7

Lines That Don’t Divide: Telling Tales about Animals, Chemicals, and People in the Salish Sea

Joseph E. Taylor III

Chucho. Bird flying south: you think he sees that line? Rattlesnake, javelin—whatever you got—halfway across that line they don’t start thinking different. So why should a man?

—Lone Star (1996)


We border our worlds to establish order—my side of the room, your side of the backseat, our province, your country—but boundary making is never a simple exercise. Among the many brilliant things about John Sayles’s film Lone Star is its deft exposure of the psychic and material porosity of the lines we draw. Chucho’s speech reminds us that nature has its own geographies, from the dust and mould that spread relentlessly from my bunkmate’s side of the dorm to the exotic species that vex environmental managers around the world. Nature reveals the limits of our spatial projects. In fact, the more we try to keep each other at bay, the more nature draws us together. Conservative Montana farmers built fences to demarcate their private property, but rolling tumbleweeds forced them to establish socialistic “weed districts” and coerce collective responses to keep their fields clean. Similarly, every nation subjects immigrants to health examinations to keep out the sick, but the mutability of pathogens also compels every nation to collaborate in a global disease-tracking system. We try to separate yours from mine to keep out that which is unwanted, but the only constant is transgression, from the 1832 cholera epidemic that swept the globe to the Fukushima-Daiichi-radiated bluefin tuna that arrived off California less than a year after the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami. Neither our national borders nor our cultural containers succeed very well at containing nature’s dynamism.1

The globalized economy exposes daily the problematic nature of modern borders. Planes and ships carry cargo from every corner of the planet—everything from Afghani-raised poppies to Zimbabwean-mined platinum—to a world of eager consumers. Most of this is intended freight, but there are always stowaways ranging from migrant labourers to insects and pathogens, that are less welcome yet ubiquitous. Our insatiable appetites have so accelerated species transfers that North America now hosts a remarkably cosmopolitan ecology. The tales we tell about such invasions are telling. When we discuss starlings and kudzu, we tend to dwell on human agency, even if only to illustrate the limits of customs agents. Nature is a tag-along companion, the undocumented alien slipping in off-manifest in bilges, bodies, and holds. Just in 2012, Pacific Northwesterners learned about infectious salmon anemia spreading from farmed to wild salmon, whooping cough spreading from British Columbia to Washington and Oregon, and debris from tsunami-plagued Japan washing onto North American beaches from Alaska to California. Nature matters in these tales, but it resembles Dr. Frankenstein’s monster: a horrifyingly unnatural beast unleashed by human caprice.2

Although this plot can unnerve, it is familiar and reliable, even comfortable, because the moral of the story is always that somebody behaved badly. But how do we narrate when nature takes the lead, when humans are merely supporting players and the most disturbing monsters are largely a consequence of natural processes? Hollywood offers a few such tales. In the movie Contagion, for example, pathogenic mutations unleash a super-virulent influenza epidemic that rapidly outpaces humans to devastate the world. The camera dwells on individual experiences, but biological processes drive this viral plot. Life history, bioaccumulation, and migration similarly frame movies such as Andromeda Strain, Minamata, and World War Z. Like the Frankensteinian narrative, these nature-propelled dramas illustrate the contingent significance of borders. Social spaces matter, but their meanings shift when nature crosses a line. In the case of Contagion and World War Z, human borders not only fail to keep citizens safe; they actually stymie the state’s ability to comprehend natural threats. In such cases the only rational form of boundary making is individual quarantine. Characters literally wall themselves off from the rest of humanity, yet the underlying, almost too-subtle lesson is that isolation is impossible.3

This applies equally to the lines we draw between ourselves and nature. Although in the late nineteenth century the germ theory of disease led medical professionals to reimagine human bodies as separate ecosystems, the hermetic body never fully displaced the older view of bodily health as entwined with its environments. Twentieth-century researchers such as Macfarlane Burnet and Rene Dubos drew links between parasites, disease, and ecology, while environmental advocates such as Rachel Carson, Lois Gibbs, and Sandra Steingraber highlighted the linkages between chemicals, morbidity, and extinction. Clusters of rare cancers, birth defects, and chronic diseases kept epidemiologists focused on the role of place in human health. Horrors such as HIV and Ebola made most of the world more conscious of how zoonosis has shaped human history. Every major epidemic from Justinian’s Plague to smallpox, measles, anthrax, yellow fever, the Spanish flu, and West Nile virus began when a pathogen jumped from an animal to us. The demarcations between humans, other species, and the environment seem less and less clear. One particularly instructive way to trace this blurred reality is via the ecology of chemicals along the northwestern edge of North America.4

The waterscape abutting southwestern British Columbia and northwestern Washington State was once known as the Puget Sound, Strait of Juan de Fuca, or Strait of Georgia (Figure 1). Now it is called the Salish Sea, a vast inland sea studded with rocky islands, complex currents, charismatic fauna, spectacular scenery, and very large cities. In most ways the Salish Sea is a seamless ecology teeming with life, yet as Emma S. Norman and Alice Cohen illustrate elsewhere in this volume, it has always lapped up against a complicated social geography. Native peoples dominated the region for millennia. Most groups spoke dialects of the Salish language, and all relied primarily on marine and riverine resources, especially the Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) and whales that plied these waters. Residents interacted both peacefully, via marriage and trade, and violently, through war and slave raiding, but sovereignty rarely reached beyond the village. Europeans overlaid but did not erase this fractured world. Even during the hegemony of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1820s and 1830s, or after Great Britain and the United States formally divided the continent at the 49th parallel in 1846, Aboriginal seasonal movements continued to bare the porosity of corporate and state space. No single sovereign has ever ruled the Salish Sea, and British Columbia’s ongoing land claims process with First Nations groups in the province reminds us that the modern state has not yet perfected its title to the region.5


7.1 Salish Sea basin. The “Salish Sea” is the official geographical term now applied to a waterscape whose individual components are also called the Strait of Georgia, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound. Map by author.

