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fisheries
Tribes Celebrate as Dam Removals Set Klamath River 'Free' for First Time in a Century
"The biggest thing for me, the significance of the dam removal project, is just hope—understanding that change can be made," a Yoruk activist said as the largest dam removal project in U.S. history neared completion.
Aug 29, 2024
Crews breached the final of four dams on a key stretch of the Klamath River on Wednesday, letting salmon run freely there for the first time in over a century and garnering tears from Indigenous activists who had campaigned for the dam removals for decades.
Together the four demolitions mark the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.
The Klamath, which runs from south-central Oregon into northwestern California, has long been bordered by Native American tribes—"Salmon People," as they call themselves—that once relied on the protein-rich fish for about half of their caloric intake but were impoverished by the institution of the dams, among other white settler colonialist initiatives.
"Another wall fell today," Frankie Myers, vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, said in a statement. "The dams that have divided the basin are now gone and the river is free. Our sacred duty to our children, our ancestors, and for ourselves, is to take care of the river, and today's events represent a fulfillment of that obligation."
The world's largest dam removal to date is restoring and reconnecting hundreds of miles of the Klamath River allowing salmon to go to their spawning grounds for the first time in 100 years.https://t.co/hts6nH3fbG
— American Rivers (@americanrivers) August 29, 2024
The four dams were built between 1918 and 1962 to generate electricity in the region and have been owned in recent years by PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate owned by Warren Buffett.
Beforehand, chinook and coho salmon were plentiful in the river.
"My grandpa said that there were so many salmon when he was younger that you could walk across their backs to the other side," Brook Thompson, a 28-year-old activist who grew up on the Yurok reservation, toldThe New York Times. "It's just so hard to express to people who are so used to fishing for sport or fun that salmon is really everything for us. The health of the river is literally our health."
The campaign to remove the dams took flight in 2002 following a devastating salmon die-off which Thompson and other Indigenous activists still talk about as a turning point. Campaigners went as far as the United Kingdom—where Scottish Power, which then owned the dams, was headquartered—to demand their removal.
The campaign faced opposition but was pushed through by a coalition that included Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Kate Brown of Oregon, who left office in 2023.
"This moment is decades in the making—and reflects California's commitment to righting the wrongs of the past," Newsom said in a statement on Wednesday. "Today, fish are swimming freely in the Klamath for the first time in more than a century, thanks to the incredible work of our tribal, local, and federal partners."
The Klamath decommissioning project is part of a larger movement aimed at restorative justice for Indigenous peoples and ecological renewal. More than 2,000 dams have been removed in the United States, mostly in the last 25 years, according to American Rivers, an advocacy group.
Thompson said the removal of the dams showed that activism can pay off.
"The biggest thing for me, the significance of the dam removal project, is just hope—understanding that change can be made," she recently told the Los Angeles Times.
The Klamath is unusual in that it runs from a desert area into the mountains and then back down to the Pacific Ocean—National Geographic has called it "a river upside down." Two upstream dams on the river have not been removed, but they have swim ladders that allow salmon to get through.
Construction work to remove the last infrastructure on the four dams is expected to last another month, while ecological restoration work will go on for years, led by Indigenous groups and Resource Environmental Solutions, a company contracted to do the work.
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What US Militarism Has to Do With Japan's Quest to Slaughter More Whales
Whaling, it turns out, has very little to do with whaling and much more to with how powerful nations want to dominate the world's oceans.
Aug 26, 2024
In early August, the crew on Japan’s new whaling factory ship dismembered a male fin whale, the first commercial catch of the species in several decades. A few days earlier, Paul Watson was arrested in Nuuk, Greenland. He sits in a Danish prison, waiting a decision on his extradition to Japan. Given the Japanese courts’ record of 99.9% conviction rate for criminal cases, and issues with Japanese justice system, if extradited, he will probably spend the rest of his life imprisoned.
A few months ago, a paper led by Norwegian government scientists showed that there are around 50,000 fin whales in just one small part of the Southern Ocean. Also in Antarctic waters, the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research has been running a research program which, as the the Institute states, is the “aimed at the sustainable use of whale resources in the Antarctic Ocean.” A new era of commercial whaling in the Antarctic looms.
Forty years ago, the International Whaling Commission introduced the whaling moratorium—a pause in slaughter, to allow whale populations to recover. At the time, the belief by most in the whale conservation community was that by the time that whale populations finally recovered, those still engaged in whaling would have given up, making the moratorium permanent. That’s not what’s happened. Three nations—Japan, Norway, and Iceland—still engage in commercial whaling.
