Salmon Confidential Exposed
Blog by Salmon Confidential, March 2013
This blog has one purpose:
To provide a factual counterpoint to bogus claims and misinformation being spread via the “Salmon Confidential“ documentary film created by Twyla Roscovich and Alexandra Morton.
The film is riddled with errors, false claims and incorrect assumptions which must be corrected. This blog will provide facts and realities which bust Morton’s myths about salmon farming in her latest film.
Blog posting: Skewering sacred cows – and salmon
by Salmon Confidential, March 6, 2013
Beware of magically simple answers to complicated questions.
Especially when it comes to salmon.
Here in B.C. we have been studying salmon for more than a century and still we don’t fully understand why sometimes they come back in huge amounts, and why sometimes they come back in small amounts.
This has been happening for millennia in salmon runs all along North America’s Pacific Coast, according to recent science.
Recent studies in Alaska showed that salmon returns have varied wildly during the last 2,000 years.
A broader look at the science shows that the human impact on salmon from industrialized fishing, habitat destruction and ocean pollution has been hard to measure, in comparison to a long-term data set. Is there even any real long-term impact? Possibly, but this field of study is like dumping a pick-up load of man-made play sand on a sandy beach, letting the wind and waves spread it around, and then measuring the overall impact.
But Alexandra Morton, who has at best a layman’s understanding of fish health, pathogens and virology, talks like she’s got it all figured out. She claims to know better than people who have Dr in front of their names which they earned by nearly a decade of higher education and hard work.
She sucks people in by telling a convincing and scary story with one single culprit. She paints a picture which is clearly black and white, with good guys and bad guys, conspiracies and skulduggery, like a bad TV courtroom drama. She claims, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, that salmon farms will harm wild salmon to the point of extinction.
But the plain, boring truth is that the facts do not support her story. Reality is rarely as black and white as people like Morton want us to believe.
Just looking at the data from the last 50 years shows clearly that salmon’s boom and bust patterns have been going on before, during and after salmon farms showed up in B.C.
This graph, taken from the 2012 DFO report for the Fraser River sockeye run, shows that the total salmon returns in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when salmon farms reached current levels of production, were higher than they had ever been. And although productivity appears to decline during that time, it also appears to be returning to average levels.
This blog is intended to cut past the scary story and clear the air of the emotional manipulation being practiced by Morton and the makers of this film, to drill down to the facts.
The science is clear. Salmon farms have little or nothing to do with fluctuations in wild salmon runs in B.C. no matter how people like Morton try to suggest otherwise with appeals built on guilt and emotion, with very few facts.
This may be challenging for some people to read, especially those whose belief system is built on assuming that salmon farms are bad. When confronted with new information which challenges their belief system, people have to either adjust their beliefs, or hold to them even more dogmatically in a state of denial of the reality around them.
The choice is yours.
