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Red Summer

Bill Carter

Group offers Oregon a taste of salmon conservation
Encouraging folks to eat Bristol Bay salmon can help save it from a mine project, advocates say
Wednesday, June 25, 2008

TED SICKINGER
The Oregonian Staff

It's not often you get invited to a tasting event for a species the organizers are looking to save.

But that's what Trout Unlimited, a sportfishing advocacy group, and New Seasons Market cooked up this weekend at the grocery chain's nine metro-area stores on behalf of Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon.

The Bristol Bay salmon run, which encompasses five rivers in southwest Alaska, is far from endangered.

Indeed, as Oregon fishermen suffer through their second fisheries closure in three years, the Bristol Bay fishery is still one of the healthiest in the Pacific. Last year, fishermen harvested some 30 million fish from the region, accounting for nearly a third of Alaska's harvest earnings.

The event's organizers want to both market Bristol Bay wild salmon and head off a proposal by a Canadian company to locate one of the largest open pit gold and copper mines in North America at the headwaters of two river drainages feeding the bay.

The mine, they say, would divert water from three rivers, involve the construction of five dams or embankments and pose an unacceptable risk of contamination to spawning grounds.

To derail the project, organizers hope to establish a Bristol Bay brand akin to the frenzied loyalty that consumers seem to have for Alaska's Copper River salmon.

"This is consumer-driven activism," said Ben Blakey, a 26-year-old Bristol Bay fisherman and graduate of Lewis & Clark College. Blakey flew down for the weekend to help staff the event and was talking to customers at New Seasons on Northeast 33rd Avenue.

"We want people to buy it, eat it, enjoy it, and then want to maintain it," Blakey said. "Mostly the goal is to get the name Bristol Bay and the Pebble Mine out there in front of consumers."

Oregonians may prove a sympathetic audience after watching their fisheries devastated by decades of poor river management. The collapse of the fall chinook run on the Sacramento River led to the largest fisheries closure in West Coast history this spring. The Sacramento River run, long considered the most reliable on the West Coast, supplied 60 percent to 80 percent of the salmon caught off the Oregon Coast.

Oregon is now seeking $45 million in federal disaster aid for the closure, while California and Washington are seeking $208 million and $36 million, respectively. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has proposed taking $70 million from the $170 million that was approved in the farm bill as disaster relief for the Pacific Coast salmon fishing industry.

New Seasons held a similar awareness event last summer, gathering 600 signatures in opposition to the Pebble Mine. This year, the company expanded the program to all its Portland-area stores, offering small paper plates of previously frozen Bristol Bay sockeye and the chance to sign up for more information on the Pebble Mine campaign. The previously frozen salmon, from last year's harvest, is selling for $9.99 a pound. Fresh fish will be available later this summer, likely at higher prices, New Seasons said.

Alan Moore, a resident of Northeast Portland who stopped to taste the fish and chat with Blakey while making his weekend grocery run, said he was in favor of the "Vote with your fork" campaign. Moore grew up on the Feather River, a tributary of the Sacramento River.

"This is a good way to improve awareness, as long as the fishery is sustainable," Moore said. "Our salmon are a disaster because we destroyed the rivers."

Ted Sickinger: 503-221-8505, tedsickinger@news.oregonian.com

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WINNER OF >>INTERNATIONAL MONITOR AWARD>>GOLDEN HUGO AWARD>>MAVRICK DIRECTOR AWARD

Miss Sarajevo is a surreal and startling portrait of Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia, during the height of the city’s siege. Winner of the International Monitor Award, Golden Hugo, and theMaverick Director Award (NewportBeach Film Festival). Instead of following the scenes of carnage that the main media so often squeezes into thirty second dramatic sound bites, Carter'€™s camera follows the alternative scene of artists, young people and the people determined to live as normal a life as they could under the most difficult and dangerous conditions.

U2's singer Bono serves as executive producer and U2, along with Luciano Pavorotti, sing the theme song, Miss Sarajevo. Carter and Bono met in Italy at a U2 concert during the war when Carter managed to interview Bono for Sarajevo television. They went on to do the well-documented satellite connections on the European leg of the Zooropa tour.

DVD Features:

* Director's commentary
* Never before seen interview with Bono
* First satellite link-up between Sarajevo and U2's Zooropa tour

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"Dante's Inferno for the MTV generation. What a guide Bill Carter turns out to be to the hell of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. Oddly and inspiringly, he finds some heaven there."

- Bono

Some trips are chosen, others choose you. When tragedy strikes Bill Carter's life he finds himself drawn to a war zone. Sharing his extraordinary journey into a modern heart of darkness, the besieged city of Sarajevo, we meet a man rebuilding the ruins of his former self in the most unlikely of places.

Carter joins a maverick aid organization, 'The Serious Road Trip,' and dodges snipers and shells to deliver food and supplies to those the UN and the NGO's can't reach. He makes friends with the artistic community of Sarajevo and fights alongside them for survival in a place where food and water are scarce, where you meet death every day, but crucially where life, love and laughter ring out all the same. The sorrow, determination and humor of a select group of people living in the worst of times will lend him the key to his own recovery.


In his quest to share the inspirational message of this community Carter takes his journey one surreal step further and enlists the help of major rock band U2, who will enable him to broadcast the plight of the Sarajevans to the rest of the world.

Fools Rush In takes us on an emotional roller coaster ride from Alaska to Dublin to Los Angeles to Sarajevo and back again while Carter seeks answers to questions he didn't even know he had. Compelling, humorous, hopeful and at times almost beyond belief, it is nonetheless all true.

Book Reviews

"Fools Rush In is a totally admirable book, the memoir of a young man written out of necessity, the only true reason to write a book. Some of the pages will burn your fingers but the anguish is leavened by the lucidity of the prose. It is a memoir of grand dimension and its consciousness will become part of your life."

