'Environmental Nightmare' After Thousands of Atlantic Salmon Escape Fish Farm
npr.org
npr.org
I honestly think that the Joe Blog's of the world have no idea how detrimental fish farming like this is to the environment, people in my family see it as a nice alternative to eating mammals. It's sad things like this have to happen to bring it to public attention.
I hope in the future they teach children to find out where there food comes from and what impact it has on their environment before purchasing it. This stuff isn't cool.
Who's they? Isn't it our responsibility?
There are a number of basic life skills that go untaught during school years - personal finance being one of them.
Plant based proteins are more sustainable. With animal proteins, people don't think about how inefficient it is to have to feed those animals before they end up on your plate. If you want to liken it to computer science, its a O^2 kind of inefficiency.
that doesn't mean its sustainable. And what would you feed these fish farms?
Cows and pigs need lots of water and lots of food (soy, corn, etc). Considering all of the required space for the animals, and the space to grow the food for the animals, and all of the required gallons of water for the animals and to grow their food, and all of the antibiotics the animals are given, then no, its not sustainable or scaleable.
I don't know where you got the idea that they are keeping up with productivity improvements, or if you are simply making assumptions. The meat is the lowest quality its ever been and line speeds are too fast to be properly inspected. Animals have to be given so much antibiotics and medications.
The only sustainable diet is one where the total has a environment zero or even positive effect. Honey would be one such animal product, since the work that the bees does has a net positive effect on the environment. Meat from over populations would also have a net positive effect, and is part of the bigger picture when farms use fertilizers and cause eutrophication.
In order for a biological system to remain diverse and productive indefinitely (the definition of sustainability), we need to look at the whole picture. Animal proteins is part of that chain, but a sustainable diet would look very different from a regular meat rich diet. The species, the amount, and also the plants would all have to be very different.
What's are the alternatives here? The ocean is overfished, mammals and birds require large amounts of water and either large areas of land or bring welfare concerns.
I can't clearly see that fish farming is any better than farming of any other animals. Did I understand you right?
The problem comes when the fish farming industry doesn't stick to the rules and the government, who are meant to be overseeing the industry, decide to look the other way.
That exact situation has been going on in Tasmania for many years now and that type of neglect can only end badly.
More details: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-08/how-salmon-farming-got...
Theoretical alternatives to the status quo are:
* Higher taxes and fines for those using detrimental and high-risk farming practices, thus driving up the price of meat, fish and poultry to deter over-consumption, people don't need to eat animals 7 days a week. Food is simply "too cheap".
* Public education and further studies into mostly plant based diets so people aren't afraid to face the stigma and uncertainty about not having animals every night of the week. It's ok to cut back.
* Eating food grown or caught as close to your residence as possible.
* Mandatory food labelling of products, detailed information about the origin and production methods used to produce said product.
* Monetary incentives to have less children.
Gross.
So basically its the very concept of paying poor people not to procreate, so that the current existing people have a 'nicer time' (which is actually also economically incorrect).
Its super gross.
Is this some kind of a joke? How will society support itself with fewer kids?
By increasing productivity, as it has been doing over the past few centuries, and not increasing waste of resources proportionally, unlike what it has been doing over the past few centuries.
Some countries are already below the necessary births to renovate the generations, you want to reduce it even further?
Why not having suicide booths, it's faster to lead humans to extinction.
Actually, many people (myself included) advocate for the right, and plan for themselves, euthanasia as the best, most humane alternative to the current nightmare/torture regime that makes up end of life, hospice, and terminal disease care. This seems like just a logical idea at first, but nothing puts it quite in perspective like experiencing these things in your own family.
The fact that euthanasia is one small way to speed up the reduction of human population down to less environmentally destructive levels is a small benefit.
IMHO this isn't necessary in developed economies as the replacement rate is already below 2. [0]
Instead of paying people in developed countries to have fewer children, as the population of these countries would already be in decline were it not for immigration, we should spend the sane money on women's education and contraceptives in developing countries. [1]
Personally, my biggest concern is that the largest population growth is occurring in regions with the lowest levels of food security. Any disruption to the food supply in these areas will lead to large loss of life and/or geopolitical strife.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
[1] http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights1...
Personally, no. Latin America is statistically more dangerous than North America yet their population growth is not significantly larger.
The largest factor toward population growth has been shown many times to be the education level of women. More choices for women means fewer children. This is disccused in my source links above.
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.h...
Eating food grown or caught as close to your residence as possible.
How would we deal with that?
Edit: not to turn them into atheists, but to reduce birth rate.
