We have had enough of the corrupt CEOs who sail towards offshore banks. We do not want to hear anymore about the prime ministers who attack and invade faraway countries. What we really want is to see real pirates. While those corsair and freebooter businessmen and politicians are well-known and still at large, you can confidently expect that the two detainees will spend a long time behind Spanish bars. Everyone knows that they are poor, black, Muslim and dared to attack a Spanish fishing boat.

PRISON PREFERABLE TO FREEDOM?

However, if you think twice, you might conclude that their future in prison is not so gloomy. First of all, they will enjoy three hot meals a day and they will see a doctor, probably for the first time in their lives. Besides, they will be spared the random bombing of their land by United States F-16s, and also the bullets shot by Ethiopians and Somalis working for imperialism.

In spite of the storytelling by NATO and European Union security high priests, who make a comfortable living out of sending troops to third world lands and seas like Somalia and the Indian Ocean, supposedly swamped by pirates on a rampage after European fishing boats, in the real world things are the other way round.

Perhaps Spanish fishers could forgive Somalis for not knowing the differences between the foreigners who approach their coasts in order to take away their fisheries, from those who land in order to impose a political regime, and both from those who just choose to dump their nuclear waste in the sea bed.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Somali fishermen live in one of the world’s poorest countries. Life expectancy is approximately 48 years. Around 60 per cent of the population is illiterate, while there is no compulsory basic education law. Close to 36 per cent of infants are underweight. There are half a million refugees and another million internally displaced. Hundred of thousands undergo similar living conditions. Almost everything is scarce, especially human rights.

Unicef announces that a Somali child’s chances of surviving to adulthood are among the lowest of children anywhere in the world. Add to this the fact that the odds of the child’s mother dying during pregnancy or in childbirth are also extremely high. These high death rates stem from the interaction of a number of causes set within a complex socio-political context, but are largely attributable to disease, dehydration, malnutrition, lack of safe water, and poor sanitation.’

GOOD PIRATE, BAD PIRATE

Perhaps Somalis could forgive Spanish fishers for not knowing the difference between illegally fishing in Somalia and in Norway, and not knowing the different ways each people has to protect their riches.

In 2005, a Norwegian Navy vessel seized a Galician boat illegally fishing halibut. The Navy communiqué says that ‘during the inspection we found out that the boat had big amounts of halibut hidden in its hold’. It also informs that ‘we ordered the boat to sail to Tromso (a north-western city), but the Spanish captain refused to comply with.’

Perhaps one could forgive the Norwegians for being so insistent. The very next day (20 November) they seized another Spanish fishing boat: ‘The Garoya is the second fishing boat captured in two days. It has been reported that it kept in the hold more than 100 tonnes of halibut, just like the Monte Meixueiro seized yesterday. Its captain has been charged with providing wrong information to the fishing authorities and tampering the books.’

Perhaps one could forgive Spanish mass media for not reporting these days about the story of the Spanish boats seized in the past, which took place in the seven seas. Boats have been captured by Norwegian, Moroccan, Irish, Canadian, South African, British patrol boats.

It is also rather ironic that the British engage today in chasing Spanish pirates, although they could be forgiven for this, since classical Spanish author Lope de Vega and Literature Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez – as well as various film directors – were inspired by Sir Francis Drake.

THE STATE OF SOMALIA

Somalia has not had a real government in the last fifteen years. During this period, the king of the seas (and indeed of the sky and the whole world), the greatest pirate of all times, ordered yet another military operation in Somalia.

Siad Barre, former Somalia president, was a client of the Soviets during the seventies, but this did not prevent the United States from supporting him during the eighties. When the White House decided to support the warlords in their war against the Islamists from 2000 on, the US president did not hesitate.

Westerners could be forgiven for remembering (and praising through a Hollywood film) the killing of 19 marines who took part in the Mogadishu military operation carried out by the United States in the early 90s, and forgetting the approximately 1000 Somalis that were killed in the attack.

This operation capped many years of US actions in Somalia. Somalis, like other lesser peoples, enjoyed US international aid, which mainly means shipping arms to a country in order for the beneficiaries to kill each other, and at the same time providing political support to justify the killing according to the motive in fashion: Communism, drug trafficking, Islamist terror, tribal fighting and so on.

One has to add the dumping of US-subsidised agricultural produce in Somalia, and other political and economic interventions related to oil and strategic interests, to produce a ravaged nation, physically and morally devastated.

Somali seas have not been spared foreign interventions. As Johann Hari writes, some Western countries have taken advantage of the lack of government in Somalia to dump their nuclear waste in its waters.² For Somalis, the consequences are as harmful as the consequences of war and long lasting.

To make matters worse, Somali fishers watch huge foreign ships taking away tons of fish while they barely manage to obtain some kilos with their skiffs.

Perhaps Somali fishers could be forgiven for dreaming of their sons and daughters enjoying the riches the foreigners take away for their children.

HOW THE WEST WINS

Spanish fishers fishing in the seas around Somalia and people who eat their produce back in Spain, could be forgiven for cherishing basic wishes: Working unmolested and ingesting fish proteins respectively. They could also be forgiven for electing politicians who guarantee the fulfillment of their wishes, no matter what price, other people’s life included.

These politicians could also be forgiven for setting up a Holy Alliance with their neighbours, in order to send war boats supported by war planes to compete for food with poor Somalis in the Indian Ocean, although they could negotiate fishing permits before fishing, or even pay fines if they are caught cheating, as it has happened many times in the past with Spanish vessels.

However, it cannot be forgiven that Spanish and other Westerners – who know how Somalis are mercilessly being crushed – put the blame on Somalis and hunt them when they confront the real pirates.

Pirates have traditionally been well considered by the people, in novels and in films. How revolting they became when they took over governments and corporations.

1. Operation Atalanta is campaign of the European Union to stop the ‘piracy off the Somali coast’. The joint naval patrol includes vessels from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
   A Spanish frigate captured two of the bunch of ‘pirates’ who seized the Spanish fishing boat Alacrana, and both are now in a Spanish prison awaiting to be taken to court.
2. Johann Hari, ‘You Are Being Lied to About Pirates,’ The Independent, January 9th, 2009.

I went to the main Gaza port. While I was there, I figured out how sad the sea and the fishermen are. Boats are stuck and fishermen are looking at the sea with no hope.

The Palestinian fishermen have been consistently harassed by the regular Israeli attacks on them, as they abuse the fishermen for pursuing their livelihood. Furthermore, they are prevented to work for far distances inside the sea. The allowed distance for them is just around 4.5 Km. Unfortunately, once they reach that distance, they find themselves under Israeli fire.

Around 3000 fishermen are now despondently jobless and in a real tragedy. The tragedy began with the complete blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip. The fishermen are prohibited from going to a deeper and richer area of fishing, and they have been dramatically affected with these restrictions from the Israeli navy forces. Indeed, they now have very low incomes with which to feed their families.

Ismael Kalilo is a 65-year old fisherman in Gaza City, who has spent 50 years of his life in the sea, and now lives in the Beach Camp. “I am totally satisfied to be a fisherman in Gaza, but completely exhausted by the conditions imposed on us.”

The aged fisherman is also a father of 8. I asked him how he takes care of his dependents, and how he feeds them: “No one can bear the situation that the fishermen are living with. He should go to the sea and see how much they suffer. We were peacefully fishing before the time of the siege on Gaza, as we just depended on our livelihood. We have become unable to secure even the basic needs of our life.

I asked him about his own experience regarding the Israeli navy forces. He took deep breath, then pointed at his son to tell us the story. Ahmed is 24 years old, and is also a fisherman.

“I was with my boat about a year ago at Sudania coast, north of the Gaza Strip,” he said. “With no alert and at 10 pm, I found that the Israeli ship started firing missiles toward my boat, exactly at my net. They ordered me to get back without my net. I tried to save my big net, which costs around $2000, but it was in vain. Then I found myself obliged after staying in the sea from 10am to 7am to get back home, and they took the net — including what I had fished. That even had increased our tragedy, as they took the net which we all depend on for fishing.”

“We are passing through a rough time, and we are suffering,” said Ismeal, as he took me to see the bullets still in the boats, the fishermen unable to get them repaired. “The siege has suffocated us for almost 3 years.”

Ismeal finished his interview with me, calling upon all of those people who claimed humanity, to stand beside the Palestinian people, their besieged people in Gaza, and to take responsibility for ending this daily suffering.

Erratic populations are hardly novel: 99% of earth’s emergent life forms have gone extinct. The demise of dinosaurs, awarding an obscure, half-pint mammal a leg up, dramatizes extinction – and yet a billion birds came forth. Our species is special in this regard: we hog 40% of global energy, but nothing (but the Rapture, a variant end of time fable) overrules physics, chemistry, and biology – or willful blindness towards overpopulation, pollution, and rising oceans.

Scads more of us jeopardize all, as oxygen-breathing, carbon-dioxide exhalers burn down life-forests that freely redeem oxygen from carbon dioxide. If we “grow, baby, grow” then we must “build, baby, build” and “drill, baby, drill” beyond sustainable practices. Actually, anointing ourselves “earthlings” doesn’t change our newcomer status: our million year genealogy pales next to a planet pushing 15 billion years. Lowly snapping turtles are 200 times older. On a 24-hour clock tracking 15 billion years, Homo sapiens span 10 seconds. And may not make 15.

The 10% Doctrine

So, by logic alone, should we be gobsmacked when Lovelock, pre-eminent British wizard who authored the stunning Gaia Theory, predicts 90% species die-off when heat storms erupt – and without a sharp tipping point, “just a slope that gets ever steeper.” Destined for emergency action, survivors will “escape to higher ground. We have to make our lifeboats seaworthy now [and] stop pretending there is any way back to that lush, comfortable, and beautiful Earth we left behind sometime in the 20th century.” Post-apocalypse, planetary carrying capacity: 700 million, 10% of today’s booming population.

In comparison, Cornell ecologist David Pimentel figures two billion will live decently, though 12 billion more will scrape by, plagued by heat and famine. Irony reigns: too much procreation equals the opposite, and success spells failure. So effective in decimating other creatures, our species stands as the first to jeopardize its own existence, perhaps life on the planet – and, doubly doomed, be conscious of it. We are masters of our fate, but not as anticipated, potential fossils done in by addiction to fossil fuel. And some doubt God’s peculiar sense of humor.

For Lovelock, Rising Seas Tell All

Lovelock favors sea levels to track global heating, his marker we’re beyond return to a 1950’s earth. Yet why the steep slope, not incremental change? The explanation lies in “positive” feedback loops by which one kind of warming feeds another: greenhouse gases melt reflective ice caps, thus more of the sun’s heat gets absorbed, thus warming oceans, thus fewer carbon-feeding algae, thus more greenhouse effect. Feedback loops amplify the rate of heating, causing today’s rising ocean elevations double official U.N. predictions.

