Joy and despair in Alaska: Adam Weymouth on his 2,000 mile odyssey
Le voyage écologique d’Adam Weymouth en Alaska.
En 2018, Adam Weymouth décide de remonter en canoë les eaux du Yukon, un fleuve de 3000 km. Il y suit la migration des saumons royaux, une espèce menacée bien connue de l'Alaska. Au fil de l'eau, il croisera une nature grandiose mais menacée et une culture autochtone également en péril... Entretien avec The Guardian à l'occasion de la sortie des Rois Du Yukon, son carnet de voyage actuellement disponible aux éditions Albin Michel.
The sun is shining on the rear deck of Adam Weymouth’s barge, and the hawthorn along the banks of the river Lea is bright with new growth. But despite the natural beauty all around him in this pocket of London, he’s finding it hard to believe we can avert climate catastrophe.
2. “Living where we do, even with the best will in the world and being as informed as you could
be, nature is incredibly abstract,” Weymouth says. “When the shit hits the fan, we’re going to turn up the air conditioning. The bread might get a bit more expensive, but we’ll be all right for quite a while.”
3. This disconnect between our comfortable urban existence and the havoc it is wreaking on the environment propelled Weymouth into the far north of the Americas to paddle 2,000 miles through the wilderness by canoe on the trail of the salmon who swim through his lyrical debut book, Les Rois Du Yukon.
CLIMATE CHANGE IN ALASKA
4. “The Arctic is heating twice as fast as other places on the planet, and those changes are much more obvious,” he says. 5. Every spring the king salmon – the biggest of the five species of Pacific salmon – swim up the Yukon to spawn in the waters of their birth. But a deadly mixture of ocean warming, early melts and commercial fishing has sent numbers crashing.
6. Weymouth set out from the furthest end of their journey, Canada’s McNeil Lake, heading down towards the sea and the approaching salmon over tumbling rapids and winding flats, past spruce forests and grizzly bears.
7. On the way he met First Nations elders who are wrestling with decisions about how many of the threatened fish they should catch, settlers from Maryland who are rebuilding after catastrophic floods and biologists struggling to understand the king salmon’s precipitous decline.