The death last month of the great salmon conservationist and angler Orri Vigfusson (obituary, July 29) produced an outpouring of sorrow at his loss and of thanks for his life. When his funeral was held in Reykjavik, flags in the city flew at half-mast. The congregation who packed the city’s cathedral included not only friends and dignitaries, among them Iceland’s prime minister, but representatives of anglers and conservationists from around the north Atlantic.
No human being has been more closely identified with the survival of a threatened wild creature than the Icelander with Salmo salar. Over 28 years of campaigning he received many awards for his work. In 2007, he won the Goldman Prize, the world’s biggest award for grass-roots environmentalism. The governments of France, Denmark and Iceland all officially honoured him.
Orri, who I knew and talked with many times, had been one of the first to recognise that the Atlantic salmon was in trouble. He had seen the economic devastation that overfishing of herring stocks had created in Iceland in the 1960s and when, in the 1980s, salmon stocks began to collapse too, he identified the same basic cause.
Two coinciding factors had brought the crisis about. The first was the discovery, in the 1950s, that juvenile salmon spawned in rivers around the north Atlantic congregated, when they went to sea, in the cold waters off Greenland and the Faroes. The second was the development of cheap nylon nets that, miles long, were laid like invisible shrouds across the ocean highways that grown salmon used to return home.
Catches inevitably rocketed — and then, as inevitably, crashed. By the late 1980s it was estimated that more than 75 per cent of the entire Atlantic stock of the fish had already been lost.
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With the herring experience behind him, Orri decided that the most urgent need was to end the netting. He brought to the task the complete campaigning package: vision, business and negotiating skills, contacts, determination and energy, all of it sustained by a sense of moral purpose through long battles with cancer, right to the end.
His idea was simple: to make it more worthwhile for netsmen not to fish than to put to sea. In 1989 he founded the North Atlantic Salmon Fund (NASF), a body financed by anglers that was to be the vehicle for all his work. In 1991 he struck his first deal: in exchange for generous compensation, Faroese fishermen agreed to stay in port and vast numbers of salmon that they would otherwise have caught were left free, year on year, to head home and reproduce.
In 1993 he reached an agreement with the Greenlanders and in 1996 he did the same with the Icelanders. Deal upon deal followed, some permanent, some shorter-term. At the time of Orri’s death it was estimated that measures he had negotiated covered about 85 per cent of the Atlantic salmon’s range. About 10 million fish are thought to have swum free.
Orri was omnipresent and tireless, as a networker, lobbyist, fundraiser and arm-twister. He would travel anywhere and everywhere to meet anglers and commercial fishermen, government officials and ministers, journalists and celebrities and anyone else he thought could help.
He could be soft-tongued and exhilaratingly direct. In 2014, he accused Scotland’s then first minister, Alex Salmond, of hypocrisy for expressing support for anglers on the one hand while on the other helping Scottish netsmen to scoop up fish that anglers, through NASF, had already paid to set free. As recently as April he wrote a strong letter to Theresa May calling for an end to the plunder in England of the same remnant stocks.
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The fundraising effectiveness of NASF supporters has been astonishing. I first saw it close-up at a dinner in London in 2003. Almost 500 anglers, among them many famous faces, paid £200 a head to be there. An auction of just 11 lots raised a further six-figure sum. A linked internet auction added more. Memorably, one of the lots was an evening with Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank. How useful would some money men have found that?
Through it all, Orri’s goal was to restore the Atlantic salmon everywhere to abundance — and by abundance he meant true historic abundance, not the niggardly, pinch-penny numbers that scientists now use to judge whether a diminished river stock can hold up for one more year. Orri wanted to see salmon spilling in from the sea again like some silvered, ecological jackpot — forging through the pools, furrowing through the shallows, leaping the falls while the crowds gathered and the cameras clicked.
He did not get there. As he worked to boost salmon stocks at one end of the equation, other factors were working against him at the other. Some netsmen, though many fewer, are still at work. Agricultural pollution is everywhere. In-river spawning habitat is being eroded. Obstacles in rivers check the fish’s upstream and downstream migrations. Salmon farms in the estuaries through which the wild salmon must swim produce
death-dealing clouds of sea lice that eat young fish alive.
In the high Atlantic the waters are warming and most young salmon that head out into them now no longer come back. But still, thanks to his work, there are today many rivers that have salmon in them that would otherwise have none, some rivers that have healthy runs of fish that would otherwise have only a few. It has been conservation on a heroic scale.
Whenever Orri and I met he would talk of his latest project, of this or that initiative and — it became a bit of a thing between us — I would tell him that, some day, someone would put up a statue to him. It was a remark that he always laughed at as though at a good joke. But in truth, I partly meant it.
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● Brian Clarke’s column appears on the first Monday of each month