Also to thwart any racists- no, this is not limited to poor country's or certain skin colors. Once the economy drops below a certain threshold, everyone goes full survival zombie with the Loop-Deformation. Proof: The Nazis turned europe into a white version of africa during WW2.
Soldiers of the leash. War feeding the war. Refugees pouring back and forth.
Source is mostly anecdata:
My late grandfather was a Nazi truck-driver in France, Italy, eastern Europe (Hungary, Greece) and the stories he and his war companions told - are really very similar to those you get to hear from African refugees. My grandfather and his officer made a nice little extra by smuggling people and got sentenced into a "Straf-battalion" for taking advantage of the general lawlessness of the situation.
I know, i know- the popular Nazi image in TV presents a wicked law & order extremist, but where the war went - it really was quite different. There was a mixture of total lawlessness (as in "We dont care/expend resources on subhumans") and extreme military overreactions.
And before you claim that was just fascism at work, as if politics where just a program loaded into humans, no,the unraveling usually set on before the occupation got started.
In a ironic way, the Nazis and their homecoming war proofed that all humanity, disregarding of race, pushed beyond a certain breaking point - is equally wretched and desperate.
A zombie like animal, forgetting about tomorrow, trying to see the end of today at all costs. Not a beautiful sight, but one that offers a lot to understand and learn.
The good news is, once the stress is reduced - and the war has not gone on to long, preventing the education of the next generation- there is a way to recover.
The demographic death spiral can be real. And if anything, there will be worse environmental impact simply because you have to use more invasive means to support an aging population. More factory farms since there are fewer, older workers, more resource intensive automation and robotics to take over things people did.
What if I Don't Care.
There's this weird assumption that information/education will lead people to share your viewpoint. It won't. I am fully aware of the impact that cattle farming has on the environment. I still eat beef whenever I want with literally zero concern.
I know that I can live without meat. I know that it's entirely possible to eat food that has a lower impact on the environment. It doesn't mean that I'm going to do either of those things. That doesn't make me uninformed or ill-educated. It just means my "utility function" is different to yours.
Is there? I don't think anyone thinks labelling is going to magically make people who don't care make different choices, they just think it will allow people who do care to actually make choices at all.
Most people include "social recognition" into their utility function. Spreading the idea that "eating too much beef is 'bad'" might actually alter the behavior of those who want to be "'good' citizens".
(please note I'm not advocating for the method here ; although I certainly see how it could work, I have no idea how much it actually does)
This is so true in most civilized world. But same is its opposite, paradoxically.
Dunno how the whole system of gov subsidies and externalized costs and all work around the world, but meat is severely underpriced and vegetables are severely over-fucking-priced. Like geez, anywhere around western Europe if you go around buying ingredients for a decent salad you're like "wtf, a beef steak would lead to a cheaper meal!"
And after this, occasionally see that the cheapest vegetables of one type or another are produced like a freaking continent away! Don't tell me that transport energy that is mostly from burning fossil fuels doesn't have insane environmental costs that somehow got magically externalized out of the product price.
Maybe this also has something to do with underpriced oil or dubious trade treaties making half-a-planet-away exports too cheap, or "indirectly subsidizing" transoceanic shipping costs (hint: China, hint 2: all that burnt shipping diesel is similar to the pollution of the world's cars).
To top it all, in most developed countries increasing food prices would 99% likely result in increasing minimum wages because people will fight for them, and politicians will eventually give them... Really, if there's any way in which global economy needs to be "fixed" is by making products prices include the real damn costs, including environment ones!
Vegetables are not good calories sources; they are good nutrient sources. Grains are good calorie sources: your rice, your potatoes [not a grain], and especially your corn. Grains will yield 10-20 times the calorie per acre of vegetables. Grains are so insanely productive that, on a calories per acre basis, it is more land efficient to get your calories from corn-fed livestock than from vegetables.
Calories per acre are a big reason why vegetables cost more than meat. It is also why we grow different foods in different places. It is why basically all of our [the United States] potatoes come from Idaho: the volcanic soils there grow potatoes so well that it makes more sense to grow highly efficient potatoes in Idaho and corn in Kansas and ship them back and forth, because you'd get half as much corn in Idaho and half as many potatoes in Kansas.
Re: food prices -> minimum wage, is your plan seriously to (somehow) raise food prices, so that the people who cannot afford to eat will riot / strike / protest for higher wages, so they don't starve to death?
Why don't tell you that? Have you ever looked at the energy needed to transport full cargo containers? It's not a lot. You could fully internalize the cost by using renewable fuels and it would still be cheap.