This social dynamism depended heavily upon a setting of ecological continuity, but food chains became ever less reliable over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Salish Sea had never been a pristine wilderness. Indigenous peoples harvested vast amounts of nature for millennia, but with little change to the sea’s ecology or chemistry. Nineteenth-century farmers, fishers, loggers, and miners accelerated the rate of extraction, especially by denuding forests, silting spawning beds, and blocking streams. Lumber mills, tanneries, and coal mines dumped their wastes into rivers and bays in a giant circle from Port Townsend to Olympia, Seattle, New Westminster, Powell River, Campbell River, Courtenay, Ladysmith, and Victoria. Sawdust leachates altered water chemistry and, in large depositions, absorbed all the suspended oxygen, while tannins toxified the water. Still, resettlement’s ecological impact on the sea was slight until the end of the century, when industrialization and urbanization transformed the Salish Sea ecosystem in ways similar to what Nancy Langston describes for Lake Superior in the next chapter. In the 1880s, railroads solidified the line between water and land by filling marshes, tidal flats, and river banks with rock and dirt. Towns expanded the hardscape with ports, levees, and pavement. Population growth and industrial development substantially deepened the ecological impact. Every urban centre poured raw sewage into the sea. Petroleum facilities on Burrard Inlet in 1908 and in Seattle in 1911 disposed wastes similarly, as did ships, shipyards, and steel mills. By 1930 the Salish Sea had suffered significant habitat loss and diminished oxygen content. The main contributors then intensified with World War II and the Cold War.6

The distinguishing ecological theme of the twentieth century was not simply the Salish Sea’s increasingly polluted state but the changing nature of the things flushed into it. Petroleum- and electrical-based energy used an array of new chemicals that refineries routinely dumped into the sea, including benzene, toluene, and xylene. The widespread practice of burning domestic and industrial wastes released mercury into the air. Pulp and paper mills poured chlorine and heavy metals into the water. Electrical transformers leaked PCB-laden coolants in the Puyallup, Duwamish, Snohomish, and Fraser Rivers and Burrard Inlet. From the 1930s to the 1970s all these chemicals—plus PCDDs, PCDFs, PVCs, and an array of organochlorines such as DDT and 2,4-D—entered the ecosystem in ever increasing amounts. A key period in the watershed was the early 1970s, when federal, state, and provincial regulatory agencies began to rein in pollution. Halting the production and distribution of toxins was a critical turning point, but the chemicals were not easily erased. All would continue to seep into and remain in the sea for decades. The sediment became a kind of safety deposit box of horrors. Moreover, even as the production and release of some compounds abated, new flame-retardant PBDEs, introduced during the 1970s as part of consumer safety legislation, entered the sea in ever increasing amounts through the air and water. Researchers also discovered a much vaster category of unregulated “nonpoint source pollution” as chemicals washed into the sea from urban streets, suburban yards, and rural farms. Most chemicals had structures and modes of action similar to dioxin—a particularly awful carcinogen—and their resilience to decay led all to be dubbed “persistent organic pollutants.”7

To this point the narrative resembles the Frankenstein plot. In our heedless pursuit of progress, humans have unleashed new, sometimes frightening, forms of nature, fouling nests and wreaking unintended consequences. The plot is so familiar—especially because of those 1950s sci-fi flicks featuring ants and blobs—that we can ignore the details and still accurately predict the outcome: giant women, toxic avengers, Ninja Turtles, and the residents of Hinkley, California, whom Erin Brockovich rescued. We focus on the human victims, but some of the things that were flushed down the toilet—birth control pills, steroids, and other artificial hormones with endocrine-disrupting properties—mutated the sea itself. Biologists have begun to detect broad changes in water chemistry. During winter holidays the sea around sewer outfalls tastes more like vanilla and cinnamon, and the entire Pacific is more caffeinated these days. Salmon farms transmit epizootics and heavy metals to wild fish. Similar to the effect that Langston describes for trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol on larval lampreys in Lake Superior, the endocrine-disrupting properties of PCBs and mercury may have changed reproductive rates and sex ratios in bottom fish in heavily industrialized areas such as the Duwamish River and Hylebos Waterway. Make no mistake: there be monsters here, but this narrative is more complex and devastating than Godzilla redux.8

What makes the Salish Sea’s chemical history so disturbing is that its environmental processes were utterly natural. Ecosystems are the sum of acts of production and consumption. Sunlight is the foundation of nutrient flows, and food chains are how they cycle. This is life, pure and simple, but the effect on the sea was anything but simple or pure. When chlorine, mercury, PCBs, and PBDEs settled into sediments, microphytes and algae broke down and absorbed these chemicals. This began many cycles of uptake. Anaerobic organisms in the sediment transformed mercury into methylmercury, a more toxic form of the element easier for other organisms to absorb. Those microorganisms were in turn consumed by plankton floating in the current, which were eaten by small fish and shellfish. At each step predators became prey. Smaller-bodied species fed larger, higher-trophic species such as bottom fish, maturing salmon, and marine mammals, while decomposers recycled nutrients and persistent organic pollutants at every level of the ecosystem. Most of the pollutants had anthropogenic origins, but their journey through the Salish Sea was utterly natural, as was the tendency for larger-bodied, longer-lived species to metabolize them—called “bioaccumulation” or “biomagnification”—in ever greater concentrations than smaller-bodied, shorter-lived species. The same process that coloured the flesh of salmon by consuming carotene-laden krill and shrimp, and made longer-lived, fattier chinooks (O. tshawytscha) and sockeyes (O. nerka) redder than shorter-lived, leaner pinks (O. gorbuscha) and chums (O. keta), also turned these high-trophic predators into toxic-waste sites.9

