As Nature Dies

There is no doubt now that the sea lice from Atlantic salmon fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago are slaughtering pink salmon and chum salmon smolts, with disastrous consequences.

Smolts are the young salmon leaving their home river for their time in the estuary and beyond, and are tiny, about 0.52 grams.

Just the use of the "precautionary principle," where the onus of safety would have been on the fish farmers, would have prevented this ongoing tragedy. The evidence of fish farm lice killing migrating salmon has been amply demonstrated in Norway, Scotland and Ireland and there we are talking wild sea trout and, ironically, Atlantic salmon whose smolts are much larger than ours.

One would have thought that positioning of fish farms, which were bound to attract lice in the millions, in the migratory paths of wild salmon smolts would have seemed mad to anyone with a particle of common sense. That the farmers have been able to get away with it is a testament to the power of the dollar and the denseness of our politicians. A simple trip to the site by anyone with common sense would make it clear that the opponents of fish farms are right.

There are other issues -- escape from farms, the deleterious mass of waste from the fish containing dyes (to give the customer the preferred colour; they couldn't sell them in their natural gray state), excrement, antibiotics and "Slice" to kill the lice the farmers say aren't there. Slice kills lice because they're crustaceans -- so are crabs mussels and shrimp. Then there is the horrible action of farmers decimating the smelt fishery of Chile in order to make it into pellets to feed their caged fish. It takes seven pounds of small fish for every one pound of farmed fish. Now, how much sense does that make?

Jobs the bottom line?

I believe that the legislative committee looking into fish farming in B.C. will have much of its trouble over the question of jobs onshore processing the farmed fish. Like every decent person, I want people to have work. I, in fact, spent half a year in desperate unemployment and I know what it's like. The fish farmers and their PR people overlook the fact that restoration of the wild salmon would keep those plants going.

But, there are two factors to consider here. First, that the fish farmers consistently exaggerate the jobs from their operations by a factor of two to three. This has been the experience in Europe as well as here. But let's look at what happens if you decide to permit environmental desecration in order to provide jobs. Why not then remove all the rules governing pulp mill emissions? That'll sure as hell create a lot of jobs, but is that the way we want to produce them?

And there is another factor to consider. If employment is the main criterion for maximizing jobs, that means the B.C. Liberal government will grant licenses up and down the coast, using employment as the reason.

All the independent, peer-reviewed evidence published in proper scientific journals leaves no doubt now that the sea lice from Atlantic salmon fish farms are slaughtering pink and chum salmon smolts in the Broughton Archipelago. The evidence of lice from fish farms killing migrating salmon smolts has been amply demonstrated in Norway, Scotland and Ireland -- but the fish farmers overlook that uncomfortable evidence, and the politicians don't want to hear anything bad about fish farms.

End of the world as we know it

Last week in this paper, Bryan Zandberg interviewed Professor William Rees from UBC, who said, "This year is the first time in tens of thousands of years you could take a kayak to the North Pole. That's the evidence. So don't give me optimism about technology moving us forward, because it isn't."

James Lovelock, in the same story, the man who wrote The Revenge of the Gaia, said there's nothing to stop the earth from slouching towards a "coma" now, taking billions of us along with her.

Several more renowned scientists, like Dr. Dan Pauly, director of the Fisheries Centre at UBC, an outspoken critic of fish farms and author of The Sea Around Us, related that, in view of the situation, he sometimes has trouble getting out of bed in the morning!

If you didn't read Bryan Zandberg's article, do so!

I thought it might be interesting to see how Patrick Moore, the fish farmer flack, would respond to Zandberg's article, so I e-mailed him a copy.

Here's what he had to say:

"For all I know, Lovelock may be externalizing his own fear of death. I don't know why he has become a doomsayer.

"The fact is we don't have a crystal ball and the future can't be predicted with certainty. If it is true that we are all going to die and there is nothing we can do about it, then why worry?"

Moore makes this interesting comment:

"If [the environmental situation] is really that bad and irreversible, the logical thing to do is party. Actually I have reduced my personal greenhouse gas emissions by over 50 per cent by changing the cars I drive and retrofitting my home with a better energy system. But all this hand-wringing is enough to make me nauseous. 'We shall perish in flames.' It's a bit too Old Testament for me."

(One assumes that Moore is referring to Revelation, which is in the New Testament.)

This is the man, co-founder of Greenpeace, now crossed over the Rubicon and advising industry of "strategies" to handle environment problems. His company is named, interestingly, Greenline Strategies -- a rather odd name for one who says he still cares about the environment.

To my dying day

Unhappily, Moore represents the feeling of most of the corporate community. Either it isn't happening and the mass of the scientific community is wrong or, if it they are right, there is nothing we can do, so let's all go and get pissed!

I'm damned near 75 and I worry myself sick about this planet in part for my eight grandchildren but even more from a philosophical, if you will, moral point of view.

Do we not have a moral obligation to leave this earth in better shape than we found it?

Does it not go further -- much further -- than saving fuel costs by more efficiency?

Must we not insist that all in power -- be it a municipal councillor, a union leader, a captain of industry, a cabinet minister, a premier, a prime minister or a president of a powerful country -- make every effort to make dramatic changes for the better, starting now?

I'm almost certainly in the last decade of my life, but until my last breath I'll advocate for things like the Skagit River and against things like The Kemano Completion Project, the Pitt River gravel pit, and fish farms killing our precious wild salmon.

Can anyone afford, socially, morally, philosophically, to do less?

Related Tyee stories:

• Farmed Salmon Even Enviros Can Swallow
• A Salmon Sleuth's Disturbing Find
• 'You Can't Spin Mother Nature'