Next year, developers plan to apply for permits for the construction of America’s largest open-pit copper and gold mine, in the heart of Alaska’s most valuable salmon runs. It’s not too late for us to stop them if we act now. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently considering requests from stakeholders to use its power under the Clean Water Act to protect Bristol Bay. FRESH, Parent Earth and Trout Unlimited are combining grassroots forces to take action and I hope you’ll join us by signing the petition!

Pebble Mine would cover 20 square miles in the Bristol Bay watershed, and require the construction of the world’s largest earthen dam for a 10 square mile waste containment pond. Up to 10 billion tons of toxic mine wastes could be produced. Any release of these wastes could cause irreparable damage to the Bristol Bay salmon runs.

Even worse: while our wild salmon are under threat, genetically modified salmon may be introduced to the market any day. Here is exclusive footage with Paul Greenberg, best-selling author of Four Fish. He explains why hybrid Frankensalmon has no place on our tables, especially when we have an abundant, healthy alternative.

Originally published on Huffington Post

Picture an Alaskan fisherman. Now wipe the slate clean. Thea Thomas is a 52-year-old blonde who wears lip gloss and earrings when she heads out on her boat, a fiberglass vessel called the Myrmidon, named after Achilles’ warriors. She holds a Master’s degree in biology and has been fishing commercially for the past 23 years. She’s also one of the “highliners” of the 540-person Copper River fleet, meaning the volume of her catch is among the highest of her peers, all but four of whom are men.

And she wants to keep fishing, too, at least until she retires, which won’t be happening any time soon. “I still really enjoy it,” she says. “I don’t know if other people enjoy it as much as I do.”

But as much as she enjoys her work, and as much as she’d like to maximize her earnings during the open season (which runs from May through September), she understands that some days she simply can’t fish. It’s not that she doesn’t feel like it, or lacks the drive, but that she’s not allowed to. And neither are the other members of her fleet.

Why? Because Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game tightly controls when the waters are open to commercial fishing, and when they’re not. They do this for one reason: to ensure that the salmon population remains strong and that the waters off Prince William Sound and the Copper River, in southeastern Alaska, do not get overfished. Sustainability, in these parts, is not only mandated, but legislated and enforced as well.

It’s not a watertight system, of course, and there are certainly fishermen who don’t comply with the regulations, but if they fish when, or where, they’re not supposed to, they risk losing their licenses and even their boats. Fellow fishermen have been known to snap photos of lawbreakers and email them off to the troopers.

According to Bert Lewis, a regional resource development biologist with the Department, sustainability is measured in “escapement,” or in the number of salmon not harvested who escape to the spawning streams. The state determines the optimal escapement goal for each species (say king, or sockeye, or coho) and then opens or closes the fishery accordingly. So if not enough fish are “escaping,” the fisheries will close. If the numbers look strong, the fisheries will open.

Escapement is measured in a number of ways, using both high-tech and low-tech methods:

Weekly aerial surveys. Each week, the Department flies 208 streams around the sound counting the salmon from the sky. As they run, the salmon look like long dark lines. Different varieties can be separately tracked based on their unique characteristics. Chums, for example, are bigger and distinctly colored; sockeye travel in smaller groups; and pinks are so prolific they’re counted by the tens of thousands. “We’re not counting every fish,” says Lewis, “but we use it as an index of abundance.”

Sonar. Even if it’s too cloudy for an aerial count, the Department can rely on its sonar system. Salmon tend to swim up against the banks of the Copper River when the currents are strong, and they emit sounds that are captured by a laptop set up at a nearby sonar station. You can actually see the salmon swimming by on the monitor. According to Lewis, the employee on duty counts the salmon for 10 minutes on the top of every hour and then uses this statistical subset to extrapolate how many will pass by in a 24 hour period. These numbers are then applied to the overall escapement goals.

Otolith marking. Now here’s where things really get interesting. Though all of the Alaskan salmon are wild (as opposed to farmed), certain fisheries do use a hatchery system. When wild salmon return to their breeding grounds to spawn, their eggs are taken and kept over the winter in a controlled environment, but with a natural flow of water. This process, which the locals refer to as “ocean ranching,” increases the survival rate of salmon fry up to tenfold. But it’s important to keep track of which fish are hatchery fish and which are not, so the fish are marked; the water in the hatchery is manipulated by heating and cooling it at different temperatures over different intervals of time, which creates marks on the tiny bones in the fish’s head called the otoliths. When these salmon, which are released into the natural plankton bloom, return to spawn, the Department of Fish & Game studies a subset of their otoliths to determine which hatchery they’re from and whether the stocks have mingled. These numbers all factor into the escapement goals as well.

