If you, like me, eat salmon, perhaps it’s time for us to finally face facts.
In the words of celebrated Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan, we’re eating horror, and we’re dining on destruction.
Reading Flanagan’s passionate booklet, Toxic, is time well spent.
So horrific is the mounting evidence of environmental damage, even federal Labor is taking notice.
National Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, is this week in the middle of a public consultation about salmon farms in Macquarie Harbour.
That’s on Tasmania’s remote west coast, where the salmon industry has helped push another fish species to the brink of extinction.
The endangered Maugean skate is a sleek stingray-like creature that faces a ‘high risk of extinction’ because the polluted water of Macquarie Harbour is its only remaining home.
In addition to potential extinction, the other impacts of salmon farming are finally becoming well known, thanks to courageous activists, scientists, and whistle-blowers.
The cruelty of caging thousands of animals in a foul soup of faeces and pharmaceuticals.
The obscenity of adding pink colour to grey-white flesh. The insanity of polluting pristine waters and harming sea life within.
In Toxic, Flanagan describes firsthand how he witnessed over decades the rise of the fish farms, the changes to the waters, and the slow loss of sea life off the coast of beautiful Bruny Island. When he kayaked, the sea started to feel more dead than alive.
He and his friends stopped seeing abalone, crayfish, and penguins, then dolphins, seahorses, and flathead disappeared.
Then they stopped talking about it, because it was too sad.
And facilitating the environmental destruction was a bipartisan political system corrupted by vested interests, mismanaged by cowardly regulators, and sustained by misleading corporate marketing.
When ABC’s 4 Corners was running its investigation of the industry in 2016, one of the salmon companies developed a secret public relations strategy to defend the industry’s image and promote its expansion. It was all laid out in a secret 50-page ‘4 Corners Strategy Document.’ Secret until it was leaked to 4 Corners.
Trickery, collusion
What’s really kept the industry alive though, is us continuing to buy this product, while trying hard to ignore the growing environmental catastrophe it causes.
‘We were tricked into colluding in the slow death of everything we loved,’ writes Flanagan. For me, those words resonate in the wider context of the climate and biodiversity crises, spurring us to act to protect and enhance what yet lives.
One group that is acting is NOFF – Neighbours of Fish Farms. They’re running campaigns to stop the floating feedlots in Tasmanian waters, and to take industrial salmon off restaurant menus everywhere.
Salmon fed antibiotics, battery hens
‘People shouldn’t believe the marketing lie that this product is healthy for Tasmania,’ says NOFF president Peter George. ‘The salmon doesn’t come from wild free waters, they come from filthy packed cages where they’re fed antibiotics and ground-up remains of battery hens.’
George told The Echo NOFF would, in 2024, be taking its campaign to the mainland, including the Northern Rivers, and he hopes to launch a competition to see which will become Australia’s first salmon-free town.
The other side of this story is of course the employment and economic benefits.
This billion-dollar agribusiness is now the biggest in Tasmania. It employs thousands of people and is so profitable it was taken over by global corporates in 2022.
In 2023, the Tasmanian government launched a new ‘Salmon Industry Plan’, promising tighter regulation, yet green-lighting expansion.
The new plan was roundly rejected as ‘more of the same’ by environment groups, including the Bob Brown Foundation who argued: ‘The reckless and negligent destruction of Tasmania’s rivers, bays and oceans is an unthinkable crime.’
I was lucky enough to see Bob Brown speak last month at the Cygnet Folk Festival, on Tasmania’s south coast, in the heart of salmon country. He inspired the crowd with news of fresh campaigns to cease all logging in the state’s native forests – and to fight floating feedlots.
As the Tasmanian Greens and others are pointing out, there are alternatives.
Land-based fish farms are considered far less polluting, are growing fast in other countries, and are an obvious source of greener jobs.
The day after the Cygnet Folk Festival, I got to see my first salmon farms. As the ferry arrived at Bruny Island, there they were, shimmering in the afternoon sun. Rows of giant round cages in the formerly pristine waters of this paradise, conjuring images of putrid prisons, barbarous and brutal.
Tasmania is a long way from the shire, but you can smell the stench from here.
♦ Disclosure: Dr Ray Moynihan’s recent trip to Tasmania wasn’t funded by the salmon industry.
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