A Stain Upon The Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, by various authors

I must admit that I am no particular expert in salmon aquiculture. It must also be admitted that this particular book is no great friend to the endeavor in general, and in reading this book one reads the harshest condemnation that could be given to it from the point of view of environmentalists opposed to the corrupt dealings of bureaucracies captured by corrupt business elements, sports fisherman, and first peoples, all of whom find their interest in preserving a population of wild salmon for the purposes of independent and prudent harvesting thwarted by companies whose practices do not provide jobs, endanger the health of wild and farmed fish alike, as well as the whole marine ecosystem and the consumers of farm-raised salmon raised under ghastly conditions. Indeed, in reading this book I was struck with the question of why it is that this sort of aquiculture takes place in the first place given the inefficiency and destructiveness of the whole endeavor. What is it that allows destructive and frequently unprofitable corporate elements to capture bureaucracies in places like Canada, Norway, Scotland, and Ireland to permit salmon farming despite the horrific condition of the salmon and the dangers that they pose to everything involved in the marine food chain, ourselves included?

The core material of this book is about 240 pages or so, but it could have been much shorter, as a lot of this material is somewhat repetitively dealt with by several of its authors, who are part of an alliance of people who for a variety of reasons have sought to oppose the proliferation of salmon farming in British Columbia. As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, albeit no great fisherman myself, I am nonetheless friends to at least a few people who engage in sport fishing and can testify to the immense bounty of wild salmon in watersheds where salmon fishing has not destroyed the viability of local varieties of Pacific salmon. In a variety of ways, through entertaining and biting cartoons that paint salmon farming as one in a long line of disasters for Canada’s first peoples, through discussion of the practices of salmon farming in Europe and Canada by explicitly comparing their own writings to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, through a discussion of the history of salmon farming in Canada, and a recounting of the frustrations that people have in leading to changes in unresponsive and unaccountable bureaucracies that have been captured by malign corporate elements engaged in classic cronyism. The book leaves the reader with the unpleasant question of what is to be done about the corrupt regulatory state in the contemporary West?

In reading this book, I was struck by the fact that the only conceivable motive I could figure out for the behavior of governments in seeking to avoid enforcing environmental sanctions on known and flagrant abusers like giant fish farmers were because the state itself supported the efforts of big pharma and big fish farming to create a captured food source that could poison the seas and poison the general population of the West. The lure of controlling the population by controlling the supply of seafood must be so powerful a motive on the part of governments around the West to support companies whose actions poison the seas with drugs and chemicals, bring about the proliferation of algae blooms and sea lice, tamper with the sex of fish with massive hormone baths to preserve the marketability of pink salmon whose color is often artificial in nature, and who are afflicted with all kinds of diseases, including the development of super pathogens through the indiscriminate and rampant use of antibiotics. Such thorough destructiveness of the viability of wild salmon stock, the interest of millions of sports fishermen, and the economic interests of local first peoples and seacoast communities must have a powerful motive in seeking to control the protein intake of ordinary people who are to be poisoned to death by companies aided and abetted by corrupt bureaucrats captured by evil corporate interests. This book does not explore those dark motives, which have proven themselves to be of immense problems in the Covid era, but it suggests that the problem has been a longstanding one that goes back for decades. If this book is certainly biased, it is biased against bad actors and it presents an important aspect of the part of corrupt Western governments to control the food supply of people and to allow no alternatives to its own toxic offerings.