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Salmon Stories

A class introduces Puget Sound students to environmental policy by examining the challenges facing the Pacific Northwest's most famous fish.

Perched on a log above the Mashel River a few miles from the Puget Sound campus, Daniel Sherman explains the complex and often harrowing plight of perhaps the most iconic creature in the Pacific Northwest: the salmon.

Decades of logging have removed trees and gravel crucial to salmon’s survival, Sherman says. In addition, the water temperature is rising and the river’s levels are low—the log Sherman is sitting on in the video, alongside his colleague, geology professor Kena Fox-Dobbs, is actually part of an “engineered logjam” to impede the river’s flow and help restore some of the salmon’s natural habitat.

What Sherman—professor of environmental policy and decision making and director of the university’s Sound Policy Institute—and his colleagues hope to accomplish is to use the story of the salmon to tell a wider story about the Pacific Northwest. And they’ve structured an entire class, ENVR 200, Introduction to the Environment, around that narrative, supplementing classroom work with a series of field trips to discuss the environmental history— and fraught future—of the region.

Salmon stories fieldwork

Salmon biologist Kristin Williamson ’02 talked to students about efforts to restore salmon habitat in the South Prairie Creek floodplain.

ENVR 200 serves as a gateway class for students seeking to major or minor in environmental policy and decision making. Two faculty members co-teach the class: one with a background in the social sciences and another whose background is the natural sciences. Several years ago, Sherman and Peter Wimberger, professor of biology, began building the course around salmon as a case study. “Their unique life history sends them vast distances out into the ocean and then they come back to fresh water,” Sherman says, “and that touches on just about every environmental science and policy issue you can think of.”

The course also asks students to consider a range of perspectives that different people and groups bring to environmental issues. Wimberger says, “We also try to get students to think about the values and beliefs that they bring to these issues.”

Along with the Mashel River visit, students meet with Warren KingGeorge, historian of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, who gives a tour of a beach on the Muckleshoot Tribe’s Vashon Island property teeming with bivalves from oysters to clams to geoducks; it also serves as a harbor for migrating salmon. King- George shares the importance of access to these traditional foods for the Muckleshoot People: “We use this property to enhance the natural resources,” he says, “and to supply tribal elders, our children, our ceremonies, and dinner tables back home in the Muckleshoot village. We use these resources to feed the people.” KingGeorge also leads students in observing the coho harvest at a Muckleshoot fish landing on the Duwamish River and participating in a salmon habitat restoration project along the Green River.

Hands holding a small plastic object at the Diru Creek Salmon Hatchery

Holland Meuller ’23

"You get a different experience being knee-deep in mud than you would sitting in class."

In another field trip, students visit the South Prairie Creek Preserve Floodplain Restoration project, where they hear from salmon habitat restoration biologist Kristin Williamson ’02. In all, there are roughly eight experiential learning field trips per semester, including a camping weekend with visits to farms, Alder Dam, and other places that are meant to tie together many of the issues that ENVR 200 seeks to explore. The weekend trip ends up at Mount Rainier National Park, where students can explore water quality issues and the impact of climate change on glaciers—and on the future of the salmon population.

“You get a different experience being kneedeep in mud than you would sitting in a class reading a textbook,” says Holland Mueller ’23, a junior who served as an instructional assistant (IA) for ENVR 200 in the fall after taking the course earlier.

The course ties together with Sherman’s role as director of the Sound Policy Institute, which encourages students to engage in this kind of experiential learning. In fact, the university is adopting a new experiential learning requirement for graduation, based in part on the success of classes like ENVR 200.

“I think when it comes to things like environmental justice or climate change, a big thing is the emotional attachment people have to it,” says Chloe Steffes ’22, a senior who also serves as an IA for the class. “The data have existed forever, but what motivates people to act on them is the connection—where they can see and feel the impacts they could have.”

ENVR 200 explores the Diru Creek Salmon Hatchery

During the pandemic, many of the experiential trips took place virtually, which produced the footage of Sherman and Fox-Dobbs sitting atop that engineered logjam on the Mashel River. But now that students are returning to visit these sites in person, both Sherman and Wimberger are once again able to see firsthand the impact these trips can have on students. Given that many of them grew up hearing about the impacts of climate change, Sherman says, they seem to have a greater sense of urgency. And the plight of the salmon embodies that urgency.

When students visit habitats that have been restored to encourage salmon to return, and understand the yearslong effort that went into rebuilding those habitats, Sherman says, they’re often overcome. “Understanding the kind of effort that went into this, and the time it took,” Sherman says, “and then to be there at that moment when salmon are returning— it’s a really emotional thing.”

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