IN 2007, I had co-authored a paper in the journal Science that predicted the collapse of the pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago due to sea lice from salmon farms. In 2019, it happened. A local wildlife photographer, Rolf Hicker, did what the bear tour operators in the area avoided: he posted photographs of grizzly bears in the Broughton Archipelago. They hardly looked like bears. Their ribs were clearly visible through their long shaggy fur. Their legs looked much too long, because their stomachs were drawn up against their spines. They were starving and would not live through the winter. Just one-tenth of 1 percent, 0.1 percent, of the Glendale River pink salmon returned.
After weeks of padding up and down the barren river, the bears entered the ocean and began swimming. They appeared on many tiny islands of the archipelago, where no one had ever seen grizzly bears before. They were desperate to find a river that still had salmon but had no memory of where to go. The paths and the timing of salmon migrations are passed down from mothers to cubs, but this knowledge was useless now. There were no salmon where there should be salmon. By December, many bears were too hungry to hibernate and some boldly tried to enter houses, enticed by the smell of food. First Nation villagers tried to show respect for grizzly bears that were now on their front porches. Government conservation officers intervened and shot them. These bears were collateral damage from an industry that has never belonged in these waters.
The lowest wild salmon return in the history of Canada happened in 2019. Meanwhile Alaska and Russia to the north and west saw many excellent salmon returns. While all these BC, US and Russian salmon feed in the same general area of the North Pacific, something deadly was plaguing the ones that spawned in British Columbia, dragging local populations down to the hard edge of extinction. The data coming in from people counting salmon in rivers revealed a pattern. Many salmon runs were low, but wild salmon from heavily salmon farmed regions, such as the Broughton Archipelago, the Discovery Islands and Clayoquot Sound were almost non-existent. The Kakweiken, Viner, Ahta, Glendale, Orford and Phillips Rivers were nearly empty.
This season, spawning grounds that had been stroked by female salmon digging nests for ten thousand years lay untouched. A thin film of green/brown algae covered the pebbles in a fine shag carpet that billowed silently in the current. This is a sure sign there are no salmon. When salmon dig nests, they wipe the algae off the rocks. When you wade across a salmon stream in the fall, you can see large circles of bright pebbles swept clear of algae by salmon. These are the redds, or salmon nests. They stand out in contrast to the darker rocks still coated in algae, making it easy to avoid stepping in the nests and crushing the buried eggs.
There were no ravens calling along the rivers, the signature soundtrack of the spawning season. The strong scent of fish was absent from the river valleys. There were no eagles standing in the shallows, their curved dagger claws deep into a salmon carcass as they tore off hunks, threw their heads back and gulped down the nutritious meat—defence against the lean times of winter.
Faced with this evidence of extinction, my positive nature faltered again. Despite more than thirty years of doing everything I could think of—the science, the lawsuits, government processes, the activism on repeat—I was watching extinction in play. After the uprising and all that came after it, were we too late? The magnitude of what I was witnessing dominated my days and my dreams. It was inside me. It was me. There was nothing else. I could not shrug off the brutal cut of extinction.
I tried to console myself by counting my blessings—my two children, grandchildren and other close family, the warmth of my dog sleeping beside me on stormy nights, working in my garden, the joy and awe of experiencing the rebirth of ancient governance among the nations whose territory I lived in. Still, I instinctively wanted to flee the scene of this crime. But where would I go? Australia was burning, along with the Amazon and parts of Africa. Climate change refugees were on the move. Crops were failing in the breadbaskets of the world.
There is nowhere to run. We, as a species, have to face this. Our primary survival strategy has been migration into new territories, but that is over. Wherever we go, we meet ourselves and the damage we have wreaked. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. It is our turn: we either evolve or go extinct. We are the perpetrators and the victims.
Through the winter of 2019–2020, I travelled monthly to Vancouver to sit on the minister’s Fish Health Committee, tasked to provide guidance on making salmon farming more “sustainable.” There is nothing sustainable about feeding fish to fish, to produce fewer fish, while releasing Armageddon levels of infectious agents into the ocean, but I accepted the volunteer position. Most of the people at the table worked on behalf of the salmon farming industry, either within DFO or directly for the three big companies.
