THE SALMON MIRACLE MUST NOT BE DESTROYED
For untold centuries, silvery hordes of wild salmon have returned to our rivers in a moving miracle of life, death and rebirth. People, bears and birds have depended upon them for food for all those centuries, and they have never failed to keep their appointments with death and life. But in this century of progress and man's ruthless conquest of Nature we are on the edge of smothering the miracle of the salmon migrations before we have even begun to understand the mysteries that make them happen.
There is something obscene about profit-obsessed corporations twisting the God-given phenomenon of the wild salmon runs into a thing of degraded fish crowded into potentially poisonous netpens fish-factories that are as natural and wholesome as cages of rats in a laboratory.
The great majority of the world's fish farms produce vegetarian fish species in landlocked, self-contained facilities. They do not consume other fish, and represent a vital contribution to global protein supplies.
The salmon farms of Norway, Scotland, Ireland, Chile, the U.S. and B.C., however, produce carnivorous fish in netcages open to the surrounding salt water bays and inlets. There is nothing to stop the flows of toxic effluent from the cages into the wild fish habitat around them.
Because it takes some four pounds of feed made from other fish to produce one pound of caged salmon, farm production actually reduces the total protein available to the world.
The late Roderick Haig Brown, dean of Canadian fishing authors and pioneering conservationist, once wrote that people unable to preserve something as splendid and beautiful as wild salmon runs may not survive much longer themselves. "Has industry some inalienable right to invade public lands wherever found and destroy them?" he asked.
It seems, today, as if it does. If the profiteers make enough empty noise about jobs and money, we can expect to find plenty of weak-kneed politicians and toadying bureaucrats to welcome resource exploitation, however vile and destructive it may be.
