Environment: Why Wild Salmon?

August-September 2000

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by Irene Vlatch

Feel guilty about eating salmon? Maybe you shouldn't.

Salmon was served at an annual banquet held in Portland in December. I am not a vegetarian, and I love salmon. However, in the context of that evening, I became aware to what degree our food choices are increasingly a political act.

I try to eat consciously and respectfully of the animal that gave its life to sustain me. This means that salmon is not just a chunk of meat; it is a fish with an interesting life, originating in a specific river to which it should return to spawn. I have made it a habit to always ask about the origin of the salmon in my plate. Wild, hatchery, or farmed? What species? If wild, from which river?

The staff person from the catering company that supplied the wonderful dinner at the December event did not know anything about the fish being served. The following Monday I called the catering company. The manager didn't know either, and had me talk to the chef. The chef himself had no idea what kind of salmon it was, as he buys it from a distributor. If the price is right, no further questions are asked. But even a chef with no environmental inclinations should ask more questions.

The Wall Street Journal/Northwest recently published an article describing a salmon-tasting experiment where six panelists (two commercial fishermen, a fisheries consultant, amazon.com's cookery editor, a Washington Fish and Wildlife commissioner, and a conservationist) were tasting cuts from identically baked kings, one from a hatchery in British Columbia, one from a farm in Washington, and one caught wild off the coast of Sitka, Alaska. They were not told which sample was from which fish, yet they all agreed that one was superior: the wild king.

If you are a vegetarian and believe that humans should not eat animal products, you might be tempted to dismiss the case with the argument that we just shouldn't eat any salmon. Period. Paradoxically, however, human consumption of wild salmon might be the factor that will ensure their survival. If you enjoy eating salmon, then knowing what you are eating is essential to your own health, to the heath of the salmon, to the health of struggling fishing communities, and to the health of the old-growth temperate rainforest of southeast Alaska and British Columbia.

Most cheap salmon available in our grocery stores is farmed Atlantic salmon from British Columbia. These fish are raised in aquaculture net pens, huge netted cages floating in sheltered inlets on the coast of British Columbia. They live in industrial farming conditions, not unlike the hog, veal and chicken farms that have replaced family farms. The fish are living in crowded and confined conditions. Their excrement pollutes both the waters in which they live and the ocean floor beneath the net pens. These unsanitary conditions make the fish vulnerable to diseases. To combat illnesses, the fish are inoculated with vaccines and treated with antibiotics and pesticides.

The farmed fish that ends up on your plate is no less contaminated than a beef steak from an industrial feed lot. Farmed salmon is also detrimental to the health of the ecosystem. Many escapes of Atlantic salmon into Pacific waters have already occurred. The escaped fish, numbering in the tens of thousands, could spread disease to native marine species. Escaped Atlantic salmon have already been documented spawning in wild salmon streams. The fear is they will displace wild salmon by encroaching on their food supply and spawning grounds.

Perhaps worse, to produce one pound of farmed salmon requires the unsustainable use of four pounds of fish protein harvested in waters off South America.

On the surface it seems that eating farmed fish would solve the problem of the consumer who likes to eat salmon but doesn't want to impact dwindling salmon runs. While in Oregon we have few healthy salmon runs left, there still are many in Alaska and British Columbia. This is where the importance of knowing what fish you are eating enters into the picture. Obviously we would not enjoy eating one of our last coho. However, we should not feel guilty about dining on a Copper River Sockeye.

It is the consumer demand for wild fish that is the most immediate economic incentive to ensure the long-term survival of the wild fish. Science is only just now identifying the interrelationships between healthy fisheries, healthy local fishing communities, and healthy forests. It is a loop where one sustains the other: we need to consume wild salmon from healthy runs to sustain the local fishing communities. These communities, in turn, have a stake in fishing sustainably, not only for the survival of the salmon, but also for their very own survival. Healthy salmon runs require properly functioning upriver forests. Industrial logging destabilizes habitats by changing water temperature and flow regimes, and interrupting nutrient and feeding exchanges. Logging roads cause increased sedimentation and frequent landslides, sometimes obliterating entire systems. Therefore, fishing communities are the best advocates for uncut forests. In turn, healthy salmon runs maintain forests as bears and other mammals scatter into the forests the nutrients from the salmon either directly by dragging the carcasses around, or through their feces.

If fishing communities disappear, then we also lose the most convincing economic argument for protecting forests. The temperate rainforests in the Alaska panhandle and on the British Columbia coast are among the planet's most diverse ecosystems. We cannot afford to lose them.

Irene Vlatch is Program Assistant for the Lazar Foundation, Portland, Oregon