I’ve spent almost all of my life searching for and evaluating fish.
As a boy, I rode home from the river with wild silver salmon dangling from my handlebars. My first full-time summer job was at the fish hatchery outside of Klawock.
The hatchery not only provided me with a job, but supplemented returns so more silvers were available for dinner. Humans helping nature! Win!
But that was longer ago than I would like to admit, and in that time, wild salmon populations have continued to decline while my understanding of the complexities of fisheries has increased.
Hatcheries were not a revolutionary idea to complement nature, they were built out of necessity to counter mismanagement. Hatcheries are now so spliced into the industry that eliminating them to allow wild salmon to proliferate and maintain their DNA would likely cause a crash of the industry.
The current reality was made worse by Gov. Dunleavy opening the door to closed-system fish farming. Even if it’s not farming salmon in pens floating in the ocean, it makes me uncomfortable, especially as commercial trawling continues to wipe out massive stocks of ground fish — the key ingredient in most fishmeal fed to farmed fish — and bycatch.
There is a profound difference between hatchery fish and farmed fish, and there is definitely a difference between open-system and closed-system fish farming.
Open-system farmed salmon live in stationary ocean pens. Their lives are not wild and robust, they are a manipulated species that exist exclusively for human consumption, similar to that of our beef and chicken. In some areas of the world, parts of Scotland for example, the farmed fish populations outnumber the wild stocks.
I didn’t live through the transition from eating game meat to industrialized cattle and poultry. By the time my parents moved us to Southeast Alaska in 1986, free range practices used by farmers were squeezed out by the high-yield facilities that prioritized weight and profits over nutrient density and living conditions. “Free range” became a euphemistic marketing term that meant the opportunity to increase the price while providing their chickens or cows ambiguous amounts of time outside of concentrated confines.
There is no danger in a chicken escaping from an industrial growing facility to infect the natural stock. Same with beef. We are long past that point. The mice used for testing in labs are not taken against their will from the wild.
Fish remain wild, and the suggestion that manipulation and supplementation is an answer is disheartening.
In 1992, only a single male sockeye returned to spawn in the Salmon River near Stanley, Idaho, down from 25,000 historically. Idaho is now gaining notoriety for having some of the most sustainable closed-system inland fish farms in the world. Strict and sustainable models make inland farming a viable option for urban areas far removed from where fish are harvested.
But here? In Alaska?
I have a bumper sticker that says, Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat Farmed Salmon but farmed trout is fine?
Fish farming is a perversion of nature. But it’s hard to dip my chicken wings in BBQ sauce while a rack of beef ribs smoke and maintain that attitude. I’ll never knowingly eat farmed fish and thankfully I live in a place where wild salmon endure so I won’t have to. I want wild — shrimp, salmon, crab, game meat and the occasional trout. It’s a matter of pride, not arrogance or delusion.
But it’s hard not to see dark waters ahead.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Alpha XR. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