By the early 2000s, wildlife biologists had a fairly clear picture of what bioaccumulation was doing at the top of the Salish Sea food chains. It was not a pretty sight. Adult chinook bore significant loads of PCBs and PBDEs back to spawning grounds and hatcheries, and persistent organic pollutants accumulated in the blubber and hair of Steller sea lions and harbour seals at even higher levels. Organochlorines were linked to cancer rates in California sea lions in British Columbia. Resident killer whales “exceeded the health-effects threshold for PCBs in blubber and, most notably, the four juvenile whales exceeded the threshold by factors of 2-3.6.” The impact on juvenile orcas was particularly devastating. Lactating orcas were managing to lower their toxic levels by transferring pollutants to their calves through maternal milk. Although researchers focused on those apex species most likely to harbour pollutants in high concentrations, they knew this was a systemic problem that affected every link in the sea’s many food chains. And just as the ecosystem did not stop at the 49th parallel, neither did it stop at the water’s edge. Biologists traced additional chemical pathways to surf scoters grazing in the nearshore environs of the Salish Sea, to grizzly bears eating adult salmon and excreting the nutrients and pollutants across the forest, and to American dippers feeding on the spawned-out carcasses of salmon in the upper Fraser River basin.10

Humans were ultimately linked to both ends of these food chains. Salmon eaters were made aware of their connectedness to the sea through a pair of scientific studies in 2004 that documented high concentrations of PCBs and PBDEs in farmed salmon. As in other tales of bioaccumulation, this was about toxins naturally concentrating as they moved up the trophic ladder. The researchers noted that farmed salmon, because they were fed processed bottom fish, functionally ate at a higher trophic level than wild salmon, which preyed on smaller-bodied fish. From an ecological perspective, there was little surprise in finding that farmed-salmon flesh contained higher concentrations of PCBs and PBDEs than did that of wild salmon, but there was a surprise: the single highest PBDE score came from a wild salmon (Figure 2). The data point seemed anomalous until researchers learned that it came from a large-bodied, long-lived chinook whose subpopulation matures in the Salish Sea; unlike most wild salmon, which spend the ocean part of their lives far out in the Pacific, these chinooks remain locavores and pay a price.11


7.2 PBDEs in salmon. In 2004, researchers published studies on the bioaccumulation rates of persistent organic pollutants in farmed and wild salmon. The above graph illustrates PBDE accumulation, with wild salmon (black bars) mostly scoring at the low end. The higher uptake values among wholesale- and supermarket-supplied farmed salmon (grey and white bars respectively) was unsurprising, but the two exceptions involving Pacific Northwest runs, especially the BC chinook at the far left-hand edge of the graph, underscored the polluted state of Northwest waters. Reproduced with permission of Ronald A. Hites and American Chemical Society.

The research on PCBs and PBDEs also illustrates how humans inhabit the highest trophic level in the Salish Sea’s persistent organic pollutant ecosystem. Every human bioaccumulates, but we do not all consume toxins equally. Although most Salish Sea residents eat salmon, they do not all eat the same species of salmon. Wealthy residents consume fresh sockeye and chinook shipped from the nonindustrialized, far less toxic Skeena, Copper, and Bristol Bay watersheds. Middling Northwesterners tend to dine on coho and chinook caught by local trollers and anglers or on Atlantic and steelhead salmon farmed in Washington and British Columbia. The poor eat pink and chum canned in northern British Columbia and western Alaska or bottom fish and crab harvested from urban piers. Thus, the middle class and poor most often consume local nature, and the poor eat more local fish per capita than any other segment of society. This is not a good thing. Bioaccumulation operates the same way in humans as it does in birds, fish, pinnipeds, and cetaceans. Toxins accrete in adipose tissues, especially the buttocks and breasts, and females can pass concentrated doses of these chemicals to nursing infants. Mammalian babies, it turns out, are the apex consumers of the Salish Sea’s toxic ecology. The biological mechanisms that led nursing juvenile orcas to have above-average levels of toxins are the same ones that place poor kids in Seattle—whose mothers consume high amounts of locally caught fish—at a higher risk for toxic contamination and cognitive delays. In this respect, the Salish Sea differs little from other heavily industrialized environments such as Lake Superior, New York’s East River, Baden-Württemberg in Germany, and Zhejiang in China, but at this point even places like Arctic Canada suffer from persistent organic pollutants.12

Because toxic ecologies exist pretty much everywhere, so do their environmental and social consequences. The intellectual and geopolitical borders that run through the Salish Sea offer a rare opportunity to consider the physical and cultural obstacles that thwart our ability to think ecologically. The sea that captures modern imaginations is decidedly not the world that Aboriginal peoples inhabited two centuries ago, yet its timeless beauty and bounty are why people continue to invoke regional identities that ignore the 49th parallel. Although the imperialistic ambitions of the Hudson’s Bay Company and American jingoists lost favour, environmentalists and entrepreneurs suggested transnational spaces that were, each in its own way, as imperialistic and blinkered. In 1975, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia included the Salish Sea in an imagined nation that would encompass the entire northern Pacific coast. Underlying his fantasy, and repeated even more expansively in Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America (1981) and Colin Woodard’s American Nations (2011), is a belief that local nature nurtures unique environmental sensitivity. The Salish Sea’s history of persistent organic pollutants complicates such claims, but it has not stopped Washington and British Columbia entrepreneurs from asserting their own kindredness with nature and each other in the “Cascadia” campaign that claims the Pacific Northwest is a natural bioregion and economy that is artificially divided by two nation states. In the words of a Canadian booster, Cascadia “is a spectacular array of natural and built environments, with wilderness coexisting in relative harmony with sophisticated urban centres.”13

