SEVEN

PRAISING SALMON

Creaturely Discernment in a Time of Species Metacide

JAMES HATLEY

“In mercy do You give light to the earth

and to all who dwell upon it,

and in Your goodness do you renew every day,

continuously, the work of Creation.”

Yetzer Or

“I heard in the name of the Ba’al Shem Tov

that making a window in [Noah’s] ark [tevah]

means making a window out of the word [tevah] of Torah and prayer,

to gaze through it from the beginning of the world to its end.”

Or hame’ir, 57

THE SALMON SHOW UP

At first, there are green shadows hovering over green stones, ghostly blurs slipping among wavering fingers of light, there and gone. But within a few days, the salmon thicken the waters, churning the river with their massive bodies, second in size only to those of their Chinook cousins. The news spreads over networks both human and more-than-human: the chum have returned. Crowding the pathways along the river, visitors linger on a pedestrian bridge to gape, rubbing up against one another to get a better look at what is going on below. Yet other onlookers choose less accommodating perches for their viewing, braving thickets of devil’s club and salmonberry to sit under the stands of hemlock skirting the river’s edge. But wherever the vantage point, flashes of silver soon become visible as supple backbones, banded in olive and purplish-black, sinuously power through the current. Here and there, yellow dorsal fins, translucent and extended, cut into the surface of waves. From time to time, a thick ribbon of flesh smothered in glassy, cycloid scales flares upward from the depths as a salmon turns on its flank and arches sideways toward the heavens.

But more than a show is going on. The chum are settling in, finding their place under a clouded sun in the shallower waters of the lower reaches of what is known these days in Sitka as the Indian River. There, the innumerable members of a generation of a fellow living kind play out the dramatic last act of their lives. Amid the commotion, each female selects an appropriate spot in the channel and burrows into the riverbed, beating on the gravel with her tail and belly to hollow out a redd. Even as this is occurring, two or three males cluster around her, jostling one another; one sometimes swims upstream, then twists back and descends with the force of the current on the others, his teeth sinking into meat, tails thrashing the waters, the suitors jockeying for position. In the weeks directly preceding the run, those teeth have grown formidable in size, their structure not unlike the canines of a mammal. For this reason, the chum are also known as dog salmon.

The energy gathering in the river is intense but short-lived. The fish, both male and female, no longer eat, even as the oils stored in their muscles leach out to feed growing genitalia. Spawning females pump out roe, a thousand or more reddish translucent spheres the size of peas, to be bathed in clouds of milt by the males before burial in the gravel.

Yet even as the next generation is called into existence, the present one is being actively consumed. Eagles descend on the river, as do bears and ravens, all intent on feasting on their share of salmon. Each has its own manner of doing so. With expert precision, brown bears bite off a chunk of the skull, intent on the protein and fat in the brain, and another chunk of the belly in the case of the female, as her ovaries are charged with unfertilized eggs. Nearby, eagles dance around one another on the banks, taking turns stripping meat off the bones of a landed fish, even as the ravens are crowding in afterward for the scraps. All of this occurs over and over again for days, until all that remains are the emaciated bodies of salmon, their flesh growing leprous with ivory splotches, their muscles and organs shriveled, leaving only molting skin and protruding skeleton, their eyes caved in and glazed over in death—unless, that is, they have not already been pecked out by the beak of a raven. In the end, the entire river stinks for days of rotting meat.

By the next spring, the now-fertilized eggs, secreted over the winter in the gravel, hatch, the fry emerge, and a new generation—“a generation of orphans,” as philosopher David O’Hara puts it—emerges in the light of day.¹

IN PRAISE OF HUMANS PRAISING SALMON PRAISING CREATION

What might it mean to be called into existence as salmon are, and what claims does this other kind of living kind make on us, as we, all-too-human in our own kind, come into its presence? That these questions and others might be raised when one frequents another creature’s haunts is inevitable. In strolling along this river where salmon are spawning, one quickly finds gatherings of fellow humans eager to glimpse the salmon. Indeed, in these circumstances, we are becoming drunk on their very proximity, inspired by their ichthyic doings. And entailed in our desire to be in the company of another living kind—particularly one as charismatic, as gifted, and as gift-giving as salmon in their several varieties—are the modes of questioning that emerge in such circumstances.

As Emmanuel Levinas points out, for “the sages of the Talmud,” attending to and assuring both the novelty and the particularity of the setting in which a question is raised in regard to a biblical text is crucial if the significance of that text is to remain alive for posterity. To this end, one’s practice of reading scripture is called on to cultivate “the transfer to another climate of an idea,” which in turn “wrests new possibilities from it.”² In this legacy of transformative interpretation and commentary, termed midrashic by the Jewish tradition, “ideas do not become fixed by a process of conceptualization which would extinguish many of the sparks dancing beneath the gaze riveted upon the Real.”³ From the rabbinic perspective, one’s ideas about the world are perpetually in danger of becoming modes of idolatry, modes of undoing what Levinas refers to as “the Real” by reifying and fixing it. The very import of the question—its vocation, then—is not to seek out a biblical authority that might in turn provide a closed response to it, one that fastens the meaning of the question to a text that already was assumed to be understood in its ultimate import. Instead, the question calls on the text to submit itself yet again to creation, to become vulnerable to being called beyond itself in order to signify the world in a manner that is sensitive concerning and remains true to meanings that were never one’s own to master, even if one has been called irrevocably to attend to them.

In what follows, the very question of posing a question within the context of Jewish biblical tradition, as this might be understood broadly, finds its particular and novel setting in the circumstances of salmon. These in turn prove to be in themselves complex and fraught with newly emerging perils. For in a time of anthropogenic species extinction, although that way of putting the matter inevitably finds itself subject to yet further questions (for what might in truth be meant by a species, as well as by its extinction?), the manner by which proximity to another living kind refocuses one’s thinking on the very reality of creation—a slippery but persistent concept permeating Jewish biblical texts—so that it might be unfolded and find itself emerging anew into the light of day is at issue. What becomes of the creaturely in the shadows cast by anthropogenic species extinction, and what becomes of anthropogenic species extinction in the light shed by creation? In the following remarks attending to these two questions, each an occluded mirroring of the other, salmon emerge as the protagonist and so the pivot by which received notions of creation and the creaturely within Jewish traditions are called on to be articulated de novo.

In her ecological reading of the biblical creation story, Ellen Bernstein notes how the fish of the sea, as they emerge into existence on creation’s fifth day, are characterized as “swarming souls” (sheretz nafesh) whom the waters are called on to “let swarm” (yishretzu); the text doubles down in its formulation of this particular characteristic of a grand class of living kinds.⁴ From this perspective, salmon emerge as creatures who are called into their peculiar mode of existence by the very fluidity of the earthly element in which they are to abide. The waters, in their capacity to flow and to stretch themselves across the face of the Earth, invite—indeed, incite—movement, particularly movement that directs itself sideways. Hence, the notions of creeping and swarming and of all manners of moving across the face of the Earth that are emphatically horizontal come into focus here.

In a more-than-human creation, Bernstein reminds her reader, the living kinds are rendered diverse through their distinctive manners of finding themselves at home in their particular place or places on Earth, meaning the salmon are called into a unique way of life by how they are called into attunement with their habitat. One’s place on Earth matters so much so that evolutionary ecologists understand each living kind as an assemblage of characteristics called forth by the manner in which a particular place affords their intertwined existence with all else that finds itself at home there. This key insight is to a degree recognized and celebrated by no less a rabbinical authority than Akiva ben Yosef, who notes how “creatures that grow in the sea” immediately die when they “come up on the dry land,” just as those that “grow on dry land” immediately die when they “go down into the sea”; “the place of death for one is the place of life for another.”⁵

What is crucial for Akiva in making his observation is how this division of life, of the setting apart of those living kinds swarming in the sea from those creeping on the earth, calls in turn for our praise. To underline this, Akiva refers to these lines from Psalms 104: “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy creatures.” What renders this comment all the more remarkable is that in it, Akiva interrupts an ongoing exposition by other rabbinical authorities of a verse from Leviticus in which the discussion has been fixed on the uncleanness for human consumption of various creatures that are understood to be among those that crawl on land. In the midst of those considerations, Akiva changes the subject and in doing so reminds his interlocutors that what is unclean and inappropriate from one perspective becomes blessed and worthy of affirmation when viewed from another. Creation, it turns out, is manifold in its values!

David Abram, when he first encounters spawning salmon in their watery element, also cannot get enough of seeing them, so he finally wades in to be more in contact with them. He comments: “The stream was thick with Salmon, boiling with Salmon, all jostling and surging against the current in fits and starts—it was as if the stream was made of Salmon!”⁶ Up to his knees in them, Abram notes how oblivious they are to his presence as they shove past him to get upstream so they can mate and spawn before “they fall apart and die.”⁷ The anomalousness of this vision—of too much movement in too small confines, of masses of living creatures bent on their shared moment of reproduction, which is immediately followed by their deaths—highlights the very manner in which the salmon as a living kind that swarms provoke distinctive modes of thinking in those humans who would spend time in their company. Indeed, the section in which Abram discusses his experience is titled “Lessons from the Salmon,” and these lessons culminate for him in an extended meditation on how he is invited under the tutelage of salmon into a renewed understanding of his own human role in a world characterized by modes of reciprocity between diverse living kinds.