> all that burnt shipping diesel is similar to the pollution of the world's cars
That's looking at a couple very specific pollutants, and could be fixed with a relatively tiny cost if there was enough political will.
The alternative is to stop eating carcinogenic, heart disease-causing foods made out of animals and animal secretions:
Please, provide evidence that all ANIMAL products are carcinogenic and causes heart diseases.
The logical conclusion is not stop eating any animal product, is eating less meat.
First of all is more efficient. We produce human food via cold blooded animals so we need to provide less animal food to obtain 1Kg of high quality human food. Mammals and birds instead will use a considerable amount of this energy just to keep itselves several degrees warmer than the environmental temperature day and night.
Is better also because reduces waste. Fishes are aquatic and have swimming bladders. Its bodyweight is carried by the water, so you are not investing in growing several Kg of heavy unedible skeletons that will end in the trash. There is more food in 100Kg of entire fishes than in a pig of 100Kg, and you'll need to allocate less volume of garbage dump.
At difference of agriculture or industry, if you have a farm fish you need to care for keeping the quality of the water in reasonable levels for life beings. This water is still available to other animals and plants.
More efficient use of energy and water and less waste is the definition of environmentally friendly. The ugly truth is that the number of humans is ever increasing but resources are limited. Cows, sheeps, pigs and poultry use also antibiotics and spreaded parasites and diseases in the past and of course the arrival of massive quantities of them 200 years ago was also a neverending 'environmental nightmare' for lots of species of trees, flowers or insects (and a bless to other, just like salmon farms). The difference is that you can have more people with aquaculture in the end.
If we look at lakes, there are plenty that is over populated because of eutrophication, but the type of fish that thrives in that environment also eats fish eggs of the fish we want to eat. Predators can actually go extinct by a combination of prey either the eggs and humans eating the adults.
Much of this could be solved if we just wanted to eat more divers selection of fish.
That was a good nat Geo article
I find I have to starve myself to be productive once I eat, it's over. At least milk/cereal/something heavy.
Beans, maybe a good recipe slow cook... Eaiser than buying those cheap thin pizzas from Walmart for $3.99, damn ate three of them today. Was hating myself, then after hours later agonizing, I got up, solved this code problem and boom! I feel better about myself.
Granted I'm in my 20's upper abs visible, v body but family's dying by heart problems. Evolution man self correcting mechanism.
I was eating those fake sausages (green boxes) for a couple of weeks with brocolli man they're expensive. Rice is so filling too I realize.
Minestrone is good too.
PS: Salmon on the other hand are horrible as predators they cost more protean than they produce.
Humans are omnivores so while we can live off plants it's much easier to have a healthy diet if you eat some animal protean. Generally people prefer not to eat bugs / 'trash fish' etc, even if we can digest them just fine. So, we generally feed that stuff to farm animals like cows but also farm fish.
The problem is people want more meat than we get just from feeding trash fish to chickens. So, we also use farm grown plants like corn. But, salmon can't eat corn. So we would need another step say corn > bugs > salmon. And it's more efficient to go corn > chickens than corn > bugs > salmon.
So, now we are better off feeding some corn to some chickens. But, we can also feed those 'trash fish' to chickens to speed their growth. And it turns out it's also more efficient to feed chickens a mix of corn + 'trash fish' than it to use that same corn to feed some chickens and all of the 'trash fish' to feed salmon. The reason for this is chickens use much of the protean in their diet to build protean in them, but salmon also use protean in their diet for energy.
The GreenWave folks seems to have a decent alternative. They base their aquaculture on filter feeders (oysters, mussels, scallops, clams) and autotrophs (ocean kelp, a salad green which btw is the source of omega-3 in fish), with the result that their farms clean up fertilizer runoff from terrestrial farms and reduce eutrophication. Their protein requirements are even lower than fish farms, requiring 0/7ths of what a cow needs (ie no inputs).
Here's an overview from the founder Bren Smith, who incidentally is pretty funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjFPdTnclUA&t=4m20s (skip ahead to 8m for just the farm description)
That said, they are a delicious source of food that is superior to other meat in many aspect, including being very ecology friendly and space efficient. Anyone that is trying to minimize the damage that a diet has on the environment should consider adding them.
It looks like some shellfish toxicity is due to cyanobacteria[3], which is mostly caused by eutrophication from farm runoff. But scaling this system should help with that.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/choose-fish-and-shellfish-wisely/fish-an...
[2] https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/metals...
Heavy metals or things that aren't biologically eliminated accumulate as you go up the food chain.
