After 300 days of First Nation uprising against salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago, two lawsuits launched by these nations, several lawsuits launched by Marine Harvest at members of these nations and 6 months of government-to-government talks with these nations, the province of BC made an announcement on June 20th. This was the day that the provincial tenures for 20 salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago expired. First Nations are demanding that they not be renewed.
The announcement made by Lana Popham, BC Minister of Agriculture, was so cryptic it is hard to decipher. It excluded the Broughton, which was the only reason for an announcement on that date. Here is my take on what it means.
Then a week later, another cryptic announcement appeared, that the government-to-government talks with the Broughton Nations that started in January as a result of the occupations, would be ongoing for another 90 days, at which time they would produce "recommendations". At this point I view recommendations as fairy tales. They are not real.
I was in court on that day, fighting Marine Harvest as they try to gain unprecedented rights to the ocean outside their 34 farms on the BC coast. Despite laws reaching back 800 years to the Magna Carta, protecting free passage of vessels over the ocean, Marine Harvest thinks they should be able to change this so they can stop people from looking at the salmon in the pens.
The video footage shot by First Nations over the past year in the pens has revealed a biological disaster of enormous implication as thousands of farm fish appear to be suffering from disease. It is this amplification of disease that is so dangerous to wild salmon and the whole problem with salmon farms. In the wild predators remove sick fish and thus reduce disease, but as we see in the farms, sick fish suffer for long periods of time potentially shedding billions of infectious pathogens directly into the path of BC's collapsing wild salmon migration routes - a sure-fire way to extinguish wild salmon.
My take on the situation is this. I 100% trust the indigenous leaders who are at the table with the province of BC. They are fighting for their home, their people, their health and their children's future. There are no environmental or industry organizations at the table and I suspect this simplifies the situation. No one fights harder than those fighting for their home and children.
I have also heard many statements of truth from the provincial government since they traveled to the Big House in Alert Bay and met with a powerful contingent of indigenous leaders fighting to keep the last wild salmon in their territories alive by removing salmon farms. Because the federal Minister of Fisheries, Dominic LeBlanc insists on holding hands with Cermaq and Marine Harvest to fight me and now the Namgis to make it legal to put piscine orthoreovirus infected farm salmon into BC waters, the industry has become a series of infection sites threatening BC and Washington State wild salmon. So it is up to the province to decide where to grant the industry the right to drop anchors on the sea floor, and therefore which will salmon will be infected by the farm salmon.
My response to the growing political storm is to keep reporting on the biology.
With the hard work of a dedicated crew we just completed the 18th year of sea lice research in the Broughton Archipelago. 10 weeks of surveys found juvenile salmon migrating out of Tribune Channel have all but disappeared. We found fish on only two weeks, tiny remnant schools of what used to be a river of millions swimming both shorelines of the channel. People can say what they like, but I have personally witnessed the repeated sea lice attacks at the Marine Harvest and Cermaq salmon farms on these tiny fish year after year. For a brief window of a few years the companies managed to drug their fish sufficiently to reduce the number of lice on the farm salmon to protect the wild salmon, but like everywhere else this industry operates, the lice beat the drugs and continue to kill wild salmon migrating past the farms. This is business as usual for these companies.
When I first discovered the sea louse problem in BC in 2001, I contacted Norwegian researchers for help. One of them told me "you are going to have good years and bad years for sea lice, but in the end you are not going to have wild salmon," and here we are.
If the following salmon farms are removed - Glacier Falls, Burdwood, Sir Edmund and Wicklow, the Kingcome, Wakeman, Viner, Ahta and Kakweikan River salmon populations will be restored. If not they certainly won't recover from the profound collapse documented this spring. People can slander me, fly armchair theories, try to pretend we don't know what happened to these fish, but I was there, I am still there and I have seen and documented the whole thing. I am heart-broken that I have been unable to protect these fish and all that depend on them, and I am hoping it is not over for them. Extinction has no hard boundaries, it is like a wall of fog. You can see it coming, but you don't know exactly where it is until it blankets you.
Tomorrow I am boarding the Sea Shepherd, Martin Sheen, to take a close look at the salmon farms from Vancouver to Alert Bay again. I don't begin to understand the politics, but I do know the biology and I have been witness to its predatory behaviour of this industry on this place that I call home since 1998. My hopes are pinned on the indigenous and non-indigenous leaders at the table deciding the fate of the last salmon in Musgamagw / Namgis territory also called the Broughton Archipelago. I think it is essential that I hold a light on this furtive, aggressive industry. I am grateful to Sea Shepherd for making the Martin Sheen available, because I do not have the resources to make this trip otherwise.
If you would like to see me stay in this fight, I need your donation no matter how small.
Donations can be made here.
It looks to me like the salmon farming industry in BC is beyond the tipping point, but I can also see that they are fighting back hard. They could move with grace and take this opportunity to show respect for the people whose waters they have so heavily used.
If you want to help, let our provincial government know if you stand with them on this. And it is so important to realize that only these companies divide us, a lot of us who live on this coast are not that different.
Gila'kasla