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.
Humans, a stupid species, happily destroying the environment, the very thing that sustains life.
You would have to be mad or totally ignorant to eat salmon from these ‘farms’. I have seen them in ‘supermarket’ with eighteen inch tape-worms
along their backbones.
The entire fishing industry is deplorable, stealing fish on an industrial scale and most of the ‘catch ‘ is waste and death to the ocean and the polluted rivers that are trawled to within an inch of their life.
I remember when the Richmond, Tweed and Clarence were clean and full of life, an hour or two with a hand-line would feed a family easily.
Cheers, G”)
Until people get educated about the way salmon farms operate they will continue to sell it, not only Tasmanian but New Zealand one . Time to spread the info and stop buying it.
Have not touched the stuff in years.
I spent time in tge beautiful Maquarrie Garbor during the Franklin campaign abd am Tasmanian.
It saddens me greatly.
Start by getting serious with your local sushi outlets and supermarkets.
I love the taste of salmon! Especially the skin. But with all this controversy about how it is raised is the least of my worries. Not too long ago you could get it for around $27 per kg. Now it is $38 down from $42per kg!
I won’t buy it on the principle of the price gouging! And now I can feel good about the environmental factor as well. Thanks for the info.
Take time out to read what science says about the sustainability of salmon farming in Tassie – it may surprise that science is at odds with what Flanagan’s book says or the claims of organisations like NOFF that exist on donations from a gullible public. As for this article it is sadly a case of garbage in, garbage out! For example, farmed salmon do not swim in a foul soup of faeces and pharmaceuticals and nor is their flesh coloured. Stocking densities are the lowest in the world, and their colour comes from a balanced, formulated, pelleted diet much like that given to pets and other farmed animals around the world. Boycotting a sustainable locally farmed product in favour of an imported one or worse a potentially overfished wild one makes no sense to me.
Thank you for emphasising the science rather than the “facts” generated by people with an agenda. When I read the original post, the first thing that went through my mind was ‘How can they be swimming in a soup of faeces, when the enclosure is a mesh that allows water currents through?’ If the exchange of water was not substantial, they would have to employ major aeration as is used in the land based farms, that the writers apparently prefer!
Thanks for sharing your perspective on this issue. For the sake of transparency, I would like to share with readers that you work at the University of Tasmania, in the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, which has an ongoing partnership with the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation. This potential conflict of interest is worth keeping in mind, especially insofar as the need to maintain this relationship constrains your ability to make frank criticisms of Tasmania’s aquaculture industry.
No problem with you pointing this out Adrian – I’ve nothing to hide, that’s why I use my full name. Note there is no request from Echo to declare interests when making a comment. That said, I retired from the University 10 yrs ago, do not receive any salary, and am under no constraint to share my personal opinions about salmon aquaculture
I think you one of two things. You are either straight out lying and an agent of the industry. Or you a very misinformed. Have another look at the industry or simply check you integrity. It’s more important than your bank account.
Bottom line is that areas where there are fish farms have become devoid of life. Something has to be wrong if people no longer like to swim in these areas, where people no longer catch fish in these areas, where the Nutrient Indicator Algae ( generated from the fish farms high nutrient loading) is smothering seagrass beds, and kelp beds. Add that to noise, light and visual pollution that has destroyed peoples lives in small coatal communities. This takes a toll on their health and well being, As an Animal Welfare issues cages salmon swimmin around in cages in public waterways is as cruel as battery hens, or sheep on a transport vessel. Its a disgrace – and also bear in mind that Flanagans book Toxic is well researched – no one has managed to sue him for what he discusses in TOXIC.