Salmon Are Sacred

Lance Howell lives near Silver Lake Park. For the past few decades, he has made his living as a salmon troller and woodworker.

Editor’s Note: The opinions in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Whatcom Watch.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, May 8, hundreds of people assembled at the Ocean Discovery Center in Sidney, British Columbia to begin the last leg of a walk from Port Hardy down the length of Vancouver Island to rally on the steps of the Legislative Assembly in support of wild salmon. Led by biologist Alexandra Morton and supported by First Nations and a broad spectrum of the settler population, the march, called the “Get Out Migration,” demands the removal of open-pen salmon farms from the waters of British Columbia.

For 10 years, Morton and her allies have studied, documented, testified, sued and pleaded for the preservation of wild salmon. Open-pen salmon farming in the North Pacific is proving to be a disaster. It cannot coexist with the wild runs. There is no win-win settlement to be negotiated among stakeholders.

There is a choice to be made. It is a choice between corporate-owned, vaccinated, pen-raised fish that pass disease and death onto the out-migrating smolts of the wild salmon, or common property wild salmon that is the underlying strength of the natural and cultural heritage of the North Pacific coast.

Carrying salmon-shaped signs and banners with the declaration “Salmon are Sacred,” the march set out for the last day’s walk of 18 miles. The migration started on Earth Day in late April and made its way through towns and villages of the coast, gathering people as it went. There were feasts and ceremonial welcomes as the march passed through First Nations villages.

The decline of the wild salmon is part of a continuing story for the First Nations, a story of a loss of resources and attacks on their culture.

As one chief said in a greeting to the marchers in Sidney, “We have been betrayed many times. Maybe we will be again. But today we all walk as brothers. That is what it takes to win this battle.”

There were other greetings as well. Here is Alexandra Morton.

“Walking through the communities of Vancouver Island on the Get Out Migration has been a powerfully emotional experience. We are walking to tell people that if they simply stand up and make themselves visible to government, there is no reason we have to lose our wild salmon. But as we walk into towns with our flags flying, brilliant salmon signs, singing ‘We are walking to Victoria to save our fish,” an entirely unexpected thing is happening. People are coming up to me and holding me­—crying. They are speaking about schools without children, independent livelihoods lost, communities dying. This is about much more than fish.

This is about the independent way of life that built these communities going extinct. As we walk, I see a land of beautiful clear streams, fertile soil green with life and air sweet with flowers, and then I enter towns so burdened by global corporate markets that they can no longer thrive on the richness of this land. There is something very wrong here, it is painful to witness and people are sad.

Somehow we have become blind to our public resource—millions of salmon flowing annually to our doorstep, feeding people and our economy province-wide. We have somehow been convinced that Atlantic salmon, dyed pink, vaccinated, fed Chilean fish, in pens where we cannot catch them, infesting our fish with lice—are better. We believe there are jobs even as the Norwegian companies are mechanizing as fast as they can to reduce the number of jobs.

When people see us they know we have been duped and they don’t know how to turn this around. The Get Out Migration has been protected, blessed, gifted and honored by the First Nations who know best what has been lost. Everyday more people are joining our trek—weathering storms in tents, waving at thousand honking motorists on the road to Victoria. Our ranks swell as we enter the towns, white doves have been released, First Nation canoes parallel us, songs have been written, feasts laid out, flotillas surround us, people are awakening.”

Last summer, the return of the sockeye to the Fraser was a bust. Nine out of 10 fish expected to return were lost. Other rivers in the region had abundant returns of large, vigorous fish. A few runs within the Fraser River system made a strong showing. When smolts of the strong runs left the Fraser, they turned south and migrated to the ocean through the Straits of Juan de Fuca. They did not turn north and pass through a battery of disease-ridden fish farms to be eaten by the caged Atlantic salmon and infected with the sea lice that are epidemic in the farms, even though subject to control by the powerful pesticide called Slice.

In surveys taken this spring, the infection rate of the out-migrating smolts is more than 80 percent. The lice cover the skin of the juvenile fish with disease and death. Viruses and bacteria follow the same path of contamination but are harder to monitor.

The Get Out Migration says, “Get these death traps out of our waters.” It says,” Salmon are Sacred.” They are not something to be measured on a balance sheet next to the profits and share price of the Norwegian-owned salmon farms.

Within the march, there is also a quiet voice of mourning. Some have painted on their faces big black sea lice. It is powerful to see the face of a youth disfigured in solidarity with the natural world that is being degraded; the world in which they are to live. They walk to put a stop to that degradation.

