Feedlots of the sea.

• Author: Ryan, John C.
• Position: Atlantic salmon fish farming and environmental consequences

On a typically cool and misty day on Canada's rugged rainforest coast, two unrelated events draw, scores of tribespeople to the remote reservation town of Bella Bella, British Columbia. The annual All-Native basketball tournament brings teams from hundreds of kilometers away by ferry, fishing boat, and small plane to the homeland of the Heiltsuk Nation. The town's small gymnasium fills with tribal members cheering as Heiltsuk girls in baggy shorts with "Nation" printed across their behinds pound up and down the floorboarcds painted with traditional thunderbird and whale icons Basketball is one of the main forms of entertainment in this isolated town of 2,000 residents with 80 percent unemployment and high suicide rates.

A more historic coming-together occurs that morning when chiefs of the Heiltsuk and Nuxalk nations meet on the waterfront of Ocean Falls, a mostly abandoned village about 30 miles up a roadless fjord from Bella Bella. Putting aside their historic quarrels, the chiefs lead a small flotilla of fishing boats into Ocean Falls to protest the construction of an Atlantic salmon hatchery there by Pan Fish of Norway, the world's second largest aquaculture company. If finished, the facility will pump out 10 million young Atlantic salmon a year to supply farms proposed for much of British Columbia's remote central coast. The coastal tribes have found common cause in vowing to keep salmon farms out of their overlapping territories.

"We have things in common that we have to fight for. We are struggling to save a way of life," Heiltsuk chief Edwin Newman tells the crowd of 150 protesters at the hatchery construction site. Alongside other chiefs dressed in their full regalia of button-blanket cloaks and carved cedar masks, Newman declares, "We do not want fish farms on the central coast."

Global Domination

Aquaculture--the raising of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic species--may be the fastest-growing sector of the world's food economy. While the catch of wild fish from the world's seas has been static or dropping grace the late 1980s, and most of the world's major fish stocks are considered fully fished or overfished, aquaculture shows no signs of letting up its tremendous growth.

Between 1985 and 2000, global aquaculture output grew fourfold, to over 45 million metric tons. Aquaculture now provides one-third of the seafood humans consume. The vast majority offish farms are in Asia; they mostly raise plant-eating fish like carp, in freshwater ponds. They make an important addition to world food supplies and, overall, have relatively little ecological impact. But a small fraction of the world's fish farms raise carnivorous species--salmon, shrimp, trout, sea bass, and eels--using a highly resource-intensive practice that has impacts around the globe. No form of aquaculture chews through more of the world's marine life than does salmon farming.

Between 1985 and 2000, annual production of farmed salmon grew sixteen-fold to more than 1 million tons, surpassing the catch of wild salmon. People have pulled wild salmon from rivers and seas for millennia. Now, fish farms have replaced nature as the world's main salmon supplier.

Norway pioneered farming of Atlantic salmon in the 1960s, and it still dominates global salmon production today. But as the industry has expanded into the often depressed coastal hinterlands of Australia, Canada, Chile, Scotland, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States, it has almost unfailingly generated controversy over the impacts of its floating platform farms. The central British Columbia coast, one of the few places on Earth where economies and local cultures still revolve around wild salmon, sits at the center of the international controversy over the spreading farms.

Salmon Country

As we head up the British Columbia coast in a five-seat Cessna plane, the best antidote for the discomfort of the cramped quarters and buffeting of gale-force winds is to focus on the scenery below. We split the difference between a low ceiling of storm clouds and a jagged landscape of glacier-carved islands and mountain spines. The first few miles of rainforest-draped fjords are clearly visible; the glaciers and snowfields at the head of each fjord peek out only occasionally from beneath the clouds.

From time to time, a small grid of a dozen or so squares, in rows of two, appears on the sheltered coastal waters. Each grid is a salmon farm. Within each square, thousands of salmon, usually Atlantic salmon but sometimes a Pacific species like chinook or coho, swim closely packed inside the 10-meter nets suspended from each platform. Workers scatter feed pellets into the floating net pens and periodically check the fishes' condition and administer vaccines, antibiotics, and pesticides. Seawater flows freely through the cages, and anything smaller than the mesh size--feces, uneaten feed, drugs, microorganisms--flows freely out.

Past the northern end of Vancouver Island, signs of human civilization--towns, cabins, clearcuts, logging roads, fishing boats, salmon farms--punctuate the landscape less and less often. The land becomes an almost continuous green cloak of conifers. Islands dot the straits and bays like confetti. This is the southern end of the central British...