the enthusiasm that Salmon Nation generates within the region that it encompasses. Can Buffalo Nation or Tallgrass Nation be far behind?

Arid Region of the United States, Showing Drainage Districts

Eleventh Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, 1890-91

From John Wesley Powell's testimony to the House Select Committee on Irrigation:
"My theory is to organize in the United States another unit of government for specific purposes, for agriculture by irrigation, for the protection of the forests which are being destroyed by fire, and for the utilization of pasturage which can only be utilized in large bodies; that is to create a great body of commonwealths. In the main these commonwealths would be like county communities in the States...

"Let the General Government organize the arid region, including all of the lands to be irrigated by perennial streams, into irrigation districts by hydrographic basins... Then let the people of each such irrigation district organize as a body and control the waters on the declared irrigable lands in any manner which they may devise. Then declare that the pasturage and timber lands by permanently reserved for the purpose for which they are adopted, and give to the people the right to protect and use the forests and grasses."

Photo reprinted courtesy of Dan Flores

Ecoregion Map

Milkweed Editions is a nonprofit literary press with a focus on place-based writing. From their website: "Developed with the help of an array of educators and naturalists, this map, which covers most of North America, is broken into fifteen areas that share similar climates, soils, and plant and animal communities, as well as cultural attributes... [It] highlights the ways natural and human communities connect — by shared rivers, forests, basins, mountain ranges, cities, and so on—while also acting as a guide for the protection of these landscapes. The ecoregion map suggests an entire way of thinking about place, in which cities and countryside are part of a larger, interdependent ecosystem.

"We owe a special debt to Sara St. Antoine and Gary Nabhan for taking on the challenges of this map, aware as we all are that any one map will fail to answer all the objections it might inspire. Yet, we believe this map to be an especially useful framework for thinking about place in context of the natural world — for realizing the connectedness of the land and all of its organisms."

www.worldashome.org

Terrestrial Ecoregions

From the World Wildlife Fund website:
"Over the past eight years we have developed a biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's terrestrial biodiversity. We term our biogeographic units ecoregions, which we define as a relatively large unit of land or water that contains a distinct assemblage of natural communities sharing a large majority of species, dynamics, and environmental conditions. Ecoregions represent the original distribution of distinct assemblages of species and communities."

Olson et al. 2001. Terrestrial ecoregions of the world: A new map of life on Earth. BioScience 51(11):933-938.

www.worldwildlife.org/ecoregions/

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