NONDALTON, ALASKA — Fly overhead in a bush plane — there are no roads between native villages — and marvel: Eight giant rivers braid across hundreds of miles of wetlands, carving cobalt ribbons through snow-coned mountains before emptying into Bristol Bay.
For more than a century, the wealth of this southwest Alaska watershed has sprung from the astonishing volume of salmon nurtured by those wild rivers. Bank-to-bank, gill-to-gill, tens of millions of silver-hued fish thrash upstream to spawn each year, unrestrained by dams, untainted by pollution.[…]