Also on the committee were people from two environmental organizations, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pacific Salmon Foundation, leading salmon virologist Dr. Fred Kibenge and delegates from two First Nations. When a scientist from the University of British Columbia assured us at one of our meetings that the wild salmon returns in British Columbia were fine, I felt a roar build in my throat and struggled to tame it before it left my lips. “How can you possibly say that?” I asked as calmly as I could, thinking of the dying grizzly bears. He backed down quickly, but industry partners glanced nervously around the table.
While many industries are directly damaging our planet, they, at least, are fairly clear that their allegiance is to their shareholders. To my mind, shareholders are the most dangerous animals on Earth; their profits relying on a cancer model: relentless growth to the point of killing life.
Governments are less honest in their goals, as they give up in the face of laws designed to protect corporate interests rather than their citizens. I now knew what this was called: political expectations. We elect leaders who look brave, but invariably they fall silent once in power and find themselves up against global corporations that are addicted to the consumption of Earth’s resources with no view to the future, even their own. I want more from the governments that I vote for, but I have to recognize that I am ignorant of the pressures they face and find myself unwilling to completely write them off.
However, what I have zero tolerance for are the scientists who use their positions of authority and public trust to justify or hide the industrial damage that is now threatening civilization. As a scientist, I recognize the skilled manipulations of the evidence that give their work a veneer of credibility, delivering scientific cover to the senior bureaucrats who are running things in an industry-friendly way. This perverted information is then sent up the line in ministerial briefings. Since ministers are shuffled every few years, changing portfolios or leaving government, they never get the chance to really learn whether to trust the senior bureaucrats who write the briefings; governments come and go, but the bureaucrats largely remain in place. This relationship—between scientists willing to produce the science to shore up industry-enticing policies and the bureaucrats who represent this as the only science to be believed—is killing us.
Similarly, but more subtly, academic scientists depend on external funding of their research. Whether the issue is climate change or salmon farms, we need to weigh the validity of the science against its funding source. If two groups of scientists report opposite results—such as in the case of whether the PRV virus found in BC farm salmon is causing disease in wild salmon—it is critical to note that one group is funded by the salmon farming industry and the other is not. This is not to suggest all scientists bend to the needs of their funders, but it certainly does happen and it is one of the greatest threats to life on Earth.
I dutifully made the twelve-hour round trips to attend the Fish Health Committee meetings held in the black tower of DFO’s downtown Vancouver offices. I had learned to understand whales by spending a lot of time watching them. Now I was watching and once again trying to figure out bureaucrats.
Since I had already read their emails through the dozens of access requests that I had made, I knew their positions on matters. Now I observed how they behaved with industry representatives and also with the lower-down-the-hierarchy field staff. I knew from the email correspondence that many field staff are fighting as hard as I am to protect wild salmon, but their concerns are blocked by senior staff and tend not to rise to the surface where the decisions were being made. DFO field personnel were writing very stern emails to salmon farming companies demanding they get their sea lice under control before young wild salmon began migrating past the farms every March. Some of these emails were written in the middle of the night. Their authors’ stress was evident as they openly lamented the impact of the lice on wild salmon. When they realized that the salmon farmers were ignoring them, leaving heavily lice-infested fish in pens during the young wild salmon migrations, they tried to convince senior management to strengthen the laws and the conditions of licence.
They complained to each other that senior DFO staff were ignoring their efforts to strengthen regulations to protect wild salmon. The regulatory loopholes they complained about were left in place: all the companies had to do to stay in business was to have a plan to keep their lice under the government limits and execute the plan; it was irrelevant if the plan worked, or if the wild salmon lived or died.
Suddenly I had slipped inside this dynamic, sitting in meetings with both the field and senior staff. I brought the field staffs’ emails to the table to allow their information to penetrate the airtight layers of the DFO hierarchy. Instead of only policy-friendly reporting, the bad news also had to rise to the surface so it could be dealt with. Everyone at the table knew the solution to sea lice was to institute fines for exceeding the limits. These fines had to be so high that it became less expensive for the companies to cull the infected farm fish than to allow their lice to kill wild salmon. If the companies met these limits, then British Columbia wouldn’t be a profitable place to raise Atlantic salmon in marine net pens. They would put them in a tank. End of subject.