A 12-year-old girl joined the migration when she and her mother crossed from the outer coast of Vancouver Island on foot on a narrow winding mountain road in the cold and rain. In the beginning of her journey, she endured occasional hostility from the drivers of the semi trucks carrying the farmed fish to market. Her strength and determination surrounded her like a sun and in the end she turned the hostility to support. She walked with the strength of the salmon.

Tofino, where she lives, is designated a world biological reserve. The air and water are pure. Most of the ancient forest is intact. Kennedy Lake is a sockeye lake, and the rivers that flow into it form sockeye spawning beds. Not long ago, the salmon runs into the rivers of Kennedy Lake had runs of tens of thousands of salmon. Now there are many salmon farms, and the runs are threatened with extinction.

The sunlight that falls on the vastness of the open ocean is taken up by plankton, the first link in the North Pacific food chain. The salmon, as they feed off of the zooplankton and small fish, gather this concentrated sunlight and grow to become a living river that delivers solar energy and ocean nutrients to nourish the rain forest watersheds of their birth.

Our grandchildren don’t need tales of a lost world. They need to live in a world in which they grow to understand that they are a living part of this story of generosity and abundance. They need to live in a world where they can know of the power of the bear, hear the call of the raven and feel the ancient majesty of the forest and know that the flesh of the salmon gives strength to all. To preserve this system, all we need to do is to do no harm.

The waters of Georgia Strait and Puget Sound have been given a unifying name, the Salish Sea. This is in recognition of a common natural and cultural heritage. The great river of the Salish Sea is the Fraser River. The people of the Salish Sea have common interests that transcend the line drawn through the sea that divides Canada and the United States.

The northern reaches of the Salish Sea have been home to salmon farms for more than 20 years. At first they were welcomed as a new and valuable part of the community. But after decades of witnessing the damage to the environment and the callous disregard of the corporate owners and governmental non-regulators, the call has come for the open pen farms to Get Out!

It is possible to farm salmon in closed containment operations, with pumps and filters that limit disease transmission to wild stocks. Local operators have been experimenting with this with promising results. The Norwegian multinationals who own the majority of B.C. salmon farms have flatly refused to consider this option. It doesn’t hurt them if they kill off their competition.

The salmon farms have their own problems. Communities that sacrificed their shellfish beds to the pollution of the farms are left to cope with unemployment and environmental degradation.

In Chile, once a major producer of farmed salmon, viral diseases have devastated the industry and salmon farming has collapsed. The virus Infectious Hematopoietic Necrosis (IHN) that caused the collapse of the Chilean industry is present within the salmon farming industry as a whole. No one knows what would happen if this disease went viral within the North Pacific wild salmon populations. It could follow the same vector of contamination as sea lice and pollute the wild stocks.

There are other problems. The recent earthquake in Chile caused considerable damage to the physical plant of the industry. The rising cost of oil makes it more expensive to bring the fish to market.

There are sound business reasons for the industry to rebuild within the North Pacific coast. Washington state presently has nine licensed salmon farms. State law is hospitable to salmon farms, yet experience has shown that open-pen salmon farming kills wild stocks.

On May 10, two days after the Get Out Migration rally in Victoria, three pages of a Google search of Alexandra Morton showed not one reference to an article about the rally from a source within the United States. The people of the southern end of the Salish Sea are unaware of the threat that is building.

People of Washington are justly proud of the results of their efforts toward salmon restoration and habitat reconstruction. But as the experience of the runs of Kennedy Lake near Tofino has shown, pristine habitat means little if the out-migrating smolts are infected with disease as they pass through the salmon farms.

The Lake Washington sockeye, so beloved by Seattleites and a symbol of the quality of life in the Northwest, could go the way of the sockeye runs of the Fraser River and Kennedy Lake if salmon farms were located in the path of their out migration. As of this writing, there are nine salmon farms in the state of Washington. It is time to place a moratorium on any new farms. Let the Canadian experience serve as a warning. It is time to stop eating farm-raised salmon and time to encourage seafood outlets and restaurants to stop selling it.

Alexandra Morton and her allies have been working for 10 years to contain the damage done by open-pen salmon farms. Now is the time to support their efforts and learn from their experience. The imaginary line that divides the Salish Sea has existed for less than 300 years, about the time that it takes for a Douglas-fir to reach maturity.

The pacific salmon has been coming home to our rivers since the ice receded. Their mythic journey helped to dissolve the newly exposed rock and build out of it the luxuriant ecosystem and rich cultures of the Northwest Coast. It doesn’t matter which side of the border we live on; if we take the story of the salmon into our hearts, we become people of the Salish Sea and that mythic journey becomes our own. Our part in the story is to ensure that it continues.

Salmon are sacred. §