The Fraser Riverkeeper crew, including Riverkeeper Doug Chapman, Treasurer Carol McDonald, Executive Director Lauren Hornor and her family, and Outreach Director Mary Woodbury and her husband, gathered with thousands of others at the final leg of the Get Out Migration, which was referred to by some media as one of BC’s largest environmental rallies in history. This event took place on May 8 in Victoria, BC, after a 500km walk down Vancouver Island by fisheries biologist Alexandra Morton and hundreds of other walkers. Police estimated over 4,000 in attendance.
Morton, along with many First Nations chiefs and supporters, Wild Salmon Circle, Salmon Are Sacred, and other individuals and organizations, walked and rallied to stand up for wild salmon. In one of her e-mailed blogs, Morton said,
Walking through the communities of Vancouver Island on the Get Out Migration has been a powerfully emotional experience. We are walking to tell people that if they simply stand up and make themselves visible to government, there is no reason we have to lose our wild salmon. But as we walk into towns with our flags flying, brilliant salmon signs, singing “we are walking to Victoria to save our fish,” an entirely unexpected thing is happening. People are coming up to me and holding me – crying. They are speaking about schools without children, independent livelihoods lost, communities dying. This is about much more than fish.
Morton’s background in work with whales and other marine mammals has expanded over three decades.
It is not just emotion that is at play when talking about our wild salmon and their demise — though compassion is natural — it is the science behind net-pen salmon farms, which are are floating feedlots of farmed Atlantic salmon that have spread sea-lice, pollution, chemicals, and infectious diseases into pristine habitats all around the world, including British Columbia, Chile, and U.S.A’s Pacific Northwest, and are having a devastating impact on wild salmon stocks. The majority of these feedlots are owned by a handful of Norwegian corporations out to make a profit off upper-class buyers, mostly in the California coastal areas. Morton and others call for shutting down pen-net farming and moving to closed containment systems.
Fraser Riverkeeper’s Lauren Hornor and Wild Salmon Circle’s Tyee Bridge spoke to the crowd at the Legislature about our new joint effort: a Stand Up for Wild Salmon (SUPS) campaign, which was also being announced and initiated on May 8 by over twenty other Waterkeeper Alliance members along the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to California. This salmon campaign is all about consumer and retailer reform, and will urge the big retailers of Costco, Safeway, Tesco, Kroger, SuperValu, and Trader Joe’s to follow the example of their fellow retailer Target. In January the discount chain, on the advice of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s SeafoodWatch program, dropped net-pen salmon from over 1,700 stores.
The migration and rally, and final march from Centennial Park to the Legislature, were awe-inspiring. People were coming up to us in the streets to join in the march. Onlookers in cars and buses honked and waved, giving us the thumbs up sign for support. A long line of marchers closed down one lane of traffic along Government Street. Everyone was inspired and energized by the number of people who gathered on May 8 to show their compassion for wild salmon heritage as well as future sustainable economic and environmental integrity of the fish.
Some concerns originating by those who are against the closing of net-pen farms point to several well-intended arguments: the loss of fish farming industry jobs and the loss of salmon to feed the world’s hungry.
Morton has pointed out, however, that the fish farming industry is becoming more mechanized, decreasing jobs anyway, but also that if farms are moved from open-net to closed containment farms, which will increase the survivability of wild Pacific salmon, that the jobs won’t leave, but would be transferred to a new more sustainable type of fish farming.
Otto Langer, in a rally last February during the Games, noted that the feed-conversion ratio involved in raising farmed fish is also not sustainable nor practical: it requires more pounds of perfectly edible fish to feed a pound of farmed salmon. Farmed salmon is primarily sold to upper-class consumers in California.
Read more about what steps you can take to help reform the farmed salmon industry.
