Home Pool: The Fight to Save the Atlantic Salmon

Just about every salmon river flowing into the North Atlantic has a “Home Pool,” a place of beauty and peace where generations of salmon have lurked and generations of anglers have tempted them. But the magnificent Atlantic salmon faces extinction. In the fall of 1995, Philip Lee wrote Watershed Down, a series of articles in the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal that traced the salmon’s plight and argued for a controversial way to renew this fragile resource: private ownership and private management. Home Pool: Saving the Atlantic Salmon is this exciting and original series in book form, illustrated throughout in colour. In Home Pool, Lee writes about the famous salmon rivers of New Brunswick — the Restigouche, the Miramichi, and the ruined St. John. He studies the salmon rivers of Quebec and of Scotland and Iceland. He talks to people who know about salmon: outfitters, anglers, conservationists, and scientists. He faces the issues of forestry mismanagement and civic and industrial pollution squarely. And he grapples with the conflicting values surrounding native fishing rights. Above all, he concentrates on “the sons and daughters of the river” — the voices that cried out for conservation in the past, and the people today who are trying to make sure the great Atlantic salmon can thrive in the future. Letters to the Telegraph-Journal from all over North America testified to widespread support for Lee’s ideas. The series won two major conservation journalism awards — the Ted Williams Award, from the US branch of the Miramichi Salmon Association, and the New Brunswick Salmon Council Lou Duffley Award--and the 1996 Atlantic Journalism Award for enterprise reporting.