Food...

Along with gas and food, salmon is going for record high prices this year, $40 a pound for a filet. The reason: the commercial season for Chinook salmon in California and Oregon was canceled because we’re destroying the salmon’s habitat. (For background see previous post.)

This month, in the The New York Times, salmon are again at the forefront. As Taras Grescoe wrote: “Wild Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct and runs of Pacific salmon south of the Alaska panhandle are experiencing catastrophic collapses.” So, this year, Grescoe is “swearing off salmon.” That means no more lox on bagels, no more salmon burgers, no more grilled salmon filets—not easy feat for Grescoe who grew up in northern British Columbia eating wild salmon.  But now, that salmon is “too scarce and too expensive.”

What’s happened to the wild salmon?

Well, giant water pumps have sucked water from the rivers and dams have stopped those rivers up, so salmon simply can’t get where they need to be to spawn. Global warming has increased water temperatures in rivers that means fewer eggs are maturing, fewer salmon are born, and when they are born, we overfish them.

Right now, 90 percent of salmon in the U.S. was raised on a farm far offshore. These ocean farms are akin to the concentrated feeding operations where we raise our cattle—not a healthy or natural environment for animals to live in. So, it’s no surprise that salmon are now sick, this year there was an epidemic of salmon anemia, and sea lice is an ongoing problem. The list of dangers from farmed salmon goes on—use of pesticides, inefficient feeding, wild salmon pick up diseases from farms as they swim by, etc, etc. Any way you look at it, it’s not pretty and, as Grescoe urges, let’s give the salmon a break.

Learn how to help save the salmon along the Snake River at WildSalmon.org. Photo from Save Our Wild Salmon action page.