The coinage of “Salish Sea” is thus the latest in a long genealogy of regionalisms. First proposed in the late 1980s by Bert Webber, a Canadian-born marine biologist who spent his professional career at Western Washington University, “Salish Sea” slowly grew more popular among activists, artists, bureaucrats, and scientists. By early 2010, state, provincial, and federal geographical naming boards had approved the term. Like previous ideas, “Salish Sea” conflates nature and culture too tidily. In honouring the Salishan-speaking people who had long resided around the edges of the sea, Webber memorialized the dominant language but homogenized the region’s fractured political and linguistic geography, which included many independent groups, ten distinct dialects, and three Wakashan-speaking peoples (Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Makah) who were effectively defined out of the modern “Salish Sea.” Webber hoped his neologism might even erase memory of the old Georgia Strait, Puget Sound, and Strait of Juan de Fuca. His aim was “to restore the damaged waters by raising awareness that this is one shared ecosystem spanning the border between Canada and the United States.” This was probably the most radical element of Webber’s agenda, and a marked departure from previous coinages, both because it lacked an entrepreneurial edge and because it gained official sanction. Nevertheless, some reactions to the new name revealed that the most formidable obstacles to ecosystemic management are not the geopolitical lines on maps but the boundaries inside people’s heads. One Canadian academic readily lumped “Salish Sea” together with “Cascadia” as another act of American “cultural imperialism,” ignoring both Webber’s Canadian nativity and the BC business community’s support of the Cascadia campaign. The critic bristled, “It’s just another one of the American efforts to erase the border. . . . It’s a silly idea. We have beautiful [geographical] names.” One is tempted to add, “and really ugly sediment chemistry,” but as historian Carl Abbott observes, the international border has indeed grown less porous over the course of the twentieth century.14

The “Salish Sea” is thus less a resurrection of ancient geography than a thoroughly modern construct, yet the sea’s environmental past is the single most important reason for embracing the new label, provided, of course, that the messiness of the past informs residents’ understanding of the present ecosystem. This is not a given. Environmentalists who care about this waterscape, for example, like to wax poetic about the beauty of the sea and its magnificent breaching whales and salmon runs. These are charismatic environmental emblems, mythic both in their place in regional culture and in their historical emptiness. They capture the imagination, but they are rather timeless in a bad way. Only by moving past the superficiality of this imagery can residents grasp the ecosystemic implications. They must drill down to the blubber and fat, linger on the ickiness of their chemical compositions, to see how biology and chemistry link sea to land and fish to mammals and birds in historically contingent ways. Only then will residents develop the sort of holistic vision of humans and nature necessary to comprehend the true extent of the Salish Sea’s persistent organic pollutant ecoystem. Historically grounded perspectives of the Salish Sea are imperative. Some local environmentalists promote locavorism—the ideal of eating locally to minimize the carbon footprint of consumption—but they seem unaware that the urban poor have long consumed local nature, and that this has not been good for them. Persistent organic pollutants no longer affect just the poor, however. Toxic fish are actually a remarkably democratic problem. Research has detected growing amounts of heavy metals in salmon that spawn in remote Alaska lakes. Thus, even well-educated consumers who avoid toxins by frequenting upscale stores and restaurants unwittingly eat tainted fish. DNA testing has also revealed that many vendors mislabel fish products, and the environmental labelling programs of the Marine Stewardship Council, Blue Ocean Institute, and Monterey Bay Aquarium are less than fully reliable.15

Such shortcomings may be a good thing. If fewer Salish Sea residents regard upscale consumption as an ecological refuge, perhaps more of them will work to make the sea an ecology that they, or at least their children and grandchildren, can consume without fear. Right now the sea is studded with signs along urban shores warning residents not to consume locally (see Figure 3). The signs offer several key lessons. First, usually written in multiple languages to inform the sea’s many immigrants, the signs underscore the socioeconomy of locavorism. It is ultimately the poor and marginalized who most regularly consume the sea. Second, the signs remind us of the devastating effects of locavorism. Dangers range from immediate poisoning to delayed cancers to inherited birth defects. The poor and marginalized run a higher risk of suffering these fates, but society as a whole pays in the form of higher costs for medical, educational, and social services. Third, the signs reveal an uneven geography of concern. Even though the Georgia Strait’s history of persistent organic pollutants mirrors that of the Puget Sound, and even though poor immigrant and First Nations fishers rely heavily on those polluted waters, the British Columbia government has been slower to erect warning signs. Finally, the signs reveal the limits of conceptualizing environmental and social problems. The public and media lean on predictable metaphors. They liken environmental monsters to Frankenstein, and victims to H.G. Wells’s Morlocks, but the biological and ecological processes that cycle persistent organic pollutants through the Salish Sea and back to us are more subtle and complex than the monster and mutant tales can convey.16


7.3 Warning sign, 2015. The chemical legacy of 150 years of industrialization emerges in signs alerting residents not to eat fish from the Salish Sea. The above warning, posted at a popular park on the lower Duwamish River, is given in nine languages: English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Laotian, Cambodian, and Somali. There is a marked difference between the United States and Canada in the frequency of these warnings. Photo by Matthew W. Klingle.

The Salish Sea’s toxic ecosystem reveals how easily and thoroughly nature transgresses governmental and cultural borders. Geopolitically, an increasing number of governments claim the sea as if it can be parsed into American, Canadian, and tribal space, while corporations and environmental groups regularly cross international boundaries to shape environmental policies. Norman and Cohen argue in chapter 2 that this fragmentation opens possibilities for a broader array of voices to shape environmental management, but those voices are not all equal. Moreover, adding more will not necessarily make management more responsive. The sea is a transnational space. Its sovereignty, though, is still exercised through territoriality—and governments, all governments, jealously guard their powers. The Salish Sea is thus, as always, a seamless ecology deeply fractured by an ever growing array of social and political geographies that might actually make regulatory coordination more difficult. The nature of this place also poses challenges to its intellectual boundaries. Environmental scientists, even when they seek “an integrated analysis of the marine social-ecological system,” still speak of “natural and human drivers” as though these can be teased apart. The persistent organic pollutant ecology of salmon, seals, and people plays havoc with such distinctions. The United States and Canada, Nature and Culture; the Salish Sea merges our comfortable antonyms in a world of hybrids that cannot and ought not be segregated. Heavy metals and chemicals course through orca and human bodies via the same natural processes. To separate the natural from the cultural in apex predators, or any other species, does violence to the tangle of social and ecological systems that link species and countries. This is a messy world, one requiring messy explanations. Its human residents, and indeed all humans, will do better by nature and themselves to acknowledge the limits of the lines they draw. Intellectual and political borders get in the way of understanding. As Chucho says in Lone Star, no other animal thinks differently when it crosses our lines. Neither do persistent organic pollutants. Why should we?17

Notes

1 I would like to thank Mark Fiege, Lynne Heasley, Matt Klingle, Nancy Langston, Dan Macfarlane, and Louis Pubols for their advice and encouragement with this chapter.

