Lamprey are among the oldest living vertebrates on Earth. Long before the appearance of salmon or sturgeon — or even dinosaurs — lamprey were wiggling through the shallow seas and up the rushing rivers of Pangaea, surviving on the strength of their muscular bodies and formidable, suction-cup mouths. By the time humans began wandering the planet, lamprey had survived no fewer than five mass extinctions. As B. Toastie recounts in this issue, the first peoples of the Columbia River Basin made an agreement with the Pacific lamprey: The people would care for the lamprey, and the lamprey would care for the people. The past century of dam development, river pollution and climate change — perpetrated by those who made no such agreement — has challenged both parties as never before. And yet, as Toastie writes, the agreement reached thousands of years ago still endures today.
Throughout the Columbia Basin, Indigenous people and lamprey are engaged in what might be called “making refuge,” a sustained effort to ensure and enhance one another’s survival. While the people continue to care for the lamprey and its habitat, and work to restore the species to its original range, the lamprey continues to provide both abundant protein and occasions for celebration. And this is not the only way of making refuge: As photographer June T Sanders and essayist Abigail Hansel document in this issue, a unique community on the border of Washington and Idaho is blooming amid and despite intensifying extremism. In several Western states, as Anna V. Smith reports, grassroots activists and elected state officials are working to make refuge for abortion care, and in Arizona, as Caroline Tracey writes, mobile-home tenants are incorporating science in their campaign to make their homes a refuge from the heat.
We often speak of refuges as isolated, static places, dependent on walls or boundaries. But refuge doesn’t require isolation — in fact, it often requires the opposite. And protecting ourselves and our fellow species has always been an active endeavor, one in which protectors and protected must detect new dangers and adapt to changing conditions. This work can be hard — as hard as a lamprey’s inch-by-inch struggle up the fast-drying cliffs of Willamette Falls — but as I hope you’ll see in this issue, it is rewarding, too.
After another summer marked by extraordinary heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires, the work of making and expanding refuge in the West feels especially urgent. No matter who we are or where we live in the region, we’re alert to new and greater dangers, and adapting to less and less predictability. May the community of readers, writers and artists that is High Country News provide some refuge for all of you, and may each of you press on in making refuge for the lives and places you love.
We welcome reader letters. Michelle Nijhuis is an acting co-editor at High Country News. Email her at michelle@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Refuge is a practice.
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