Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (31 page)

On September 3, 2003, the Netscape News proclaimed that farmed salmon was “contaminated with high levels of cancer-causing chemicals” when PCBs have never been shown to cause cancer in humans, even at thousands of times the levels found in salmon and other foods. The story, which was based on reports from the
New York Times
and Reuters, should have read, “[farmed salmon] contain extremely low levels of substances that have never been shown to cause cancer in humans.” But that wouldn’t have made a good headline, unlike the loaded word
contaminated,
which has little scientific meaning in this context.

The study that the
Science
article was based on contained numerous flaws. The wild salmon that researchers selected included species like pink salmon, which have a much lower fat content than farmed Atlantic salmon. Because PCB and other fat-soluble contaminants concentrate in fat, it is predictable that pink salmon, which are not farmed because they are not as desirable as Atlantic salmon (partly for the very reason they have a lower fat content!), would have a lower PCB content. But pink salmon also have a lower omega-3 fat content and are therefore not as effective in preventing heart attacks as farmed Atlantic or wild king (chinook) salmon, both of which have a similar high (good) fat content.

An even more glaring shortcoming of the
Science
paper was that it failed to reference two previous studies that provided examples of wild salmon containing higher PCB levels than farmed salmon. One of these reports analyzed the famed Copper River sockeye salmon from southeast Alaska. It is usually the first fresh wild salmon on the market. It appears in stores in May, so it commands a high price. The report, done by the environmental organization The Circumpolar Conservation Union, showed Copper River sockeye contained about five times the level of PCBs found in farmed salmon.
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Another well-known report demonstrated that wild king and silver (coho) salmon in Puget Sound, Washington, contained two to three times the levels of PCBs found in farmed salmon.
[21]
Both these reports were widely circulated among scientists before the
Science
article was published, yet no mention was made of them. Selective sampling of salmon and selective omission of previous studies makes for a biased report.

Nowhere in the
Science
article or in any of the anti-aquaculture literature is there a mention of the fact that the average North American consumer ingests about eight times as many PCBs from beef and about three times as many from milk as they do from eating farmed salmon. Yet all the warnings are about salmon and the facts are ignored. The famed Canadian activist Dr. David Suzuki said to a
Toronto Star
reporter, “I would never feed farmed salmon to a child. It’s poison.”
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He should retract that statement if he wants to leave a credible legacy.

The fact is eating salmon has many benefits and carries so little risk that it makes sense to to eat it regularly. The American Heart Association states categorically that eating oily fish, such as salmon, reduces the risk of a fatal heart attack by 50 percent. According to the association, for every 100,000 people who eat salmon only 400 will suffer fatal heart attacks. The Environmental Protection Agency, which tends to exaggerate risk by orders of magnitude, estimates that eating farmed salmon more than once a month will result in one additional cancer in 100,000 people in a 70-year life span. I make that a 400 to 1 justification for a regular feed of salmon, pretty good odds in my book. And one might ask how these people lived to be 70 years old in the first place: they probably ate a lot of oily fish like salmon.

And it’s not only the American Heart Association that underlines the benefits of eating salmon. The World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, and the U.S. Council on Science and Nutrition all recommend increasing our intake of seafood, particularly oily fish, as a way of improving our health. The activist campaign against salmon farming alarms people unnecessarily. Rather than heeding it, they would be much better off to ignore these scare tactics and eat more salmon—farmed or wild.

In order to save the wild salmon we should boycott farmed salmon and only eat wild salmon

Whoever thought up this lunatic idea should get the Nobel Prize for anti-logic. How can you save wild salmon by eating more of them? Yet a whole gaggle of goofy groups has succeeded in convincing chefs, restaurant owners, and consumers that a boycott of farmed salmon will somehow be good for wild salmon. Activists are blackmailing chefs and restaurateurs by threatening to picket and harass them if they don’t take farmed salmon off their menus. Of course the deadly sea lice fabrication comes in handy here: Get rid of the salmon farms and wild salmon will no longer be decimated by the lice from the farms, activists say. As if the fishermen are not decimating the wild salmon. Oh no, they are just “harvesting” them, a nice term for “killing.” Every time you eat a farmed salmon you are saving a wild salmon.

Every year tens of millions of wild salmon are killed by commercial, sport, and aboriginal fisheries just as they are about to go up rivers and spawn. This is somehow twisted into being “good” for the wild fish. If you ask me, what’s good for the fishery is not necessarily what’s good for the fish. I am not opposed to fishing for wild salmon, I do it myself, but fishermen are unquestionably impacting salmon numbers far more than fish farmers. There isn’t any conclusive evidence that salmon farms harm the wild fish in the slightest, but there is no doubting the body count in the wild salmon fisheries.

It is interesting that the anti-aquaculture set have allied themselves with commercial wild fishing interests. Obviously the wild fishery opposes aquaculture; it represents a direct competitive threat. It doesn’t cost as much to grow a farmed salmon as it does to catch a wild one. Moreover, one has to chase around for wild salmon in big power boats, which burn fuel. Of course this is why people began to farm plants and animals on the land 10,000 years ago; it is more efficient than hunting and gathering.

So why do so-called environmentalists side with the people who are killing the wild salmon? It has to do partly with a romantic notion about going back to a time when brave men went to sea and sometimes died trying to earn a living and bring food to hungry villagers. Partly it is an opportunistic move to play upon the public’s notion of this romantic theme. In fact there is nothing romantic about risking your life and possibly capsizing and drowning in an angry sea. Just ask the widows.

