from the westcoaster
By Alexandra Morton
Opinion
Like the drawing that illustrates it, Cameron MacDonald’s well written article in the Globe and Mail (Feb. 23, 2008) is a caricature. His essay on the benevolence of industrial aquaculture uses a familiar outline, but then fills it in with very selected facts – and omissions. The essential fact that Cameron has chosen to overlook: industrial fish farms on wild salmon migration routes are rapidly driving salmon to extinction, has been repeated by scientists around the world. The most distressing thing about this omission: this is a problem we can fix.
Farming a high-end carnivore like salmon is just another form of intensive fishing. Why anyone would go fishing; process, bag, transport and throw their catch back into the sea to produce less fish (burning fuel every step of the way) is a mystery to me. The issue is not aquaculture. The issue is farming wolves instead of chickens. If BC fish farmers really want to contribute to the global food supply and protect wild fish, they should be raising livestock that produces protein from plants, like the rest of the farming industry.
Here on the West Coast of Canada we have an extraordinary diversity of wild salmon species. Cameron’s disregard for escape of Atlantic salmon into this delicate balance is disturbing. Why is there only one salmon in the Atlantic? Didn’t play well with the others? What will it take for humans to read the fine print on our life-support systems. Invading species are the greatest threat to life on earth.
Atlantic cod did not go extinct because they were fished. They went extinct because the Federal Agency responsible silenced its own scientists when they pointed out how to manage the stock. Fisheries and Oceans Canada should have been put on trial and disbanded for destroying one of earth’s biggest food supplies, but instead they are back at the helm, in charge of our wild salmon, one of the very last clean proteins on earth. And oil wells are on the Grand Banks.
Cameron wants us to believe that only a few specific stocks of pink salmon are at risk from farm lice, but that is not the case. Out of concern for our wild salmon, people up and down this coast are helping me study sea lice. DFO wonders why there were no sockeye last year and had to close the entire south coast fishery. As it happens I looked at that stock when they went to sea in 2005 and sea lice were eating them alive as they passed through the gauntlet of fish farms off Campbell River. Farm lice from the Beaver Cover farm fish processing plant infested Nimpkish chums for years as they went to sea and this year they vanished. If the missing Squamish chums migrate to sea via the Discovery Islands they too were covered with farm lice, as were the east Vancouver Island pink salmon. Steelhead, coho and chinook smolts also had lice in that area. The Georgia Strait herring now have farm lice before they have scales. And what about those Megin River Chinook? No lice in Clayoquot? Really? Those who care about that river might want to look a little more closely.
Cameron’s most misguided statement ranks wild salmon as consuming more fish than farm salmon. But as a teacher surely he is familiar with the food chain? From the moment wild salmon eggs leave their mother’s body they feed the world around them. Nitrogen from the ocean has been tracked deep inland in a wave of luxuriant green life. Our trees are grown on salmon. Vancouver should be called CITY OF THE SALMON as it, even now, has one of the biggest wild salmon runs on earth still passing right through town. No other city in the world can boast this!
Please, British Columbians, Canadians don’t be blind to the gift of wild salmon, because we won’t be given this birthright twice. What if the scientists are right, those whose peer-reviewed study shows that everywhere there are fish farms, everywhere in the world, wild fish stocks decline by as much as 50 per cent a generation? What if the people of this coast who have taken a stand are right? Jobs are important but in my town, Echo Bay, surrounded by more farms than anywhere on this coast… not one person has a farm job. Why? No one wants to foul their own home. Any place on earth that still makes clean air, water and food must be allowed to continue functioning if we humans are to survive.
This issue has been confusing for urban Canadians, and an easy one to ignore. The fish are invisible to city folk and their life cycles quite mysterious. If you’re walking the Vancouver streets in September, do you think of the magnificent wild salmon swimming home almost beneath your feet? More likely, you only think of them when you’re at Whole Foods, picking up a delicious filet of sockeye. In April are you aware that 3cm salmon fry are bravely making their way downriver out to sea – small, scaleless and extremely vulnerable? And the length of the coast, away from urban eyes, millions will die in the coming weeks from farm lice. No other B.C. marine user group is given the luxury of externalizing their costs at such a massive cost to all Canadians - now and future generations.
The science is absolutely in on this issue. Two studies have been published in the last few months that are unassailable. One, previously cited, shows the devastating effects of industrial aquaculture worldwide, another that shows the extinction trend of a major B.C. stock in just four years. The “debate” is a skillful campaign to stall progress.
The truly frustrating thing is that, we can reverse this. Sea lice are not a climate-change sized issue, this is local and in our hands. All we have to do is get the fish farms off the wild salmon migration routes before the little guys wake up this spring. And that is what is maddening about Cameron’s impression piece – it muddies the waters just when we need clarity.
B.C.’s Premier Gordon Campbell has a serious louse problem that he will have to attend to. Or what will we all tell our children?
eman
