First published in the aftermath of the English Civil War and its catastrophic effects upon the society and the land, The Compleat Angler has for nearly four hundred years captured and held the attention of a far wider readership than just fishermen. Why and how this unexpected situation has come to be is the subject of the aforementioned Prof. Marjorie Swann’s new book “Environment, Society, & The Compleat Angler.”
The moment I drew the copy of Marilyn Sigman’s new “Entangled; People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay” from it’s University of Chicago Press envelope, I had a bit of a flashback. As a young man, my father and I made the annual summer journey with so many of the other north Oregon coast commercial fisherman to work in the salmon fishery in Bristol Bay – a mere hundred miles and change to the west of Kachemak.
All the time I spent reading and subsequently writing the review of David Berger’s “Razor Clams” got me reminiscing about my time growing up in a commercial fishing family on the Oregon coast. The time I spent out on the water, learning the craft from my father, who learned it from his father. The feeling of a Chinook or Silver Salmon in my hands. The knowledge that what we were doing was going to enable people to have wild-caught fish to eat.
Most every hunter or angler I ever met had every bit as deep an interest in one area of natural history of another as any other naturalist of my acquaintance. Indeed, were it not for such famous hunters and anglers of years past, we would not have some of the important collections in natural history museums that we do today.