21st May 2022. Salmon | Paper
Salmon need forests—and forests need salmon. // The discovery of paper.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
Apologies for missing some editions this week, but work has been busy. Enjoy this bonus weekend issue. Have a good weekend.
1: Salmon need forests—and forests need salmon
I came across an influential article re-published in Hakai magazine on the relationship between salmon and trees and animals. The article, by Nancy Baron, was re-published in 2015, and the original dates from 2000. It’s fascinating.
The Hakai cover note explains it like this:
Baron tromped through British Columbia’s coastal rainforest with Tom Reimchen, a biologist who advanced the theory that spawning salmon “feed” forests, their decaying bodies importing vast stores of nitrogen to the ecosystem via food webs. This elegant idea helped focus people’s minds on a more comprehensive picture of coastal ecology.
The original article takes the form of a narrative of this ‘tromping’. You have to wade through some North American reportage that is designed to bring the characters to life in our minds eye (Reimchen’s graduate student, Deanna Mathewson is “tiny as a ballerina, with blond Botticelli curls”) but you get to the salmon soon enough.
Earlier we had seen swarms of salmon in the estuary, which means that after dark, the place should be crawling with bears. We clutch night-vision monoculars and infrared flashlights—our windows into a hidden world. Over the years of his study, Reimchen has observed that bears fishing for salmon are almost twice as successful at night as during daylight hours, which is why we are heading out now. The moment the Zodiac pulls away from the lights of the boat, we can see part of the reason why bears have such good luck at night... Any agitation triggers a burst of chemical light from these tiny critters, making the ocean look like a liquid galaxy.
And bears are pretty good at fishing for salmon:
We watch in silence as it gropes in the water, grabs a salmon, and retreats into the forest to eat. We can’t see it, but we can hear it, and we wince at the double pop of its teeth biting into the fish’s brain. “Brains are best,” Reimchen says. “Testes are detested.” Tonight the bears are biting off the heads and leaving the bodies, scattering them everywhere.
—
(A bear fishing for salmon. Photo by Christopher Strassler/flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
They’ll eat more of the fish when they’re hungry, but the fact that they can be less picky is part of the ecological relationship between the salmon and the land. Reimchen got drawn into studying this during a battle about over-fishing in Canada’s South Moresby National Park. He argued that over-fishing would destroy the ecology; Parks Canada challenged him to prove it.
(Reimchen) determined to find and quantify all the users of salmon within a representative watershed. If the salmon were not important, he reasoned, then yearly fluctuations or even their disappearance would have little effect on other species. On the other hand, if salmon were the key to the whole ecosystem, as he suspected they were, then fluctuations in their populations would be reflected throughout a whole range of signifiers, including bears.
His first discovery was that there were fish bones on the ground 150 metres into the forest from the water; the second, that this was down to the bears.
During the 40-day spawning period, he calculated, each bear ferries about 700 salmon, amounting to 1,600 kilograms of fertilizer, far into the woods. Under conditions of abundance, the bears eat less than half of their haul. By Reimchen’s reckoning, this one small stream provided enough salmon for 2 martens, 4 eagles, 12 ravens, 150 glaucous-winged gulls, and 250 crows. When these animals dispersed through the forest, massive recycling continued as they spread nitrogen through their droppings. Decaying salmon also kick-start a maggot population that emerges in spring to feed warblers and flycatchers that arrive famished after their long journey north.
The trees benefit too: “up to 50% of the nitrogen the trees use come from salmon”. In other words: salmon need forests, but forests also need salmon. He proved this by testing trees for N15, a types of nitrogen isotope that is found in salmon but not in the atmosphere. But not without stumbling across a classic research problem: Forestry Renewal British Columbia declined a funding request because they said his work “had nothing to do with forestry”.
In 2000, rivers that had once teemed with salmon were suddenly short of them, sometime because of poor ecological management—loggers dumping logs into the estuary, for example. This is a problem for the human population, but a much bigger problem for the bears, who get 70% of their annual consumption of protein from the salmon:
Reimchen speaks for the bears. “Right now,” he says, “the other users of salmon are not relevant in terms of any fisheries policy... When (the Department of Fisheries and Oceans) says, ‘Okay, you guys, you can fish for three days this year and take in your two million units,’ they give no units to the alternative users of this resource. None of the quotas required for users besides humans are factored in.”