As Abram ruminates on his time spent in proximity to the salmon, he is moved to a series of insights in regard to the salmon as a way of life, a cascade of affirmations that are meant to be not only factual in content but also elevating in import. For instance, Abram entertains how the prodigious energy he is witnessing, bottled up and boiling as it is between the current’s stony banks, leads one to appreciate and be thankful for the capacity of this living kind to move so fluently across great oceanic reaches. Roaming an arc of the planet running 2,300 miles, from the Aleutian Islands to the Kamchatka Peninsula to the coast of Japan, Abram notes, salmon gather the nutrients dispersed throughout these waters only to return them in concentrated form through their very bodies to the place of their own birth. In this way, their deaths become “an offering” that makes possible the flourishing of many other living kinds—indeed of the very ecosystem itself that is the Alaskan rainforest.⁸ One is also called on by Abram to appreciate the anadromous intelligence exercised in this process by the salmon; they have the capacity to move between fresh and briny waters in their life cycle, to find their way home after thousands of miles of wandering over several years, and to do so in such a carefully calibrated time span that their widely dispersed kin show up within a few days of one another.⁹

What, then, draws the onlookers to a bridge arching over the waters of Baranov Island? While there are many ways in which this question might be answered, the one that is hoped for, if we are to take Bernstein’s and Abram’s remarks seriously, with the words of Akiva echoing in the background as our guide, is that people are there to praise the salmon. If one has shown up simply to gawk and be diverted and entertained, one has already lost track of the very thing that one has been invited to behold. A mode of discernment on the part of humans as they frequent the haunts of salmon is being called for. For salmon as a way of life constrain our approach of them precisely by how they differ from us as a living kind, even as they invite in that differentiation, indeed through that very differentiation, our reciprocity with them.

Hineni: Praising another involves mindfully beholding and so providing one’s witness for how another is in some manner preeminent and commands through that preeminence one’s own attention to them. Further, in becoming praise, this attention emerges as a liturgical response, as one’s very words are elicited for the sake of that other. In praise, then, the very meaning of one’s expressiveness emerges not as lying in one’s own hands or resonating in one’s own voice but rather as already having been offered for the sake of another. One does not speak in order to assure oneself that one is through this speech in command of its intent but rather paradoxically foregoes this very possibility. In praise, before one could have been responsible through one’s own means for what one might mean by one’s words, those words are revealed to have already been inspired and so claimed by another.

Hallelujah: In the concluding line of the concluding Psalm of the Book of Psalms, “all that breathes” (chol han’shama) is called on to “praise the Lord, Hallelujah” (t’hallel Ja, hallelujah) (Ps. 150:6). Here, hallelujah, the last word of creation—a word that is in fact doubled in its telling—is revealed to be the word praise, as all of creation is called on to give praise to the Creator. The rambunctious quality of this praise has been developed in more detail in the two preceding Psalms. Indeed, the very first line of Psalm 148 is “Hallelujah, Praise ye the Lord from the heavens; praise Him in the heights,” and commentary in Midrash Tehillim notes that these words “are spoken to the creatures in heaven,” the “ministering angels.”¹⁰ Even as there are “hosts of creatures” on Earth, their analogues are also to be found in the heavens. The hosts who praise the Creator then are doubled—they are hosts both of the heavens and the Earth—but it does not stop there; a few lines later, it turns out praise is to emanate not simply from one heaven but from “the heaven of heavens” (sh’mei hashamayim). From this, “you may learn,” the rabbis argue, “that there are no fewer than three heavens.”¹¹ Three heavens, then, and one Earth are consumed in praising the Creator—a noisy rambunctiousness, indeed.

But as creatures are also called on “from the earth” to offer their praise of the Creator, a list ensues in Psalm 148 that is surprising in its ordering, since humans remain unmentioned even as “the sea-monsters and all the deeps” are mustered. Then come “fire and hail, snow and vapor; stormy wind, fulfilling His word,” followed by “mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all cedars; beasts and all cattle; creeping things and flying fowl.” Creature upon creature is praising the Creator before finally humans of all stations—“Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, both young men and maidens”—are invited to join in. Perhaps in a playful mood, the commentary asks, in light of this odd, even scandalous way of proceeding: “After God’s praises are sung from the heavens, who ought to be the first on earth to sing His praises?” The answer given is “He that is larger than his fellow creatures”—that is, “the sea monsters of whom it is said ‘And God created the great sea-monsters’” (Gen. 1:21).¹²

This dizzying multiplication of praise is induced midrashically, not only by the words of authors of commentary on the Psalms but also through the very words of the Psalms themselves,¹³ as they take up from other vantages the accounts of creation found in yet other biblical books. In line with this strategy, Psalm 148 offers commentary on other Hebraic accounts of creation through an exegesis that envisions a renewed (re)ordering of the creatures, one in which humans are imagined more as being at the end of the line than at the culmination of the proceedings. The effect of this inversion is to bring into focus what might be termed the reaches of creation. Creation’s exuberance and its manifold dimensions of distinct creatures, elements, and processes are hinted at, even as the modes of praise respectively offered to the Creator by them are attended to.

Thus, while the Hebraic gesture of praise finds its exemplary end point in the Creator, in that terminus that is understood to transcend infinitely all that is creaturely, a strong argument can also be made for a mode of praise that is robustly attuned to the creaturely rather than one that is immediately theological.¹⁴ In this attunement, the very speech emerging from one’s mouth is revealed already to be an offering on behalf of another living kind for the sake of how that creature in its own way praises the Creator. It is not only humans who are involved in praising the Most High; salmon, too, must be attended to. Indeed, if the ordering of Psalm 148 is to be taken at its word, they are in line before us.

THE KINGDOM OF ENDS AND THE COVENANT OF CREATURES

One can certainly mark in Abram’s words about salmon a fellow traveler in this tradition of praise and commentary. Yet in order to develop the full significance of the biblical invitation to creaturely praise, two additional points need to be acknowledged. First, one must consider how the praise involved here is not commanded by the ethical notion of respect for another’s autonomy, through which one is called to live in what Immanuel Kant famously terms a “kingdom of ends.” Insofar as one’s actions are praiseworthy in this arena, this is to be justified purely by whether one has chosen freely to act according to rational principles that prove consistent with themselves. What is commanded here is respect for lawfulness and, as a result, only for those beings for whom the matter of freely choosing to act lawfully arises in the very nature of their being who they are. Rather than praise for a living kind, Kant calls for respect for a reasoning kind, whether this be human, angelic, or the Most High, who in turn is only worthy of praise insofar as he, she, or it acts according to the rational nature they have already been given to be. One is understood to be autonomous precisely because one is given to oneself through the inherent capacity to set down the laws by which one’s actions are in turn to be guided. The obliviousness of the salmon to their capacity to choose the principles by which their actions might proceed—whether these involve their driven rush to morbidity and death at the moment of spawning or their exuberant exploration of the oceanic reaches beforehand—rules out any respect due to them for the sake of their ethical autonomy. We humans do not join with salmon in a kingdom of ends and so are not called on to praise them in this context.

But this is not where the story finishes, for beyond any kingdom of ends postulated by human reason is the very covenant by which the living kinds as creaturely subjects have already been bound to one another before any human interjection in the name of reason might have occurred. This leads to the second point, which is that we must consider how the very notion of one’s creatureliness entails the collapse of one’s all-too-human autonomy and the rendering of it as abject in regard to its very emergence into existence within the frame of a living kind. Humankind, once it exists, constitutes a kingdom of ends, but its very emergence into existence as such a kingdom is dependent on its having been brought into being as a living kind as well. Yet, in emerging as a living kind, one does not choose one’s own birth but rather finds oneself already having emerged, already entangled into the very fabric of a living world brimming over with other living kinds, all of whom are implicated through biogenetic evolution in the very possibility of each other’s emergence.¹⁵ In these circumstances, to speak of one’s right to have emerged as a living kind is nonsensical, even if, in the wake of one’s emergence as a reasoning creature, a whole range of inalienable rights might ensue.

One then does not possess a right to having been created, meaning to having emerged as a creature, a living kind among others. This insight offers the possibility for a critique of human doing in which the radical approach of Kant of insisting on questioning to their very root in human autonomy the values by which we are to proceed in filling out our way of life is interrupted and supplemented through one that is anarchical.¹⁶ This means that critique begins not in seeking out a ground for how one can then proceed to evaluate what is to be affirmed through one’s reason but rather in responding in faithfulness to an emergence into light that could never have been anticipated and could not have been evaluated as a choice of one’s own beforehand. In creaturely praise, in reaching out beyond all of what is creaturely to acknowledge and be thankful for the very circumstances of one’s creatureliness, humans become mindful of their helplessness and of a poverty without limit in regard to the very circumstances by which they have found themselves the recipient of their own capacity to have existed. Humankind, in the sense of its having been born into itself, finds itself without any root whatsoever in its own kind, anarchically unloosed from its moorings.

The enlightenment project, it turns out, involves a fatal and even catastrophic confusion of categories in which the creaturely is at best subsumed under the lawful or at worst simply dismissed. In this way, humans implicitly understand themselves as a necessary and inevitable element—indeed the necessary and inevitable element of the living world. One comports oneself as if (even if one does not acknowledge this) one’s very presence as a reasoning creature were legislated metaphysically from eternity. In this frame of mind, one need not thank or praise anyone—not even the Most High—for one’s very existence as a human being. Rather, one need only attend to how the very structure of one’s autonomy, once one finds oneself to be human, calls on one to respect the autonomy of those others with whom one shares a capacity to reason. In this way, one becomes sealed up in one’s reasoning through an obsession with the significance of one’s own all-too-human humanity.