Because filter feeders are generally low on the food chain, they are actually a food type which is very low on heavy metals. Thanks for correcting me.
Shellfish farming is very efficient and ecological, in addition to having cultural value as a traditional local activity, but it does have drawbacks.
Attribution aside, I'd like to see the technique more widely known and practiced. The commenter was defending fish farming by favorably comparing it to cows, but ignored shellfish polycultures probably because they simply didn't know about them.
It appears to be mainly China that practices it widely. To the extent the Chinese aren't scaling it globally as a climate-friendly alternative to fish farming, they leave an opportunity for other players.
Some links:
http://www.circleofblue.org/2012/china/chinas-marine-aquacul...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture_in_China
https://theconversation.com/how-farming-giant-seaweed-can-fe... (discusses both GreenWave and China)
And to come back to the topic of the original post: there's an invasive species of Japanese oysters in the Dutch Wadden Sea that you're free to harvest if you're in the neighbourhood. Although the debate on whether they are an ecological disaster or help restore the environment is not set, it's probably going to be the former if left unchecked, so you'll probably be helping out in the process.
It seems to me that a lot of damage is being done because of the idea that getting enough protein is difficult unless you eat meat. In reality, it's difficult to be protein deficient if you eat 2000+ calories/day.
I'm not advocating that everyone go vegan, but clearly the amount of meat we eat today is unsustainable. I think a good first step to addressing that is some nutrition education, and dispelling the myth that protein = meat.
I understand this is simplistic, as some plants (e.g., iceberg lettuce) provide few calories and are costly to grow. On average, eating from trophic level 1 is more efficient than eating from levels 2 or 3.
I volunteered for a decade for a group trying to save wild salmon. Towards the end, I attended the EPA hearings for adding 12+ local salmon runs to the endangered species list. So depressing. Then GWB got selected, pushing a clear "pave it all" agenda, the conservation effort fizzled; my peeps just gave up.
By comparison, Bush Sr signed the landmark federal legislation for wetlands conservation. Huge progress after the Reagan & James Watt era of environmental destruction.
I think there's been some policy progress since I left the scene. Our tribes, fishermen, and anglers have made (mostly) common cause. Still opposed by timber and developers, of course. (I don't know agriculture's current policy position.) And what can any one do about international treaties and open water and modern technology (fish spotting, tracking)?
Any way. My family loved to fish. Very involved with Trout Unlimited, Poggie Club, etc. My brother studied to be a marine biologist.
The deep irony for me is that conserving the wild fisheries would have immense positive economic impact. Ditto cultural. Our current policies (malign neglect) steal dollars from the majority to give pennies to a select few. Woot.
Edit- Removed pejorative reference to Watt's faith-based anti-environmentalism.
I understand you have strong feelings and a point-of-view, but I'd like to ask you to please attempt to make your point without slandering a religion.
We really need to learn how to talk to one-another, again, without being so needlessly provocative and confrontational.
That's certainly creative.
Plus, the failure didn't even happen during the eclipse. It happened two days earlier, when the moon would have been 20-30 degrees away from the sun's position. That combination happens quite frequently.
The article notes that tides weren't abnormally high, and had reached greater heights at some point in every month of 2017 so far.
http://www.independent.ie/breaking-news/irish-news/public-ur...
You've missed the point. Of course they do it because it makes business sense. That's the whole point of a business.
What remains a mystery is why on earth would they be farming an invasive specie right in the ecosystem they are a threat.
That's far from being the point, and it doesn't answer anything at all.
I mean, I assume this "environmental nightmare" happened on a fish farming business located in Washington. After a brief googling, it appears that Aquaculture companies in Washington are required to apply for a commercial license.
http://wdfw.wa.gov/licensing/commercial/misc_additional_perm...
Why on earth would a commercial license be granted to a business that involves introducing invasive species on a protected ecosystem?
My sister is a marine biologist for a fish farming company (not the one involved in the article). My understanding from past discussions with her is that there have been attempts to farm some of the species of pacific salmon, but they have not yet figured out how to get good yields.
Talk to a local Conservation Officer. You'll likely come away with newfound respect, but also pessimism. ;-)
What's your ideal punishment? Death? Life imprisonment? Complete liquidation of the company? Fines or wage/income garnishment for executives and mangers and board members?
Shouldn't at least some government officials also be punished? I'm miffed that they're not routinely punished for similar (or worse) lapses.
And what exactly is it for which you wish they'd be punished? Potentially introducing an invasive species into the habitat of a protected species? Or failing to do more to prevent the actual introduction?
