Shared Memory: In the Swim

Climate change and fisheries

Lisa Moore
PhotoZone
Jun 09, 2022

THROUGHOUT ITS 60-YEAR HISTORY, National Wildlife® magazine has returned again and again to issues that affect the health of our nation’s waters, including a June–July 2002 article (above) looking at the ways climate change might impact North America’s fish. Drawing on a “consensus of concern” that had emerged from a special symposium of the American Fisheries Society, the story’s conclusions were based largely on computer modeling, forecasts and other possible scenarios filled with significant unknowns. Twenty years later, they seem disturbingly prescient, however, as we recall heartbreaking videos of sockeye salmon in the Pacific Northwest dying of heat stress last July—and wonder how high temperatures will climb this summer.