Profit and protecting wild salmon is what it's about
Courier-Islander December 10, 2010
Attention Ray Grigg.
Your Shades of Green column "Alexandra's epiphany" (Friday Dec. 3 Courier-Islander) regarding Alexandra Morton's recent realization that the salmon farming companies here are in it for profit, (unlike every other business since the start of civilization), seemed like good news, as me and some of my friends like money and salmon too. Sure would be great if there was a way of providing year-round full-time jobs with benefits, while cashing in on the insatiable global appetite for salmon and providing relief to both the wild stocks and taxpayers alike. However, your article seemed more like an attack on a possible solution to some of the salmon problems, than a praise of our economic system.
Mr. Grigg, you appear to be uneducated as to why fish farms are a good idea, so I recommend that you read a weekly column in this paper called "Shades of Green". The author has reported numerous times on the almost unimaginable extent and breadth of the massive overfishing epidemic that is emptying the oceans of fish. He also seems to be concerned by several very real and dire environmental conditions that are killing the entire marine food chain and or toxifying the flesh of associated marine organisms. He has even gone as far as to theorize "the DFO is anticipating the eventual demise of BC's wild salmon, indeed, the entire global fishery, and is attempting to extend our supply of fish by accommodating the transition to a farmed substitute". Not a bad plan, the switch to farming has saved humans and wildlife before.
On the other side of the coin, the lady who just recently claimed to have figured out that businessmen and investors are trying to make money (I see a Nobel for economics in her future) has also said that the farms are wiping out the wild salmon.
Just for giggles, here are some other things Mrs. Morton has said, had printed in her interviews, websites, and research papers. "When you find the baby lice, you know you are near the mommy lice." "Pink smolts are designed to encounter zero sea lice." The infection rate (of lice) on adult pinks in the open ocean is very low, about 91 per cent...the infection on rate on smolts is very high, about 90 per cent. I like this one...51 per cent to 84 per cent of the smolts she has studied shed their lice because of the "Suboptimal nature of small salmon fry as (louse) hosts compared to adult salmon," and that there is a "relatively enhanced innate resistance to L. Salmonis in the juvenile pink salmon." I can't blame her for finding one thing in her research, and telling something different to the public, as her condition appears to be pathological. As an example, this is from one of her web sites... "1977 Graduated Magna cum Laude from the American University in Washington D.C. with Bachelor of Science." This one is from her 2008 NY Times interview..."When Ms. Morton first came to British Columbia, she did not have a traditional academic background. She was a prep school dropout (Milton Academy in Massachusetts)," and this is from Alexandra's Echo..."Fresh out of university in California, Alexandra Morton made her way to northern Vancouver Island." Who would put out at least three totally different versions of their education when they know it is going into the public domain? And why should we believe her work when she doesn't?
Anyway Mr. Grigg, I believe that one of the hallmarks of journalism is the checking of your sources. Regardless of what I or anyone else thinks, before starting any angry letters, I plead that everyone to read all of Morton's published papers in full.
Eric Becherer
