Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

One of the ideas we wanted to explore as part of our latest theme, Seasons, was what happens when salmon season, something long celebrated across the world,

from Alaska to Japan, Oregon to Norway, no longer arrives each spring. What does this

mean for the many practices and ceremonies tied to this arrival? How does this affect the wider ecosystem?

What would it mean if salmon vanished entirely?

But in the process of researching what this story might look like,

we were surprised by a different angle that was emerging in real time.

One not about loss, but about celebration.

Here in Northern California, along the long-dammed Klamath River,

salmon season wasn't unraveling.

It was returning.

This week's story is an in-depth reportage by journalist and author Ben Gullfarb,

who in the summer of 2024 traveled the winding course of the Klamath as the last of its foremost

obstructive dams were being dismantled, as part of a federal restoration plan to reopen

hundreds of miles of salmon spawning habitat.

For decades, these structures have halted the river's flow and disrupted the migration

of one million Chinook salmon that once coursed up the river annually.

And as the dams begin to come down, Ben chronicles how the prolonged absence of this species

reshaped the river, the surrounding redwood forests, canyons, and deserts, and the Uruk, Karuk,

...