Coextinction

Or: Half a Chance

For the past year and a half salmon has become very important to me. I’ve traveled around Idaho telling stories about salmon, their place in myth and history and the vital impact they have on everyone in the Intermountain and Pacific Northwest. As such I’m always interested in learning more about our friends the founding fish so I went to the Idaho Conservation League’s screening of Coextinction.

I was absolutely bowled over by the artistry and storytelling of the documentary. Directed and lead by orca researcher Gloria Pancrazi and wildlife photographer Elena Jean, the film begins with the tragic story of Telequa, a mother orca who lost her calf to starvation in the summer of 2018 and carried the small body for over a thousand miles along the coast of Puget Sound. Pancrazi and Jean were moved by this, and the ill health of another orca calf named Scarlet, also by malnutrition.

Their mutual interest in protecting the Southern Residence Pod, led them to uncover not only the plight of the orca, but the threats to their primary food source salmon populations across Canada and the United States. The salmon are a keystone species of the wild, not only feeding the orca but hundreds of other species, as well as numerous human communities.

We follow them under the sea and up mountain creeks, speaking to divers, environmentalists, engineers, and principally, to leading First Nations activists who’s cultures and traditions are tied to the salmon, and who face racist reprisals. Pancrazi and Jean might be our storytellers but they cede the floor to the impassioned work of Will George (Tsleil Waututh), Chief Ernest Alfred (Namgis), and Carrie Nightwalker Chapman Schuster (Nimiipuu).

The film is also gorgeous, taking in by camera and animation the full majesty of the seas and rivers, from the widest vista to the finest detail, as well as the human impact of them. It’s a rare film that can take two process, here the private canning of salmon by a fisherman vs the bloody industrialism of a salmon farm, and leave with such a vastly different feeling. And despite its’ artistry, the high drone shots, the slow motion pans, it never looses sight of its human core; a candid shot of Pancrazi trying not to cry in the front seat of a car, “I just don’t want them to go extinct.”

The movie lands on the tone of ferocity without rage, and hope without naivety or absolution. The issue is nowhere solved, and the audience does not and should not feel that they’ve done their part just by watching a film (nor does it awaken the desire to go out of the street and throw yourself under a bus, the moral of too many climate stories). The message is one of interconnectivity, the salmon feed the orca and so many others, and their stewardship is the responsibility of all human kind, and you the viewer are a part of it, so you need to get off your tuchus and steer your elected officials (especially here in Idaho about the removal of the four “Deadbeat Dams” of the lower snake river).

As the former Army Core of Engineers Jim Waddel puts it, the orca and the salmon are survivors, they can survive so much “given half a chance, but they need to be given that half a chance.”