In the process, Lovelock debunks politically-popular “green” scams as half-assed, feel-good dodges, even snake oil, profiting tech and finance opportunists but not deflecting catastrophe. Included scams are “cap and trade,” the incentive program to reduce emissions, and carbon trading, whereby one entity, having reduced carbon-dioxide pollution below set levels, sells this “gain” to those above allowances. Three years ago, at 87, he published The Revenge of Gaia, warning the window to save the earth was shutting. Now comes Vanishing with his dire call, like J. Robert Oppenheimer after creating the atomic bomb, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Gaia Rings the Globe

Two decades ago, Lovelock introduced his own feel-good theory, encapsulating the planet with a mythological name. Gaia science depicts a self-adjusting, homeostatic balancing act in which major biosphere constituents – plants, animals, minerals, gases, the sun’s heat – interact to sustain a life-friendly habitat. Unless one clever, greedy animal finds a way, say running dirty industrial machines for 150 years, to overtax innate safety values. What Gaia provides Lovelock is a predictive global model more comprehensive, he claims, than experts monitoring parts of the whole. Thus, his focus on rising sea levels, not temperature, for they measure two heavy-duty warming sources: “the melting of glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms. Sea level is the thermometer that indicates true global heating.”

Admittedly, Lovelock is a minority doomsayer, but what if there’s a 1% chance he’s right? Or 10%? If Dick Cheney’s 1% Doctrine on terrorism holds for this greater menace, shouldn’t we do more than organize summits? Cheney equated a 1% chance of renewed terrorism with certainty, thus feeding wildly counter-productive over-reactions. Happily, Lovelock’s solutions don’t involve unwinnable wars against wrong foes, or thrashing humane Geneva Conventions or basic privacy rights, simply respect for science and technology, like nuclear power.

Epilogue on change

In The Black Swan, economist-finance guru Nassim Taleb delivers his own wake-up call: what impacts history isn’t foreseeable change, thus the past serves as notoriously misleading guide. Taleb argues paradigm shifts come out of the blue, consequences are disproportionately transformative, and disruptive shocks often contaminate best responses. Take 9/11 as “black swan:” Bush-Cheney egregiously misread terrorism, inflating it from incendiary, symbolic tactic into full-fledged assault on civilization, thus instigating a trillion dollar “global war on terrorism.”

We’ve handled the Internet better, a black swan whose seismic shifts persist, unintended or not, positive or not. I find Lovelock useful, even as alarmist, by projecting a worst case – well, short of extinction. Yet Lovelock remains a humanist, reinforcing Santayana’s maxim, “those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We need far more scientific literacy that honors empirical data, trends, and methodology: otherwise, wise and rational planning will again be trumped by paranoia and ideology. What if planetary disruptions are ultimately more predictable than one-time shock treatments malevolent radicals think will change the world for the better?

The British Columbia capital, Victoria,¹ has only one local corporate newspaper. In the Sunday edition of the ever diminishing Times Colonist newspaper, there appeared an advertisement very much unlike the standard ad that attempts to persuade a person based on its slickness, celebrity worship, or appeal to prurient senses. The ad was a full-page letter on the back of the A section entitled in bold: “BC speak now or forever lose your fish!” It is a rationally based appeal and is replete with footnotes to peer-review science journals and annual reports.

Addressed to the people of BC, it begins, “I am no longer certain that you want wild salmon, because every level of government that you have elected seems against them.” The biologist Alexandra Morton, who has been waging a battle against the deleterious effects of salmon farming on the wild salmon population, questions why voters opt for a government unconcerned with the plight of the wild salmon. British Columbians, by dint of their voting preferences, might be viewed as oblivious to the destruction of their five native salmon stocks.

For three consecutive elections, British Columbians have voted the right-wing Liberal Party, a friend of salmon-farm corporations,² into political power in the westernmost Canadian province. These election victories have coincided with an upsurge in corporate salmon farming and catastrophic crashes of the wild salmon population.

Morton sees no mystery in the disappearance of the wild Pacific salmon: “The science is conclusive: where salmon farms exist, wild salmon and trout are in exceptionally sharp decline.”

She holds the government responsible because it has granted gatekeeper status to the fish farms in estuaries, exposing wild salmon runs that pass by to pathogens from the farms. In particular, sea lice have been implicated in the demise of juvenile wild salmon.³

Morton emphasizes that the problem is not just sea lice, and it is not just salmon that are threatened. She points out, for instance, that the “sheer numbers of IHN virus shed from farms over 100s of km from Bella Coola to Campbell River was an unprecedented threat to herring and salmon.”

Who Profits?

So why do government allow corporations to continue farming fish along wild salmon migration routes that imperil the wild fish?⁴

Morton follows the money. She further asks what money there is and for who?

Citing the BC Ministry of Environment, Morton writes that fish farms brought in $365 million in landed catch value in 2007. Wild salmon brought in $1.5 billion in tourism and $288 million in sports fishing. Sport fishing is mainly owned by British Columbians while salmon farms are mainly Norwegian-owned corporations. Citing Wilderness Tourism Association figures, full-time jobs provided by fish farms were 4,000 versus the 52,000 full-time jobs that wild salmon made possible.

The figures clearly point to the far greater economic importance of wild salmon over farmed salmon.

The evidence points to politicians colluding with the flow of money into the pockets of a few foreign corporatists against the economic well-being of many Indigenous and local people.

As Morton knows well, there are other corporatists who would like wild salmon to go away. Salmon do not just stand in the way of salmon-farming corporations:

Because wild salmon require functional habitat from the tops of mountains, down through richly forested watersheds, along the coastal shelf and out to sea, politicians can’t bear the consequence of taking a stand to protect them. They would say “no” to the loggers who want to take the most valuable trees now standing in the last thriving watersheds, “no” to those who scheme to dam, divert, and sell BC’s fresh water, “no” to miners wanting to dump tailings into the rivers, and most importantly, “no” to the oilmen greedily eyeing our coast. To these politicians, farm salmon means a salmon that means no habitat. It is a good deal for them.⁵

Corporate Contradiction

Sometimes making money can get in the way of having one’s fun.

The ex-Norwegian, now Cypriot, tycoon John Fredriksen, an avid fisherman, reached a conclusion that contradicts his 30% ownership in Marine Harvest, the world’s largest salmon-farming corporation: “I am worried for the wild salmon’s future. Fish farming should not be allowed in fjords with salmon rivers.”⁶ The world traveller Fredriksen seemed primarily concerned for his homeland’s Alta River: “Neither Iceland or Canada can measure up to Alta. Management of the river, with its exclusive and peaceful fishing spots, is special here.”⁷ Fredricksen also pointed to a global threat to wild salmon: “Sea lice, infectious diseases and genetic and ecological interactions of escaped farmed salmon with wild salmon are a serious threat to the future of both wild Atlantic and Pacific salmon.”⁸

Marine Harvest Canada’s communications director Ian Roberts — who once complained, “I believe people are starting to get a little weary of this type of Doomsday prophecy”⁹ — must have felt befuddled by Fredricksen’s Doomsday prophecy.

The Corporate Media, and Salmon Farming

On Friday, 31 July, actor William Shatner headlined the front page of the BC capital’s corporate newspaper with his appeal to remove the fish farms.¹⁰

Redolent with academic hubris, the TC quoted Brent Hargreaves, “a research scientist from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans who has studied sea lice for six years,” as questioning Shatner’s scientific knowledge to pronounce on wild salmon. Hargreaves also accuses Morton of “a big stretch” in attributing the demise of wild salmon to sea lice from fish farms. He claims there is no evidence that sea lice cause sockeye death.

I was surprised by this media slant. Why the focus on sockeye salmon when it was the Broughton Archipelago pink salmon collapse in 2002 that rang alarm bells, and sea lice were sited as the culprit.¹¹ It was pink and chum salmon that Hargreaves studied with his colleague Morton.

The writer of the article, Judith Lavoie, said that the editing had distorted the story, and that Hargreaves “was far less adamant than the story indicated – saying there is no evidence [for sea lice causing sockeye salmon deaths], but qualifying it with some of the studies on chums and pinks.”¹²

Morton replied, “Brent simply means there has been no science to prove that sockeye juveniles can be killed by sea lice. Adult salmon can be killed by sea lice, so it is only a matter of how many. Brent knows sea lice are a serious issue for wild salmon, but he can’t rock the boat. DFO policy is to support the expansion of fish farms and anyone who has a problem with that is sidelined.”¹³ ,¹⁴

Morton agreed she was extrapolating in saying that sockeye smolts — which grow for a year in freshwater and enter seawater fully scaled, as opposed to pinks and chums which go to sea right after hatching and have no scales — can be killed by sea lice. However, Morton says “that does not mean sockeye infested with lice will be fine and will survive and complete their life cycle. It remains, whenever I see a generation infected with lice as they go to sea… They don’t come back in healthy numbers.”¹³

Morton added,

Brent’s colleague Simon Jones says a .7g pink salmon can survive with 7.5 sea lice on it. My research and the European research found young salmon can survive with about 1 louse per gram of body weight. Who knows why the difference in findings, but one thing does jump out and that is in Jones’ work all the infected fish were sedated with a chemical early on in the experiment. Perhaps this killed all the lice or made them sluggish. I don’t know, but he does not even cite my published study nor address the difference. This is not good science, particularly because his findings are such an outlier.

In the same 2 August issue as Morton’s ad, the TC makes the case that “there is little hard information to go on” about the infestation of sea lice on wild salmon.¹⁵ Vancouver Island University professor Duane Barker, “an expert in fish diseases and parasites,” is quoted as saying: “recent research data indicates higher levels of sea lice on wild salmon caught in the open ocean away from farms.”

Morton noted that there are “tens of papers myself and others from here to Norway have published on extensive research on how this occurs and the impacts”:

Duane Barker is a making a political statement of little biological significance and it is very disappointing such a person was given 400,000 to study sea lice by the government. Sea lice biology occurs in the open ocean.  There has always been more lice there than in the inshore waters.  When wild salmon return to spawn, all their lice die of fresh water and so the inshore waters wash clean the parasite cycle is broken between generations.

Today, however the wild salmon infect the farm fish as they pass on their inbound migration. The farms allow the lice to reproduce all winter and infect the young salmon. It is irrelevant if there are more or less lice on them than in the open ocean…they are not at all prepared for any lice and what they are getting at the fish farms is killing them. Baker is very misguided saying there is “little hard information.” …

It is not in the public’s interest for people to be confusing [the] issue, but it is in the fish farmer’s interest. This is a variation on the theme talk and log.

No one is raising alarms about the number of lice on adult fish out in the open ocean.  Dr. Baker is talking about adult fish, but the concern is regarding the juveniles just as they leave the rivers and become infected.  Adult salmon frequently have 10 lice or more, but the very young salmon die of one or two.¹⁶

The salmon-farm mouthpieces defy believability.¹⁷ Does the corporate media deserve any trust¹⁸ or credibility?¹⁹ The TC is a part of the Canwest Global corporation, by no means a moral media beacon.²⁰ Just like the corporate fish farms, the corporate media’s primary motive is profit.

Whither Wild Slamon?

“Fundamentally,” fish farms are unconstitutional argues Morton “because they attempt to privatize ocean spaces and own schools of fish in the ocean.”