I was told this was impossible, that DFO was not allowed to fine salmon farms. This was a jaw-dropper; I had to ask several times whether it was true. Was it really true that DFO officers can come to my door and threaten to arrest me for catching a handful of juvenile salmon, but salmon farms can kill millions of the same fish through sea lice infections and face zero penalties? Field staff looked at me, perhaps thinking Welcome to our world, and in that way we became awkward allies pushing for changes that would protect the fish outside the pens.
However, these discussions failed, as all other consultations before them had failed. Senior staff took our concerns, consulted with industry and their lawyers, and came up with new farm lice recommendations for 2020. They would grant the companies an unlimited number of lice per farm salmon for forty-two days—six weeks to get their lice under control during the highly sensitive juvenile wild salmon migration from March to June. This was a godsend if you were a salmon farming corporation that couldn’t control its lice infestation, but a death sentence for salmon runs already reduced to less than 1 percent by farm lice. When you are only a few centimetres long, it’s lethal to swim for forty-two days in an ocean teeming with lice.
When the Mowi representative at the table boldly stated that the virus PRV does not cause disease in British Columbia, I countered that Emiliano Di Cicco and Kristi Miller had published finding the disease HSMI, due to PRV, in a BC fish farm in the Discovery Islands in 2017. The Mowi rep shook her head no, and the DFO meeting facilitator, Carmel Lowe, director of science, said I was getting into too much detail for the committee. I countered that sorting this out was critical to providing effective recommendations to the minister. “What about bringing two veterinarians with opposite opinions—Emiliano Di Cicco and Gary Marty—to this table to explain their opposing views on HSMI?” I asked. There was a murmur of agreement around the table.
As a result, on January 28 and 29, 2020, a veterinarian workshop was held to answer whether PRV causes disease in British Columbia or not, but DFO’s deputy minister, Timothy Sargent, prohibited me, the two First Nations representatives, John Werring from the David Suzuki Foundation and Andrew Bateman from the Pacific Salmon Foundation, all members of the committee, from attending. When I asked why we were banned, DFO senior staff said, “This conversation needs to be protected”; a company rep said the company people needed “to feel safe.”
The facilitator selected for this workshop, Dr. Ian Gardner, had already gone public in opposition to the finding that PRV is causing disease. I arrived at the workshop as it was getting under way to ask Lowe if she was sure she wanted to make the mistake of excluding us and further destroying the public’s trust in DFO. Apparently she was. As they entered, I looked each participant in the eye. Doctors Di Cicco and Kibenge, the only two scientists present who accepted the evidence that PRV is a disease agent in British Columbia, were in for a hell of a fight, with no witnesses. At the end of the workshop, the group were asked to vote on whether PRV is causing HSMI in British Columbia—an unusual method of conducting science. I wasn’t there to cast a vote but the managing director of Mowi’s BC operations, Diane Morrison was. The final report recommended that DFO refuse to recognize any diagnosis of HSMI in a salmon farm until the disease had reached a “population level”—meaning, they were to wait until the disease was an epidemic within the farm. This destroyed any hope of containing the spread of this exotic virus to protect wild salmon.
The problem, I realized, as I tried to find a path through the obfuscation, was that no one from DFO at the Fish Health Committee was there to oversee the health of wild salmon. I began looking for anyone in DFO with such a job description.
DFO is an organization with 11,500 employees. I went online to scroll through the DFO staff to check all the department’s directors. There were a lot of them, but no one was in charge of the state of wild salmon. This is despite the fact that salmon support tens of thousands of people in the various fisheries and the growing wilderness tourism industry, bringing in billions of dollars to the province. Salmon are entwined in the legal title and rights of First Nations. The horrifying images of the southern resident orca, carrying her dead baby on her head for seventeen days over two thousand kilometres, made millions of people worldwide aware that this population of orca was starving for lack of salmon in Canada. Salmon are economically, biologically and legally important. Furthermore, people love them and want them to thrive.
I did find a person in the DFO directory in charge of Salmon Management and Client Services. Who were DFO’s “clients” and what “services” did they require, and how were these services attached to management of wild salmon? I wrote this person and asked her if she had been invited to sit on the minister’s committee on fish health, where the only fish being discussed were farm salmon. She did not answer.
