Historical Image of the Day

Filipino salmon cannery workers, Alaska, probably the 1930s but it could be as late as the 1950s.

Priorities

Jeremy Elton Jacquot frames the bailout in the right way. He notes that the Bush administration is happy to ask for $700 billion to help their rich friends but is willing to spend nothing on anything else. The case Jacquot mentions is a very reasonably priced $70 million plan to help save salmon populations.

While I agree that some kind of bailout is necessary, just what could be done with that money? Go catch Osama Bin Laden. A national healthcare plan. Subsidies for alternative energy technologies. Providing mass transit around the nation. Any number of small programs that would make life better for Americans. But this will never happen. For Republicans, there are 2 things worth spending money on. Giving it to rich people and fighting wars. That's it. McCain last night kept talking about cutting spending except for defense. He wants more defense spending. A terrible idea. Just horrid.

Chile Reduces Salmon Antibiotics (but Fails to Address the Broader Environmental Issues)

Earlier this year, I commented on a story about salmon farming in Chile, where fish populations were being ravaged by a virus facilitated by industrial-style fish production in Chile. Although salmon-producers in Chile at the time denied that their practices were "unsafe for consumers" nor for the fish, the Chilean government finally apparently disagrees. The government's biggest step will be to reduce the level of antibiotics used on the fish (currently between 70 and 300 times above normal levels according to Dr. Felipe Caballo) in the hopes that drug-resistant bacteria don't develop. Like Caballos says, it's a step in the right direction.

However, based on what's reported in the article at least, I really don't see how the decision to reduce antibiotics is going to solve the overcrowding problem. Improving sanitary conditions and all is fine, but when the salmon industry has grown from 28,000 tons to 665,000 tons produced in just eighteen years is amazing, and the government representative is quoted as saying “The development of this sector [salmon] can only continue to grow and be successful if the private sector and government continue to work in a responsible and coordinated way,” then you clearly are not concerned with actually dealing with overproduction and the environmental costs of overproducing salmon (or any other foodstuff). I know I'm not an economics major, but you simply cannot simultaneously "grow" and "reduce" production levels at the same time, and the antibiotics decision does little to curb the environmental damage, including salmon waste killing other marine life and stripping water of oxygen, or salmon escaping and invading other rivers and lakes, eating the marine life there.

There's nothing that anybody will realistically do about this; salmon makes too much profit for Chile, and Americans like eating their fish too much to consider why it might be better to do without. So is reducing antibiotic levels a good idea? Probably. But at the end of the day, salmon production in Chile is still a major force of environmental degradation that nobody is really willing to do much about.

The Damage Caused by Salmon Farming in Chile

Erik has written before on the collapse of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, but it isn't limited to there. Salmon in Chile are being devastated by a virus that has already killed millions of salmon in a country whose third-largest export is salmon. The virus has been able to spread in large part due to overproduction of salmon in Chile in what biologists consider unsanitary conditions, a general consequence of industrial-style production of fish (or other animals) for consumption. Not surprisingly, the salmon industry leaders "reject the notion that their practices are unsafe for consumers," despite the fact that they use antibiotics that are prohibited for use on animals in the United States (where 29% of Chile's salmon is sent).

And as has been the case in so many similar instances of environmental damage due to overproduction of resources, the people in the localities where the salmon are raised are the humans who suffer first. Their water is being polluted due to overproduction, damaging the water in ways not unlike monocrop agriculture, and as the companies pick up and relocate to cleaner waters (which they will inevitably pollute with overproduction once again), the Chileans in the south are left without jobs.

Nor are humans the only ones affected. The article points out that "Salmon feces and food pellets are stripping the water of oxygen, killing other marine life and spreading disease, biologists and environmentalists say. Escaped salmon are eating other fish species and have begun invading rivers and lakes as far away as neighboring Argentina, researchers say," and fishers are having a really hard time finding fish in the sea for their own consumption (on a much smaller scale). The overproduction in Chile, as in elsewhere, is causing potentially-irreparable damage to the environment, marine ecosystems, and even the local economies of southern Chile. The story here is nothing new, but it's still depressing, and it sure seems unlikely that companies will ever learn before it is too late.

When Workers Get Desperate

I was saddened to be forwarded this post on Oregon fishermen shooting sea lions because they view them as salmon killers. Of course, sea lions naturally kill salmon. They survive on salmon, among other things.

Thanks to the massive reengineering of the Columbia River basin however, salmon populations are in collapse. Despite (and in large part because of) all the attempts to construct fish hatcheries, fish ladders, and other technological solutions, the wild salmon population is near extinction in much of the Pacific Northwest. The fishing industry therefore has collapsed as well. The Northwest has a precedent for this kind of thing. When the spotted owl controversy was in full force, loggers were shooting owls (and only sometimes did they actually shoot a spotted owl) and posting them on fences and such to show that people came before animals.

In both of these cases, working class people who live off the land have targeted their anger at animal species who did not deserve it. Rather, both the massive cutting of old-growth timber and the decline in salmon populations have happened directly because of human activities, including (but by no means exclusively) workers changing the environment each and every day.

The salmon industry is dead. Shooting sea lions isn't going to make it come back. If we're lucky, and I don't think we will be, wild salmon will not actually become extinct in the majority of the Northwest. But again, the chances of that happening seem to me almost nil.

Of course, idiot Washington Republican congressman Doc Hastings wants to change the law to make killing sea lions legal again.

I highly suggest reading more on this topic, particularly Joseph Taylor's Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Taylor documents how people created a river system where wild salmon can no longer survive.