The article reminded me of the lyrical passage in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass about how native Americans on the Pacific coast managed their salmon, ensuring that enough salmon swam upstream for the health of the ecosystem and the continuing health of the salmon population. And how we need to get back to some of those understandings quickly enough if we’re not going to devastate our ecologies.
2: The discovery of paper
The London Review of Books has a review of a book about the history of the early use of paper in England. Paper in Medieval England: from Pulp to Fictions, by Orietta da Rold sounds dry (although I can see what she just did with the title), but judging from Tom Johnson’s review it’s full of intriguing stories about new technologies arrive and then take hold. There’s an economic history here, a cultural history, and also a legal history.
(It’s also behind the LRB’s relatively tight paywall; you may have to try a different browser).
The review starts with a fact: in 1391, England imported 2.3 million sheets of paper, which was about one sheet per person. Some of it was cheap stuff for wrapping, some very expensive and ceremonial, but hundreds of thousands of these sheets were for writing.
At the beginning of the century, almost all writing was done on parchment:
To make parchment, you washed the skin of a sheep (for vellum, a calf), soaked it in lime solution, washed it again, stretched it out on a wooden frame, scraped off the hair with a hooked knife called a lunellum, and cut it into rectangular sheets. Scribes kept a stone pumice to even out the gooseberried skin, and perhaps a boar’s tooth to polish the surface so that the ink – made from oak gall – would adhere. They kept another knife to scrape off any mistakes.
It sounds slow going. All the same the government produced thousands of documents in the fourteenth century, as did the monasteries, lawyers, and others. Fortunately England had a lot of sheep at the time.
(Early paper-makers at work. Image via the Mittelzeit blog.)
Although paper first arrived in England in the thirteenth century, the technology itself was far older, developed by the Chinese around 100 CE and reaching the Middle East around 700 years later. The Chinese had made their paper from mulberry trees, but Arab craftsmen found a way to make it from textile waste instead. By the late thirteenth century, Italian innovation had industrialised this paper making process:
Italian craftsmen in the small towns of the Marche used water power to improve the rag-smashing process: water wheels drove camshafts fitted to enormous hammers, the heads furnished with blades and nails to shred the rags. The water was squeezed out more quickly with huge screw presses developed in the winemaking industry, leaving a finer pulp that could be dried to make much thinner paper. All this meant that smoother, lighter, stronger paper could be produced in much larger quantities.
The Italians also fixed the mediaeval paper sizes, of “imperial, royal, median and chancery”, and invented the watermark. All technologies call forth new forms of social relations, and paper gave us a society “clogged with text”. Contemporaries noted the lustrous quality of paper: Chaucer used the phrase “paper-white” to describe the horse on which Dido rode to meet Aeneas.
Paper had different material qualities from parchment: it absorbed ink more quickly, so scribes could write more quickly. But mistakes were also more visible. And although paper was expendable—used once—it was also much cheaper than parchment. A huge shipment to England from the paper-maker Antonio Bembo cost less than a penny for ten sheets, and could be sold for three times that. So there was also money to be made in the paper trade.
All the same, parchment didn’t just vanish. It was used for things that required more permanence:
(P)aper and parchment were not ‘competing’, but used in ways that showed a recognition of their distinctive qualities... In 1389 the fraternity of St Peter in the Norfolk village of Oxburgh sent off two pieces of writing in response to a government inquiry into religious guilds. A square of parchment listed rules about when the brothers and sisters should congregate, and how much candlewax they should offer at evensong. A small paper ‘bill’ had a brief account of the guild’s goods – five quarters of barley – and the names of its alderman and beadle. These two documents were stitched together: parchment for law, for permanence; paper for quick calculations, for temporary states of affairs.
The thing that finally did for parchment was the invention of printing—paper absorbed ink, while parchment didn’t. But even before that, according to da Rold, people were experimenting with this new expendable media:
Single-use texts such as handbills, pamphlets and posters became increasingly popular in the later 14th century and were ubiquitous in the 15th. During a parade through London to mark the end of a visit to England in 1416, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund had his servants scatter ballads in the streets, praising ‘Blessid Inglond, ful of melody ... whech we schul evir sey and sing.’ The chronicler doesn’t say what the bills were made from, but it must have been paper. Parchment doesn’t flutter.
j2t#316
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.