Morton offers many solutions. The sine qua non solution is simple, and it has been known for a long time: closed containment systems for fish farms. Writes Morton, “Feedlots belong in quarantine, because they break the natural laws that prevent disease epidemics.”

Morton is giving people a chance to make their collective voices heard. She believes people power can protect the wild salmon and is behind an online petition where people can register their vote for wild salmon. The logical choice is clear: a vote for the preservation of wild salmon is a vote for ourselves.

1. Victoria is the imperialist designation, the indigenous Songhees called it Camosack. British Columbia is also an imperialist designation, which some people trace back to Christopher Columbus. Kathy Pelta, Discovering Christopher Columbus: How History Is Invented (Lerner Publishing Group, 1991): 50. Delno C. West and August Kling, “Columbus and Columbia: A Brief Survey of the Early Creation of the Columbus Symbol in American History” Studies in Popular Culture, 1989, 12(2): 45-60.
2. The BC government has also offered BC wilderness — including salmon-bearing streams — for the profit of private interests. See Melissa Davis, “Deciphering the truth about the B.C. Energy Plan,” Georgia Strait, 20 April 2009.
3. Martin Krkošek, Mark A. Lewis, and John P. Volpe, “Transmission dynamics of parasitic sea lice from farm to wild salmon,” Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, 7 April 2005, 272 (1564): 689-696.
4. See Kim Petersen, “Capitalism and an Impending Wild Salmon Apocalypse,” Dissident Voice, 22 December 2007.
5. Alexandra Morton, “Dying of Salmon Farming” in Stephen Hume, Alexandra Morton, Betty C. Keller, Rosella M. Leslie, Otto Langer, and Don Staniford, A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, (Harbour Publishing, 2004): 235. This book is scathing indictment of the salmon-farming industry. See review.
6. ”Steng fjorden for oppdrett,” Altaposten, 19 June 2007. Jeg er bekymret for villaksens fremtid. Det burde ikke vært tillatt med oppdrett i fjorder der det finnes lakseførende elver.
7. ”Steng fjorden for oppdrett,” Altaposten, 19 June 2007. Verken Island eller Canada kan måle seg med Alta. Forvaltningen av elva, med eksklusivitet og ro ved fiskeplassene, er spesiell her.
8. Severin Carrell, “Fish billionaire in plea to save wild salmon,” Guardian, 29 September 2007.
9. Bjørn Erik Dahl and Agnar Berg, “Marine Harvest Canada boss attacks Science article writers [but not Frericksen],” Intrafish, 18 December 2007.
10. Judith Lavoie, “Shatner’s latest mission: remove fish farms,” Times Colonist, 31 July 2009.
11. See Kim Petersen, “The Great Auks, Wild Salmon, and Money,” Dissident Voice, 15 December 2004.
12. Personal communication, 4 August 2009.
13. Personal communication, 3 August 2009.
14. On the complicity of the DFO in the mismanagement and non-conservation of wild salmon, see Hume et al., A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming and Kim Petersen, “The Great Auks, Wild Salmon, and Money,” Dissident Voice, 15 December 2004.
15. “Professor wins grant to study sea lice,” Times Colonist, 2 August 2009: A6.
16. Personal communication, 2 August 2009.
17. Kim Petersen, “Farmageddon and the Spin-doctors,” Dissident Voice, 29 May 2003.
18. Kim Petersen, “Disinformation: A Crime Against Humanity and a Crime Against Peace,” Press Action, 17 February 2005.
19. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).
20. David Beers, “Marc Edge on ‘Asper Nation,’” The Tyee, 13 November 2007. The associate professor of journalism at Sam Houston University makes the case that CanWest Global is “Canada’s Most Dangerous Media Company” because of its ownership editorials that attempt to set the political agenda and influence democracy. On Canwest’s flagship newspaper, see Kim Petersen, “The Corporate Media and Critical Thinking in Education,” Dissident Voice, 20 August 2009.

Israel’s murderous 22-day offensive last December/January left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties, 200 schools, 39 mosques and two churches damaged or destroyed. The International Committee of the Red Cross says the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair”, unable to rebuild their lives because Israel, having wantonly wrecked their civil society and infrastructure, is blocking efforts to bring in the necessary repair materials. Those on board the Spirit of Humanity were acting in accord with donors’ pledges of $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation and US President Obama’s request to Israel to let those supplies pass.

The mercy ship sailed from Larnaca, Cyprus, with a crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. In the early hours of Tuesday morning Israeli warships surrounded it and threatened to open fire if the crew didn’t turn back. When they refused to be intimidated, the Israelis jammed their instrumentation and blocked their GPS, radar, and navigation systems, putting all lives at risk.

The ship had been searched and given security clearance by the Port Authorities in Cyprus before sailing, and posed no threat.

Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, says the seizing of the Spirit of Humanity is unlawful and the continuing blockade of Gaza a crime against humanity. Yes, yes, Mr Falk. But the question as always is, what is your paralytic, useless organization doing about it? Or is hand-wringing all it’s good for?

Many here, including myself, immediately wrote to David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, about the outrage. Two days later I called the Palestine desk at the Foreign Office in London. The person I spoke to sounded uncomfortable having to trot out the same old gobbledigook about “working hard to resolve the problem” and “doing all we can”. He said the six Brits were in Israeli custody and nobody was sure where exactly the incident took place. However, the vessel was fitted with a SPOT GPS tracker, so the system should have a record of their position when attacked.

The real problem, as I suggested, is that Israel dares to kidnap Brits on the high seas and doesn’t fear the consequences – no doubt confident there won’t be any. I was reminded that Israel had issued warnings (and so had the Foreign Office) not to travel in that area. What area? Mustn’t one travel in international waters?

The spokesman assured me that progress was being made. There was “movement” on getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza, but I pointed out that nobody had seen any evidence of Israel conforming with international law and Geneva Conventions. He claimed there was also “movement” on halting settlements on occupied territory, although I observed that the Israelis had just OK’d more illegal building.

I also reminded him about the ramming of the MV Dignity on a similar mission by an Israeli gunboat on 30 December, 53 miles from shore, and how people here were still hopping mad that nothing had been done about it. The vessel, with 16 on board, was badly damaged and had to limp to a safe Lebanese port. As far as I know, there was never an offer of compensation and no demand from London. As usual, somebody else had to pick up the tab for Israel’s unbridled destruction.

The Dignity had a cargo of 3.5 tonnes of medical supplies, the majority donated by the Cyprus government, and a British skipper and a Greek mate. It carried fourteen passengers, one of whom was Cynthia McKinney. There were also two surgeons and a Palestinian physician. A friend of mine was among them and wrote this chilling account of the attack…

At 04.55 hrs EMT on 30 December, searchlights appeared astern. There were two Israeli gunboats. They came abreast, circled and stayed with us. These boats can do over 45 knots, carry ten tonnes of fuel and have sophisticated weapon systems including Hellfire missiles. Tracer bullets were fired skywards, forming ellipses, and flares put up. At 05.30 hrs approximately, one gunboat was playing its searchlight on the port side of ‘Dignity’. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash at the bow, and then another almost simultaneously, and another on the port beam… The bow dipped and it seemed the boat was breaking up. It was dark, the wind force was 4 to 5 and there was a 10ft sea. The master shouted ‘we have been rammed’. It was feared the boat would sink. He broadcast a Mayday distress signal; there was no response.

Cynthia McKinney and Caoimhe Butterly could not swim; the life jackets were rapidly deployed to all. The hull was taking water but bilge pumps were working. The first words from a commander of one of the gun boats came over the radio. First there was the accusation that the ship’s company was involved with terrorists and that it was subversive. Then there came the threat to shoot. The master was forbidden from making for Gaza or further south to El Arish in Egypt. He was ordered to return to Larnaca – about 160 miles, even though the boat was badly damaged and the Israeli did not know whether there was sufficient fuel, which there was not. He set a northerly course and the boat stayed buoyant in a moderating sea. A crew member arranged with the Lebanese authorities for a safe harbour in Sour (Tyre) where jubilant crowds thronged the quays. A UNIFIL ship came out to escort us and the Israeli gunboats, which were following, fell back.

Was there lethal intent? A gunboat came out of the black of night with no lights showing whilst a searchlight from the other gun boat displayed our port hull as its target. It would have approached at about 30 degrees to the Dignity’s port and at speed. The intention to sink the Dignity and thus to drown its company was clear. If the hull had been GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic) it would have shattered and the boat would have sunk like a stone 53 nautical miles off Haifa. Fortunately, the hull was constructed of marine ply with timber ribs and survived…. The ship’s company were repatriated except for a resolute Scot, Theresa McDermott. She was imprisoned in Ramleh gaol. When the British Consulate in Israel was contacted for assistance in finding Teresa, staff refused to help locate her saying they couldn’t provide assistance to a UK citizen unless she personally requested it. Teresa was released after six days, her ‘crime’ probably being a member of the International Solidarity Campaign like Rachel Corrie before her.

My written question to Mr Miliband was simply this: “Why isn’t Her Majesty’s Government providing the mercy ship ‘Spirit of Humanity’ with an escort to protect against the unlawful, piratical interference and threat to life by the Israeli navy? There have been repeated incidents of harassment, damage, theft and armed aggression on the high seas or in Palestinian waters by the Israeli regime against unarmed vessels”.

The British government has loudly pledged Royal Navy help to stop the “smuggling” of arms to the Gaza resistance but won’t protect Gaza’s fishermen from being fired on by Israeli marauders while trying to earn their living. And evidently the government can’t be bothered to protect our own people going about their lawful business.

But, sure enough, they kicked up an almighty fuss when Iran nabbed 15 British sailors two years ago for allegedly straying into Iranian waters.

For our sins we are saddled with a foreign secretary who calls for Israeli tank crewman Gilad Shalit’s release but not the release of 11,000 Palestinian civilians – some of them women and children – rotting in Israeli jails. He even allows the British ambassador to become a dogsbody of the Jewish community in this one-sided campaign. On 25 June Miliband said: ‘Today is the third anniversary of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Both British Ministers and the British Ambassador in Israel have had repeated contact with Gilad’s family and emphasized our support for Gilad’s immediate release. Last September, the Ambassador helped to deliver over 2,000 Jewish New Year cards for Gilad to the ICRC as part of a campaign organized by the UK Jewish community. I repeat the UK’s call to Hamas for his immediate, unconditional, and safe release. We share the Shalit family’s dismay at Hamas’s refusal to allow the ICRC access to Gilad.

It’s shameful that his dismay doesn’t extend to the 11,000 Palestinian families.

British people are waking up to the truth about Israel’s lawlessness. In the absence of firm action from the British government they are taking reprisals of their own, in the form of boycotts, which has driven Mr Miliband to complain that “the Government is dismayed that motions calling for boycotts of Israel are being discussed at trade union congresses and conferences this summer”. He insists that boycotts “obstruct opportunities for co-operation and dialogue and serve only to polarise debate further. Boycotts would only make it harder to achieve the peace that both Palestinians and Israelis deserve and desire”.