There are many arguments against whaling: it’s cruel, it has to be subsidized, most people in whaling nations don’t care about it, it’s traditional in very few places in Japan, whales don’t eat all the fish, instead they’re ecosystem engineers that contribute to carbon sequestration. These points have been made for many years, and have never had the slightest impact on the Japanese whaling bureaucracy. They’re not only irrelevant, they’ve proven pointless.
Whaling, it turns out, isn’t about whales at all. Japan’s primary interest in commercial whaling is to maintain their geopolitical clout to exploit other marine wildlife (“living marine resources”) internationally. Tuna, for example. This point’s been made recently in a couple of forums. For the Japanese government, whaling’s a thin-edge-of-the-wedge problem. The moratorium was a big win for marine conservation that couldn’t be repeated with other international fisheries.
Given this framing, the actions of the Japanese whaling industry over the past forty years are rational. Whaling is primarily about asserting dominance in international negotiations over access to marine wildlife, so whether or not Japanese people eat much whale meat is irrelevant. What matters is access to other fisheries by Japan’s pelagic fishing fleets. Subsidizing whaling is a minuscule price to pay. The primary role of Japan’s new floating factory, the Kangei Maru, is as a flagship, a symbol of Japanese hegemony in international maritime negotiations. So its $48 million price tag is trivial. A Ford class US aircraft carrier, with a build cost of around $13 billion and an annual upkeep of $700 million, puts that in perspective. The Kangei Maru’s costs are a rounding error.
Despite Japan leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in late 2018, the Japanese fisheries bureaucracy still controls the activities of the pro-whaling bloc. This September, the IWC meets again. One rumor currently swirling is that the Japanese will rejoin the IWC with a reservation to commercial whaling, one way to demolish the whaling moratorium. Another appeared a couple of weeks ago, when the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an opinion piece calling for the IWC to be dismantled. The article’s first author is a former chair of the IWC, who with his coauthors, argue that the IWC is now a “zombie” organization that has outlived its usefulness and should be dismantled.
Interesting timing.
Once, the threat of US sanctions in response to “diminishing the effectiveness” of the IWC regulated the manner in which the whaling bloc engaged there. That threat—obviously—no longer exists. How have the whalers brought the U.S. to heel on whaling? What’s their lever?
There was a belief in the NGO community that the threat of withholding IWC quotas on U.S. Inuit bowhead whaling was driving U.S. acquiescence. The pro-whaling bloc engaged in brinkmanship on this several times in the past. But the “Aboriginal Subsistence” whaling issues at the IWC have been resolved, removing this threat. Besides, ending the IWC would put bowhead whaling management back entirely with the U.S., internally. It can’t be that.
It’s here the military comes in. The U.S. has around 55,000 military personnel based in Japan. This is, for example, almost the size of the Australia’s active duty defense forces. Their weaponry includes some the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal. Most of those personnel are based in Okinawa, where there were over 6,000 criminal cases involving U.S. military personnel in the 50 years since the island was handed back to Japan in 1972. That’s a couple of crimes a week. And they include reported 134 rapes, or two to three reported rapes per year, including recent charges of the sexual assault of a child. Understandably, there is a vocal anti-US-base movement in Okinawa that regularly engages in mass protest.
These put Paul Watson’s “accomplice to assault” and “ship trespass” charges in context.
At the same time, the U.S. is reconstituting its forces in Japan, a buildup in response to the perceived threat to U.S. hegemony now posed by China. The Japanese government has leverage. Getting its way on whaling is Japan’s price for U.S. bases.
What could happen? Possibilities include Japan rejoining the IWC with a reservation that allows it to conduct commercial whaling wherever it wants. Perhaps the IWC will collapse. The recent Nature article shows that destroying the IWC is being considered. Returning the management of whaling to whaling nations? We know how that worked. And allowing Japan’s return to the IWC with a reservation will return the IWC’s role to that of a toothless body overseeing mass slaughter.
The huge U.S. military presence in Japan matters to the national security apparatus of the United States. The bureaucracy has worked with the Japanese government to see commercial whaling return. The return of commercial whaling is the U.S. military's quid pro quo for its regional dominance in the Pacific—not to mention its rapists in Okinawa.
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Factory Fish Farming Threatens Fishermen and Farmers - But New Legislation Could Change That
By using commodity grains produced on factory land farms to feed fish in factory ocean farms, Big Ag has brought small-scale farmers and fishermen like us together.
Oct 15, 2023
Farmers neither milk cows with nets, nor harvest vegetables with rods. And fishermen neither scatter seeds in the oceans, nor catch fish with sickles.
Despite our differences, something we do share is a common threat from the expansion of industrial fish farming and big agribusiness.
