When my family first moved from Terrace to Victoria we attended the United Church in Langford, where my mom played the piano and my dad was an elder and taught Sunday School to the older children, like me.
(A few years later that church hired a minister from Ontario whose church had been inundated by the St Lawrence Seaway. According to my dad, he was an anti-Semite, and consequently our family separated its connection with both the church and formal Christianity. But that's another story.)
One of the stories I remember most vividly from my dad’s class was the story of Cain and Abel. Because my dad took his job as a new teacher seriously, he wasn't prepared to just recite stories: he wanted us to get at what these stories, so obviously symbolic, were actually about. We had discussion groups.
Given that my parents had recently survived occupied Holland in WW2, it is perhaps not very surprising that the story of Cain killing his brother Abel turned out to be about the evils of internecine warfare and the importance of loving your metaphorical brother, regardless of his skin colour or religion...
But it doesn't require a lot of pondering to realize that's only one interpretation, one which really doesn't doesn't get at some of the more ambiguous aspects of the story: why does God reject Cain's offering? Why is He delighted by that of Abel? What motivates Cain to kill Abel? And what’s with Cain, cursed by God Himself to be a perpetual wanderer, setting up both a lineage and a city in the Land of Nod?
Wikipedia provides a better solution to these puzzles: “Modern scholars typically view the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel to be about the development of civilization during the age of agriculture; not the beginnings of man, but when people first learned agriculture, replacing the ways of the hunter-gatherer.” So that's what I'm going with.
It's pretty clear, if one uses this template of the story, that the reason God prefers Abel's sacrifice over that of Cain is that His is a romantic, nostalgic Sensibility. According to the story, God prefers the herder, the hunter-gatherer, the one who lives closest to Nature, over the farmer, the fencer, and the house-and-barn builder.
Although, as we see from the story and as milennia of history have demonstrated, the farmer invariably replaces the hunter-gatherer-herder.
That God of the ancient Semitic Tribes, however, is very much with us still, and especially on the West Coast of Canada, where I live.
How else to explain the prevalent antipathy towards salmon farms that one finds here? The answer, it seems pretty obvious to me, is romance and nostalgia for a bygone time; it is pretty obvious from their rhetoric that the God of Nature is with the passionate “activists” and “environmentalists” who espouse the cause of wild over domestic, free-swimming over penned.
Which is interesting, because in other parts of the country we don't often see movements to ban pastures, feedlots, and slaughterhouses in favour of everyone hunting. There isn't, as far as I know, a campaign to remove all the fences and have bison reclaim the Prairies. No one is suggesting we cease breeding chickens or revert to stealing eggs from the nests of wild birds.
But that's essentially what many of us advocate for the West Coast salmon fishery. You'd think that, after we've seen what happened to the cod and salmon fisheries on the East Coast we'd understand that our continued exploitation of wild salmon is ultimately unsustainable, no matter how well we “manage” the fishery: in blunt terms, the commercial harvest of wild salmon has to end if we are to maintain any sustainable population of wild salmon.
That's not the way those who worship the God of Nature see things, however. They remain quite firmly convinced that, if only ocean-based salmon farms were banned from our coast, everything would return to as it was 50 years ago.
As if.
When we first came to Campbell River, I accompanied my friend and colleague Ray out fishing several times. We'd take his boat to Quathiaski Cove, and there, working the eddies near the mouth of the harbour, we'd “rake” herring. That involved a long foil-shaped pole, the last several feet of which had many sharp needles driven into the leading edge. That was passed through the water where there was evidence of herring, the herring were caught on the needles, and then swept into the back of the boat. Salmon loved those herring.
I haven't fished for years, but as far as I know, nobody near Campbell River rakes herring any longer. There simply are not enough of them for the method to be reliable. Instead, fishermen buy bait herring at the dock; where the vendors source these I have no idea. But I do have an idea that accounts for the paucity of herring in our waters: One of my first years of teaching here I had a first-nations student who, in the Spring, suddenly disappeared from his Grade 12 class. I heard that he had “gone fishing”, but that he'd be back. Two weeks later, he was, and he was pretty chuffed. According to him (and I have no reason to disbelieve his account) in those two weeks, “I made more money fishing with my uncle than you make in a year!” He'd hit the jackpot fishing herring on his uncle's seiner in Barkley Sound. Roe herring: the expensive roe for the Japanese market, the nearly worthless herring bodies for fish fertilizer and catfood.
Need I mention that salmon eat herring? There's still a herring fishery on the coast every Spring, but it's a shadow of what it once was, just as there is only a shadow of the salmon fishery that once - quite recently - was.