Also not at the table was the one person who had experience measuring the impact of viruses on wild salmon health—Dr. Di Cicco, the veterinarian with the Pacific Salmon Foundation who was the lead author on the research with Dr. Miller that reported the impact of the PRV virus on chinook salmon. Actually Di Cicco was at the meetings out of his own interest in what was being said, but he was not allowed to talk. When industry representatives threw his science under the bus, claiming there was no evidence that the PRV virus causes disease in British Columbia, I glanced at him. He looked as if he had been hit. He didn’t look up, but sat caved in on himself. How was he able to keep silent?
Sick of meetings, I attached a magnetic sign I’d had made that read Department of Wild Salmon to the side of my car and went to look at what returning salmon I could find. I needed to be with them, smell the forest, touch the clear river water, feel their energy. I did find salmon returning to some rivers. It wasn’t too late yet.
In remote wilderness areas, spawning salmon are shy. A human moving along the edge of the river could be a wolf or a bear, and so the fish rush away if you make the slightest movement. They are not only assessing the gravel for its nest-building potential and sizing up prospective mates, they are also watching the silhouette of the forest through the rushing water, alert for predators. However, in rivers that flow near towns, the salmon ignore people and will dig their nests right in front of you. As always, I marvelled at how completely confident they were even though they had no previous experience with the spawning ritual.
The first river I visited was the Campbell River. Arrow pulled at the leash I used to keep her close so she would not disturb the salmon or the bears. I felt calmed by the sheer beauty of the river flowing through the dappled light of leaves waving fall colours in the cool breeze. There on the dark wet sand of the riverbank I spied a dead pink salmon glowing yellow in the muted light. I leaned down to lift its gill plate. Damn, the gills were pale. I slit its belly with my pocket knife, took a look, then spun on my heel and hurried up the riverbank to retrieve my sampling kit from the car. The fish’s spleen was huge, swollen in the act of fighting infection even as the fish died. Its heart was pale and the tough little valve attached to the heart, the bulbus arteriosus, was pale yellow. Yellow is the colour Di Cicco and Miller reported in the chinook salmon dying of PRV.
I took samples, measurements and photos, labelled the vials and bags and popped them into a cooler, then drove south to the next river, the Puntledge. I was no longer sight-seeing. I was tracking yellows.
Dead pink salmon, turned yellow by jaundice, were visible from the bridge, lying on the river bottom. A helpful man in shorts and light blue plastic Crocs waded out and brought them to me. Yellow skin, pale gills, swollen spleens; dead with eggs still in them. I took more notes, samples and photos. I called Brad and Sandy, my friends from the lower Fraser River with the speedboat. We bent over yellows strewn dead the length of Mountain Bar, taking samples from the freshest corpses. The dramatic beauty of the dark blue mountains, the cottonwoods in yellow fall foliage, the hundreds of eagles perched on the trees, their white heads gleaming like blossoms among the leaves, and the bright blue sky could not calm my rising sense of dread.
If these fish were dying of PRV, a virus my own research and the work of others have traced from Norway to the millions of Atlantic salmon in net pens throughout the southern half of the BC coast, this was an epidemic. As I knelt beside a dead fish at the river’s edge, I could see tiny young salmon and trout tugging at the fraying flesh of another dead yellow salmon that lay on the river bottom. Transmission.
In the natural world, the decomposing bodies of spawned-out salmon feed the world around them. They feed the trees that are sequestering the carbon that is threatening life on Earth. They feed the eagles, fish and bears, and the Indigenous and invading cultures. They feed the insects that lay eggs that will hatch in spring to nourish the next generation of tiny newborn salmon wriggling out of pebble nests. And in addition to all this, they feed us. They represent food security.
In the unnatural world, dying salmon are industrial disease vectors, putting this entire food chain at risk.
As I was walking back to my car from the river, a young man hurried to catch up with me. At first I was apprehensive, but he was in hip waders and carrying a fishing rod, and so I stopped. In a lovely foreign accent he said, “You are Alexandra Morton, aren’t you? I am from Denmark and I come every year to BC to fish. I read your posts on Facebook and I love what you do. Please keep it up. We have lost our salmon in Europe.”