But in praising salmon precisely for their being salmon, the very thought of the priority of one’s humanity and of one’s own living kind to claim for itself solely through its own means its own spot under the sun is, at the very least, put on trial. This trial in turn need not be staged—indeed, it ought not to be staged—solely by a confrontation with the figure of the Most High, the theological Creator, but it can be supplemented, as suggested by Akiva, through a polyphony, or better, a heterophony, of living kinds whose very differentiation from one another is already enough to remind humans that they are not the masters of their own emergence as a living kind. Indeed, the respective indebtedness of every creature for having emerged as a living kind, whether this be human or otherwise, proves to be abject, a helplessness without limit.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg retells a midrashic Aggadah (story) in which the creation of Adam involves not only the Creator’s breathing into the human form its very animation but also the Creator’s immediately standing that human form upright on its legs.¹⁷ In this way, the orientation of a humankind that is created and so creaturely is understood to be that of looking upward and downward (the vertical dimension), even as it is given a vantage, a stature (komato), to gaze across the face of the Earth and so witness all the creatures with whom creation is shared (the horizontal dimension). From the very position of the human as upright—keep in mind here how well this plays out in Abram’s case as he wades into the waters with the salmon—praise for the Creator immediately emerges as a praise that calls on all other living kinds in the carrying out of its liturgical work. In a further twist to this insight, the midrashic Aggadah relates how the animals, fearful of the upright human posture and concluding that humankind is their Creator, approach the human in order to worship it. The human in turn responds by imploring all animals to join in putting on “the clothing of majesty and strength” so that the Creator and not the human is made “King over us, who created us all.”¹⁸

CREATURELY DISCERNMENT ACROSS THE LIVING KINDS

In his mediations on the salmon, Abram is practicing what could be termed creaturely discernment. This entails becoming receptive to the agencies and intelligences of a more-than-human world so that one might be instructed by them and so interact with them more attentively, more thoughtfully, more justly, and, most importantly, more reverently. In creaturely discernment, the horizontal axis of creation and of how the diversity of living kinds calls for differentiated acknowledgment and response by humankind is taken carefully into account. For all of Abram’s explicit and inspiring—although at the same time controversial and contested—dependence on Indigenous ways of thinking in pursuing this project, he is also implicitly practicing a mode of discernment in alliance with Hebraic tradition. In this latter understanding of his undertaking, the other, more-than-human living kinds, such as the salmon, function as modalities of Torah, meaning they offer modes of learning that open up how one is, in the Hebraic sense, called to acknowledge oneself as a creature, as an entity who is created.

Some further thought now needs to be given to what precisely is meant by acknowledging one is a creature, for in this a particular understanding of human exceptionality, especially as it is has been formulated since the Enlightenment, is put on trial. While the traditional Hebraic notion of how this trial should proceed is through an interrogation of the human by the Most High—an immediately vertical aligning of transcendence in which creature is confronted by Creator—room has also been made within that traditional approach, as the midrashic Aggadah already illustrates, for a horizontal axis. And no less than the Most High explicitly does so, for instance, when, in confronting Job, Elohim draws his attention to how creation is filled with creatures who put the very sense of a human claim on its ultimate intelligibility and justification into crisis. “Doth the hawk soar by thy wisdom, And stretch her wings toward the south?” asks Elohim.¹⁹ Job is then directed to consider the ways of the vulture, who also flies where it will regardless of what humans might desire and whose very provision for its young turns out to be bloodied chunks of raw flesh, a meal that from a Hebraic perspective is fully unbefitting for human consumption and yet blessed nonetheless by the Creator.

What the Most High intends with this discourse, or, at the very least, what the all-too-human author of the Book of Job intends by placing this discourse in the mouth of the Most High, is to challenge Job in regard to that understanding of his own creatureliness that is so taken with its exceptionality, its height above creation, that he has failed to take seriously his kinship with and entanglement in all that is earthly. Throughout the book named after him, Job asks for an audience with his Creator, a request that fits solidly with the thought that Job and the Most High share membership in a kingdom of ends populated by reasoning and autonomous beings, only to be instructed, when the Creator finally appears, that this request requires Job to discern anew how the other creatures with whom he shares creation were already providing him counsel (although one of a different sort than Job had been soliciting). The living kinds serve at this moment as Torah, which is to say, as instruction into one’s own creaturely dimensions, and a certain faithlessness in Job that was unremarked by him during his previous interrogation of the Most High is now put into relief.²⁰

In a similar vein, Abram is concerned with putting into relief a contemporary version of our growing faithlessness in regard to the creatures with whom we share creation. Placing himself in proximity to another living kind, Abram finds he is being offered instruction on following a way of life that is not merely characterized as an existential ascent (as one is caught up in wonderment at one’s own emergence into illumination and fluency) but also as a creaturely humbling in regard to others (as one is bowed down in thankfulness to powers that are not one’s own to master). As Abram puts it, “Surely it is time to outgrow this most tenacious of modernist presumptions: for all our craftiness and creative ferment, we humans are by no means the sole, or even the primary, agents of the world’s construction.”²¹

Here, Abram is perhaps doing the rabbis one better, for it is not enough to invite the other living kinds to join humans in the praising of their Creator; one must also acknowledge how those other living kinds are providing yet other modes of praise of the Creator than those available to the human through its own means alone. We are called to praise how they in turn are called to praise. Here, our covenantal relationship with other creatures provides an anarchical supplement to the ethical notion of value enacted through a human kingdom of ends. The very terms by which creation elicits elevation and praise move us beyond the solely ethical and the securely human, involving us in a panoply of more-than-human qualities and activities by which we are instructed in regard to its very creatureliness. In this way, the reciprocity that Abram cultivates with salmon can be understood to be interrogative. The salmon call one to a reciprocity in which the very intelligibility of the terms by which that reciprocity is to be characterized is no longer simply in one’s own hands (or emerging from one’s own all-too-human mouth). As a result, we are called beyond even a radical humility in regard to what we might accomplish on Earth to one that is anarchical. In the latter prospect, one finds that what is to be affirmed through one’s reason comes to be heard anew, as the very sense of that affirmation is altered and twisted through the manner in which other human beings and living kinds come to be involved in the matter. Here, one discerns that human affirmation alone is insufficient—even a human affirmation that takes upon itself the circumspection of reason. The ways of vultures, as much as of the salmon, are involved in how humans might be called on to make sense of their own comportment in regard to creation.

EATING THOSE WE PRAISE

One example of how one might be called to anarchical humility is provided by Abram as he meditates on how the thronging of the salmon as they move upstream, seemingly in oblivion to all that surrounds them, reminds him of similar tendencies in humans, although with some telling differences. Like the salmon, humans are capable of swarming behavior, of engaging in, as Abram puts it, “a steady, unending surge, a procreation and proliferation without bounds.”²² And yet this capacity, when left unfettered in the human, is of another order entirely than that of the salmon. For in the swarming of salmon, a “relentless sacrifice,”²³ as Abram puts it, is offered through which countless other species are nourished. Moved and humbled by this thought, Abram engages in a litany of creaturely praise as he recounts how salmon become “food for the bears, for the river otters, for raccoons, coyotes, skunks, bobcats and squirrels, food for eagles and red-tailed hawks and winter wrens, and for all the local corvids—ravens and crows and stellar jays and gray jays.”²⁴ The run, it turns out, does not end in the waters where the salmon spawn but continues to eddy up the mountainside as the salmon’s very flesh filters into the forested slopes, “gifting them with wild nutrients.” Indeed, molecular remnants of the salmon’s flesh have been found to be sequestered in the heartwood of the cedars and hemlocks standing on those slopes.²⁵

As these remarks make clear, creaturely relationships are sustained via an ongoing offering of one’s flesh, as one living kind becomes food for other living kinds, who in turn become food for yet others. In this manner, reciprocity between the human and the salmon is revealed to involve a heterociprocity,²⁶ an entanglement of multiple axes of reciprocity between a manifold of diverse living kinds. That Abram would offer his praise for these circumstances in which the salmon find themselves seems right and proper; yet, if the very same litany were to be offered on behalf of similar activities in the kingdom of ends, it would be nothing less than horrifying, a defiling of all that would be worthy of one’s respect and praise. Indeed, as one Psalm succinctly puts it, most abhorrent to the Most High are “the workers of iniquity,” namely, those who “devour my people like bread.”²⁷ And yet everywhere one turns within creation, creatures are indeed being at least fed upon as if they were bread—and, to be sure, as if they were salmon. And this is precisely what one is being called on to praise.

This praise, unlike that on behalf of those of ethical agents acting responsibly in a kingdom of ends, involves subjects bound to one another through their very creatureliness rather than through their capacity to reason. In this regard, a point needs to be made clear that is not so obvious although perhaps still implicit in Abram’s remarks about the reciprocity at work in the creaturely relations between the living kinds. In what is understood to be creation—which is to say, in the instantiation of our covenantal relationship with other living kinds—we find ourselves to be subjects beyond any means whatsoever of our having been the agents of our having become subjects. In creation, the very capacity to have a capacity is exposed as ultimately empty, as without a standing. Put in other words, as creatures, we are without a capacity to have had a capacity. Further, whatever reciprocity emerges between ourselves and the diverse living kinds who are also respectively without a standing in their very emergence as a living kind, the give-and-take between them and our all-too-human selves should be understood as occurring on the basis of an initial poverty, an inextricable helplessness in affirming one’s standing among others through one’s own agency.