More specifically, the expansion of industrial fish farming provides an increasingly profitable outlet for large-scale agriculture corporations to market surplus grains like soy and corn as “fish feed.” Such developments threaten both fishing and farming communities, as the model promotes industrial production of genetically modified monocrops for concentrated animal feeding operations on land and at sea.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), marine and inland aquaculture production has significantly increased around the world from 1990 to 2022, with the former growing from 12.6 to 44.7 million live weight tons, and the latter moving from 9.2 to 26.8 million live weight tons.
Factory fish farms have emerged to line the pockets of big corporations by producing monocultures of fish at mass volume, under the guise of satisfying seafood demand. This "demand" is artificially created by the fact that we currently export 75-80% of U.S. wild-caught seafood. US wild-capture fishermen landed more fish domestically than Americans consumed in 2020, according to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.
The influx of nutritionally inferior farmed fish devalues sustainable and diverse wild-caught fisheries, forcing fishermen to accept pennies on the pound for hard-earned fish. Furthermore, wild forage fish, which make up the base of healthy marine ecosystems, are being harvested for incorporation into aquaculture fish feeds, along with soy and corn. These fish, specifically Menhaden and herring, are the main source of protein for every species of finfish.
Densely packed fish farms also degrade ocean ecosystems. They amount to floating feedlots that pollute waters with antibiotics and fish waste; endanger marine mammals that interact with the cages; and compromise local coastal economies that depend on fishing and tourism. From coast to coast, lobbyist-backed efforts are underway to expand this industry in the United States.
Certain large-scale agribusiness firms have jumped on the bandwagon and made offshore industrial fish farming an area of focus. In a nutshell – or perhaps a soybean – the firms together referred to as “ABCD” (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and the Louis Dreyfus Company) are developing what is known as “aquafeed.”
According to Cargill, aquafeed includes “co-products” that are “not of marine origin.” Those “co-products” include all kinds of things, including large amounts of soymeal and corn - most of which is genetically modified.
Should fish eat corn or soy? Common sense says no.
As you can imagine, fish have trouble digesting grains. On top of that, placing thousands of fish in confinement generates other issues, including disease and illness.
In response, Cargill has acquired firms, such as Diamond V, which specialize in producing feed additives to improve fish health and digestion. They are also working on new “co-products,” such as insects and algae to supplement the soy and corn that fish are forced to eat.
Notice the circle: agribusiness firms create solutions for problems they created in the first place. In fact, we wouldn’t have to worry about fish diets if they were not sick from being crammed into unnatural habitats, eating manufactured food — basically, if there were no factory fish farms.
Meanwhile, our current industrial agricultural system rests upon bailing out farmers just enough through schemes like crop insurance, so that they continue to grow excess corn and soy, regardless of demand. In fact, crop insurance has become the second largest section of the Farm Bill, the mammoth piece of federal legislation that covers programs ranging from rural development to food access to beginning farmer training. In comparison, federal agencies spend a pittance on policies that could promote diverse operations and climate solutions.
The truth is that mega-scale agribusinesses' grain merchants wouldn’t be looking to force-feed soybeans and corn to fish if we had a decent agriculture policy that supported farmer incomes and local, diversified operations, rather than crops that feed into the commodities market. Instead, soy and corn are being overproduced in the U.S. and the Global South, often on land seized from Indigenous peoples for mono-crop expansion that relies on deforestation and pesticide use.
This plays out as a perfect scenario for agribusiness giants to pad their pockets. But not so for small-scale farmers and fishermen, who don’t see any benefits for themselves or their communities.
Still, there’s hope. New proposed legislation for the currently debated Farm Bill may yield positive results, instead of more commodities in our global industrial food system.
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) recently introduced the Improving Agriculture, Research, Cultivation, Timber, and Indigenous Commodities (ARCTIC) Act, much of which is aimed at including seafood in the Farm Bill. The legislation bans offshore fish farms in federal waters, while increasing portside processing facilities for small-scale fishermen. It also calls for country of origin labeling for cooked crab that may come from outside of the US into our markets, as well as a ‘Wild USA Seafood’ label for fish that is landed in US waters.
Preventing the development of offshore factory fish farms is a win for fishing communities. But it’s also a potential win for farmers and the environment. It could deter farmers from continuing on the commodity grain treadmill, allowing them to instead diversify in search of market alternatives and better profits.
By using commodity grains produced on factory land farms to feed fish in factory ocean farms, Big Ag has brought small-scale farmers and fishermen like us together. The Farm Bill, up for reauthorization, seems like an apt opportunity for cross pollination. Why not use this important legislation to address farmers’ and fishermen’s issues together?
We hope more food producers from land and sea join in on our shared fights. After all, our farming and food systems don’t end at the water’s edge.
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