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I've pondered many mysteries standing in a river how it can be ever-changing and eternal all at once how in 1992 a lone sockeye salmon named Larry could swim 900 miles up a river a river right here outside of town to go home to spawn alone without a mate just bond with how somebody could chug 12 beers and think that this river is the perfect place through all the empties still pondering that one I fell in love with wild salmon when I was 2 my memories around 10 my dad standing next to me in the boat at first light and the purple of the King's Salmons side arcing toward me as I was drawing it into the net and the look on my dad's face as he watched me do it and later the smell on my hands like metallic sweetened grass and that night my family chattering happily with lemons mustard smudges on their faces and the taste of the ocean in them or orange flesh of the salmon no one really knows why you're called to a river but and I took to it early on my dad brought me into fishing and I was easily hooked but for me it was about the experience the mist coming off the river in the morning the hot cocoa and the coffee early morning from the thermos but most of all it was the connection with my dad with my brother and with this holy being that comes to us from the sea under the surface of the water and a connection to that through a thin rod and a thin line that directly connects me to it to this this mysterious creature that comes back to us to create new life over and over and over again I wanted to connect to that and for time I did and then I lost that connection and I nearly lost my own life and in the end it was that same mysterious creature that called me back to life and that's why now and forevermore I will sing their song so I spent my 20s as a wilderness fishing guide in Southeast Alaska I got paid to fish for salmon let me repeat that I got paid to fish for salmon dream job something changed me though during this time I slowly transformed from somebody that needed to possess and dominate all these salmon as they came to me one after the other and I saw thousands of them I started thanking every fish that came into my boat I actually did this you could ask my off bewildered guests as they were standing next to me what the hell is this guy doing but I did because I developed this holy reverence for these things and as this went on and towards the end of that part of my career all I wanted to do was figure out a way to save the remnant runs that remain but I just didn't know how so flash forward to 2014 and I'm now ensconced in my career as a storyteller and as a filmmaker and I spent four years working on this story that's my best version of a love story for a wild salmon it's the best I could I could do at the time it's what I needed to do and during all this time I tried to come up with a call to action to tell people to to do something that would make a difference to help save one salmon and so at the end of it all on a particular Tuesday no fanfare whatsoever it just kind of came to me and floated in the window in order to save wild salmon we need to eat them I know what you're thinking why would you kill something that you want to save doesn't make a whole lot of sense I'll get there we'll probably promise beyond a spiritual physical and emotional and cultural virtue that all these wild salmon bring to us they're just plain cool they're they're shaped like a bullet of muscle and teeth and blood and they're shaped perfectly absolutely perfectly to survive and make their way down the river streams from their natal streams where they come from to make it out into the ocean and swim with powerful tail thrusts clear out in this great ellipse of we don't even know how far yet we haven't even tracked that we don't have a way to track that all the way to arrive back at their River their natal river where they came from after they've gone through an entire gauntlet of whales and otters and sea lions and nets and fishermen like me and sometimes like Larry to make it nine hundred miles clear back up to the same spot the exact spot they were born to spawn and die and give life to new salmon and new things and new creatures to a hundred and thirty seven different creatures their shape has given them the ability to survive ice ages volcanic eruptions even cataclysmic floods but will it give them the ability to survive us because what we do to salmon we do to ourselves Bristol Bay Alaska is the site of the last largest wild salmon migration in the world it's also site to one of the largest open pit copper mines its largest appositive of copper actually in North America the pebble limited partnership is a Canadian corporation that has been trying for many years to extract this copper from this place which is seated in the headwaters of where these salmon go to spawn him if this went through it would require tailings dam 700 feet high this just tall as the Space Needle in Seattle to hold back toxic material forever so about the time I was taking this salmon love movie out into the world the United States EPA spent three years doing a watershed assessment to try to tell whether as a mine the size and scope of the pebble mine could coexist with a fishery like that in Bristol Bay after three years of a scientific assessment they decided that they could not and that offered protection for Bristol Bay when we ask these questions of ourselves or do we want to survive do we want to perpetuate the survival of wild salmon in order to save ourselves I've had to ask that question to myself it's because I took to drinking early on after the hot cocoa after the coffee I took to drinking alcohol at first it was a rite of passage it was a way to fit in it was a way to celebrate go to school eventually it became a constant companion it became a way to grieve and deal with growing anxiety and depression and at the end it became a way for me to simply keep existing this all culminated in 2016 in the first part of November that year I found out at a span of five days that my mom was diagnosed with cancer my grandmother Dorothy headed into Hospice and I knew she was dying our nation elected a new president and for me brought a lot of fear and uncertainty and I lost my connection to the star light of the universe and my connection to these wild beings fed up that really transformed me as a young person and this began a downward spiral for me about a year ago the newly appointed head of the United States EPA met in a closed-door meeting with the president and CEO of the pebble limited partnership one hour after this meeting the entire EPA was instructed to stand down on protections from Bristol Bay I felt helpless and hopeless at this point I was I was drinking daily to obliterate my feelings of sadness and I didn't know where to turn and after six months of this I finally hit the bottom three days after that meeting and after three days after burying my my grandmother Dorothy I checked myself into a hospital and asked the people inside to save my life and without them and subsequently the people that loved me enough when I couldn't love myself I wouldn't be here speaking to you today after I left the hospital alive I found I loved in and for my wife that I never knew was possible for the death she seemed to be able to love and care for me through all of this and for her and for those people that love me I'm forever grateful wild salmon have transformed me they they called me to face my fear and in so doing now I want to know how I can pay it forward to them how I can share it with you and in turn how you can share it with the rest of the world we can start by cleaning up the rivers we've fouled here in the lower 48 I mean there's a lot of them the Elwha River in Washington State is a beautiful example of how this can be done two dams that were no longer useful or taken out and opened up hundreds of miles 70 miles to be precise it's not quiet hundreds but seventy miles of pristine salmon country I will personally pick up all the beer cans many rivers I can find but what we must do and what it's more most important is protect the wild systems that remain the wild systems like the eight beautiful wild salmon rivers in Bristol Bay Alaska and in order to protect them we need to eat wild salmon and I know this seems just so counterintuitive again why would you kill something that you want to save but here's what we know wild salmon need clean cold clear rivers in order to make new babies and perpetuate life and if they do that if we keep those rivers healthy and if we keep demanding a fishery like exists in Bristol Bay Alaska that is managed absolutely perfectly and we keep demanding wild salmon on our plates will demand the habitat sufficient for those wild salmon to keep coming to our plates and feeding us body and soul forever this can't be done we need wild salmon we need them to connect to that thing which is bigger than ourselves we need them to connect to that things that are sacred in ourselves that we don't see every day we need them to connect to each other and if we do that and we eat wild salmon together in this way it's the most holy form of sacrament I can think of we are taking that those nutrients from the ocean into ourselves and we're sharing them in community and that is a way of finding peace and that is a way of coming together and I can say with great joy and gratitude that today my mom is cancer-free and it's been almost a year I've been sober and in recovery and I'm so grateful for these wild beings from the other side that it brought me there and now we're gonna watch just a few images that really kind of help tell the story for me about what these creatures are [Music] [Music] standing in a river brings more questions than answers many days but the answers are shrouded in mystery and that River is eternal and it keeps flowing through us and if we wait for them those answers will come what I've learned is that for me wild salmon are the way shape and form of life and I choose to live thank you [Applause] [Music]