Are Salmon Returning to British Columbia Now that Fish Farms Are Gone?
A HOT GLOBE Investigation for World Ocean Day
Tomorrow is World Ocean Day and we are launching an unusual HOT GLOBE investigation—a hopeful one.
Here’s the tagline:
Are native salmon in British Columbia returning now that billion-dollar open-ocean pens have been ripped out, to great controversy? Is this bringing back grizzlies and orcas, and will it revitalize indigenous “First Nations” peoples as well, their economies and culture, which have depended on harvesting salmon for millennia? Not least will it finally provide tasty, disease- and anti-biotics-free wild salmon for sustainable diners like you and me worldwide? And at scale (so to speak.) A win-win-win, “Nature Beats Industry” result, if true.
Which is what we plan to find out.
If protecting wild salmon (and perhaps eating same!) are important to you and you would like to help fund this important investigation, please email the team directly at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com or simply
to HOT GLOBE here at any level. These paid subs will be applied to the investigation. Reports of the journey will be issued weekly.
Here’s the plan, and some more formal language:
The appetite for salmon and seafood grows unabated. However, open-net salmon aquaculture has proven in many cases terribly damaging to wild populations of both salmon and other local marine species with the net pens acting as a vector for viruses and sea lice.
The controversy came to a head in British Columbia recently, when some 15 open-pen operations, employing over 4000 people and producing seafood worth hundreds of millions a year were shut down because it was shown that the open-pen system killed very large numbers of migrating young salmon. This action was backed by most First Nation stakeholders and environmentalists. Much of this is known.
What is not known now, however, is whether these actions by the Canadian federal
government are actually improving salmon stocks. As the Atlantic salmon industry is now forcibly reduced, is this proving worth it? Are native wild salmon—not the Atlantic salmon inappropriately introduced by the fish farms--now recovering and returning? Because if so, this is a major environmental success story for this keystone fish as well as for the biodiversity of the Vancouver Island region and for First Nations such as the Namgis, who would be able to harvest and sell the returning salmon. Even more, if true, it would provide a natural model for dealing with the abuses and mistakes of open-ocean salmon farming around the world.
Already there is evidence of a resurgence of pink salmon as well as an expansion of grizzlies, humpback whales, a change in the migration and behavior of orcas, and a possible recovery in spawning herring.
This is all encouraging even exciting news but is it just natural coincidence or really the result of removing the big ocean pens?
HOT GLOBE will launch two expeditions early this summer.
The first, in June, will be in conjunction with Dr. Benjamin Neal’s annual University of Victoria two-week field trip in salmon ecology up the Broughton Archipelago. A few weeks later, Dr. Neal and HOT GLOBE will return. Both trips will include intensive interviews with First Nations leaders, commercial fishers and their families, Federal regulators, local researchers and activists, community members and more. Listening to and reporting on the stories of Vancouver Island stakeholders firsthand, on their own territories, surrounded by the next generation of young environmental leaders, presents a compelling story, indeed.
Benjamin Neal is assistant teaching professor at the University of Victoria, and a professor of environmental studies at Colby College, the author of many scientific publications including the relevant “Forgotten whales, fading codfish: Perceptions of ‘natural’ ecosystems inform visions of future recovery.”
HOT GLOBE’S Steve Chapple is a veteran environmental journalist who has written for National Geographic, the New York Times, the LA Times and many other newspapers and magazines. He is the author of the NY Times Notable, Kayaking the Full Moon: A Journey Down the Yellowstone River to the Soul of Montana, co-author of Breakpoint: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises (with Jeremy BC Jackson,) and Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to Those Who Would Save the Earth (David Brower with Chapple.) Raised in Montana, he was educated at Yale College and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography where he is a Visiting Scholar.
If protecting wild salmon (and perhaps eating same!) are important to you and you would like to help fund this important investigation, please email the team directly at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com or simply
SUBSCRIBE to HOT GLOBE at any level and these paid subs will be applied to the investigation. Early reports of the journey will be coming weekly.
And as for World Oceans Day tomorrow, here’s a beautiful shout-out from Michael B. Jordan, “From the Hoops to the Seas”:
ALSO, Tune in HERE to the World Ocean Webcast, TODAY, Friday at 11:30 am (archived later) with the great PAUL WATSON, founder of Sea Shepherd and co-founder of Greenpeace, along with long distance swimmer DIANA NYAD (of movie fame,) and HOT GLOBE contributor, oceanographer Kim McCoy, on the website of our partner THE SAMUEL LAWRENCE FOUNDATION.
(HOT GLOBE’S Associate Producer is Michael Janelle.)