Mr Miliband hasn’t learned the lesson of the last 61 years. And our prime minister-in-waiting, David Cameron (a Zionist and, like Brown and Blair, a patron of the Jewish National Fund), is no different. He says: “I think there’s something else we need to do, which is to say to our academics in this country that boycotts of Israel are completely unacceptable, and I think we also need to say that to the trade unions.”

Nowadays you have to carefully to pick your way through a veritable obstacle-course of pro-Zionists, Chosen Ones and Israeli stooges that inhabit every nook and cranny in the corridors of power and dominate Britain’s key defence bodies. These Israeli flag-wavers seem only too happy for the Israelis to piss on us – and on the rest of the world – while rewarding them with more and more trade and scientific co-operation.

I ask you, dear reader, to stay with me a little longer and follow the key information with me, for we are all going to feel the consequences quite soon, and only the actions you do right now are going to make the outcome any better.

The sad truth is that the dissolution of the atmosphere is moving faster than anticipated. The key indicators are exceeding most of the computer projections. Nowhere have the remedial actions already taken made things better.

This is because 80 percent of global warming comes from burning fossil fuels, and none of the wind farms or hybrid cars has made the slightest dent in its use.

As more people and nations acquire more wealth, consumption rises and emissions increase — all exacerbated by the growing world population. This combination is increasing world temperatures, especially in the northern hemisphere where the ice in the Arctic sea is fast disappearing.

In Footprints (December 2006) I reported the US Navy calculation that there would be no summer sea-ice in the Arctic by 2012, whereas the international IPCC study had earlier calculated this would not happen until the end of the century.

Last year it was reported that ice-melt was exceeding expectations by 30 percent. At the Canberra Conference a number of speakers said they “would not be surprised if all sea-ice will be gone within a year or two.”

The great glaciers of Greenland are supporting the sea-ice nearby, but these too are melting. Speaker after speaker produced evidence that the Greenland ice sheets were “unstable”, seriously melting around the edges and being undermined by melt-water rushing through crevasses and literally putting the skids under the glaciers, so they slide faster towards the sea.

One large glacier on the west coast, 3 miles wide and a mile deep, is now slipping into the sea at 2 meters an hour, when the normal rate was around 90 meters per year.

We know that were all the ice on Greenland to melt, sea levels would rise over 7 meters. The question is how long may this take? The IPCC estimate of hundreds of years is being contradicted by studies of past glaciations. Andrew Glickson and Bradley Opdyke showed that at the end of earlier ice ages the glaciers collapsed suddenly.

Suddenly does not mean over a century or two, but within a decade.

We all saw the speed at which this can happen in 2002 when 2,600 square kilometres on the Larsen B ice shelf in the Antarctic disintegrated and disappeared in less than five weeks.

This could happen with Greenland.

We are already feeling the consequences in Australia. The day before the conference it was reported that low-lying coastal areas like Cairns and Narrabeen will be at serious risk.

The Sydney Morning Herald had earlier reported the IPCC study that showed that 700,000 houses lie within 3 kilometres of the coast and less than 6 meters above sea level, most of them in NSW and Queensland (July 19, 2006).

It looks like the government is beginning to recognize what a monumental problem this is going to be. We are a coastal civilization. Most of us live within either sight of the sea or just a short drive away. Our beaches and our beach culture help to define us.

In August the Federal Department of Climate Change warned that a one metre increase in sea levels would push the waterline inwards by an average of 100 metres. Combined with storm surges and king tides the consequent coastal flooding could affect double this area.

Experts working for the Victorian State Government have warned that suburbs such as Elwood, St Kilda and South Melbourne are at risk, while towns like Lakes Entrance and Cottesloe will probably need to be moved to higher ground. The situation is similar in other states.

Will Steffen of the ANU told the Coast to Coast conference in August that “we (meaning scientists) have underestimated. We see change happening much faster than we thought,” and went on to warn that devastating rise in sea levels is now inevitable. It means that close to a billion people will be displaced around the world — this is not just a local problem.

These warnings do not address the most important ethical issues: If your house was on the beach, or just a street or two away, how would you feel being forced to move? Where would you go? Who would take you in? It could not be sold, so how would you repay your mortgage?

These warnings are based on a sea level rise of just one metre.

Britain is a step ahead of us, for their Environment Agency is planning to evacuate parts of the coast. The Daily Mail (19 August) reported, with astonishing photographs, that houses and farming land are already being washed away.

Early in the year the UK government promised that no seaside villages would be abandoned. Since then it has faced reality and now proposes to let the sea breach part of the Norfolk coast.

Understandably the reactions have been swift. Especially in Norfolk where much of the land is only a few meters above the North Sea.

The locals were horrified. In just this one area six villages, 300 properties, thousands of acres of farmland and a section of the Norfolk Broads would be wiped off the map, while much of the Suffolk coast would be inundated shortly afterward.

We have not faced this issue in a public way in Australia, not yet, though there is an indication in a recent ruling by Victoria’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal that vetoed the approval for six buildings in Gippsland because of threats from rising sea levels.

Here is the most potent political problem. How will we who live on or near the sea react? What is the political fall-out? Will we demand sea-walls and expensive protective measures? This has already been demanded by some wealthy Byron Bay and Cottesloe residents. If not built, or not affordable, and if our houses do get washed away, who will recompense us for our mortgages? Let alone our loss of wealth?

Dr Jo Mummery of the Department of Climate Change has estimated that 270,000 houses in NSW alone are currently under risk, many very expensive. If their mortgages were only average, the unrecoverable loss would be close to 100 billion dollars.

It is unlikely that insurance will cover it. It is also unlikely that the Federal Government will either. When asked by the Victorian Premier whether Canberra would pay to hold the sea back, Senator Wong pointed out that “matters of land ownership and land development reside with state and territory governments”.

The buck will be passed, and a million Australians will be at imminent risk of being swamped or undermined by the sea. What will happen to the value of their properties over the next decade or so? There is no compensation available for that.

This scenario assumes that only insignificant portions of Greenland and the Western Antarctic will melt. But we know this is unrealistic. The one metre rise being considered in most public discussions will be exceeded.

How do we know?

It was agreed at the Conference that two degree rise in global temperatures is now inevitable from the pollution we have already put into the atmosphere, though it may take us until 2025 to get there. We also know that in the historical past every degree rise in temperature has quite rapidly produced a minimum 4 metres rise in sea levels.

So, the past tells us that 8 meters is on the way, though none know when. This is not the one meter assumed in our government’s discussions.

Also, there are the international implications: The mere 2 percent of the world’s land that is less than 10 metres above sea level is home to more than 10 per cent of the world’s population — 680 million and counting — and much valuable property and vital farmland.

Without mega-engineering protection, many cities would be inundated — including New York, London, Sydney, Vancouver, Melbourne and Tokyo — and leave surrounding areas vulnerable to storm surges. In Florida, Louisiana, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and elsewhere, whole regions and cities would vanish. China’s economic powerhouse, Shanghai, has an average elevation of just 4 metres.

We need to address the full enormity of this issue before it is foisted on us. No government will face the unpalatable unless we push them into it. So, this is what you can do:

Personally visit your local members, state and federal, and your local councillor, and tell them what you want them to do. It is confronting, even for a politician, to be faced with your strong opinions, your real worries for the future and your determination to have them act in our interests.

Do it! And do it today, please.

California has spared no expense to either taxpayers or natural ecosystems to attain its status as the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet. It would surprise few that California was built on gold, greed, extraction, depletion, extinction, dubiously acquired large-landed semi-desert agricultural empires, well-gifted railroad land grants fueling speculative growth, and highly subsidized stolen water—all comprising a tunnel vision for overextended populations and infinite growth in a world utterly finite.

The incomprehensible vulnerability of California’s over-reaching population centers (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose), the projected urban expansion of the Central Valley, and the weight of climate-warming models leaves one haunted by civilization’s lack of respect for a river’s entitlement to its water and the food systems that it naturally perpetuates.

There’s only so much natural wealth covering the 158,302 square miles of California’s ten hydrologic regions. When a region overextends its local resources, it must take from another. More than water is diverted; it drains the very wealth of the food chains these waters support in aquatic, terrestrial, and ocean basins.

With 200 million acre-feet (MAF) of average precipitation spreading over 100 million acres containing 450 known groundwater basins and draining on average 71 MAF of runoff through 20,000 miles of rivers and streams, California has only 1,900 river miles legally protected from dams and diversions. All but one major river remains dam-free, the Smith River on the upper north coast.

About 42 MAF of the state’s runoff is captured and diverted through six major systems of reservoirs and aqueducts. This massive infrastructure artificially waters the coastal region from the North Bay to San Diego, and the Sacramento Valley through the San Joaquin Valley into the Tulare Basin, the Mojave Desert, and the southernmost Imperial and Coachella valleys.

Before the Spanish arrived in 1769, there were only twelve large natural lakes in California—Lake Tahoe, Lower Klamath, Goose, Tule, Honey, Eagle, Clear, Mono, Owens, Kern, Buena Vista, and Tulare Lake. Today the latter four are devoid of original wildlife, having been dewatered for agriculture. Tulare Lake, a once-thriving ecosystem in the lower San Joaquin Valley, was four times the area of Lake Tahoe. Today, 1,200 non-federal dams and 181 large federal dams with their reservoirs temporarily dominate a contrived oasis that is doomed by sediment, evaporation, the force of time, the laws of nature, and global warming.

These numerous artificial lakes defy the balance between natural surface water stores and underground stores. In nature, 70% of the fresh water circulating in the hydrologic cycle is stored underground and a combined total of .017% for lakes, rivers, and land-locked seas. Underground storage is free from evaporation, siltation, and storage cost (both economically and environmentally).

Before European contact, underground glacial water stores were estimated at 1.3 billion acre-feet—the entire California landmass under thirteen feet of water. This now has been overdrafted to 850 MAF. Like oil, the remaining supply will be extinguished in less than a hundred years. One out of four Californians rely totally on groundwater, and nearly three-quarters of a billion acre-feet of that groundwater once lay under the Central Valley. Continual overdrafts in the region have caused the landmass to subside as much as thirty feet, yet the aquifer remains a major water source for agricultural production.

Five million acres of Central Valley wetlands—nature’s food bank, filtration system, and flood control mechanism—once brimmed with life including half a million Tule elk and sixty million ducks and geese. Reclaimed for agriculture, this area has been reduced to 350,000 artificially managed wetland acres. Nine out of every ten acres of riparian woodlands are gone, along with ten thousand grizzly bears that once roamed the valleys and foothills. The loss of mega and micro flora and fauna is beyond counting.

Ninety percent of the coastal salt marshes between Morro Bay and San Diego are gone. The 200,000 acres of vibrant salt marshes that once surrounded the San Francisco Bay have been reduced to 35,000 acres by landfill for urban development. The Bay Delta, the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, drains 40% of the state’s total runoff. It is the main pumping station for the massive State Water Project and the Central Valley Project. It serves two-thirds of California’s population and irrigates millions of San Joaquin and Tulare Basin acres. Eighty percent of all developed water is consumed by agriculture.