Lone Star, directed by John Sayles (West Hollywood: Castle Rock Entertainment, Rio Dulce Productions, 1996); Mark Fiege, “The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape,” Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2005): 22–47; World Health Organization, Bugs, Drugs and Smoke: Stories from Public Health (Geneva: WHO, 2011), 119–38; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Daniel J. Madigan, Zofia Baumann, and Nicholas S. Fisher, “Pacific Bluefin Tuna Transport Fukushima-Derived Radionuclides from Japan to California,” PNAS 109, no. 24 (2012): 9483–86.

2 Alfred W. Crosby Jr., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Harriet Ritvo, “Going Forth and Multiplying: Animal Acclimatization and Invasion,” Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012): 404–14; Derek H. Alderman and Donna G’Segner Alderman, “Kudzu: A Tale of Two Vines,” Southern Cultures 7, no. 3 (2001): 49–64; Brian Comon, Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia, rev. ed. (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010); Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); William Yardley, “Canada Holds Hearings on Suspected Virus in Salmon,” New York Times, December 16, 2011; Pamela Fayerman, “BC Health Officials Aren’t Following Washington State’s Lead on Whooping Cough,” Vancouver Sun, May 15, 2012; Lori Tobias, “Tsunami-Loosened Dock on Oregon Coast Raises Concerns about Future Debris, Foreign Organisms, What to Do with It,” Portland Oregonian, June 7, 2012; T.F. Sutherland and C.D. Levings, “Quantifying Non-Indigenous Species in Accumulated Ballast Slurry Residuals (Swish) Arriving at Vancouver, British Columbia,” Progress in Oceanography 115 (August 2013): 211–18.

3 Jules M. Blais et al., “Biologically Mediated Transport of Contaminants to Aquatic Systems,” Environmental Science & Technology 41, no. 4 (2007): 1075–84; Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh (Burbank: Warner Brothers, 2011); Michael Crichton, Andromeda Strain (New York: Knopf, 1969); Minamata, directed by Noriaki Tsuchimoto (Japan: Higashi Productions, 1971); Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Crown, 2006).

4 Warwick Anderson, “Natural Histories of Infectious Disease: Ecological Vision in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Science,” Osiris 19 (2004): 39–61; Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Conevery Valençius, The Health of the Countryside: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Lands (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Lois Marie Gibbs, Love Canal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982); Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1997); Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview, 1990); Barbara L. Allen, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Dispute, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012).

5 Richard Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997); R. Cole Harris and Eric Leinberger, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002); Alexandra Harmon, “Lines in Sand: Shifting Boundaries between Indians and Non-Indians in the Puget Sound Region,” Western Historical Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1995): 428–53; John Lutz, “Work, Sex, and Death on the Great Thoroughfare: Annual Migrations of ‘Canadian Indians,’” in Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans, and the Western Border, ed. John Findlay and Ken Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 80–103; Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 74–134; Jennifer Seltz, “Epidemics, Indians, and Border-Making in the Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest,” in Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories, ed. Benjamin Johnson and Andrew Graybill (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 91–115; Lissa Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Keith Carlson, ed., A Stól:lo-Coast Salish Historical Atlas (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001); Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Alexandra Harmon, ed., The Power of Promises: Rethinking Indian Treaties in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

6 On precontact fishing, see Patricia Berringer, “Northwest Coast Traditional Salmon Fisheries: Systems of Resource Utilization” (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 1982); and Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 13–38. On nineteenth-century environmental change, see Robert Bunting, The Pacific Raincoast: Environment and Culture in an American Eden, 1778–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); Thomas R. Cox, The Lumberman’s Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America’s Forests (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2010), 266–330; Michael Kennedy, “Fraser River Placer Mining Landscapes,” BC Studies, no. 160 (Winter 2008/2009): 35–66; Richard A. Rajala, Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest: Production, Science, and Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998); and “A Tannery Has Been Established,” La Conner Puget Sound Mail, December 16, 1882, 3. On twentieth-century urbanization and industrialization, see Margaret W. Andrews, “Sanitary Conveniences and the Retreat of the Frontier: Vancouver, 1886–1926,” BC Studies, no. 87 (Autumn 1990): 3–22; Norman H. Clark, Mill Town (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970); Matthew W. Klingle, “Frontier Ghosts along the Urban Pacific Slope,” in Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire, ed. Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, and Adam Arenson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 121–45; Matthew D. Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Charles M. Gates, “A Historical Sketch of the Economic Development of Washington since Statehood,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1948): 214–32; Howard A. Hanson, “More Land for Industry: The Story of Flood Control in the Green River Valley,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1957): 1–7; Arn Keeling, “Sink or Swim: Water Pollution and Environmental Politics in Vancouver, 1889–1975,” BC Studies, no. 142–143 (Summer/Autumn 2004): 69–101; Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–118; W.K. Lamb, “Building Submarines for Russia in Burrard Inlet,” BC Studies, no. 71 (Autumn 1986): 3–26; Norbert MacDonald, “A Critical Growth Cycle for Vancouver, 1900–1914,” BC Studies, no. 17 (Spring 1973): 26–42; and William J. Williams, “Accommodating American Shipyard Workers, 1917–1918: The Pacific Coast and the Federal Government’s First Public Housing and Transit Programs,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 84, no. 2 (1993): 51–59. On hardening borders, see Bruce Miller, “The ‘Really Real’ Border and the Divided Salish Community,” BC Studies, no. 112 (Winter 1996/1997): 63–79; and Carl Abbott, “That Long Western Border: Canada, the United States, and a Century of Economic Change,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans, and the Western Border, ed. John Findlay and Ken Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 203–18.

