Thank you for that.
Wild salmon leave the river small. They go out into the open ocean and they basically collect the energy of the sun hitting the open ocean, because they feed on animals that feed on the zooplankton, stimulated by the sun. Then they carry those nutrients up into the watersheds throughout British Columbia and deep into the Fraser watershed, and those nutrients pour down over the hillsides.
You can actually see the growth rings in trees get bigger when there's a wild salmon run, and because the nitrogen they carry is different from terrestrial nitrogen, there's no question that it is coming from salmon. Salmon are feeding the trees that make the oxygen we breathe, but also, when you talk to climate scientists about our best technology to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, currently it remains the tree. By restoring wild salmon back to where they were in this ecosystem, Canada is playing its role in reducing the carbon that is threatening our entire society. They are a power cord to this coast. They're absolutely essential.