So what about the salmon farms? I'm going to have to make a bit of a disclaimer here: I'm not unbiased. Our daughter was a fish-farmer, working for Stolt, between sessions of undergrad study. So I met and talked to a lot of people interested and working in the business. What I heard wasn't always laudatory, but on balance, I thought then and still think that if we are going to eat salmon, they'd better be those raised in pens.
And we are going to eat salmon, right? That’s pretty much a given.
When salmon farms first came to our coast in the 80's there were a large number of startups. Consequently, many were located in unsuitable places (eg Baines Sound, off Denman Island, where there is very little tidal action), generally many mistakes were made, and there was a good deal of environmental degradation as a result. But things are very different now. The industry is controlled by a few large players, and, as their publicity puts it, “the industry ...now contributes over $1.1-Billion annually into B.C.’s economy and provides thousands of steady, year-round jobs in coastal communities – which pay 30% more than the average median income in B.C.” In other words, they are big economic players in places like Campbell River, and hire a lot of people, including, unsurprisingly, a lot of first-nations people.
While it is true that all commercial farming has an environmental impact, and that salmon farms are no exception, it is obviously not in the interests of these companies to degrade the environment in which they exist and on which they rely, although you would never know this if you listened to only the critics of the industry.
Two recent stories involving salmon farms are illustrative of some of the prevailing if largely misguided narratives of the “God of Nature” folk: the “occupation” of a Marine Harvest site near Alert Bay by a group of “traditional first-nations leaders and environmentalists” and the escape of some 305,000 fish from a farm in the San Juan Islands.
The escape story from the Guardian covers the issues particularly well: we have the person involved with the harvest of wild salmon who worries that, “We don’t want those fish preying on our baby salmon. And we don’t want them getting up in the rivers.” And we have the more unbiased observer, who notes that, “These things are kind of couch potatoes... They are domesticated. Imagine a dairy cow getting lost out in the Serengeti. It doesn’t last very long.” As Uvic’s Professor Volpe points out, there’s a history going back to the beginning of the last century here: no Atlantic salmon has ever successfully populated the Pacific coast. And it has been tried many times. In fact, Professor Volpe and his graduate student wrote a paper about it after that student had apparently found evidence of Atlantics breeding successfully: “Feral Atlantic salmon juveniles were found in three Vancouver Island, British Columbia, streams (Tsitika, Adam, and Amor De Cosmos) in 1998 (Volpe et al. 2000), indicating the likelihood of successful spawning of net pen-reared fish in the wild. In reviewing the scientific literature that is available through September 2006, there have been no further reports of Atlantic salmon successfully spawning on the West coast in the wild (i.e., discovery of wild juveniles) since the 2000 British Columbia sightings.” So we can probably retire that one.
The other story is more problematic, in that it largely involves unresolved emotional issues. Chief Alfred’s reported complaint is that, “the farm is threatening [his] traditional way of life by impacting wild salmon and herring stocks” and “the company does not have a formal agreement with the 'Namgis to operate in their traditional territories”. Chief Alfred is likely to be correct on the latter point; he has no way of knowing if he’s correct on the former, because that case, in spite of the best efforts of many people, is far from proven. The other part of that story is about photos of deformed fish in the pens. As if deformed fish happen only in pens! ( Spoiler Alert: the seals get the wild ones.) We’ll rely on a spokesperson for Marine Harvest to make the case: “...deformities are very rare in salmon, but like other animals and humans, they can occur. We are able to remove any poor performing or deformed fish from our farms before they are sent to market," he said. "Our salmon are very healthy, are regularly checked for health by licensed veterinarians and audited by Fisheries and Oceans Canada."
One last point: one cannot visit this issue very often without coming across references to the closed-containment land-based fish farm, which has long been the holy grail of the opponents of ocean-based net fish farms. It’s hard to see how this would work, as any economic study would suggest that the energy inputs outweigh the economic outputs. However, we no longer need to rely on theory: the ‘Namgis in fact started just such a farm, Kuterra, “with $9.5 million in government and charitable funding, including $3 million from Tides Canada”. They even harvested and sold some fish. But it’s far from a success, let alone making back its investment, so in spite of all the claims that this is the future of fish farming, I’m not the only one to have my doubts.
I know this issue isn’t going to go away, and I know there is a dedicated lobby whose aim is to end the fish farm industry on our coast. As you can tell, I think they’re misguided, and that we’d better do something real about wild salmon socks if we want to keep them viable. Closing the salmon farms isn’t a realistic option, and, anyway, wouldn’t accomplish the desired end.
In other words, I’m pretty sure Abel loses again; let’s hope that, in the meantime, we don’t lose the wild salmon as well.
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