The Small Politics Of Salmon
The regional recovery meeting is held in a conference room at a hotel in Tukwila, because Tukwila is approximately equidistant between the counties involved and because the hotel has a rate the state can justify. The room has twelve tables arranged in a hollow square, three water pitchers, a projector that works on the fourth attempt, and a box of pastries that will be gone by the second break. I have been coming to some version of this meeting for eight years. The people in the room have changed, slowly, with the ordinary turnover of careers. The agenda has not changed much at all.
The meeting has a formal purpose, which is coordination among co-managers, funding agencies, and technical staff across the Puget Sound basin recovery effort. The meeting also has an informal purpose, which is the one that actually runs it. The informal purpose is to keep a network of working relationships in tolerable repair across a political landscape that is, at the best of times, fractious. Grant cycles are the nervous system of this work. An application window opens, agencies rank projects, priorities are set, and the results determine whose culvert gets replaced next summer and whose does not. The meetings are where the priorities get set in the social sense — before they are formalised, before they appear in a ranking spreadsheet, before anyone at an agency desk writes them down.
I sit,