Submitted to Shelton Blog by Jake Rufer
April 16th, 2011
Dear Readers,
NOAA: National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
NMFS: National Marine Fisheries Service
Somewhere I read about the NOAA granting permits for the purpose of situating salmon farms on Puget Sound and Hood Canal. Wanting to pursue the idea, I searched on “NOAA salmon farms Hood Canal”. I discovered an interesting NOAA “Technical Memorandum NMFS-NWFSC-53” entitled “Review of Potential Impacts of Atlantic Salmon Culture on Puget Sound Chinook Salmon and Hood Canal Summer-run Chum Salmon Evolutionarily Significant Units.”
I’ve emphasized the above as these fish are subsequently referred to as ESU’s. I have learned that by collapsing an important concept to a mere acronym, the writer diminishes the impact of the subject matter. Now, we could forget that we are reading about salmon--just ESU’s.
The document provides a cursory executive summary including the following: “After conducting several scientific reviews of Washington salmon farming industry, including the present one, NMFS concluded that the operations can be managed to minimum risks to local salmon populations.” How much of a risk is “minimum risk”? Does not the term include some degree of risk? Can we permit threatened wild salmon runs to be further endangered with any preventable risk?
Also, included in the summary is the following: “Much of the available scientific information pertaining to salmon aquaculture was produced by NMFS in furtherance of its national mandate to advocate environmentally sustainable aquaculture through research, technology, development, financial assistance, and regulatory programs.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service is trapped in an inescapable conflict of interest. The agency is tasked to be an advocate for salmon culture. Of course, there are qualifications. So, what about those qualifications. How effectively are they pursued? The task essentially requires NMFS to come up with some ESU farms. Does NMFS dare report that it cannot approve some ESU farms because of some discovered liability? Understanding a bit of government bureaucracy, I’d say, “ not”.
I wonder whether the NMFS is aware that many of Norway’s Fjords are highly contaminated with poop of farmed salmon. I also wonder whether the NMFS is aware of the many escaped farmed Atlantic salmon from fish pens in Washington waters.
The George Mateljan Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation, asserting it has no commercial interests, reports in part as follows: “To produce one pound of farmed salmon, 2.4 to 4 pounds of wild sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring and other fish must be ground up to render the oil and meal that is compressed into pellets of salmon chow. Removing such immense amounts of small prey fish from an ecosystem can significantly upset its balance.” If true, does the effect of feeding farmed salmon prey fish amount to anything environmentally sustainable in terms of the charge given to the NMFS?
The NMFS memorandum sounds much like The City of Shelton’s Mitigated Determination of Non-Significance (MDNS) as applied to the Simpson/Solomon incinerator.
Lest you forget-- ESU stands for Washington State’s endangered wild salmon, i.e. Oncorhynchus tshawytscha and O. keta.
All emphasis supplied by Rufer
(George Mateljan Foundation: See "The World’s Healthiest Foods” at www.whfoods.org)
Photo "King salmon fishery" by Dave Kenogy
Unanticipated consequences.
ReplyDeleteThese things seem to happen in so many of the agencies we create with the anticipation they will do good... "minimum risks to local fish," and feeding them salmon chow... so that the food supply of the wild salmon, and other wild fish, is diminished...
NOAA, NMS, EPA, FEMA, DOE, ORCAA.... agencies designed to ... hurt citizens? Not intentionally.
Unanticipated consequences.
Who could have anticipated that between 2000 and 2008 many of these agencies would have their staff stripped and replaced by George Bush's "yes-men." From the inside out, everything we are looking at right now is rotten to the core.
What to do?
What to do when all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.
"The average salmon farm creates as much raw sewage as a town of 65 thousand people"-Ian McAllister who works for the Raincoast Conservations Society. The antibiotic sewage creates a dead zone that can reach up to 500 feet around the pens killing the shellfish and the good bacteria on the seafloor. Disease and parasites are easily spread in the overcrowded pens (like cattle feed lots) and although regularly treated with pesticides, the sea lice (tiny parasites that eat and kill the young salmon) are a major problem. At the north end of Vancouver Island, wild salmon fry were found with up to 25 sea lice on the tiny fish. The fish farms are blamed for this as they are located along the migration routes. The numbers of returning fish are down the worst since 1953 and he said sea lice could "be responsible for the extinction of complete races of salmon." -from Bracing Against the Tide by Rebecca Clarren 3/17/03 This article is from Water in the 21st-Century West, A High Country News Reader, edited by Char Miller 2009. This is a collection of articles on water from High Country magazine.
ReplyDeleteSubmitted by Sheri:
ReplyDeleteMy question when reading the farm raised salmon article is, what have they been feeding us in order to remove the "common sense" gene? I can't find it anywhere anymore!
"Common sense," once the benchmark of maturity and social responsibility has been replaced by the "profit motive". These two forces are mutually exclusive as applied in today's world. And while the agencies created to protect the public from corporate greed and the environmental destruction that comes with it were once a formidable deterrent, the Reagan administration began a pattern of deconstruction of these agencies that we all must live with today. As a result, the public has little representation and our political leaders have become nothing but handmaidens for those who would profit from the degradation of our world. The sky has, in fact, been falling for the past 30 years, just a little at a time.
ReplyDelete