There are some controversies. For one, the salmon are supposed to home back to their original hatcheries, but they don’t always do so. And second, sometimes the hatchery fish stray into the wild population, which can negatively impact genetic diversity and inflate the wild salmon numbers, causing escapement goals to appear to be met when, in fact, they haven’t.

Even with these issues, Alaska’s wild salmon is consistently ranked high on lists of sustainable seafood choices.

There’s a human element to the sustainability equation, too. I asked Mike Poole, a salmon fisherman with the Copper River fleet, whether he was tempted to fish even when the waters were officially “closed” — you know, to try to catch more fish and, obviously, to make more money. He shook his head hard. “We have sons in the fishery,” he said, gesturing toward his colleagues. “We want them to be able to fish in 10 years, too.”

[Editor's note: Check out Samual Fromartz's video of fishing on the Copper River, and visiting the processing and sonar facilities there over on his great site Chewswise]

It seems like not a week goes by without industrial animal food production somehow making headlines–the H1N1 flu pandemic, astounding meat recalls, high levels of arsenic in chicken feed, or any of a dozen other concerns. One recent story that should have generated some rather large waves, however, has made only a minor splash. Chile’s salmon farming industry, second only to Norway’s, is on the verge of collapse.

Salmon are not indigenous to Chile, but grown in crowded cages installed in the bays and estuaries of the country’s otherwise beautiful southern fjord region. These “farmed” Atlantic salmon are fed a steady diet of wild fish–perfectly edible for humans, but more profitable when converted into “value-added” finfish. The approximately three pounds of wild fish needed to produce each pound of farmed salmon has caused some people to refer to finfish aquaculture operations as “reverse protein factories.” Equally alarming, salmon farms have become excessively dependent upon toxic pesticides to combat sea lice and antibiotic medicines to thwart viruses that can run rampant among the high concentrations of rapidly growing, penned fish–not unlike industrial-scale hog, poultry, and cattle CAFOs on land.

But the drugs are no longer working. According to industry source Intrafish, Chile’s 2009 salmon output could decline by as much as 87 percent from last year–a drop from 279,000 metric tons in 2008 to between 37,000 metric tons and 67,000 metric tons. The cause is the widespread outbreak of a virus known as infectious salmon anemia (ISA). When the virus first appeared in 2008, many offshore aquaculture companies moved their production farms further south in Chile, into waters still unaffected by ISA. Instead of lessening the problem, the industry actually spread the virus into the southern waters.

The Chilean government and regulatory agency are now implementing measures to address the crisis, but their efforts, for the time being, have been too little, too late. Chilean salmon stocks have been devastated, and this is expected to send ripple effects throughout the world’s food supply. A 20 percent shortfall in the global supply of farmed Atlantic salmon is predicted for this year and perhaps 2010 as well. The human toll in this saga is also significant, as the salmon industry has become a primary employer in the southern region of the country, and could lead to the unemployment of as many as 15,000 people.

Experts had been cautioning for years about the hazards of unsanitary conditions and overcrowding in industrial salmon cages. The first widespread die-offs due to ISA began to mount early in 2008, but the industry declined to take protective measures to guard against further spread of the infection. Critics have called for improved conditions by limiting the number of salmon in the cages and by spreading the farms farther apart from one another to avoid transfer of disease and to lessen the concentration of harmful chemicals, antibiotics, and other adverse affects of large-scale fish production.

Unfortunately, this has not been the only alarming news in 2009 about Chilean aquaculture. In February, the Pew Environment Group obtained documents [PDF] from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealing that the Chilean salmon industry has been using antibiotics prohibited on fish destined for the United States. (Pew wrote a letter [PDF] to the FDA) Apparently, the FDA notified the three companies guilty of using the unapproved drugs that they can no longer use them on fish raised for the U.S. market. But questions remain whether or not the FDA will enforce these restrictions, and if so, how they will go about ensuring that the banned substances are not used.

Concerns over antibiotic overdosing and its potential to create antibiotic resistant disease organisms that could harm humans may become less of an issue if the Chilean salmon industry suffers an even further decline. Many are calling for a dismantlement of the industry. Others caution that without real reforms it could implode of its own unsustainable production practices. At a minimum, we should take this as one more in a long series of wake-up calls that our concentrated animal food operations–whether on land or at sea–need to be urgently reconsidered, before they are all on the verge of collapse.

Photo: Sam Beebe / Ecotrust