This, to me, includes chemical factories. Whenever they have a gas leak, or an chemical spill, the fines should be utterly draconian. Personally I think a CEO of a chemical company should live no more than 1 mile away from one of her factories, but that's the environmental fascist in me.
Ineffective government officials should be fired with prejudice.
> Warren said his main concern is that Atlantic salmon could out-compete native Chinook salmon and steelhead for food and spawning grounds.
For instance, where I'm from, a failed float switch allowed millions of gallons of treated drinking water overflow into the local streams. The EPA pitched a fit about a hazardous chemical release. It is really difficult to support and believe in the EPA's mission without an explanation why the same water you drink and spray on your lawn suddenly becomes a hazardous chemical.
The article mentions "millions of gallons of raw wastewater dumped into Puget Sound in 2000, 2006 and 2009" as well as "millions of gallons of wastewater began flooding the plant" [this time, in 2017].
I could find no source indicating that the flooded water was "treated drinking water", nor that the EPA pitched a fit.
But my point still stands: Drinking water is surprisingly and counterintuitively an environmental hazard. It is easy to conclude that the local environmental agency is being irrational without good science media explaining.
It is well-understood that chlorinated water causes fish kills:
https://www.fws.gov/nc-es/edout/albefitfish1.html
http://www.vita-d-chlor.com/specs/awwarfdechlorguides.htm
http://www.fosc.org/AL-Chlorine.htm
http://ntv.ca/chlorinated-water-killed-hundreds-of-fish-in-waterford-river/These farmed salmon exist in this huge pen of netting, where they swim in their own filth and spread disease amongst each other and any wild salmon swimming through the filth that washes out from the netted pens. It hurts and damages the wild population as they spawn and swim through this sickness and get sick.
I wish they were banned personally, but if humans are not smart enough to not buy this sick farm raised salmon then we deserve to have salmon wiped from the earth.
It's such a shame.
Spoken like a true capitalist.
I don't eat meat, but watching a documentary on sea lice in farmed salmon made me lose my appetite for everything. Getting a little queasy just thinking about it.
I bet that most, if not all, decent restaurants in Japan ultra-freeze wild fishes on the other hand, even if they may not admit it.
They (can, in some restaurants or if you ask) serve the head next to the sashimi and it is still twitching so you know it is fresh. So no, they don't.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/12/national/scienc...
https://www.dsm.com/markets/anh/en_US/products/products-solu...
Isn't that called trout?
i.e. if people just ate the inputs directly then there would be more food for less environmental impact.
All meat by and large has a much worse impact on the environment per-calorie than vegetarian diets.
The laws of physics must be obeyed.
Such cows are raised in a much more sustainable / efficient manners than others, and the important tradeoffs are independent of whether they are "organic" or not.
I've never seen product labeling that reflects this, and it makes me sad.
As an aside, the Coptic christians in Cairo stopped collecting trash because the government slaughtered all their pigs, leading to a huge garbage crisis in the city.
Cows and sheep graze on marginal grassland that is unsuited to agriculture. Most countries aren't like India and suited to vegetarianism. Tibet would basically not exist without meat (and Tibetan Buddhist are specifically not vegetarians accordingly). The Inuits could never make a go at it in the arctic as vegetarians.
I've never seen actual wild Salmon whose flesh you could describe as 'vibrant rich red', it would be more of a hue somewhere between orange and pink. But I have seen farmed Salmon with that over-bright and saturated color.
Sorry about the lack of a citation, I found out about this while handling tons of infested salmon over several summers, not by reading a study. Last I heard, a study was commissioned by the DFO, but the results were kept private by the BC government; communications by government sponsored scientists were tightly regulated, beginning during premier Gordon Campbell's time in office.
Farming is not the problem. Unsustainable farming is the problem. We can raise and kill and eat animals humanely (oh irony), just as we can grow food sustainably. The problem is that knowledge is not evenly distributed...
If people filled up on more plant-based foods and had a little meat for flavor we would have much less of these kinds of problems.
Commercial fishing has absolutely devastated our oceans. Farmed fish have long been proposed as the "sustainable" solution.
If commercial, open water fishing or fish farming isn't the solution to provide sustainable food, then what is?
We need to repair the DFO, the gutting of regulatory agencies is a root cause for many of these problems.
Meat colour can be deceiving (at least for land-based mammals).
Eg - Some American supermarkets treat meat with carbon monoxide to keep it bright red for days.
http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/why-supermarket-meat-...
Edit - apparently farmed salmon are given pigments mixed with their feed to make their flesh more pink : https://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color...