Everywhere I went, people responded to the sign on my car, pleased to see that the Department of Wild Salmon was on scene. They likely assumed I was with a branch of DFO dedicated to wild salmon. It was just me and my dog, but the Department of Wild Salmon was also a concept I was working on: a step-by-step path to restore wild salmon by intertwining the salmon people, powerful new scientific tools and local Indigenous and municipal governments, in which the fish become the ultimate authorities on their own restoration. They become our guide and teacher.
We love wild salmon, but in over a hundred years of human attempts to force more salmon from the natural system and then to combat the declines that we caused, we have loved them to death. With very few exceptions, we never actually gave the fish what they needed. Instead, we take shortcuts; we do what suits us more than them. The trouble for the salmon, and all that depends on them, is that they run afoul of so many industries, including logging, mining, hydropower, fishing, salmon farming, oil and agriculture, as well as urban development.
Governments in both Washington State and British Columbia thought they could destroy salmon habitat and simply create salmon without a river, and that everything would be fine. Hatcheries seemed like a good idea, but they have not worked out. Still, people cling to the hope that restoring salmon is as easy as building more hatcheries. Some of the most dedicated people working the hardest to restore salmon are hatchery workers. In all weather, including snow, they catch salmon and carefully transport them to hatchery tanks to wait for the females to ripen. Gently feeling the females’ bellies, they can tell when the eggs have been released from the skein that holds them in place in the fish’s body. They are ready to be fertilized.
With a swift blow to the head, they kill the fish, then slit her belly open and carefully remove the eggs. Since the male salmon are always ready, the hatchery workers then “milk” them for their sperm, which they collect in a cup. Putting the eggs together with the sperm is the next step.
Spawning in the natural world is a carefully choreographed event. Since the outer soft shell of a salmon egg will only allow sperm an entrance for a matter of moments, the male and female have to release sperm and eggs into the gravel together. As the eggs tumble into the river, the sperm fertilizes them, then the eggshells seal up as the mother quickly pushes pebbles over them to prevent them from being swept downstream.
While hatchery workers do think carefully about which males to pair with which females, they are looking through human eyes, not salmon eyes. Humans successfully breed many species, but we have never bred wild animals. This is the first problem with hatcheries. They prevent wild salmon from rapidly evolving to keep up with the changes in their environment. With the era of rapid climate change upon us, we would be wise to back off and let the salmon handle this. They know how to ensure that each generation has the best chance to deal with changes in their environment.
The hatchery workers quickly add the sperm to a bowl of translucent orange eggs and gently stir. If the sperm does its job, a light foam appears. The workers add water to harden the shells and seal the dividing cells inside the eggs. Then they place the fertilized eggs in trays they stack in racks, where water gently pours over them to simulate the river flowing over pebble nests. Entire salmon runs made in a bowl.
When the tiny fish hatch, they are protected from predators and fed a specially formulated chow. They swim in a featureless steel tank until they are released back into the rivers their parents were taken from. Unlike the progeny of their wild brethren, weaker fish do survive in the hatchery because there are no predators; since finding food is too easy, they don’t learn anything about being salmon. But they grow bigger and faster than the wild fry and so compete successfully against the wild fish for food in the rivers. Though they appear healthy and robust, their genetic code is weak; the reproductive success of hatchery-bred salmon can be as much as 50 percent lower than that of their wild relatives. Hatchery fish are dependent on hatcheries.
The second problem with hatcheries is that the disease organisms flourish unnaturally when you raise salmon in the absence of predators. We learned this with salmon farms, but it is also true of hatcheries. They are not self-sustaining.
There may be a place for hatcheries to raise salmon for fishermen to catch. But we’d need to release those hatchery fish away from the wild runs. Big hatchery returns attract big commercial fisheries. If the huge seine nets and kilometres of gill nets are set across truly wild salmon migration routes and the wild fish are caught along with the hatchery fish, the valuable wild runs, with their superior genetics, risk extermination. This is the third problem with hatcheries.