In one’s very creatureliness, one is called into a relationship with all the other living kinds that one could never have been in a position to have assented to. Yet precisely in these circumstances lies the notion of a covenant that is creaturely, meaning it is entered into in a manner such that the very incapacity of one’s entering into it on one’s own terms is the context by which the covenant is offered its meaning and paradoxically is found to be praiseworthy. Understood in this way, the very act of coming into covenant is the covenant offered by the covenant. The logic here, as recondite as that of Augustine’s notion of in-venire,²⁸ of coming into oneself in order to be oneself, plays out in an allied strand of Latin roots, namely that of con-venire, “to come with or together.” Creation, then, is a convening of the created in which the very incapacity to have been convened is reconciled by the gift of having been convened. In this way, one is called on to agree beyond one’s capacity to have agreed! To affirm creation and to enter into the praising of it is to find oneself to have been vulnerable to what is to be affirmed or praised before one could have evaluated for oneself whether this should occur. Precisely in this slippage between a past that one could never have mastered and a present for which one could never have been prepared is offered a mode of affirmation that is not radical, that does not go to a root in order to sustain itself upon its origin, but that instead is anarchical and without precedent. One witnesses creation beyond one’s capacity to ever have rendered it explicable merely in one’s own terms.

That one is asked to live in a world in which one must eat other living kinds might seem, from the perspective of reason’s partiality to its own autonomy, an odd and even monstrous thing to praise. And whether one might render such praise more acceptable simply by refusing to eat of the flesh of animals, preferring the tissues of plants, there exists an entire panoply of trophic relationships constituting life; as one gazes from the height of an all-too-human stature on the diverse living kinds feeding upon one another, the mother raven makes her way to her eager brood with bloodied pieces of rabbit or slivers of salmon in her beak.

But it is precisely in this context of how one is called on to praise the hunger of chicks for the flesh of other living kinds or indeed one’s own hunger that a question of creaturely comportment emerges for humans for which their membership in a kingdom of ends could not have prepared them—namely, to what degree and in what manner is one required to digest the other living kinds in order to be who one is? The very condition of being a fleshly creature, one who must arise from the flesh of another in order to be born as oneself and who must then yet eat of others in order to sustain this birth, calls in turn for discernment and an openness in one’s thinking and acting to modes of justice in which the very terms by which that justice is to be rendered must remain ambivalent and uncanny.

One needs, for instance, to become discerning concerning the distinction between one’s eating of and one’s devouring another living kind, or, more generally, between one’s eating of and one’s devouring creation itself. That another living kind can be devoured, can be eaten away so that its very being is consumed as a living kind and it is extinguished in its very kind, is a realization humankind, particularly in its European instantiation, has only come to in the last several hundred years.²⁹ When Psalm 53 fixes its regard on those among us who live absent of all humility as if they were gods unto themselves, it finds they are those “who eat up My people as they eat bread.” We are only too familiar in our own time with political and economic regimes in which humans became fodder for the sake of the vaingloriousness of their oppressors. But Abram’s meditation on spawning salmon asks whether an addendum to this insight is not urgently called for, namely that one lives in a perversion of creation and in abhorrent iniquity when one devours the entirety of another living kind as if it were merely one’s own bread.

NOACH AND THE UNDOING OF CREATION

For most of the Abrahamic tradition, the willful extinction of a living kind was a sin one did not even know one might commit. While the Most High tinkers with the thought of the mass annihilation of all living kinds in the story of Noach, that power was laid squarely in Elohim’s admittedly anthropomorphized hands and no one else’s. Further, the rabbis are clear that Noach’s act of tending to his shipload of living kinds during those forty days of shadows and storm functioned as a moment when he might finally be drawn near in an act of Imitatio Dei to the Most High, this occurring precisely in the ceaseless tending to the living kinds, no sleep or even a moment of inattentiveness possible,³⁰ while one was sharing with so many hungry mouths and defecating anuses, the ark.

The story of Noach, the rabbis inform us, is a meditation on what comes to pass when the lewdness of humans and their perversion of other living kinds through widespread fornication with them undo the very boundaries by which creatures are differentiated from one another.³¹ The notion of this particular flood, given the Hebraic cosmology in which it finds its context, involved both a bubbling up from underneath the earth and a spilling down from overhead, so that the waters were undoing creation from both above and below, in the process overturning the very sense by which what is overhead and what is underneath are differentiated. The result is a world undone in its entirety, inundated in disorientation. Indeed, the Greek translation of haMabal, the Hebrew word reserved solely for the Noachic flood—a flood that is to be understood not as a but rather as the flood—was Katachlysmos. This term is the root of the English word cataclysm, which indicates not only a watery deluge but also the intensifying of any calamitous act to the point of its irretrievability. In cataclysm, destructive forces are unleashed that cannot be called back, whose uncanny workings put into question the very sense of orientation by which creation is to be guided and sustained.³²

The elemental expression of the Most High’s displeasure with humankind, the forty days of storm and shadow, can be understood both as an explicit punishment after the fact and a confirmation of what already was the state of affairs in which creation had found itself. The flood in the story of Noach in which creation is to be undone only occurs because it had already been preceded by a regime of undoing creation, a deluge of disorientation in which the very manner by which one kind is differentiated from another, so that each kind emerges in its own way of life as a living kind, was lost.

For the author of the story of Noach, or at least of a certain rabbinical reading of it, this particular mode of the perversion of creation in regard to the other living kinds is the worst that might be imagined and so is exemplary of precisely how creation is vulnerable to an undoing that threatens not only humankind but all the living kinds in their entirety.

Yet the current treatment of salmon at the hands of humankind—one moment in a vast array of moments of the undoing of a vast array of living kinds that have permeated human activity over the last two centuries, which is to say the regime of an era of widespread anthropogenic extinction of species—can also be characterized as cataclysmic, although in a manner that was not imaginable in the story of Noach. For here and now, the threat, rather than being that of a grandiose lewdness or of the desire to fornicate with the other living kinds below one’s purported station as well as with the angels above it, now involves the wholesale de-animation of the creaturely world, the rendering of it as if it were a mere item to be seized and absorbed by one’s all-too-human doing without any sense for the integrity of another’s creatureliness or thankfulness for its unique contributions to a shared covenant, to a creation that inextricably involves more than humans, even if humans are, at least from a particular perspective—one needs to remember here G-d’s fondness for Leviathan and insistence on praising vultures—to be viewed as creation’s crown.

MORE THAN AN EXTINCTION MANIA

How one views and is claimed by the very emergence of life on Earth should not be discounted, even as one rushes to focus on the all-too-pressing issue of the ongoing human-caused undoing of a plethora of living kinds in every corner of creation. To entertain the latter thought, it turns out, is to find oneself already entangled in questions regarding the former, questions that would be imperative to consider even if the catastrophe that is currently unfolding had somehow been avoided. For if one is to learn from salmon regarding their plight in a time of mass anthropogenic species extinction, one must be first willing to learn from salmon simply because they are our fellow creatures, our kith and kin in creation. All too often, one comes to the question of how to respond to the threatened extinction of a living kind, as if what gave the question its heft and purchase was the very status in itself of being threatened with extinction. As a result, one proceeds as if the particular creature being focused on in this sort of discussion is extraneous to the very subject of it. What captures one’s attention, instead, is demise pure and simple, even if it happens to be clothed in feathers or scales. One cultivates registries of annihilation and bemoans the numbers of threatened things, even as one calculates the relative importance of this or that instance of vulnerability, rallying support willy-nilly for this and that creature that one has determined is currently sitting at or near the top of a list.

In other words, one of the dangers of a species being threatened by anthropogenic extinction is that the very onset of this process all too often merely functions to fetishize a living kind, to register its significance not in its unique way of life and palpable entanglement with other creatures but in its terminating excision altogether from life, as if a living kind’s ultimate significance is not in how it is a kind but rather in how, whatever kind it might be, it is vulnerable to ceasing to exist. This process of obsessive fixation redoubles and then redoubles in its redoubling; as a range of species are each entered singly into the many varieties of listings of extinction, the entirety of all living kinds, beyond any contingent itemizing of a set of particular species, is simultaneously being revealed to be vulnerable to excision. To enter the Anthropocene, in at least one of its senses, is to enter an era in which all living kinds are vulnerable to anthropogenic extinction, including humankind itself. The thought long cultivated by apocalyptic traditions of all earthly things being extinguished and of life itself dissipating altogether into the shadows suddenly finds a heft and purchase that is not so easily dismissed.

But if one is attentive to, for instance, salmon, two insights arise implicitly admonishing one to resist the tendency to render the current plight of the living kinds in a merely apocalyptic tone. The first involves our growing understanding of the evolutionary history of salmon, which, as with all other earthly species, is built on an edifice of extinct forebears. Salmon, particularly the Oncorhynchus keta, are born into existence precisely by their capacity to weather extinction and move beyond being one type of living kind into being yet others. Indeed, the genus Oncorhynchus, in its being genetically tetraploid, is particularly adept at moving along a path leading to species differentiation.³³ This capacity for a species to become other to itself proves to be part of a larger pattern, as we have come to discern that the lineage of any species currently inhabiting the Earth reaches back beyond itself to an origin in another living kind, even if it inevitably is more or less intimately related to one’s own. Chickens are surely a kind of bird, but, as we are now discerning, they also prove to be a new iteration of dinosaur. Extinction, in this sense, does not so much excise a creature from creation as find its progeny, or, at the very least, its kin at one remove or another, emerging into something new under the sun.