The Delta is not on the verge of collapse; it is collapsing. Once supporting 345,000 acres of salt marshes and a major fishery for salmon and smelt, it has been reduced to 8,000 marsh acres, with Delta pumps decimating the fisheries. With valuable marshes reclaimed as islands below sea level, they are protected by a series of poorly maintained and aging levee systems vulnerable to earthquakes, storms, and climate change.

Historic flows from the Delta to the Bay have been reduced by half, increasing saltwater intrusion into the freshwater system. (Normally freshwater flows from the Sierra snowpack create a hydraulic barrier holding back intruding salt water.) California’s unceasing march towards 50 million people by 2015 will increase demands and destabilization. A one-meter rise in sea level will inundate about 200 square miles of Delta land. Long-term climate patterns anticipate a sea level rise of six meters. Loss of the Delta will have a catastrophic effect on southern populations and agriculture. Today’s water consciousness, especially in the Bay Delta, is motivated less by the loss of fisheries and ecosystems and more by the loss of water supply and its curbing impact on agriculture, growth, and development.

Salmon are the keystone species, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Untold millions, perhaps ten-plus million salmon, once migrated between Monterey Bay and the Oregon coast through 582 coastal streams—while steelhead migrated along most of California’s 800-mile coastline. During the winter of 1883-84, more than 700,000 salmon were caught and processed in the Bay Delta alone. By the early 1900s, cannery operations had become commercially unviable. Perhaps 80% of that protein source has been depleted now, with only 10% of the suitable spawning sites remaining.

Think about what the salmon represent in total natural energy distribution and conversion—as an energy component, their nourishing value to the sea, the land, the aquatic and terrestrial food chains, and human life.

Once 400 million strong throughout North America, beavers once populated all the tributaries of California’s great rivers. Building temporary small dams from nearby willows, alder, poplar, birch, maple and aspen, they trapped nutrients from twigs, leaves, branches, and logs, which mixed with silt behind the dam, creating a clear, cool, deep-water fishery. Bacteria break down the cellulose, which feeds protozoa, which feeds cyclops, daphnia, fresh-water shrimp, mosquitoes, dragonflies, caddis worms, tadpoles, and water spiders. These in turn feed young trout, salmon, and frogs, which feed egrets, ospreys, golden and bald eagles, kingfishers, turkeys and owls.

Downed trees fill with insects and feed woodpeckers and sapsuckers. The increased wet area around the beaver pond absorbs flood waves and slowly infiltrates water into the groundwater table. When the building materials deplete, the beavers move on to another location. The dam, filled high with rich, black organic muck, breaks down, causing the water to change course and meander around. As the area dries it becomes a rich pasture of grasses, feeding herbivores which feed predators. The meadow, recolonized by the seeds of the trees that initiated the process, begins anew. Multiply this lifecycle by 13,000 years and you have the continual development of fertile valley bottomlands and a regenerative model for human developments.

Without considering global warming, a century from now all man-made reservoirs that are not full of silt will nonetheless have lost their operational capacities to support agriculture, prevent floods, and serve human population centers. The moment they were filled, the concrete’s limited lifespan began its 50-100 year process of degeneration. Where’s the future?

This narrative represents a very short list of human events upon the landscape. The visible consequence of California’s altered watersheds and landscapes translate into today’s deepening water scarcity. The beaver negotiated its survival within nature, paid for the space it occupies by creating a pool of regenerative life, borrowing energy and converting it to produce a sum of energy far greater than it borrowed from nature—this is the model of regeneration.

In stark contrast, civilization consumes nature, converting its energy in a way that exhausts its supply, and then we return the waste with a toxic aspect that further devalues the natural systems—leading to air, soil, and water pollution, depleted fisheries, constipated rivers, ocean dead zones, deforestation, erosion, salinated valleys, overgrazing, wildlife extinction, toxic dumps, nuclear waste, and yes, global warming.

One can readily see that California as well as the planet is exhaustible. Our unique faculties allow us to shape and modify the land that provides for our survival. That faculty, that capacity, that survivability, comes at a great price, a great responsibility. That price is regenerative stewardship over the land.

The Waters of Change

As a consequence of natural evolution, the Earth’s surface has adapted to the sun’s radiant heat through a renewable hydrologic cycle. How a warming climate relates to the hydrologic cycle is the subject of the following discussion.

There is a high degree of scientific agreement that our planetary energy use relates directly to climbing temperatures. Current climate models are constantly readapting to temperature changes that are occurring much more rapidly than expected due to the climate feedback systems and non-linear movements. The climate system is the hydrologic cycle, and to the extent that model changes, so change rainfall and snow patterns across the state.

Today cold, moisture-laden westerly storms roll off the Pacific Basin from the Gulf of Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands primarily between December and April. They lift over the low-rising Coast Ranges, releasing a taste of their precious load before falling into the arid rain shadow of the 450-mile-long Central Valley. Having warmed during its descent across the lower valley floor, the stingy jet stream yields little moisture to today’s artificially contrived breadbasket of California.

The storms’ real contender is the west-tilting, 400-mile granite spine of the Sierra Nevada. Representing one fifth of California’s landmass, much of the range exceeds 8,000 feet in elevation. Mount Whitney reigns supreme at 14,494 feet. As the air rises, cools, and condenses, the contest between landmass and planetary water cycle is resolved. Moisture molecules transform and surrender as snow.

On the eastern or rain-shadow side of the Sierra is a long narrow trench known as the Great Basin. Any moisture that escapes the wringing of the western Sierra then faces the western front of the 14,000-foot White/Inyo Mountain range, which creates the watersheds of now dewatered Owens Lake and endangered Mono Lake.

Seventy-five percent of California’s precipitation falls north of Sacramento. The critical Sierra snowpack provides roughly 60% of California’s water demands and represents the state’s Achilles heel (along with the Bay Delta) in the wake of a warming planet. The Sierra range contains 24 major watersheds and the headwaters of California’s American, Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Upper Sacramento, Feather, Merced, Tuolumne, Mokelumne, Cosumnes, Calaveras, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Kern, Caliente, and Yuba rivers. All these major rivers are constipated by numerous dams and their diversions.

This 20th-century hydrologic model laid the foundation for the infrastructure of 1,400 dams and reservoir systems providing water storage and flood protection for California. The 21st century will provide an altogether different climate model, and water management policies and structures will have to change dramatically if the state’s population is to survive that challenge.

The greatest challenge for water managers in today’s weather system is timing the flows from the Sierra snowmelt. A dicey business without climate change considerations, we’re talking about 15 million acre-feet (MAF) of runoff before it hits the first series of dams, and 20 or more MAF at or near the confluence of the Delta. The 20th-century model could anticipate gradual runoff in late spring and early summer to meet the greatest demand between summer and fall. These reservoirs have to be relatively empty in the winter for flood protection. Managers have to decide when to fill the reservoir to meet the greater demands of the dry season. Fill them too early and you risk floods; fill them too late and you risk insufficient supplies and drought conditions.

Climate models show the Sierra snowline climbing upward. As the landmass heats, it requires a greater volume of water to resolve the heat, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, producing more intense rainfall and resulting in less snow, earlier and greater mass movements of flows, and erosion. Snowfall that would normally inundate the Sierra throughout the winter and gradually melt between late spring and early summer will come as intense wet storms, generating massive flows and torrential flooding throughout the lower watersheds. This will alter rivers, creeks, and stream channel profiles significantly and cripple the Bay Delta as a freshwater supply for the southland as water is lost to massive runoff and not stored and released slowly as snow.

Incidence of landslides will greatly increase the sediment budget, and some landslides will create slidedams and cause a river or creek to change course, incising fresh sediment loads from alluvial plains. The large recipient of these massive, sediment-laden flows will be the mega-million acre-feet reservoirs of the State Water and Central Valley projects. Inundating the already limited-lifespan reservoirs, the increased sediment budget will reduce their functionality.

These large events will also decrease the ability of the land to slow and infiltrate water into the groundwater system, and the higher temperatures will increase evaporation. Droughts and higher temperatures will increase the incidence of forest and grassland fires. Reduced reservoir water storage will increase groundwater pumping and land subsidence in the already overdrafted, oversubsided Central Valley.

The Eel River runs through some of the most erodable landmass in California, a situation exacerbated by massive lumber operations, gravel extraction, cattle ranching, and narrow-vision land management strategies. The Eel River owns the record for the highest peak flood discharge of 753,000 cubic feet per second during the 1964 flood, enough energy to send a fleet of battleships to Japan. With Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam choking its headwaters and depleting its fisheries, nearly 90% of Eel’s summer flow is diverted into the Russian River, altering that river’s natural profile and enabling unsustainable human developments in population centers and the wine industry to the south.

Outlet Creek, a Willits tributary of the Eel, has six dams with the seventh being built, all within a sixty-square-mile area. The ecology of Little Lake Valley and the former Little Lake, food basin for juvenile salmon, has been destroyed by straightening and channeling the six feeder creeks. With Snow, Hull, and Rice mountains forming the main headwaters, climate change will impact this region’s snowpack and flow dynamics, as well as the larger Sierra range.

All of California’s rivers, like the dams that drain the natural wealth from these regions, are ill-prepared for the upcoming changes in climate dynamics. Natural river systems are among the most efficient systems on the planet. The great sculptress shapes and transports with exacting tools of erosion and deposit. Water is the great conveyor between landmass and ocean—eroding and depositing material pushed up from the constant collision of tectonic plates. Dams incarcerate the river’s main element, water, leaving her artistry a slave to human infrastructural bondage and rendering all dependent life forms immensely vulnerable to even slight changes.

Where do we go from here?

California’s water infrastructure is overdeveloped, overused, oversold, under-maintained, and impermanent. California’s 1,400 dams share a common destiny–silt-up and become a dysfunction waterfall. One would think the profundity of this incontrovertible geophysical fact might dissuade one from building or continuing to build dense population centers supported by impermanence and develop marginal agricultural lands to feed these ultimately doomed arid population centers. Civilization has deferred this reality from one generation to the next. Not in my lifetime eventually claims the living–were so dammed close.

California’s water infrastructure is aging and degenerating. The older it gets, the more problems it has. The massively altered watersheds, accumulating the burdens of dams and diversions, have lost the stability of equilibrium. This impetus drives the collision between the environment, economy, and a population that continues to increase 600,000 per year.

The recent federal court decision to reduce water withdrawals from the irreplaceable Delta by 37% in an attempt to save its failing hydrology and fisheries has staggered farm production, cities, and the Silicon Valley. As well, less agricultural water sends a shockwave through soaring food prices and produces major losses in farm labor that is severely impacting an already deficit-ridden state budget; health care, education and transportation.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed 9 billion dollar Delta bailout (1982 Peripheral Canal revival) seeks to pour vast energy into the sprawl of canals, aqueducts, levees, pipesheds, and off-stream reservoirs. Cloaked as a restoration project, should the central delta be bypassed diverting the Sacramento directly to canals and off-stream storage reservoirs, the central valley and southland water boosters will be well positioned for an ultimate water grab to fuel economic determinism and contrived population growth projections down to the last drop.

The big question remains. Will a canal bypass save the Delta? Answer: No. As mentioned earlier, what the Delta needs most is increased mountain runoff water to create the hydrologic barrier to hold back saltwater intrusion from the Bay and the fisheries need inundated wetlands and sloughs.