The Department of Wild Salmon would link the hundreds of people who are already on scene on the rivers and in the marine environment working to study or restore wild salmon. We would take tiny non-lethal samples of salmon as they migrate through our regions and read their immune systems. Remarkably, many of the same genes turn on and off in fish immune systems as in human immune systems. For example, the immune system of a Pacific salmon fighting the influenza-family ISA virus looks similar to the immune system of a human fighting an influenza virus. A salmon gets mucus on its gills; a human gets mucus in the lungs. The immune system uses a planet-wide language shared by the cells of all animal life on Earth.
Immune systems are like toolboxes and genes are the tools in that box. When an animal becomes stressed, its immune system picks the right tool to deal with the specific stressor by turning on the genes that will best deal with the situation. This means that looking at which genes have been turned on, or upregulated, tells us what is stressing the animal. In a sense, the pattern we detect allows the animal—in this case the salmon—to talk to us and tell us the water is too warm, it’s fighting a virus, bacteria, or pollutants and so on. If we take samples at intervals down the long rivers and along the coast of British Columbia, we could see where salmon immune systems are lighting up to indicate a problem. By looking at which genes are turned on, we could make a good guess at what’s wrong. Then this information could be provided to the people in that region and together we could find the cause—the agricultural runoff, the storm drain outfall, the source of viruses, parasites and bacteria, the dam causing elevated water temperatures—and turn our minds to fixing the problem. We could find the bottlenecks and open them up, strategically getting out of the way of the fish where the salmon need it most. As salmon pass this location during the next migration, we could ask the salmon, Did we make it better for you? By sampling again, they can tell us.
This is the really powerful ingredient to this immune-system science. It begins a remarkable conversation between us and the fish. First Nations Elders would say that they used to engage in such a conversation to make sure the life-sustaining salmon populations never faltered. This science would allow the rest of us to catch up. If we do this sampling throughout salmon’s coastal migration pathways, we will get a blueprint of how we need to change if we want to keep wild salmon alive. A spinoff benefit to this approach is that we learn how we are damaging the ocean and rivers and what is required to reverse the damage and thus protect ourselves from the destruction of these ecosystems.
Kristi Miller is the world leader in applying this science to salmon and DFO is trying to stifle her; every time she checks in with the salmon in British Columbia, the fish tell her something else about salmon farms that the current DFO regime does not want to hear. Miller’s work is at odds with policy, and so they try to shut her up, but it turns out she is remarkably resilient and determined. Norway, the home of the salmon farming industry, has tapped her to work with them, but Canada pretends her work should be ignored.
The Department of Wild Salmon would pay close attention to the people trudging up rivers, climbing over logs, and crawling through dense brush to reach salmon runs throughout British Columbia—the eyewitnesses. This science depends on them, and so I would take them into the labs to see what happens with the samples and data they so arduously collect. As field workers visited the labs, they would find out why was it was so important to use sterile tools on each fish and to take each sample exactly two kilometres apart along the river. Samples taken at precise intervals allow for higher degrees of confidence in statistical results; we would learn more. But forcing a field crew to do the impossible destroys morale and weakens the results, so the lab technicians working on the samples would need to pull on their own hip waders, try to anchor a boat on a falling tide where it will go aground in exactly ninety minutes and help in the gathering. In this way, the technicians in the labs would also gain respect for the challenges faced by the collectors in the field; working together, they would streamline methods to find a balance between what is optimal and what is possible. The Department of Wild Salmon would facilitate annual gatherings where all teams could share ideas, successes and failures—where they could eat together and perhaps hold a salmon dance, and create a community among the people learning the language of salmon.
And finally, all of this would have to be gathered under the auspices of the local First Nations. While giving control over what happens to salmon runs to First Nations scares some people, consider this: Indigenous governments are entirely focused on very specific regions, without the need to consider international trade. This difference is critical to life on Earth. While the big picture is important, it immobilizes governments who are trying to satisfy international corporate needs and keep complex ecosystems functioning to produce clean air, water and food. We are extremely lucky that the First Nations of British Columbia were not extinguished by colonialism and that they are combing through the ashes, revisiting the secret places, reviving their languages and seeking wisdom from their Elders to rebuild governments based on human and nature as one.