The very notion, then, of what a species might be is anarchically unsettled by its entanglement in generative lineages pivoting on previous nonanthropogenic extinction events, whether the latter have been writ small (in the relatively low rate of ongoing, background extinction) or large (as in the case of a meteor striking the Earth and mass extinction ensuing). Extinction, insofar as it is part of a living complex that has led here and now to the evolution of human beings and our more-than-human fellow creatures, can even be argued to be positive and necessary. Further, the very fabric of intertwining lineages stretching across geological time leads to the emergence within creation of what Rolston Holmes III has described as an invitation to sympatry, to cultivating a feeling for and with all other creatures simply because they exist and also because we inevitably find ourselves to one degree or another in kinship with them.³⁴

This idea is tied to a second insight, namely that as we become cognizant of how another living kind exists, the latter offers in its very way of life an invitation to humankind to learn anew of the engagement in our own manner of life and to become aware of the dizzying investment this involves in all other modes of life. This is not simply a matter of marveling at the difference between ourselves and other creatures, as if such wonder could simply feed upon itself, as if novelty were in itself its own reason for being claimed by another. The claim of other earthly living kinds on humankind is more personal, more intimate, and more unsettling than that; for these other, more-than-human modes of life, even as they are in kinship with the human, differ from that of humans in not only their empirical details but also in the very manner in which the world emerges as meaningful in them. The diversity of life, then, is both ontologically articulated and also semiotically communicated. Another way to put this is that there are not simply diverse kinds of life but also diverse worlds revealed through those kinds of life.³⁵ Life emerges both in the various kinds of beings and in the various ways in which these kinds render life as intelligible and meaningful, both to themselves and to others.

If one is to engage carefully in this mode of semiotic and ontological inquiry, then a notion of intelligibility is called for that is paranoetic,³⁶ that emerges neither straightforwardly nor even subtly, if by the latter one means through an extensive network of implications that ultimately can be discovered and eventually made explicit in fully human terms for oneself. Rather, one is called to know another living kind in a way that differs from how one was prepared to do so and could have ever been prepared to do so in the first place. In paranoiesis, one finds oneself engaged in a knowing of others that is hypersensitive to the blindness inherent in what can emerge as intelligible in one’s always all-too-human knowing; this hypersensitivity is not the symptom of a pathological state, although it might at times resemble one, but is the very emergence of a responsibility that is creaturely. This means one is called on to know fully what one knows about another living kind and to simultaneously circle around one’s knowing in order to outmaneuver it, so as to become, at the very least, aware of its blind spots. Yet even this is not enough. One must also be led to circle beyond the all-too-human circling of one’s own knowing around one’s own knowing of other living kinds so that the traces of these other creatures might begin to circulate from beyond one’s own ken in one’s knowing of them. The point here is that communication from another living kind concerning its significance is not simply to be facilely received and translated into one’s all-too-human idioms; a radical and even anarchical sense to things is instead unleashed by the very approach of another living kind. In this way, one is brought to other manners in which the world offers its being made sense of lying beyond those rendering it intelligible that are held in the keeping of one’s own kind.³⁷

THE BLASPHEMOUS ARTS OF DEVOURING A LIVING KIND IN ORDER TO EAT IT

Wendell Berry surely has something like this in mind when he claims that eating other creatures, even those of flesh and blood, is to be praised insofar as one eats them “with understanding and with gratitude.”³⁸ He adds that crucial to the goodness of this act is that it be framed by “one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.” In eating of the world from which food comes, Berry argues, we are called into an “extensive pleasure,” one that entangles us in the manifold processes and living creatures by which our bodies and our lives are in turn to be nourished. In eating is enacted our perhaps most profound connection with the world, one in which “we are living in mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”³⁹

Yet this world is perhaps too narrowly conceived by Berry when he argues that one’s eating of it is to be understood as an “agricultural act.” In this formulation, the significance of eating, no matter how expansive and rich our interpretation of what is meant by agriculture might be, is not quite expansive and rich enough to account for the agencies and powers in play in the salmon run on Baranov Island. A bit of a sleight of hand is at work here, as Berry argues for the mystery involved in “creatures we did not make” even as he overlooks how the human pursuit of agriculture, in whatever form one contemplates it, inevitably involves profound alterations of living kinds as they come to be adapted to and dependent on human practices of husbandry and cultivation.

This is not to argue that the emergence of agriculture as a human enterprise, along with the immense burgeoning of hybrid and domesticated living kinds that accompany this, necessarily diminishes or perverts the mystery Berry would have us consider. But what does need to be acknowledged is that the notion of eating as an agricultural act is not enough to capture the full sense of what is suggested by eating as a creaturely act.

In the latter sense, our eating of the world involves participation in a covenant of diverse and heterogeneous living kinds rather than in a community of autonomous beings. In covenant, what brings creatures together with one another is not the similarity of their needs or even the possibilities of reciprocity between one set of needs and another. This covenant is not to be understood as the reciprocal exchange of mutually beneficial gifts between various living kinds but rather as the intertwining expression of a poverty that goes all the way down in the diverse ways of life with whom we share the Earth. In the context of creaturely covenant, nothing that is living proves itself capable of satisfying its own hungers through its own means or its own claim on itself or the world in which it is embedded. In this way, the very priority of autonomy as it is expressed in and structures a community of reason is anarchically disrupted and put on trial in a manner that a community of reciprocal ends could never have prepared itself for.⁴⁰ A community of reason is one based on respect for respectively autonomous actors, but a covenant of creatures is bound together precisely by the necessity that no living kind exists except through its feeding on and being nourished by yet other living kinds.

In the rabbinical discussion of the story of Noach, his caring for the other living kinds is based on the interaction of two virtues; the ceaseless discipline called for in the feeding of others is interwoven with an ongoing discernment as to precisely how these others are each in their own respective way in need of this care. That one shows up with persistence is not enough; one must also engage with another with sensitivity to the very manner in which the other might be nourished by one’s approach. An interspecies or transhuman etiquette, as Anthony Weston has put it, is called for.⁴¹ For this, one needs to cultivate both the commitment to be of help to other ways of life and the skillful means by which this help can be received. This cultivation in turn requires an ongoing and far-reaching curiosity regarding how other living kinds engage in their respective ways of life, as well as the capacity to judge when one’s approach of these other living kinds is out of touch, or worse, at odds with their respective ways of life. This is what is meant in this essay by the notion of creaturely discernment.

Yet this discernment is called for not only in the matter of feeding others but also in the matter of how one how feeds upon others. This paradox leads to creaturely as opposed to ethical discernment. With this in mind, is it finally possible nearly at this essay’s end to raise the question that all along has been simmering underneath its every word: How might one be called on to respond in one’s all-too-human manner to the plight of being salmon in an age of anthropogenic mass species extinction? The question of how one might even raise this question regarding the circumstances in which another living kind now finds itself is itself one that calls for creaturely discernment. All too often, the very question of how other living kinds are threatened with extinction here and now is being raised without taking the proper time to cultivate one’s sense of how one is compelled to attend to and affirm aptly the particular living kinds on the face of the Earth. We act like rescuers entering a burning building in which all the subtleties normally called for in the breaching of another’s home can be dispensed with. The emergency alone is enough to provide a newfound relationship, an improvised utopic intervention in what is otherwise a cataclysmic circumstance.

Sadly, our obsession with the notion of an extinction emergency only exacerbates the extinction mania and serves as a sign of how lost we continue to be in regard to the plight of the living kinds in a time of mass species extinction. A state of emergency does indeed frame the story of Noach, as a flood demands human intervention in the lives of other living kinds. But this notion of emergency in our current circumstances promises a false sense of clarity in regard to what is going wrong, one that proves in itself to be the articulation of the very manner by which the cataclysm we are undergoing is being driven in the first place.

THE FATE OF CREATURELY DISCERNMENT IN A PLANET SCULPTED BY ANTHROPOGENIC EXTINCTION

So, given this lengthy preamble regarding the role of one’s ethical and creaturely discernment in regard to the living kinds, some questions might now be provisionally posed: What, indeed, is the plight of salmon in an era of anthropogenic extinction? And how might we, in creaturely discernment, engage ourselves with it? How might we be called on to praise salmon-kind in the moment in which they, among so many other living kinds, are increasingly in danger of being lost to the Earth due to the negligence of our own all-too-human humankind?