The Peripheral Canal simply adds an ever increasing layer of complexity and energy flows to a system that cannot be saved by the same strategies that produced the problem in the first place. California history can be understood from the earliest need to transport water from a distant watershed to an overextended watershed (1913 LA Aqueduct). Each solution along that predictable path requires still more complexity and energy inputs. Yesterday’s solution becomes today’s problem like a mad layer cake. Each new solution bears exponential energy costs often greater than all the energy consumed by all previous water projects. And, the emergent spectre of the unintended consequence, watershed and infrastructure degeneration leaves one pondering this question: Is this advancing towards a higher or better state?

California’s water, population, and economy are up against Stephen J. Gould’s right wall of limitations. The insane complexity, economic and ecological, is beyond comprehension and the exponential energy cost to run the infrastructure alone denies a positive return: A Dead End.

Since our economic system cannot consider limitations because our American way of life is non-negotiable, narrow-visioned, economic growth focused policy makers will commit our remaining economic might and push this unsustainable model against the right wall of limitations unwittingly. In this context, it is difficult to envision a divergent path that recognizes the need to reduce population, consumption, and charts a path towards watershed restoration statewide. Californians will, as they have throughout California’s water history, approve any measure for one simple reason, fear.

The final analysis strongly suggests that the geophysical forces of climate change dynamics, watershed-wide ecological degradation, oversold and over-mined watersheds, overextended economy and overpopulation coupled with the limited lifespan of 1,400 dams will likely, eventually, resolve the issue of overextended coastal populations and ill-conceived floodplain developments once and for all.

The real solution, backing off the right wall, reducing and relocating vulnerable population centers, reducing consumer demand, developing local water sustainability, and restoring watersheds is simply unthinkable–and the unthinkable is the only solution–and real solutions are not found when one cannot even define the problem.

The latest people to join these surreal protests are the world’s fishermen. They are on strike in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and Japan and demonstrating in scores of maritime countries. Last month in Brussels they threw rocks and flares at the police, who have been conspiring with the world’s sedimentary basins to keep the price of oil high. The fishermen warn that if something isn’t done to help them, thousands could be forced to scrap their boats and hang up their nets. It’s an appalling prospect, which we should greet with heartfelt indifference.

Just as the oil price now seems to be all that stands between us and runaway climate change, it is also the only factor which offers a glimmer of hope to the world’s marine ecosystems. No East Asian government was prepared to conserve the stocks of tuna; now one-third of the tuna boats in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea will stay in dock for the next few months because they can’t afford to sail.¹ The unsustainable quotas set on the US Pacific seaboard won’t be met this year, because the price of oil is rising faster than the price of fish.² The indefinite strike called by Spanish fishermen is the best news European fisheries have had for years. Beam trawlermen — who trash the seafloor and scoop up a massive bycatch of unwanted species — warn that their industry could collapse within a year.³ Hurray to that too.

It would, of course, be better for everyone if these unsustainable practices could be shut down gently without the need for a crisis or the loss of jobs, but this seems to be more than human nature can bear. The European Union has a programme for taking fishing boats out of service — the tonnage of the European fleet has fallen by 5% since 1999⁴ — but the decline in boats is too slow to overtake the decline in stocks. Every year the EU, like every other fishery authority, tries to accommodate its surplus boats by setting quotas higher than those proposed by its scientific advisers, and every year the population of several species is pressed a little closer to extinction.

The fishermen make two demands, which are taken up by politicians in coastal regions all over the world: they must be allowed to destroy their own livelihoods, and the rest of us should pay for it. Over seven years, European taxpayers will be giving this industry E3.8bn.⁵ Some of this money is used to take boats out of service and to find other jobs for fishermen, but the rest is used to equip boats with new engines and new gear, to keep them on the water, to modernise ports and landing sites and to promote and market the catch. Except for the funds used to re-train fishermen or help them into early retirement, there is no justification for this spending. At least farmers can argue — often falsely — that they are the “stewards of the countryside”. But what possible argument is there for keeping more fishermen afloat than the fish population can bear?

The EU says its spending will reduce fishing pressure and help fishermen adopt greener methods. In reality, it is delaying the decline of the industry and allowing it to defy ecological limits for as long as possible. If the member states want to protect the ecosystem, it’s a good deal cheaper to legislate than to pay. Our fishing policies, like those of almost all maritime nations, are a perfect parable of commercial stupidity and short-termism, helping an industry to destroy its long-term prospects for the sake of immediate profit.

But the fishermen only demand more. The headline on this week’s Fishing News is “Thanks for Nothing!”, bemoaning the British government’s refusal to follow France, Spain and Italy in handing out fuel subsidies.⁶ But why the heck should it? The Scottish fishing secretary, Richard Lochhead, demands that the government in Westminster “open the purse strings”. He also insists that new money is “not tied to decommissioning”: in other words no more boats should be taken off the water.⁷ Is this really a service to the industry, or only to its most short-sighted members?

I have a leaked copy of the draft proposal that European states will discuss on Thursday.⁸ It’s a disaster. Some of the boats, which under existing agreements, will be scrapped and turned into artificial reefs, permanently reducing the sized of the fleet, can now be replaced with smaller vessels. The EU will pay costs and salaries for crews stranded by the fuel crisis, so that they stay in business and can start fishing again when the price falls. Member states will be able to shell out more money (E100,000 per boat instead of E30,000) without breaking state aid rules. They can hand out new grants for replacing old equipment with more fuel-efficient gear. The proposal seems to be aimed at ensuring that the industry collapses through lack of fish rather than lack of fuel. The fishermen won’t go down without taking the ecosystem with them.

What makes the draft document so dumb is that in some regions, especially in British waters, the industry is just beginning to turn. While French, Spanish and Italian fishermen clamor for a resumption of blue fin tuna fishing,⁹ knowing that if they are allowed to fish now, this will be the last season ever, around the UK it has begun to dawn on some fishermen that there might be an association between the survival of the fish and the survival of the fishing. Prompted by Young’s seafood and some of the supermarkets, who in turn have been harried by environmental groups, some of the biggest British fisheries have applied for eco-labels from the Marine Stewardship Council, which sets standards for how fish are caught.¹⁰ Fishermen around the UK also seem to be taking the law more seriously, and at last to be showing some interest in obscure issues such as spawning grounds and juvenile fish (which, believe it or not, turn out to have a connection to future fish stocks). By ensuring that far too many boats, and far too many desperate fishermen, stay on the water, and that the remaining quotas are stretched too thinly, the EU will slow down or even reverse the greening of the industry.

Why is this issue so hard to resolve? Why does every representative of a fishing region believe he must defend his constituents’ right to ensure that their children have nothing to inherit? Why do the leaders of the fishermen’s associations feel the need always to denounce the scientists who say that fish stocks decline if they are hit too hard? If this is a microcosm of how human beings engage with the environment, the prospect for humanity is not a happy one.

1. Tom Seaman, July 2008. “Global supply of sushi tuna to plummet on soaring fuel prices,” Intrafish, Vol 6, Issue 7.
2. Steve Quinn, 29th June 2008. “Time to jump ship? Almost, say commercial fishermen,” The Associated Press.
3. James Meikle, 23rd May 2008. “Fish prices may rise by up to 50%,” The Guardian.
4. 4. European Union, 2008. Evolution of the fleet’s number of vessels, tonnage and engine power.
5. European Commission, 2006. The European Fisheries Fund 2007-2013.
6. Fishing News, 4th July 2008.
7. No author given, 4th July 2008. “Open the Purse Strings.” Lochhead. Fishing News.
8. The Council of the European Union, 2008. Proposal for a Council Regulation instituting a temporary specific action aiming to promote the restructuring of the European fisheries fleets affected by the economic crisis.
9. Agence France Press, 17th June 2008. “EU rejects calls to drop planned tuna fishing ban.”
10. Severin Carrell, 26th March 2008. “British seas turning green, says watchdog,” The Guardian.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.

In San Diego, I met with Exxon’s US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, “Admit it; the oil spill’s the best thing to happen” to the Natives.

His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal — but Natives die.

And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.

In today’s ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon’s recklessness was ”profitless” — so the company shouldn’t have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it’s oil shipping partners saved billions – BILLIONS – by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.

The official story is, “Drunken Skipper Hits Reef.” But don’t believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska’s Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here’s the unreported story, the one you won’t get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:

It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.

These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land — for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.

In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives’ specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.

The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.

The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises – cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.

Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.

For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was “state-of-the-art” on-ship radar.

We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.

• Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, “The Miracle Barrel.”
• In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply “not possible” to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows — exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.
• The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round-the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.

In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.

Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.

The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.

Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can’t happen again. They promise.

If the data is verified in upcoming meetings of the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC), commercial and recreational salmon fishing in California and Oregon ocean waters and recreational salmon fishing in Central Valley rivers could be closed or severely restricted in 2008. This alarming news couldn’t come at a worse time, since recreational and commercial fishermen are already reeling from draconian restrictions on rockfish, lingcod and other groundfish in California.

“The magnitude of the low abundance, should it be confirmed in verification efforts now underway, is such that the opening of all marine and freshwater fisheries impacting this important salmon stock will be questioned in the upcoming Council process to set 2008 ocean salmon seasons,” according to an internal memo of the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) by Donald O. McIsaac, Ph. D, Executive Director. “This is particularly disconcerting in that this stock has consistently been the healthy ‘work horse’ target stock for salmon fisheries off California and most of Oregon.”

According to McIssac, the Salmon Technical Team (STT) met last week at the Council office to tabulate total counts of West Coast salmon stocks, including spawning escapements and catches. Two areas of bad news emerged relative to the 2008 abundance level for this important stock:

* The adult spawning escapement for this stock in 2007 failed to meet the goal for the first time in 15 years and only the second time in 35 years. This unexpected result indicates the carry-over of older fish in the ocean that might contribute to 2008 abundance will probably also be weak.

The adult salmon escapement was only 90,000 fish, down from about 275,000 a year earlier. The Sacramento River returns were 88,000 fish, while the San Joaquin River returns were only 2,000 adult chinooks.

* The count of jacks in the Central Valley fall Chinook return this past fall, which are used to predict adult abundance in 2008, was a record low: an order of magnitude less than average and less than a fourth of the previous record low. The return of Central Valley fall Chinook jacks in 2007 was about 2,000 compared to a long term average of about 40,000 and the previous record low of 10,000.

McIssac said there “were informed discussions” last week about whether a reasonable forecast of abundance in 2008 could rise to the point of achieving the spawning escapement goal in the absence of any commercial or recreational salmon fishing anywhere on the West Coast that Central Valley fall Chinook are typically found in significant abundance.

“It is important to note that the current information needs to be verified and validated, and that it is three or four weeks before the documents are finalized that the Council will use in its deliberations,” explained McIssac. “However, it is typical that the estimates at this stage do not vary much from the finalized values.”

McIssac also noted the potential collateral effects of this “unprecedented salmon fishery” situation to groundfish recreational fisheries, open access commercial groundfish and albacore fisheries, other fisheries, and research planning.