I know that many Indigenous people reject the word science. I saw the horror on the face of one woman in the ancient salmon drying shack on the banks of the Fraser River in Lillooet as I pulled on blue latex gloves and opened a sterile blade to sample the fish she was preparing for the drying racks. But they are scientists in the truest sense of the word. They observe, remember, ponder, see and feel that all life is connected. The sacred dances of the animal kingdom are cultural, but they are also biology lessons. All the animals that appear around the fire in the Big House—from bears to bottom-dwelling fish like sculpins—are part of what happens in this place and why it happens.
Here on the western edge of the North American continent, salmon are masters at the art of thriving. Through the concept of the Department of Wild Salmon, salmon would become our teachers, ensuring that we finally learn how to thrive, because we will only thrive if the world around us thrives.
I wrote to the facilitator of the Fish Health Committee, Carmel Lowe, just as I entered self-isolation against COVID-19: “I am resigning to ensure that my name does not endorse the outcomes of this committee…. It is unforgivable at this moment in history for DFO to pretend they don’t understand the risk of allowing a highly contagious virus to spread through Canada’s wild salmon.”
The collapse of the 2019 wild salmon runs worsened in 2020, showing us that we are down to the wire, with no time to repeat mistakes. Sitting in the black tower of DFO, watching field staff waving red flags as their superiors ignore them, I realized those staff needed a pathway to the decision makers.
DFO is deaf to their field staff. DFO is broken because they have severed their own nervous system, blocking the information flowing from field staff to the decision makers. How DFO manages salmon is not based on salmon, it is based on politics. This is not working.
I realized it was time to try something else.
Dear Minister of Fisheries,
If Canada is going to keep her salmon, your department needs a Director of Wild Salmon, Pacific Region, someone whose sole mandate is keeping wild salmon alive, who you can trust to tell you what the fish need. This person has to be someone who doesn’t really want the job, who isn’t looking for advancement, a political career or academic tenure and who knows not only what is going on, but more importantly knows the people who know what needs to be done. This person needs to possess an honest working relationship with First Nations and understand the powerful science that can allow salmon to talk to us.
I am writing to ask you to consider creating a new position in response to the 2019 wild salmon collapse, the Director of Wild Salmon, Pacific Region, and name me as the first occupant in this role.
Alexandra Morton
I am waiting for the answer.
On April 2, 2020, I headed out in my speedboat to begin my twentieth year of counting sea lice on young wild salmon as they passed the salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. I stopped at the research station to load my net into my boat. I had to work alone this season because my boat was too small to safely bring any crew on board during a pandemic.
Since 2001, every year, from April to June, I have made sure to take weekly samples near two Mowi salmon farms, Wicklow and Glacier, and one Cermaq site, Burdwood.
Few adult wild salmon had returned to the nearby Ahta and Viner Rivers the fall before, so I knew there would be very few little fish. When I finally found a school in the Burdwood Islands, I nosed my boat up to the rocky shoreline and began my routine, catching about forty salmon, mostly chum and a few pinks, in the bunt of the net. I scooped them gently into a bucket and, once back aboard, I began the process of recording data.
I lifted each fish and slid it into a plastic bag with a little seawater then held it against a piece of graph paper to measure it. They were so tiny, less than 4 centimetres long. Using a hand lens, I examined all sides of each fish through the bag. Their skins were smooth and slivery—no lice, no lice wounds, no scars. Their eyes were jet black, so dark it felt like I was looking into another world. In recent years the eyes of the little fish I’d sampled had become disturbingly cloudy, a grey veil between them and their world, almost certainly making it harder for them to see, to find food and avoid predators.
My heart began ringing like a bell and the sensation grew stronger with each fish I examined. As I was finished with the fish, I slipped it out of its bag and back into my bucket. At the end, I poured them all out of the bucket into the ocean, wishing them well. I breathed deeply, maybe a little shakily, unfamiliar with the sensation of joy. Sea lice were still ravaging juvenile salmon elsewhere on the coast, but this place was safe for wild salmon again.
I don’t know if there are enough wild salmon left to rebuild the rivers of the Broughton Archipelago, but for the first time in a long while I knew that everything I had done was worth it.
The power of one is all we have, but we all have it.