These questions and the circumstances by which they come into being do not lend themselves to easy or clear answers. For instance, a recent study has noted that more salmon are populating the North Pacific fishery than at any time since records began being kept in 1925.⁴² Further, the rise in these numbers has been especially pronounced for pink, chum, and sockeye salmon. If this is so, then the annual run of Oncorhynchus keta described at the beginning of this chapter might be understood to illuminate important aspects of our relationship with another living kind but hardly seems to demand our worried attention in a time of anthropogenic mass species extinction. If anything, the current conditions under the sun, which include warming arctic waters and the maintaining of hatcheries designed to intensify salmon numbers, have led to a wild salmon boom—“approximately 36% more Salmon than in the previous peak in the late 1930s.”⁴³ The chum are doing well, and the pinks are doing better; the latter now account for 70 percent by number of the wild salmon fishery. Further, hatchery fish now make up 40 percent of the total biomass of all salmon free-ranging across the Pacific, “largely because of Chum Salmon that spend more years at sea.”⁴⁴

At the same time, the numbers and biomass of the other salmon species in this fishery—Chinook, coho, and steelhead—have been plummeting. So too have some populations of chum, including those emerging from Japanese watersheds.⁴⁵ To complicate this picture even more, the unprecedented number of free-roaming salmon now straining the carrying capacity of the Pacific has led to worry that these conditions are resulting in “reduced body size and survival of Salmon and lower survival of seabirds.”⁴⁶ Yet another study found that the size of salmon who eventually make it back to Alaskan rivers has been diminishing over a sixty-year span. This includes Chinook, chum, coho, and sockeye. The factors driving these changes are complex but are generally tied yet again to global warming and increased competition from hatchery fish.⁴⁷

Craig Medred, an independent journalist based in Alaska, points out that this situation has newfound negative implications for the spate of dam-removal projects that recently have been providing hope that once-extinct runs of various species of salmon across the Pacific drainages of the American West might be restored.⁴⁸ Indeed, even as these words are being written, Chinook salmon are being reintroduced into the Sanpoil River, a tributary of the upper Columbia under the auspices of the Colville people.⁴⁹ And while the tribe is hopeful that this run can be reestablished, the experience so far in the not-so-distant Lake Washington (bordering Seattle) suggests that as helpful as dam removal might be for restoring historic salmon runs, global climate change and the negative effects of the increasing prevalence of hatchery fish in these runs may be even more important factors undermining our efforts.

Indeed, to contemplate the plight of salmon in a time of anthropogenic mass species extinction is to confront a myriad of issues, including the extirpation of the genetic variability of individual species of salmon as the distinct heritages of genotypes that have coevolved over biogenetic time within the conditions offered by particular watersheds are lost. The loss of the coho or the Chinook or the steelhead proves to be not a single thing but a number of intertwined losses as the dance between salmon and their habitat so richly evoked in the words of Abram and others is brought into narrower and narrower confines until—and this threat continually hangs there—nothing at all like the dance that has been salmon is possible any longer.

To be clear, the loss that is being contemplated here is not simply that of anthropogenic species genocide, the human-induced wiping out of a unique living kind, or even that of serial genocide, as species after species succumbs to the current planetary regime framed by human doing. Rather, what calls for our all-too-human attention proves to be a regime of anthropogenic species metacide.⁵⁰ In this event, it is not merely a single or even a set of living kinds that are eradicated; instead, the very significance of being a creaturely living kind in itself is repeatedly undermined until the very significance of the creative entanglement of all living kinds with all others is thoroughly effaced. What is under attack in our time is not simply a specific lineage of salmon or of any other living kind, as they have each emerged in their own way and time through the creativity of evolutionary processes and the labors of succeeding generations. Rather, what is under attack is the very notion that it matters to be any kind of a way of life at all, meaning any kind of a way of emerging in biogenic time in order to weave the tangled fabric of a shared, creaturely, biogenic existence with all the other creatures thriving on Earth.

One irony of the regime of species metacide currently oppressing the living kinds of salmon is that their progressive transformation into an industrial commodity promises a world with a greater biomass of farmed salmon in it than heretofore could have ever been sustained by the waters of this planet.⁵¹ Already, creatures who are understood to be salmon find themselves inhabiting the Southern Hemisphere in Chilean and New Zealand growing pens, locations that the warm equatorial waters of the Earth had served to deny entrance into by anadromous salmonid species, all of which had been previously confined to the frigid upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere. And increasingly, the coastal waters ringing the Northern Pacific and Atlantic are home to vast stocks of genetically modified, farmed salmon, as they are confined to another sort of life than was possible heretofore in their free-roaming state. Indeed, as many as five hundred thousand Salmon have been recorded as being readied for market in one industrial rearing unit alone in Norway; this is, as Martin Lee Mueller points out, “roughly equivalent to all free-roaming Atlantic Salmon who returned to Norway’s coast in [that same year].”⁵²

On one hand, the introduction of salmon into new circumstances that require them to change their very manner of being a salmon is hardly a new thing under the sun. In fact, in our current moment in creation, the anadromous, free-ranging salmon whose various life cycles move them from fresh to salt water and then back again are arguably descended from distant generations that were previously confined in their way of being salmon solely to freshwater habitat.⁵³ Their evolutionary history undeniably involves successive radiations in which their respective kinds successfully adapted to the changing conditions of their habitat in order to thrive anew. Indeed, the fact that there are no less than six species of anadromous salmon populating the West Coast of North America (all belonging to the genus Oncorhynchus), whereas only a single species of yet another genus, Salmo salar, is to be found in the entire Atlantic, is in part attributable to a history within the Pacific region of more severe geological disturbances over the last twenty million years, particularly in the last two million. These included regimes of glaciation, volcanic eruptions, lahars (great mud flows), and megafloods (some of which involved in a single incidence more water than is found in all the rivers on Earth today).⁵⁴ Salmon indeed proves itself to be a shape-shifter, as Abram might put it, dancing down through the expanses of geological time, altering and renewing its forms of life in collaboration with the dynamic elements forming the diverse habitats of the planet.

Yet to understand salmon’s sudden appearance in fish pens around the world as signaling another moment in which creation is emerging anew in its significance and a living kind is teaching humans something novel and unprecedented about what it means to be a creature is to have gotten something horribly wrong. In her admirable study of human-salmon interaction in the industrial feeding pens of Norwegian aquaculture of the last decade, Marianne Elisabeth Lien provides an arresting analysis of how the human attempt to control the lives of salmon in these circumstance is inevitably undermined, altered, and redirected by the very processes by which life sustains itself. And to a degree, her work demonstrates that penned salmon continue to exercise a creative agency as a living kind that inevitably amends the conditions under which its ongoing, so-called domestication is to occur and that invites new alliances and what she terms “assemblages” of living kinds to come into being. For instance, Lien discusses the transformation of two different species of wrasse as they are enlisted by humans to control the sea lice plaguing the fish pens and threatening wild runs of salmon swimming nearby. In thinking through the meaning of this relationship, Lien is taken by the renaming of the wrasse as rensefisk “cleaner fish” by their human collaborators. She argues, “Their new name seals their purpose and signals their new position: from an abundant and insignificant pastime prey for kids with a fishing pole, they have become a scarce commodity and an active agent in sea lice mitigation.”⁵⁵

Mueller is far less forgiving in his approach to these living assemblages, as Lien would have it, that are produced by the emerging regimes of salmon aquaculture. In his discussion of Lien’s work and of the genetically modified salmon confined in their human-constructed pens, Mueller notes that Lien’s account looks too quickly past the categorical imperative governing the activities of humans who have brought salmon into these circumstances in the first place—namely, unremittingly redefining a living kind as the availability of its biomass for human consumption. In industrialized food production, the remarkable agencies and promiscuous sociality of free-ranging salmon are reduced to a single activity: gaining weight as quickly and efficiently as possible. Mueller notes that while pockets of resistance enabling some degree of trans-species contact and creaturely agency might emerge in this process, particularly in the open-air pens characteristic of the final stages of farmed salmon rearing, the unhappy reality of the overall situation in which these salmon find themselves would have been more clear if Lien had been attentive to the salmon fry being reared in the inland water tanks, facilities in which they spend half their lives in the model of aquaculture Lien had been studying. As these make clear, the goal of the business of producing salmon ultimately is characterized by “a wish for absolute control with the fry’s built environment.”⁵⁶

Indeed, the future of industrial salmon production, ever intent on its categorical imperative, envisions facilities, even now being planned and built, where salmon are to spend their entire life cycle before being slaughtered for human consumption in vast indoor tanks in which all aspects of their lives will be subject to an even more fine-tuned regime of control than was heretofore possible. As a result, the firm Atlantic Sapphire is confident of producing annually 222,000 tons of salmon, for which a mere 1.05 pounds of feed would be required for each pound of filet on a consumer’s plate. This outcome would supply nearly half of the current US annual consumption. And all of this, it is proudly noted, would occur on a single “160-acre tract that once grew about 5,000 annual tons of tomatoes.”⁵⁷

Salmon are now being brought into existence whose life cycle will never have touched the oceanic reaches with whom heretofore they were as a living kind in such deep attunement. The one remaining connection will be in their feed, which will mostly be composed of processed wheat and rapeseed, though a third of it would consist of fish meal and fish oil from herring, among other species. Eventually, it is hoped even this contribution will be replaced by “some kind of microalgae.”⁵⁸ In this development, salmon, a fierce carnivore in the wild, will have become in the tank fully vegetarian in its diet.

Who, then, are these salmon? As adults, their lives consist of being “crammed together even closer than feedlot cattle,” Michael Grunwald notes, as they swim in tight, never-ending circles against an artificial current. Still, he is assured by a spokesperson that the salmon’s ravenous appetites make clear “they’re enjoying their South Florida lifestyle.” Grunwald continues: “I saw hundreds of juveniles in one tank the size of an above ground swimming pool linked up directly below a horizontal bar that dispenses feed, as if they were queuing in a cafeteria. I then watched them swarm to the surface in unison as the feed hit the water.”⁵⁹

But the question of whether farmed salmon are thriving in their radically altered circumstances will increasingly become irrelevant, at least in the corporate eyes of Atlantic Sapphire, as future generations of these fish are shaped genetically by their human owners to conform increasingly to what humans have decided should be their allegedly “ideal conditions.” As the chief technology officer of Atlantic Sapphire puts it in regard to the lives of these creatures: “They’re only going to get better.”⁶⁰

This statement, offered so confidently and without any sense of irony, reflects an exasperating incapacity on the part of at least some of humankind to be discerning about the creaturely significance of salmon. As Mueller points out, the insistence of understanding salmon as a mechanism—in this case, as a set of genes to be tinkered with until the physiological processes and behavioral capacities of a living kind lead to the maximum output of biomass—empties out the very question of Who is salmon? In these circumstances, one answers it simply by responding Whatever I need salmon to be!