7 A quick elaboration of terms: PCBs = polychlorinated biphenyls; PCDD = polychlorinated dibenzodioxins; PCDF = polychlorinated dibenzofurans; PVCs = polyvinyl chlorides; DDT = dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane; 2,4-D = 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid; PBDEs = polybrominated diphenyl ethers. For general overviews, see Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 139–94; Joe Thornton, Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)1–199; Shinsuke Tanabe, “PBDEs, An Emerging Group of Persistent Pollutants,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 49, no. 5–6 (2004): 369–70; Yasunobu Aoki, “Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Polychlorinated Dibenzo-p-dioxins, and Polychlorinated Dibenzofurans as Endocrine Disrupters—What We Have Learned from Yusho Disease,” Environmental Research 86, no. 1 (2001): 2–11; Ronald A. Hites, “Dioxins: An Overview and History,” Environmental Science & Technology 45, no. 1 (2011): 16–20; and P. Agamuthu, “Mercury—The Real Story,” Waste Management and Research 31, no. 3 (2013): 233–34. For studies on the Salish Sea, see Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, Pollution Effects of Pulp and Paper Mill Wastes in Puget Sound: A Report on Studies Conducted by the Washington State Enforcement Project (Portland: U.S. Dept. of Interior, 1967); D.E. Konasewich et al., Effects, Pathways, Processes, and Transformation of Puget Sound Contaminants of Concern, NOAA Technical Memorandum OMPA-20 (Boulder: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1982); S.L. Walker et al., “Canadian Environmental Effects Monitoring: Experiences with Pulp and Paper and Metal Mining Regulatory Programs,” Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 88 (2003): 311–26; Peter S. Ross et al., “Large and Growing Environmental Reservoirs of Deca-BDE Present an Emerging Health Risk for Fish and Marine Mammals,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 58, no. 1 (2011): 7–10; and John E. Elliott, Laurie K. Wilson, and Bryan Wakeford, “Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether Trends in Eggs of Marine and Freshwater Birds from British Columbia, Canada, 1979–2002,” Environmental Science & Technology 39, no. 15 (2005): 5584–91. On halting efforts to address pollution, see Leon Kolankiewicz, “Compliance with Pollution Control Permits in the Lower Fraser Valley, 1967–1981,” BC Studies, no. 72 (Winter 1986/1987): 28–48; and Klingle, Emerald City, 154–264.

8 On taste, see Robert McClure, “The Sound Is Flavored by the Holidays,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 25, 2006; Zoe Rodriguez del Rey, Elise F. Granek, and Steve Sylvester, “Occurrence and Concentration of Caffeine in Oregon Coastal Waters,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 64, no. 7 (2012): 1417–24; James P. Meador et al., “Contiminants of Emerging Concern in a Large Temperate Estuary,” Environmental Pollution 213 (2016): 254–267. On salmon farms, see A.D. McIntyre, “Environmental Interactions of Aquaculture,” Fisheries Research 62, no. 3 (2003): 235; A.M.H. Debruyn et al., “Ecosystemic Effects of Salmon Farming Increase Mercury Contamination in Wild Fish,” Environmental Science & Technology 40, no. 11 (2006): 3489–93. On sex ratios and reproduction, see Tracy K. Collier et al., “A Comprehensive Assessment of the Impacts of Contaminants on Fish from an Urban Waterway,” Marine Environmental Research 46 (July 1998), 243–47; Lyndal L. Johnson et al., “Contaminant Effects on Ovarian Development in English Sole (Parophrys vetulus) from Puget Sound, Washington,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 45, no. 12 (1988): 2133–46; Holly Pyhtila, “Pink Water: Plastics, Pesticides, and Pills Are Contaminating Our Drinking Supply,” Earth Island Journal, Autumn 2008, http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/pink_water; Anders Goksøyr, “Endocrine Disruptors in the Marine Environment: Mechanisms of Toxicity and Their Influence on Reproductive Processes in Fish,” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A 69, no. 1–2 (2006): 175–84; Peter Thomas and Md. S. Raham, “Extensive Reproduction Disruption, Ovarian Masculinization and Aromatase Suppression in Atlantic Croaker in the Northern Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279, no. 1726 (2012): 28–38; and Karen A. Kidd et al., “Collapse of a Fish Population after Exposure to a Synthetic Hormone,” PNAS 104, no. 21 (2007): 8897–901.

9 Heloise Frouin et al., “Partitioning and Bioaccumulation of PCBs and PBDEs in Marine Plankton from the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Canada,” Progress in Oceanography 115, no. 1 (2013): 65–75; James E. West, Sandra M. O’Neill, and Gina M. Ylitalo, “Spatial Extent, Magnitude, and Patterns of Persistent Organochlorine Pollutants in Pacific Herring (Clupea pallasi) Populations in the Puget Sound (USA) and Strait of Georgia (Canada),” Science of the Total Environment 394, no. 2–3 (2008): 369–78; S.C. Johannessen et al., “Joined by Geochemistry, Divided by History: PCBs and PBDEs in Strait of Georgia Sediments,” Marine Environmental Research 66 (Supplement 2008): S112–S120; Paul B.C. Grant et al., “Environmental Fractionation of PCBs and PBDEs during Particle Transport as Recorded by Sediments in Coastal Waters,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 30, no. 7 (2011): 1522–32; S.C. Johannsessen et al., “Water Column Organic Carbon in a Pacific Marginal Sea (Strait of Georgia, Canada),” Marine Environmental Research 66 (Supplement 2008): S49–S61.