But the single biggest driver is the competition for sales in fish stores and restaurants from Los Angeles to New York. This is a very good example of “environmental” campaigns today that are simply piggybacking on trade disputes, competition for market share, and antiglobalization agendas. Salmon farming just happens to be one of the issues in the crosshairs. In the case of salmon farming, it’s all about U.S. interests (read the Alaskan salmon fishery) versus the growing imports of less expensive, consistently fresher, higher quality, available year-round, high in omega-3 fat content, farmed salmon from Chile and British Columbia. It really has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with raw competition, a good thing when the consumer has the right information. Activist groups, who advertise themselves as environmentalists, make sure that the public doesn’t have the right information and they raise money on the misinformation they spread.

It is no coincidence that most of the money flowing into British Columbia and Chile to combat salmon farming comes from the U.S.. For example, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation of California funds the anti-salmon farming activities of the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver. (Packard made his fortune by founding the Hewlett-Packard computer company.) Thus local Canadian activist groups are taking money from wealthy American foundations and acting as fronts for U.S. commercial interests.
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It’s a winning formula for all concerned, except the salmon farmers and their customers in American stores and restaurants.

Let’s look for a moment at the so-called wild Alaska salmon fishery, which is so proud to be wild rather than farmed. The fact is much of the Alaskan salmon fishery is based on what is called “salmon ranching.” Every year eggs are stripped from returning adult females, fertilized with milt (sperm) from returning males, and placed in hatcheries just like the ones salmon farmers use. When the eggs hatch they are “ponded” into large tanks, where they are fed the same fish feed farmed salmon get, complete with synthetic canthaxanthin as a nutrient/colorant. When the smolts are ready to go to sea, they are transferred to net pens in the ocean, just like farmed salmon, and are fed on a diet that contains the same fishmeal and oil that farmed salmon enjoy. If they get sick, they receive the same antibiotics farmed salmon have the privilege of receiving. Some months later they are released to the open ocean to forage for themselves.

About 1.5 billion salmon are released into the wild each year from these aquaculture facilities in Alaska. After this point, they must compete with the truly wild salmon that have not been artificially spawned, hatched, reared, fed, and medicated. While promoters of Alaskan salmon go on about the amount of wild fish used to feed farmed salmon, their own industry churns out ranch salmon that consume about 20 times more wild feed than the entire Canadian salmon farming industry. The Alaskan ranched salmon are competing directly with the wild salmon for feed in the ocean while the farmed salmon are confined to their pens, where they feed on anchovies, soybeans, and wheat germ.

This is the reason I placed “wild” in quotation marks earlier on. The practice of salmon ranching is about as wild as the practice of cattle ranching. Who would insist that cattle, reared on the farm and then released to the range, be classified as “wild” when they are rounded up for slaughter? I say ranching is a type of farming! Yet the activists who decry the salmon farming industry endorse salmon ranching. This is another clue that the anti-salmon farm campaign has little to do with the environment and everything to do with an unholy alliance between commercial fishermen and political activists, who effectively act as their agents.

I wouldn’t have used up so much ink on this subject if I didn’t think it was vital to our future health and the health of the world’s oceans. Allow me to spend a little more time discussing aquaculture in order to present a positive vision, as the negative side of it has already received far too much attention.

First and foremost, aquaculture is the only feasible way to increase seafood production while at the same time managing the wild fisheries on a sustainable basis. More seafood is good for us; the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet and the longevity of Japanese people attest to this. And if it is done in an intelligent manner, aquaculture can even help increase the productivity of many wild fisheries.

The Japanese abalone and scallop fisheries are good examples of combining high-tech aquaculture with traditional fishing methods. All around the coast of Japan are found modern solar-powered hatcheries, where abalone and scallops are bred and reared. The juvenile shellfish are fed on algae and grown until they are the size of a penny. They are then seeded by the millions into the ocean at appropriate spots, where they grow to market size. In the south of Japan, where the sea is warm, they are harvested by women who dive for them in a traditional costume. In the north, where it is too cold for free diving the shellfish, they must be harvested with long poles from small boats, in the same way it has been done for centuries.

Another fine example of sustainable aquaculture is the abalone farming practiced in Monterrey, California. Juvenile abalone are purchased from a commercial hatchery and placed in cages, which are then suspended by ropes beneath the fisherman’s pier. The cages are hauled up regularly for cleaning, sorting, and harvesting and then filled with California giant kelp (
Macrocystis
) harvested from nearby reefs. The kelp provides the staple diet for the abalone, along with algae and other marine species that grow inside the cages. California giant kelp grows very quickly, up to three feet a day, so the kelp is easily sustainable in quantities that can feed a lot of abalone.

Over 100 species of finfish and over 50 species of shellfish are now grown in commercial or experimental aquaculture operations around the world. Tilapia, which is now available in Costco and other large chains, makes a firm white fillet. Tilapia production is growing rapidly in tropical and subtropical countries, as is basa, a Vietnamese variety of catfish that is popular in many North American restaurants. Farmed Atlantic cod and sablefish (Alaska black cod) are already on the market and other species, such as sturgeon, halibut, and tuna are not far behind.