To this frame of mind, salmon becomes a kind whose very significance is to be found in its being rendered increasingly compliant to one’s control over it. This kind emerges as meaningful solely through how radically it is open to taking on any qualities whatsoever, whatever one desires. The biotic processes by which this kind functions are determined to have nothing to teach one but everything to learn from how one decides to interpret and order them.

In a regime of species metacide, then, the very notion of a living kind becomes arbitrary beyond any limit. The danger that is to be confronted in regard to salmon, as well as all other living kinds in this moment, is not merely that one living kind after another is succumbing to anthropogenic extinction, as crucial and devastating as that knowledge might be. Beyond this, the very significance of being a creaturely kind whatsoever is becoming lost to our all-too-human human doing. The anarchic openness of the creaturely to renewal across the generations and to an emergence from out of its very kind of yet other creaturely kinds fails to command one’s reverence and invite one’s praise but rather merely proffers for oneself unlimited opportunity. In this way, salmon’s standing as a unique living kind, not only differing from the human in its genotype and so in its empirical anatomy and physiology but also in the very manner in which the world—indeed, creation itself—emerges as meaningful through it, becomes lost to human discernment.

Mueller’s diagnosis of this doubled extremity, deeply informed by Abram and an Indigenous understanding of creation, would address our current depredation through a reawakening of wonder at how “each landscape can simmer with its particular creativity, with its own swarm of voices that strive to make themselves heard.”⁶¹ And so we are invited by Mueller through our witnessing the “luminous embodiment” of salmon to enter fully into “the experience that the world is birthing itself,”⁶² a world in which the diversity of living kinds announces a diversity of creaturely values. Modes of storytelling are called for, Mueller argues, that would offer a compelling alternative to “the narrative exceptionalism” of settlement culture. In the latter’s telling of the story of creation, Mueller charges, a linear account of history is laid out in which “the world is to be remade through reason alone.”⁶³ Finally, in lieu of a biblical notion of creation that has been characterized by its obsession with categories of transcendence, Mueller argues for one embracing creation’s “radical immanence” and “palpable mystery.”⁶⁴

What is being argued in this chapter in regard to creaturely discernment, although deeply sympathetic to both Abram and Mueller on this question, also has insisted, in its retellings of the biblical story of creation, on the recuperation of a Hebraic notion of transcendence. That Indigenous peoples might be deeply suspicious of this project is all too understandable. Indeed, the insistence on transcendence lying at the very core of the Jewish tradition has all too often been misunderstood or misappropriated by Christian exceptionalism, which in turn has all too often led to Hebraic ways of characterizing creation becoming weaponized for the working out of the colonial projects of settlement cultures.

Yet, in this time of an unparalleled depravity in regard to the living kinds, humankind, mired in regimes of ecocide and species metacide, needs a renewed and renewing moment of t’shuva; we need desperately to be called back to a sense of our ethical obligations within a kingdom of ends and our creaturely vocation in regard to all the living kinds. But in order for this to happen, we must first be able to imagine what the creaturely as a category entails. In the Hebraic perspective on creation, as it has been developed in this chapter with the help of salmon, an alternative is being offered for this struggle that would supplement the radical immanence so persuasively argued for by Abram and then Mueller. Indeed, this supplement—namely, anarchic differentiation and the practices of heteroprocity that it invites⁶⁵—proves already to be at work in Abram’s own thinking, as Indigenous practices of storytelling find themselves at every turn intermixed with Hebraic modes of midrash and commentary.

Not only the Most High, it turns out, can be the subject of blasphemy. For this reason, the issue of our relations with the more-than-human living kinds in our time exceeds a merely ethical determination. Respect for the law and reverence for the unprecedented, for that which cannot be commanded by any human means yet ineluctably offers renewal, still inviting covenant in spite of our helplessness before it, are being proffered. Yet our forgetfulness of the creaturely and the discernment it requires from us is increasingly rendering the Earth a place of cataclysmic loss. In these dire straits, we are being called on to witness not merely the succumbing of living kind after living kind to regimes of human doing but also an infectious confusion in that doing regarding the very meaning of being a living kind. Ironically, given this confusion, the very attempt to account for what is being lost all too often only intensifies the disorientation that underlies all that is going amiss. What is called for in these uncanny circumstances is a humility that is anarchical and without limit in regard to the acknowledgment of its limits. Only then might modes of engagement with the other living kinds be sought through practices of paranoiesis, an ongoing and unceasing reorientation of the very manner by which the living kinds find their way into our all-too-human discourse. In this work, the reaches of creation might find expression within a human element that has become increasingly isolated from and hostile to its creaturely vocation.

The green shadows hovering over green stones, ghostly blurs slipping among wavering fingers of light, are there and gone. We are in this with salmon, and they with us. Perhaps, being already creatures of the waters, they did not need to find their way onto the passenger manifest in previous instantiations of the storied ark of Noach, and even now the very thought of salmon as passengers on any ark that humans might build for them is a disturbing one. But precisely in eliciting these reservations, the capacity of salmon to become a question that puts the human on trial is given yet another iteration. What must be thought through in all of this is how salmon share with humans both the vocation and the affliction of being creatures, of being born into poverty that goes all the way down. The praise due to salmon, then, is not only for their luminous, embodied powers, as formidable and shape-shifting as these might be. One must also attend to the manner in which salmon’s vulnerability to emerging from out of other living kinds into its own unique rendering of the world confounds and alters our own all-too-human ways of affirming our shared creaturely existences. Without salmon and the other living kinds, humankind is fully lost to creation.

JAMES HATLEY is Emeritus Professor in both Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Salisbury University in Maryland. He is author of Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable, a study of how one is called on to pursue philosophical questioning after the Shoah. He has also coedited one volume on the thought of Levinas and one on that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For the last decade, he has collaborated with the Extinction Studies Working Group, founded by Deborah Bird Rose, to publish essays addressing the plight, among the other living kinds, of buffalo, the Honshū wolf, ticks, and quoll in a time of widespread anthropogenic species extinction.

NOTES

1. David O’Hara, “Ash Wednesday, All Saints’ Day, and the Bodies of Salmon, Given for You,” Presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Nature, Philosophy, and Religion, November 1, 2019, Pittsburgh, PA.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, “To the Other,” in Nine Talmudic Readings, ed. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 21. The midrashic method of commentary employed in this chapter is inspired by and depends on the approach modeled by the writings of Levinas, particularly in the confessional essays stemming from his yearly presentations during the latter half of the twentieth century for Le colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française. “To the Other” is among these. The midrashic writings of Catherine Chalier, who was Levinas’s student, also frame the approach being employed here. See also note 31.

3. Levinas, “To the Other.”

4. Ellen Bernstein, The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2005), 79.

5. Babylonian Talmud, Seder Kodashim, Chullin, 127a. William Davidson edition, trans. Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, https://www.sefaria.org/Chullin.127a.10?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en.

6. David Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon: Water-Borne Reflections from the Northwest Coast,” Tikkun 16, no. 1 (May/June 2001), 21.

7. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon,” 21.

8. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon,” 22.

9. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon.”

10. William Braude, trans., The Midrash on Psalms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 375, 5.148.1. Discussions of the provenance of Midrash Tehillim agree that the commentary in the latter half of this document entailing Psalms 119 to 150, including the passages being discussed here, was written well after the rabbinic period, likely in the sixteenth century, perhaps by Rav Mattithiah Yizhari of Saragossa, who in turn was relying on material adapted from Yalkut Shimoni. See Wilhelm Bacher and Jacob Zallel Lauterbach, “Psalms, Midrash To (Midrash Tehillim),” in Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isidore Singer et al. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), 248.

11. Braude, Midrash, 375, 5.148.2.

12. Braude, Midrash, 377, 5.148.5.

13. One should keep in mind that the Hebrew name for the Book of Psalms is simply Tehlillim, meaning “Praises.” The Book of Praises, then, engages its subject precisely by enacting its call to praise in a series of innovative reinterpretations of what praise itself might reveal. In this way, praise shows itself in Psalm after Psalm to be a mode of expression in which commentary erupts in the very manner that praise is elicited in and yet beyond one’s own speaking by that which is to be praised.

14. This conclusion has been persuasively argued for in regard to Psalm 104 (yet another moment of the ongoing biblical reinterpretations of the meaning of creation) in Deborah Bird Rose’s unpublished talk, “Two Laws: Steps toward Decolonisation in the Shadow of the Anthropocene.” For Global Ecologies—Local Impacts, 6th Biennial Conference of the Association for Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, AU, November 23, 2014. Rose argues there for a midrashic strategy (one involving an ongoing reinterpreting of all previous interpretations) so that one might move fluently and discerningly across the vast reaches of creaturely differentiation that characterize creation. In law that is attuned not only to humans but also to all other creatures, Rose argues, the full and robust sense of what creation demands of us emerges to challenge a purely secular thinking about how we are situated in regard to the earthly.