10 For “exceeded” see Margaret M. Krahn et al., “Effects of Age, Sex, and Reproductive Status on Persistent Organic Pollutant Concentrations in ‘Southern Resident’ Killer Whales,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 58, no. 10 (2009): 1527; see also Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), xvii–xviii. On salmon, see Brian R. Missildine et al., “Polychlorinated Biphenyl Concentrations in Adult Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) Returning to Coastal and Puget Sound Hatcheries of Washington State,” Environmental Science & Technology 39, no. 18 (2005): 6944–51; D. Stone, “Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers and Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Different Tissue Types from Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha),” Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 76, no. 1 (2006): 148–54; Barry C. Kelly et al., “Tissue Residue Concentrations of Organohalogens and Trace Elements in Adult Pacific Salmon Returning to the Fraser River, British Columbia, Canada,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 30, no. 2 ( 2011): 367–76. On marine mammals, see Juan José Alava et al., “PBDE Flame Retardants and PCBs in Migrating Stellar Sea Lions (Eumetopias jubatus) in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, Canada,” Chemosphere 88, no. 7 (2012): 855–64; and Donna L. Cullon, Steven J. Jeffries, and Peter S. Ross, “Persistent Organic Pollutants in the Diet of Harbor Seals (Phoca vitulina) Inhabiting Puget Sound, Washington (USA), and the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia (Canada): A Food Basket Approach,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry 24, no. 10 (2005): 2562–72. A recent study suggests that levels have begun to fall: Peter S. Ross et al., “Declining Concentrations of PCBs, PBDEs, PCDEs, and PCNs in Harbor Seals (Phoca vitulina) from the Salish Sea,” Progress in Oceanography 115, no. 1 (2013): 160–70. For toxification beyond the water, see Rachel D. Field and John D. Reynolds, “Sea to Sky: Impacts of Residual Salmon-Derived Nutrients on Estuarine Breeding Bird Communities,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 278, no. 1721 (2011): 3081–88; Jennie R. Christensen et al., “Persistent Organic Pollutants in British Columbia Grizzly Bears: Consequence of Divergent Diets,” Environmental Science & Technology 39, no. 18 (2005): 6952–60; Christy A. Morrissey et al., “American Dippers Indicate Contaminant Biotransport by Pacific Salmon,” Environmental Science & Technology 46, no. 2 (2012): 1153–62; L.K. Wilson et al., “Properties of Blood, Porphyrins, and Exposure to Legacy and Emerging Persistent Organic Pollutants in Surf Scoters (Melanitta perspicillata) Overwintering on the South Coast of British Columbia, Canada,” Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 59, no. 2 (2010): 322–33.

11 For studies of salmon and toxic chemicals, see Ronald A. Hites et al., “Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed Salmon,” Science 303 (9 January 2004), 226–29; Ronald A. Hites et al., “Global Assessment of Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers in Farmed and Wild Salmon,” Environmental Science & Technology 38, no. 19 (2004): 4945–49; and Daniel L. Carlson and Ronald A. Hites, “Polychlorinated Biphenyls in Salmon and Salmon Feed: Global Differences and Bioaccumulation,” Environmental Science & Technology 39, no. 19 (2005): 7389–95. On trophic levels, see A. Ardura et al., “Forensic DNA Analysis Reveals Use of High Trophic Level Marine Fish in Commercial Aquaculture Fish Meals,” Fisheries Research 115–116 (2012): 115–20.

12 On fish consumption, see Anna Schmidt, “An Evaluation of Fish Consumption and Environmental Concern in Low Income and Food Insecure Populations in Seattle” (MS thesis, University of Washington, 2011); Maureen O’Hagan, “Washington State Casts Line for Residents’ Fish-Consumption Rate,” Seattle Times, July 9, 2012; and Joseph E. Taylor III, “The Food of Kings: The Social and Cultural Geography of Salmon Consumption” (paper presented at the Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historical Site, Steveston, BC, April 23, 2006). On consumption of farmed salmon, see Tracy Hampton, “Farmed, Wild Salmon Pollutants Probed,” JAMA 291, no. 8 (2004): 929–30; and Jeffery A. Foran et al., “Quantitative Analysis of the Benefits and Risks of Consuming Farmed and Wild Salmon,” Journal of Nutrition 135, no. 11 (2005): 2639–43. On toxic fish, breast feeding, and cognitive development, see R.Y. Wang and L.L. Needham, “Environmental Chemicals: From the Environment to Food, to Breast Milk, to the Infant,” Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B 10, no. 8 (2007): 597–609; Josef G. Thundiyil, Gina M. Solomon, and Mark D. Miller, “Transgenerational Exposures: Persistent Chemical Pollutants in the Environment and Breast Milk,” Pediatric Clinics of North America 54, no. 1 (2007): 81–101; and Edward Groth III, “Re: Maternal Fish Intake during Pregnancy, Blood Mercury Levels, and Child Cognition at Age 3 Years in a U.S. Cohort,” American Journal of Epidemiology 168, no. 2 (2008): 168. For similarly toxified environments elsewhere, see Laura Anne Bienenfeld, Anne L. Golden, and Elizabeth J. Garland, “Consumption of Fish from Polluted Waters by WIC Participants in East Harlem,” Journal of Urban Health 80, no. 2 (2003): 349–58; Pamela Valera et al., “‘Trying to Eat Healthy’: A Photovoice Study of Women’s Access to Healthy Food in New York City,” Affilia 24, no. 3 (2009): 304–6; Bernhard Link et al., “Biomonitoring of Persistent Organochlorine Pesticides, PCDD/PCDFs and Dioxin-Like PCBs in Blood of Children from South West Germany (Baden-Wuerttemberg) from 1993 to 2003,” Chemosphere 58, no. 9 (2005): 1193; Gaofeng Zhao et al., “Biotransfer of Persistent Organic Pollutants from a Large Site in China Used for the Disassembly of Electronic and Electrical Waste,” Environmental Geochemistry and Health 28, no. 4 (2006): 341–51; and J. Van Oostdam et al., “Human Health Implications of Environmental Contaminants in Arctic Canada: A Review,” Science of the Total Environment 351–352 (2005): 165–246.