- Jim Harrison, author of Dalva and Legends of the Fall

"Fools Rush In is a wrenching, intensely felt book. After reading it, you may find yourself giving much greater consideration to what in life is important and what is merely trivial."

- Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven

"No one can keep the wars straight anymore as they hopscotch from continent to continent. The slaughter in Bosnia has slipped beneath the rising tide washing over our minds. But Bill Carter takes us to his killing ground in Sarajevo and for a while we are there, just as we are in the current killing ground and the next one, also. This fine book is the best guide you are going to find to the rest of your life. And, yes love is always the answer."

- Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River

'Bill Carter is more than a digital age Huck Finn. He is not merely writing here, he is singing, as if his life depended upon it. And you get the very real sense that it does. This drama is an honest, wry, immensely humane look at coming of age at the edge of a bomb crater. Carter tells this story with a sense of grandeur.'

-Doug Stanton, author of IN HARM'S WAY

'This book is like Good Morning Vietnam crossed with a Conrad novel.'

- The London Times

"Carter's book reads like a novel, evoking a lost city inhabited by angels, bandits, punks and adrenaline fiends. In the end, Carter reaches far beyond personal experience to find the story of a wounded city, and a war that pitted neighbor against neighbor in a nightmare of mindless hated."

- GINANNE BROWNELL, NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

"It's been held that there are only seven original stories, most of them cogged from the Greek: basic templates that have provided endless variations from Homer to Hemingway. To this lineage we can add Bill Carter's book "Fools Rush In."

-Hotpress

"A brutally frank education about the nature of survival."

- Jane Magazine

"Fiercely intelligent . . . It is a deeply felt emotional reaction to the horror and the humanity that Bill Carter would witness, into ordinary life surviving beneath the gun, told with the passion of one who came to identify himself with the tragedy of Bosnia, not as an observer."

- Guardian

"In recounting an extraordinary human story, it simmers with a quiet rage and a remarkable self-awareness."

- Irish Times

"Carter's book deserves a wider audience: his shell-shocked tales of life in the besieged city paint a powerful picture of ordinary people trying to survive in hell."

-Ink

"Carter tells a powerful story . . . The author and his camera will make you examine yourself and realise that, however you were enjoying yourself when this conflict was taking place, you were undoubtedly, to some extent, actually asleep."

- Big Issue

"This is a book with miraculous twists, where the absolute desperation touches the cosmic loneliness of people from Sarajevo during the war. Bill Carter was one of them, he was proud of it but that's not everything: He knows how to tell it in the very best way."

-Dani Magazine

'Bill Carter's graphic memoir opens a whole new window on modern conflict ... His matter-of-fact frontline reportage throws into relief the strength of the human spirit under duress.'

-What's On In London

'Bill Carter is one of those guys who seeks answers to questions most of us are afraid to ask. His heart and eye have always seemed set on describing and revealing the world just as he sees it, and his heart and eye are so clear that it almost breaks your heart.'

- BONO

"In this gripping chronicle of his time in war ravaged Sarajevo, Bill Carter bears witness to both the evil we can do each other and the remarkable resiliency of the human spirit."

- Emmylou Harris

"The ilk of Cronkite is gone from these tubes for good. We are left with someone else's daily idea of what we should see and hear, and it's never good. Never enough information and never enough time to tell the story. Just bite after bite. In the literal mean time, this man Carter managed to yank the window wide open enough to get a view of what we do to ourselves when we don't know why. And even more pertinent, why we can't stop. The book is a must."

- Howe Gelb

"Bill Carter's book Fools Rush In gives those of us who have suffered great loss, hope and inspiration. A ferocious read."

- Calexico

"This book is such a sock to the stomach. We never planned on meeting the people of the world who write important books, or make movies that effectively change the course of the world, but that's exactly what we did when we met Bill Carter. "Fools Rush In" reminded us that even though some folks can dig themselves deeper than they probably should, they also only do what's mostly necessary and true when they're dug down deepest. If only such dreadful circumstances weren't sometimes required for these traits to shine through."

- Grandaddy

Carter's first book, Fools Rush In, first published by Doubleday in the UK and Wenner Books in the US, takes the reader on an emotional journey from Alaska to Sarajevo to the Southwest and back again. This memoir, which Jim Harrison called, "a memoir of grand dimension and its consciousness will become part of your life," is a story of love, loss and the difference a single person can make, even when the odds seem insurmountable.
Participant Media - makers of such movies as "Good night and Good Luck," and "Syriana" and "Kite Runner" acquired the rights to the book. Carter penned the screenplay. Please check back for updates on production news.

In the last 15 years he has traveled to more than 45 countries. He is the director of Miss Sarajevo, the award-winning documentary, produced by Bono, who also wrote the theme song for the film. He has written for Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, Gear and Spin magazine on topics such as drug trafficking in Mexico, where he investigated the brutal deaths of Tarahumara Indians by narco-traffickers, to the streets of Algiers, once listed as the most dangerous city in the world. He also wrote a story of his 300-mile journey in 30 days across the Utah desert with no more than a cup, a knife, a compass and an extra pair of socks. He also directed a short documentary on the American icon singer Emmylou Harris during the recording of Red Dirt Girl, as well as a documentary on the Tucson-based band Calexico. He also has made a behind the scenes short featuring the legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Recently 12 prints of his black and white photography were purchased by the Center of Creative Photography in Tucson, the largest collection of American photographers in the world.

He has also worked as an assistant director, a bartender, adobe mason, firefighter and commercial fisherman. It is his work as a commercial fisherman in Alaska that is the inspiration for his new book, Red Summer.

He lives in Southern Arizona.