“What is not clear at this time is the reason for the apparent collapse, although it is notable that both hatchery and naturally produced fish have been negatively affected,” he concluded.

The federal and state governments will probably try to blame “ocean conditions” for the unprecedented collapse of salmon fisheries. Others will cite the increase of sea lion and harbor seal populations along the coast, the invasion of the highly predatory Humboldt squid, the change in forage fish populations off the coast, water pollution, climate change and other factors.

Although ocean conditions and other factors are all important to consider, I believe that unprecedented water exports out of the California Delta to subsidized agribusiness and southern California in recent years play a major role in the collapse of Sacramento and San Joaquin chinook populations.

The salmon are apparently the victims of the Delta food chain crash that has resulted in record low numbers of delta smelt, longfin smelt, juvenile striped bass and threadfin shad in the California Delta since 2005. During 2005, an unprecedented 6.4 million-acre feet of water was exported out of the Delta by the state and federal governments.

The salmon that returned in 2007 as “jacks and jills” — two-year-old fish — would have migrated downriver in 2005 at the same time that record water exports were taking place. Those smolts may have starved from lack of food as they migrated through the Delta, never making it to the ocean. Or they may have ended up stranded in South Delta sloughs and channels, sucked in by powerful reverse flows caused by export pumping, if not destroyed in the pumps themselves.

Another factor that probably played a role was the fact that the pen release program of the Fishery Foundation of California was not in place in 2004 and 2005. Through this program, the salmon smolts are released into brackish water after being acclimated for 1 to 2 hours. This program cuts down greatly on smolt mortality.

The absence of the pens apparently contributed to increased salmon mortality when the DFG released them into San Pablo Bay those years. Fortunately, the program will be in place this year when the salmon are released into the bay.

Recreational anglers are alarmed about the crash in the salmon numbers and are urging the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations to take immediate action to restore the once abundant fish populations. “This news about the salmon population collapse is not surprising considering the decline of the California Delta food chain caused by increased export pumping by the state and federal governments,” said Dick Pool, owner of Pro Troll products and coordinator of Water4Fish.org. “We need the state and federal governments to solve this problem by reducing water exports and taking other measures to restore Central Valley salmon.”

After receiving word of the low abundance of Central Valley salmon forecasted in 2008, Jim Martin, West Coast Regional Director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance, said he hoped that the PFMC was able to keep a recreational chinook season open because of the minimal impact of recreational anglers on the overall salmon population. “If the Council closes salmon fishing completely, it will put more pressure on the rockfish population,” said Martin.

For more information, contact the PFMC, 7700 NE Ambassador Place, Suite 101, Portland, Oregon 97220-1384, Phone: (503) 820-2280, Fax: (503) 820-2299, Web: www.pcouncil.org

The 2008 PFMC Process:

* The STT will meet Feb 19-22 to collate coastwide salmon stock abundance forecasts.

* The PFMC publishes the Review of 2007 Ocean Salmon Fisheries and Preseason Report I: Stock Abundance Analysis for 2008 Ocean Salmon Fisheries, which contain the details of past year abundance information and 2008 stock abundance forecasts. These documents will be available to the public no later than February 24, 2008.

* The PFMC will Sacramento, CA March 7-14, 2008 to select three options for 2008 salmon seasons.

* Hearings on salmon season options will be convened March 31 in Westport, Washington and Coos Bay, Oregon, and April 1 in Eureka, California. The PFMC meets in Seattle, WA April 6-12, 2008 to reach a final decision on 2008 salmon seasons.

* Federal and State government authorities formally establish marine and freshwater salmon seasons subsequent to final Council action.

If nothing changes, we are going to lose these fish.

– Martin Krkošek, lead author on Science paper warning of impending collapse of wild pink salmon population

That sea lice from salmon farming pens imperil wild salmon populations is known.¹ A recent article in the respected academic journal Science has confirmed these earlier reports.² But more ominously, the article authors warn that the sea lice threaten a “99% collapse in pink salmon population … expected in four salmon generations.” The culprit is corporate salmon farming whose pens provide a platform where the sea lice can proliferate. The wild juvenile pink salmon that venture to the sea past these salmon farms are at risk of picking up sea lice.

Lead author Martin Krkošek and his colleagues concluded:

   • Pink salmon populations known to be experiencing sea lice infestations were depressed and declining whereas the other populations remained productive.
   • If sea lice infestations continue, affected pink salmon populations will collapse by 99 percent in a further two salmon generations (four years).
   • The sea lice typically killed over 80 percent of the fish in each salmon run.³

To isolate sea lice from other factors affecting pink salmon populations, the researchers used data from the Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans that enumerate adult salmon returning to BC rivers each year since 1970. The data allowed researchers to compare populations of pink salmon exposed and unexposed to salmon farms.

In a press release, Krkošek and his co-authors calculated that sea lice have killed more than 80 percent of the annual pink salmon (Onchorhynchus gorbuscha) returns to British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago.⁴

The authors’ results indicate wild salmon populations are endangered and suggest that large-scale aquaculture should be carefully considered for its effect on wild species.

The Broughton Archipelago has an “80-kilometer gauntlet of fish farms” that juvenile salmon must negotiate on the way to the open ocean. Study co-author Alexandra Morton, director of the Salmon Coast Field Station, located in the Broughton said, “Salmon farming breaks a natural law. In the natural system, the youngest salmon are not exposed to sea lice because the adult salmon that carry the parasite are offshore. But fish farms cause a deadly collision between the vulnerable young salmon and sea lice. They are not equipped to survive this, and they don’t.”

The cause, according to Krkošek is simple: “In the Broughton there are just too many farmed fish in the water. If there were only one salmon farm this problem probably wouldn’t exist.”

What to do? Mark Lewis, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Alberta, identified two possible solutions: closed containment and moving farms away from rivers.

Daniel Pauly, Director of the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre, put it in perspective: “If industry says it’s too expensive to move the fish farms or contain them, they are actually saying the natural system must continue to pay the price. They are, as economists would say, externalizing the costs of fish farming on the wild salmon and the public.”

Corporate-Government Collusion in Collapse of Pink Salmon

The BC Liberal [sic] Party has been supporting an increase in the number of salmon farm operations.⁵ The salmon farming industry has reaped a whirlwind of criticism. Corporate salmon farming in BC is Norwegian dominated, and a section of the Norwegian media jumped to a nationalistic defense of the Norwegian concerns.

Overall, the Norwegian media reaction was mixed. Norway’s largest media house, NRK, headlined with “Norwegian company wipes out wild salmon.”⁶ Industry media portrayed the matter differently. Næringslivsavisen ran: “Attack on Norwegian salmon giants.”⁷ Dagens Næringsliv’s headline was: “Frontal attack against Norwegian salmon giants.”⁸

From an industry that hires disinformation specialists, the industry offensive was predictable.⁹ They attacked the prestigious Science journal and denounced the scientists as “activists.” Morton was labeled an “environmentalist,” as was Krkošek.¹⁰ One wonders about what is so objectionable about being an “environmentalist.” Nonetheless, one would hardly hurl the “environmentalist” label at the corporatists.

Marine Harvest Canada CEO Vincent Erenst complained the Science article authors are not “independent researchers.”¹¹ Erenst charged that the scientists are engaged in “agenda research,” which is “not research.” He further asserted, “These researchers have made up their minds they would arrive at a predetermined result, then have ruled out everything that conflicts with their hypothesis.” Nowhere in the interview is evidence provided to back up his allegations.

Ian Roberts, Marine Harvest Canada’s communications director, chimed in, “I believe people are starting to get a little weary of this type of Doomsday prophecy.”¹¹ These are sly digs bordering on ad hominem that do not address the scientists’ research results and conclusions.

The Pacific Salmon Forum responded, “The extent of the impact of salmon farming on wild salmon is still not fully understood, nor is there a consensus of scientists on the best ways to minimize that impact.” This is an unsurprisingly wishy-washy statement coming from a panel of seven individuals appointed by the BC government, whose ruling Liberal Party is a major recipient of political contributions from the salmon-farming industry.¹² Presumably, the Pacific Salmon Forum holds that a looming 99 percent eradication of existing wild salmon stocks is worth the risk?

Mary Ellen Walling, executive director of the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA) stated that Krkošek and Morton are “well known for their hard line views about salmon farming.”¹¹ One wonders if this is similar to the hard-line rejection of environmental concerns by the salmon-farming industry lobby.

The BCSFA once claimed it would “like to work in partnership to ensure wild salmon are protected.”¹³

Krkošek criticizes the salmon farming industry for lacking the competence to realize the problem. “We have tried to co-operate for years, but it has been difficult. The salmon farming industry does not want to talk with environmentalists at all, and they are skeptical of the science around this,” he said.¹⁴

Nevertheless, when criticisms were directed to the study, Krkosek compellingly refuted the criticisms.¹⁵

Given what is at stake, Morton called for public input: “Wild salmon are enormously important to the ecosystem, economies, and culture. Now it is clear they are disappearing in place of an industry. People need to know this and make a decision what they want: industry-produced salmon or wild salmon.”

1. Alexandra Morton, “Dying of Salmon Farming” in Stephen Hume, Alexandra Morton, Betty C. Keller, Rosella M. Leslie, Otto Langer, and Don Staniford, A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming (Harbour Publishing, 2004), 199-237. See review.
2. Martin Krkošek, Jennifer S. Ford, Alexandra Morton, Subhash Lele, Ransom A. Myers, Mark A. Lewis, “Declining Wild Salmon Populations in Relation to Parasites from Farm Salmon,” Science, 14 December 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5857, pp. 1772 – 1775. For a summary of the Science paper, see Martin Krkošek, Jennifer S. Ford, Alexandra Morton, Subhash Lele, Ransom A. Myers, Mark A. Lewis “Aquaculture Impacts on Wild Salmon,” Lensfest Ocean Program Research Series, December 2007.
3. Martin Krkošek, Jennifer S. Ford, Alexandra Morton, Subhash Lele, Ransom A. Myers, Mark A. Lewis “Aquaculture Impacts on Wild Salmon,” Lensfest Ocean Program Research Series, December 2007.
4. Press release, “Fish Farms Drive Wild Salmon Populations Toward Extinction: Experts raise serious concerns about the expansion of industrial fish farming,” University of Alberta Compass, 13 December 2007.
5. Joel Connelly, “In The Northwest: Opponents are raising a stink over B.C. fish farms,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 21 February 2003.
6. Eva Aalberg Undheim, “Norske selskap utryddar villaks,” nrk nyheter, 14 December 2007.
7. “Angriper norske laksegiganter: Anklages for å utrydde villaksen i Canada,” NA24.no, 14 December 2007.
8. Bjørn Erik Dahl and Agnar Berg, “Frontalangrep mot norske laksegiganter,” DN.no, 14 December 2007.
9. Kim Petersen, “Farmageddon and the Spin-doctors,” Dissident Voice, 29 March 2003. For a recap of industry complaints, see Kim Petersen, “Eating Profit: Frustrations of the Salmon-Farming Industry,” Dissident Voice, 21 April 2005.
10. Bjørn Erik Dahl and Agnar Berg, “Bredt angrep på norske laksegiganter,” Fiskaren, 14 December 2007. “Alexandra Morton … er også kjent som miljøverner, noe som selvfølgelig har blitt brukt mot henne av laksenæringen. Det samme sier næringen om hovedforfatteren av studien, Martin Krkosek.“
11. Bjørn Erik Dahl and Agnar Berg, “Marine Harvest Canada boss attacks Science article writers,” Intrafish, 18 December 2007.
12. Tom Barrett, “Fish Farm Documents Show Politics Trump Science, Say Critics,” The Tyee, 12 May 2005.
13. Mary Ellen Walling, “Wild versus farmed Salmon: Emotion Versus Facts,” British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association, 15 April 2004. NB, the link no longer appears to carry the entirety of the article.
14. Translated from Eva Aalberg Undheim, “Norske selskap utryddar villaks,” nrk nyheter, 14 December 2007. “Vi har forsøkt å få til eit samarbeid i årevis, men det har vore vanskeleg. Oppdrettsnæringa vil ikkje snakke med miljøvernarar i det heile teke, og dei er skeptiske til vitskapen kring dette, seier han.”
15. Martin Krkosek, “Public Critiques and Responses.”