13 Quoted in Matthew Sparke, “Excavating the Future in Cascadia: Geoeconomics and the Imagined Geographies of a Cross-Border Region,” BC Studies, no. 127 (Autumn 2000): 17. See also John Findlay, “A Fishy Proposition: Regional Identity in the Pacific Northwest,” in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David M. Wrobel and Michael R. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 37–70; Abbott, “Long Western Border”; Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (Berkeley: Banyan Tree, 1975); Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981); Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Viking, 2011); and Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, Jaidev Singh, and Robert G. Lee, “Cascadia: The (Re)Construction of a Bi-National Space and Its Residents,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 19, no. 1 (2004): 59–77. On toxic narratives elsewhere, see Scott C. Doney, “The Growing Human Footprint on Coastal and Open-Ocean Biogeochemisty,” Science 328, no. 5985 (2010): 1512–16; David S. Page et al., “Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Sources Related to Biomarker Levels in Fish from Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska,” Environmental Science & Technology 38, no. 19 (2004): 4928–36; T.G. Knowles, D. Farrington, and S.C. Kestin, “Mercury in UK Imported Fish and Shellfish and UK-Farmed Fish and Their Products,” Food Additives and Contaminants 20, no. 9 (2003): 813–18; Goksøyr, “Endocrine Disruptors”; Diana Mitsova et al., “Variability in Road Runoff Pollution by Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the Urbanized Area Adjacent to Biscayne Bay, Florida,” Journal of Environmental Protection 2, no. 10 (2011): 1317–30; Shinsuke Tanabe et al., “PCDDs, PCDFs, and Coplanar PCBs in Albatross from the North Pacific and Southern Pacific Oceans: Levels, Patterns, and Toxicological Implications,” Environmental Science & Technology 38, no. 2 (2004): 403–13; E.M. Krummel et al., “Delivery of Pollutants by Spawning Salmon,” Nature 425, no. 6955 (2003): 255–56; Jules M. Blais et al., “Arctic Seabirds Transport Marine-Derived Contaminants,” Science 309, no. 5733 (2005): 445; W.L. Lockhart et al., “A History of Total Mercury in Edible Muscle of Fish from Lakes in Northern Canada,” Science of the Total Environment 352–352 (2005): 427–63; J. Ruelas-Inzunza, J. Hernández-Osuna, and F. Páez-Osuna, “Total and Organic Mercury in Ten Fish Species for Human Consumption from the Mexican Pacific,” Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 86, no. 6 (2011): 679–83; Dorothea F.K. Rawn et al., “PCB, PCDD and PCDF Residues in Fin and Non-Fin Fish Products from the Canadian Retail Market 2002,” Science of the Total Environment 359, no. 1-3 (2006): 101–10.

14 For “restore,” “imperialism,” “erase,” and “silly,” see Warren Cornwall, “‘Salish Sea’ Proposed Name for Waters Washington, BC Share,” Seattle Times, March 14, 2009; Carlito Pablo, “Washington State Adopts ‘Salish Sea’ Name for Body of Water Including Strait of Georgia,” Strait.com, October 30, 2009, http://www.straight.com/article-268225/washington-state-adopts-salish-sea-name-body-water-including-strait-georgia; and Michael Fellman, “Sleeping with the Elephant: Reflections on an American-Canadian on Americanization and Anti-Americanism in Canada,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans, and the Western Border, ed. John Findlay and Ken Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 274–94. Historian Carl Abbott argued that, if anything, “the national border actually divided the Northwest more thoroughly at the end of the twentieth century than it did at the beginning.” Abbott, “Long Western Border,” 203.

15 On localvorism, see Gary Paul Nabhan, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). On Alaska, see Matthew R. Baker et al., “Bioaccumulation and Transport of Contaminants: Migrating Sockeye Salmon as Vectors of Mercury,” Environmental Science & Technology 43, no. 23 (2009): 8840–46. On mislabelled fish, see Erica Cline, “Marketplace Substitution of Atlantic Salmon for Pacific Salmon in Washington State Detected by DNA Barcoding,” Food Research International 45, no. 1 (2012): 388–93; Sheryl A. Tittlemier et al., “Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers in Retail Fish and Shellfish Samples Purchased from Canadian Markets,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 52, no. 25 (2004): 7740–45; and F. Sun et al., “A Preliminary Assessment of Consumer’s Exposure to Pesticide Residues in Fisheries Products,” Chemosphere 62, no. 4 (2006): 674–80. On labelling, see Peter B. Marko, Holly A. Nance, and Kimberly D. Guynn, “Genetic Detection of Mislabeled Fish from a Certified Sustainable Fishery,” Current Biology 21, no. 16 (2011): R621–22; Erik Stokstad, “Seafood Eco-Label Grapples with Challenge of Proving Its Impact,” Science 334, no. 6057 (2011): 746; and Peter B. Marko et al., “Mislabeling of a Depleted Reef Fish,” Nature 430, no. 6997 (2004): 309–10.

16 On local consumers and effects, see Douglas C. Harris, Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 2–4, 106–26; Klingle, Emerald City, 249–80; and Thrush, Native Seattle, 193–207.

17 For “integrated analysis” and “natural and human drivers,” see R. Ian Perry and Diane Masson, “An Integrated Analysis of the Marine Social-Ecological System of the Strait of Georgia, Canada, Over the Past Four Decades, and Development of a Regime Shift Index,” Progress in Oceanography 115 (2013): 26. On the 49th parallel, see Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders. On sovereignty, see Allan K. McDougall and Lisa Philips Valentine, “Sovereign Survival: Borders as Issues,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 19, no. 1 (2004): 23–35; Patrick J. Smith, “Transborder Cascadia: Opportunities and Obstacles,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 19, no. 1 (2004): 99–21; Donald K. Alper, “Emerging Collaborative Frameworks for Environmental Governance in the Georgia Basin-Puget Sound Ecosystem,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 19, no. 1 (2004): 79–98; Emma S. Norman, “Cultural Politics and Transboundary Resource Governance in the Salish Sea,” Water Alternatives 5, no. 1 (2012): 138–60; and Joseph E. Taylor III, “Boundary Terminology,” Environmental History 13, no 3 (2008): 454–81. For recent discussions of hybridity, see Linda Nash, “Furthering the Environmental Turn,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 131–35.