Where Have All the Salmon Gone?
To Find Out, We Launch our Field Trip with UVic Undergraduates and Dr. Ben Neil to the North of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
We launched the “Hot Globe Hunt for Wild Salmon” at the paved edge of the Tilikum (remember that name) mall in Victoria, British Columbia, our safari vehicles—two vans, a tricked out Malibu and a vintage Toyota 4-Runner--idling in the parking lot above Colquitz Creek—call it an urban trickle—as Dr. Benjamin Neal, a professor of biology, environmental studies, and all things salmon, explained how in the middle of the province’s second largest city, some 200+ intrepid and sexually-determined coho salmon somehow made the journey from the north Pacific back home to this partially restored river in order to spread their gametes, eggs and milt, in the shadow of the Montana Bar & Grill above the students’ heads.
For this was no ordinary field trip into the wilderness, Von Humboldt climbing Machu Pichu or Teddy (“The Colonizer”) Roosevelt paddling up the Amazon. This was a graded field trip composed of 16 smart, cheerful, funny Canadian undergraduates from the University of Victoria, with the purpose of attempting to understand why so very few salmon return to the streams they were born in, sometimes only 10%, sometimes none, and the situation has been getting worse for over a century.
As Americans we kind of know that the great green swatch on the map above Seattle and Chicago spawns some amusing people, Dan Aykroyd, Margaret Atwood, and Seth Rogan come to mind, some excellent musicians, think Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Drake, the Weeknd, also Justin Bieber, but what would be difficult for anybody from Los Angeles to Brooklyn to wrap their heads around is how hardy these Canadian kids are. Most were born with backpacks attached to their umbilical cords. They learned how to put up tents as toddlers. They do employ some difficult foreign words nobody outside of Canada can pronounce correctly like “eh?” but other than that they look like Americans and are easily as diverse. (Why we even care about warring theocracies in the Middle East when we have the potential return of salmon to our north and Mexican food to our South, I don’t know, except that it is a cancelable digression to even say so.)
One thing that should be stressed is that indigenous peoples, what Canadians call First Nations, have agency and power up here, and comprise 5% of Vancouver Island, a place as big as Massachusetts, and more as you forage north. The Kwakiutl, for instance, are known as the “Salmon People,” their culture is based around the fish, and they and nearby nations successfully farmed salmon with giant, elaborate, high-tech fish traps for an astounding 4500 years, until what First Nations refer to as “The Colonialists” arrived, killed thousands if not far more with small pox and disease, then outlawed the old communal ways of catching salmon in order to install a capitalist salmon canning monopoly, and soon forced many children into hideous brick edifices of abuse and horror called residential schools where children were forbidden to speak their native language, and often died. Once other Canadians learned of this, they (mostly) reacted to the situation with compassion, unlike so many Americans with indigenous in the States, and so views of how best to bring back salmon, who should benefit from the potential return of salmon in numbers, or whether fish farms help some Nations by providing good jobs, and so forth, count for a great deal in determining national fisheries policies. Fish counts hold strong meaning for politicians in Ottawa, the capital, including nepo-premier and environmentalist Justin Trudeau, up for election this fall, since fishers, open-pen industry folk, diners and First Nations all vote.
Enough back-story. We’re on a raucous investigative ramble up both coasts of Vancouver Island to determine whether open-net fish farms are destroying native salmon, or not, whether other forces are at play, instead, or everything together.
The retro-Freudian concept of “over-determination” plays well in the woods. The stakes are high for the economics of the region, for the morality of omega-3 diners worldwide and most of all, for the salmon. So time to get maybe a little sciency here and learn the “Six H’s” of what has tanked (hah!) the salmon, according Dr. Neal. Read on:
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