Twenty-five years after negotiators finally put down their pens on the Law of the Sea Treaty, Bush and the Pentagon have joined with rational Republicans like Richard Lugar and the Democrats to support its belated ratification, pushed along by oil, maritime and telecom lobbies that see the need to end oceanic anarchy.

The Senate foreign relations panel voted 17-4 on October 31 to send it to the full floor for a vote, where it seems likely to win the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Quite apart from the significance of the treaty itself, there is a certain symbolism: this would be the first multilateral treaty of its kind that the US has ratified since Ronald Reagan.

Reaganites may indeed appreciate one of the impulses behind the ratification: the Russian claim to the north pole. Outside the treaty, the US has no means of contesting the claim, which, if successful, would be recognised by almost every nation in the world.

The very first case to go to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea demonstrated the need for it. In 1997, the MV Saiga, an oil tanker registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines, owned by Cypriots, chartered by Swiss, managed by a Scottish company, officered by Ukrainians and crewed by Senegalese, had been bunkering fishing vessels off the coast of Guinea when patrol boats from there seized the ship and detained the crew. Guinea claimed a customs zone that extended 250 miles from its coast. The tribunal ordered the release of the ship and crew on payment of a bond, and, after consideration, it threw out the Guinean claim and ordered the ship and its crew freed. Under the convention, Guinea was not entitled to claim more than 200 miles for its exclusive economic zone.

The Law of the Sea should be an important cause for internationally minded liberals and Democrats, representing as it does a global commitment to the health of the oceans and the rule of law. But their silence is stunning. A quick internet search shows that most of the clucking comes from loony right-wing Chicken Littles who think the sky is falling down. There is a certain ironic satisfaction that the White House is now under fire from the ideologically hardcore foundations that have so far been barraging its liberal enemies.

At this year’s hearings on the treaty at the Senate foreign relations committee, the groups that spoke against ratification, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), depicted the treaty as an undercover version the Kyoto protocol — reminiscent of earlier far-fetched accusations of an undersea land grab by the United Nations.

But money talks as the know-nothings cluck. Last year, Exxon — Big Oil’s last-ditch opponent of the UN Convention on the International Law of the Sea — dropped its financial support for CEI. The lobby now left in the field against ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty reveals the wacko money tail that has been wagging the Republican dog, and, more often than not, converting many Democratic politicians into fawning puppies.

The process was described in an email that Mike Scanlon, the lobbyist who once worked for Tom DeLay, sent to his Indian tribal clients. It was released by the Senate Indian affairs committee when it was investigating disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff:

Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.

The wackos are now in the spotlight. But the sane wing of American politics does indeed seem to be letting the ratification of the Law of the Sea slip past them, even though it presents a unique opportunity to break the conservative hold on multilateralism. If the Senate cannot ratify this treaty when the White House, the Pentagon and former Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee are onside with a Democratic majority, then Americans had best resign themselves to being all at sea in a world of international anarchy.

Canada’s west coast is naturally blessed. Picturesque alpine lakes and glaciers give rise to spectacular waterfalls that plunge to clear, rushing rivers and streams that forge into the deep-invading arms of the fjords that extend from the life-churning ocean. Evergreen forests of pine, spruce, majestic cedars, and towering Douglas firs sweep upwards from the emerald water’s edge with the snow-capped Coastal Mountain range as a breath-taking backdrop.

The creature that symbolizes the merger of oceanic and fresh waters is the anadromous Pacific salmon. The salmon have a long history in the Pacific; the fossil record for the salmon stretches back 1.6 million years to the Pleistocene Age, with an origin perhaps 100 million years ago. The Pacific salmon has since evolved into five species — pink, chum, sockeye, coho, and chinook — that inhabit a particular niche within the aqueous ecosystem. On the west coast of North America, the salmon range from northern California to Alaska.

The salmon’s lives begin as eggs deposited in a gravel bed, fertilized by milt from the male salmon. Upon hatching, they are tiny creatures called alevins, with huge eyes attached to orange sacs that sustain them nutritionally. Later they emerge from the gravel as small fry and search for feed. If the young fish survive, they will migrate as fingerlings to the saline embrace of the ocean. In the open ocean the salmon feed voraciously and carnivorously. Eventually the adult salmon will answer the not-so-well-understood, instinctual call-of-nature and return to their birth waters to spawn again.

Although salmon spawn throughout the year, it is particularly in autumn when school groups, families, naturalists, and visitors flood to the leaf-strewn banks of flowing waters to observe the epic life-and-death struggle of the returning salmon. I often admired the fall spectacle and have donned wetsuit, mask, fins, and snorkel to drift with the unyielding flow while shoals of salmon powerfully darted up current around my mass.

The salmon’s life cycle has great importance for the web-of-life. This renewal of salmon provides an ecological feast for myriad creatures from cutthroat trout to bald eagles and seagulls to large predators such as the black and grizzly bears and to the microorganisms that decompose the decaying carcasses. But the Pacific salmon is increasingly under greater threat; and, as a consequence, the ecosystem that it is a part of.

Shoddy logging practices near streams, mine tailings entering the waters, and the human thirst for more-and-more energy leading to the damming of salmon-bearing waters have wiped out the salmon and imperiled them elsewhere. A more recent menace has invaded the Pacific coast: salmon farms.

Stephen Hume, Alexandra Morton, Betty C. Keller, Rosella M. Leslie, Otto Langer, and Don Staniford have synthesized the various threads of danger posed by salmon farming to the wild Pacific salmon in an informative book, A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming. Salmon farming involves the previously unheard-of mass cultivation of a carnivore species. To compound matters, on the Pacific coast, the farmed species is the introduced Atlantic salmon, a domesticated variant dubbed by some as Salmo domesticus.

A Stain Upon the Sea revolves around the cataclysmic collapse of the 2001-2002 pink salmon run in the Broughton archipelago off northeast Vancouver Island — a collapse attributed to a lethal sea lice infestation originating from the salmon farms. Hume details a similar collapse near salmon-farming operations in Ireland.

Hume also examines the perspective of First Nations people, whose culture and existence are bound with the salmon. Salmon farming endangers this indigenous way-of-life. Kyuquot Nation member Leo Jack rails against the greed behind the drive to expand salmon-farming operations.

British Columbia salmon-farming operations have ramifications outside the province. In Alaska where salmon farming is prohibited, fisherman David Harsila exclaims, “Alaska is the next target. When I look at the salmon farming industry I sort of boil it down to the structure of the multinational conglomerates and how they can influence government.”

Keller and Leslie chronicle the haphazard growth of salmon farms that are predominantly controlled by a few foreign multinational corporations.

Langer delineates how his former place of employment, the federal Department of Fisheries (DFO), functions contrary to its mandate, which includes the protection of the fisheries and the marine and freshwater environment. The DFO is described as politicized; many key personnel are considered unknowledgeable about fisheries, and some work in an incestuous relationship with the salmon-farming industry that the DFO must monitor.

The situation is so egregious that Langer muses, “Salmon farms seemed to have been given immunity from [the regulations of] the Fisheries Act.”

Langer finds particularly disturbing DFO’s recalcitrance to seriously investigate the alleged outbreak of sea lice in the Broughton archipelago.

Biologist Morton gives a firsthand account of the sea lice infestation traceable to salmon farms that precipitated a horrific 99 percent wipeout of the pink salmon run. She begins with the government chicanery that led to locating salmon farms in extremely sensitive areas of Broughton archipelago. She describes disease outbreaks from the salmon farms, and untenable practices such as employing “acoustic harassment devices” that frightened off the whales. The DFO was both uninterested and disinterested. After these experiences Morton writes, “I lost trust in the system; I felt it was working to hide the truth.”

Any lingering doubts were dismissed by DFO’s negligence in enforcing regulations in the aftermath of the pink crash. If only it were supreme political and industrial ineptitude, but clearly disinformation was at the core of the government-corporate maneuvering. The government even sought to cleanse a community of witnesses to the illicit and destructive salmon-farming practices. As Morton states, “This is a rigged game and no truths will come to light.”

Morton speculates that the eradication of wild salmon might insidiously serve as a pretext to open up British Columbia to further exploitation by resource-extracting industries. Morton was moved to activism. Morton solidarized with others to form an action group and take on the corporate-government nexus that was imperiling the wild salmon and a community way of life.

Choose your Poisson

Staniford’s information-packed chapter details the toxic chemical brew in widespread use in the salmon-farming industry, focusing primarily on toxic delousing agents. Clearly, the salmon-farming industry had to deal with the terrible optics of the sea lice infestation. Occurrences of sea lice outbreaks and crashes of the wild salmon population confined to the neighborhood of salmon farms could not repeatedly be fobbed off as freak manifestations. The industry attempts to control sea lice with chemicals such as dichlorvos: a “carcinogenic, mutagenic and hormone-disrupting — a so-called gender bender” organophosphate.

The anti-parasitics are unselectively effective in the short-term. The salmon are adversely affected, as are benthic creatures and shellfish. Resistance developing among sea lice forces a change in chemicals. But the anti-parasitics were developed for use on terrestrial animals and many are explicitly labeled as dangerous to fish and not to be used in water, where the toxicity may be magnified.

Staniford laments the insouciance to poor aquaculture practices: “I’m sick of the arrogant assumption by salmon farmers that their right to profit comes before the environment.”

However, the raising of farmed salmon doesn’t have to be conducted in such a destructive fashion. The book concludes with a seven-point action plan to resolve the hazards of salmon farming.

Currently, the corporate-government collusion prioritizes the profiteering of salmon-farming operations with minimal regard for the environment, wild creatures, and the health of workers and consumers while staunchly refusing cost-incurring alternatives. In western society, citizens caught stealing from corporations are severely punished, but when corporations steal the right of citizens to a clean environment and healthful food they are too often unpunished and seldom penalized harshly. As A Stain Upon the Sea illustrates, this is a scenario that must be changed — the continued existence of wild Pacific salmon may depend on it.