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Tackling community issues. Celebrating local voices.
Jennifer Fairbrother grew up listening to the sounds of breaching fish tails slapping the surface of wild waters.
Migrating runs of chinook salmon swam from the Pacific Ocean through the Willamette River near her rural childhood home.
But the river symphony has gone silent, a decline connected to a disrupted journey back to the river’s mountainous watershed, where the salmon life cycle begins and ends, she says. These are the species’ homewaters, where they are born before leaving their freshwater roots for a life in the salty ocean. Once mature, they return to create the next generation…