15. What is being argued for here finds a degree of correlation to Bruno Latour’s suggestion that even if one were to remain fully secular in one’s thinking about the human relationship with other living kinds, one still needs a paradigm such as James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis in order to render that relationship as “messily providential,” which is to say, as one’s inhabiting an evolving yet encompassing providence sculpted by innumerable actants. In this view, the entanglement of all living kinds with one another suffuses the living world with intentionality. See Gerard Kuperus, “Listening to Salmon: Latour’s Gaia, Aboriginal Thinking and the Earth Community,” Environmental Philosophy 16, no. 2 (2019): 382. The claim being made here differs from those made by Latour and Kuperus in the insistence on the bottomless incapacity of any of the living kinds to have been born into itself through its own means. Rather than suffused with intentionality (or perhaps only in addition to this), creation is suffused with affliction, with poverty, with hunger. As a result, what Kuperus and Latour understand as the messily providential finds itself reframed as the anarchically differentiated.

16. The notion of the anarchical, understood as that which is without measure and whose significance lies beyond or is otherwise than the lawful and the rationally grounded, is an important concept in the thought of Levinas. The meaning that the anarchical gains in this discussion diverges from and innovates upon Levinas’s emphasis on the anarchical as solely a feature of the human-to-human relation as it is developed in his Otherwise than Being. In particular, see his discussion of this term in the section titled “Principle and Anarchy” in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 99–102.

17. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginnings of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 21.

18. Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, trans. Rabbi Gerald Friedlander (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Turner & Co., 1916), https://archive.org/details/pirkderabbieli00frieuoft/page/n9/mode/2up.

19. Job 39:26.

20. See discussion of this point in Henry Bugbee, “A Way of Reading the Book of Job,” in Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings, ed. David Rodick (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

21. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon,” 25.

22. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon,” 22.

23. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon.”

24. Abram, “Reciprocity and the Salmon.”

25. Dale Stokes, The Fish in the Forest: Salmon and the Web of Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 4–7.

26. See discussion of this term in James Hatley, “Telling Stories in the Company of Buffalo,” Environmental Philosophy 13, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 118.

27. Psalms 14:4. See also 27:2.

28. Augustine, On the Trinity, book X, chapter vii, paragraph 10, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. III, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1980), 139.

29. See discussion of this point in the opening chapter of Mark V. Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19–23.

30. Zornberg, The Beginnings of Desire, 60–61.

31. See Rashi’s commentary on Bereshit 6:11–12, in which the corruption of the Earth witnessed by the Most High is interpreted as involving sexual immorality on the part of humans, as well as idolatry. Rashi adds that “even domestic animals, beasts and birds had relations with those which were not of their own species.” Rabbi Yisrael Isser Zvi Herczeg et al., ed., trans., Rashi: Sepher Berishit (The Torah with Rashi’s Commentary Translated, Annotated, and Elucidated), ArtScroll Series (Brooklyn: Mesorah, 1995), 67. See also Zornberg’s discussion of this issue in The Beginnings of Desire, 51–53.

32. The notion of cataclysm being developed here owes much to Catherine Chalier’s discussion of the Hebraic category of tohu v’bohu, “the formlessness and emptiness” over which the Most High hovers in the very first biblical account of creation in Genesis 1: “Tohu v’bohu is not in effect nothing, it is not simply a lack, or pure nonbeing, but rather a shadowy power of dislocation and confusion—that is to say, decreation—and it gives birth to nothing. . . . If speech is a light for us, this is precisely so because it grants being to differentiated creatures, and that it makes them emerge from out of shapeless magma” (translation mine). See Chalier, La nuit, le jour: au diapason de la creation (Paris: Editions de Sueil, 2009), 45.

33. Robin S. Waples, George R. Pess, and Tim Beechie, “Evolutionary History of Pacific Salmon in Dynamic Environments,” Evolutionary Applictions 1, no. 2 (May 2008): 190. See also F. W. Allendorf and G. H. Thorgaard, “Tetraploidy and Evolution of Salmonid Fishes,” in Evolutionary Genetics of Fishes, ed. B. J. Turner, 1–53 (New York: Plenum, 1984).

34. See Rolston Holmes III, “Values Gone Wild,” Inquiry 26 (1983): 181–207. Also see my discussion of this point in Hatley, “Blood Intimacies and Biodicy: Keeping Faith with Ticks,” in Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in a Time of Extinction, eds. Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, Australian Humanities Review 50 (2011): 74.

35. Vinciante Despret, “It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared,” trans. Matt Chrulew, in Extinctions Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, eds. Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matt Chrulew, 220–221 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

36. See discussion of this term in Hatley, “Telling Stories in the Company of Buffalo,” 110.

37. The notion of intelligibility as it is being developed here owes much to Abram’s turn to Spinoza in order to resist reductive, obsessively anthropocentric views of making sense of the world. Abram asks: “Once we acknowledge that our awareness is inseparable—even, in some sense, indistinguishable—from our material physiology, can we really continue to maintain that mind remains alien to the rest of material nature?” Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 109. In becoming open to the entanglement in the material and in the physiological of our very awareness of anything whatsoever, we might in turn become mindful of other living kinds in a manner that is increasingly apt in regard to how creaturely intelligibility emerges anew within the ambit of those other living kinds.

38. Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, ed. Paul Kingsnorth (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2018), 72.

39. Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating.”

40. I am indebted here to Timothy Stock’s reading of Levinas, in which “the alterity of hunger” is understood to be “proximal or ‘at the core’ of the subject.” While Levinas characterizes hunger as initiating a dispossession of the human ego, leaving it bereft and fully attendant on the affliction of other humans, this insight is expanded on to argue for the trauma of this dispossession as permeating all creaturely relations. See Stock, “A Broken Fast in Advance: ‘The Bread from My Mouth’ as Ethical Transcendence and Ontological Drama,” Levinas Studies 12 (2016): 165–184.

41. See his discussion of this idea in Anthony Weston, Back to Earth: Tomorrow’s Environmentalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 145–168.

42. Greg Ruggerone and James Irvine, “Numbers and Biomass of Natural- and Hatchery-Origin Pink Salmon, Chum Salmon, and Sockeye Salmon in the North Pacific Ocean, 1925–2015,” Marine and Costal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science 10 (2018): 152–168.

43. Ruggerone and Irvine, “Numbers and Biomass.”

44. Ruggerone and Irvine, “Numbers and Biomass.”

45. These chum circulate in warmer Pacific waters and so have been negatively affected more quickly by global climate change. Unlike the chum of Indian River, Japanese chum are threatened, the annual catch there having plummeted by 70 percent in fifteen years. “Compelled to travel faster and farther to reach cooler northern waters, the young salmon use up stores of energy when they can least afford it.” See Simon Denyer and Chris Mooney, “The Climate Chain Reaction that Threatens the Heart of the Pacific,” Washington Post, November 12, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-environment/climate-change-japan-pacific-sea-Salmon-ice-loss/.

46. Denyer and Mooney, “The Climate Chain Reaction.”

47. “Alaska’s Salmon Are Getting Smaller, Affecting People and Ecosystems,” University of California–Santa Cruz, Phys.org, August 19, 2020, https://phys.org/news/2020-08-alaska-Salmon-smaller-affecting-people.html.

48. Craig Medred, “Losing Salmon,” CraigMedred.news, January 7, 2021, https://craigmedred.news/2021/01/07/losing-Salmon/.

49. Eli Francovich, “Salmon Spawning in Upper Columbia River for First Time in More Than Eighty Years,” The Wenatchee World: The Spokesman Review, December 17, 2020, https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/salmon-spawning-in-upper-columbia-river-for-first-time-in-more-than-80-years/article_fbba53a4-4155-11eb-808d-6bc4189e0971.html.

50. This term (metacide) is not one found in traditional midrashic sources but is rather an innovation required by the way in which the question of anthropogenic species extinction calls forth new senses of what is at issue in the context of these sources. This fits with the midrashic methodology of thinkers such as Levinas and Catherine Chalier.

51. See, for instance, Martin Berger, “Is Farmed Salmon Really Salmon?,” Nautilus 30 (November 26, 2015), https://nautil.us/is-farmed-salmon-really-salmon-235688/

52. Martin Lee Mueller, Being Salmon Being Human: Encountering the Wild in Us and Us in the Wild (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2017), 33.

53. This possibility has been openly discussed for several decades with no definitive answer in sight. What is not to be disputed is the capacity of some anadromous species of salmon to adapt to and thrive in solely freshwater habitats. See R. M. McDowall, “The Origin of Salmonid Fishes: Marine, Freshwater . . . or Neither?,” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 11 (2002): 171–179.

54. Waples et al., “Evolutionary History.”

55. Marianne Elisabeth Lien, “Unruly Appetites: Salmon Domestication ‘All the Way Down,’” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M114.

56. Mueller, Being Salmon, 41.

57. Michael Grunwald, “Will Your Next Salmon Come from a Massive Land Tank in Florida?,” Politico, July 16, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2020/07/14/florida-bluehouse-fish-farm-352495.

58. Grunwald, “Will Your Next Salmon?”

59. Grunwald, “Will Your Next Salmon?”

60. Grunwald, “Will Your Next Salmon?”

61. Mueller, Being Salmon, 172.

62. Mueller, Being Salmon, 174.

63. Mueller, Being Salmon, 184.

64. Mueller, Being Salmon, 175.

65. Anarchic differentiation refers to how creaturely values and new and unique manners of making sense of creation emerge in particular living kinds as they evolve into their current lifeways from out of the lifeways of their previous generations.