Environmental Act? What Environmental Act?

Okay, so the picture on here says "the office", well thankfully I am on the replanting side and not the destructive deforestation side of it. Yay for us dirty ass treeplanters. Heh.

So, I have a "technical report" to write for my fisheries ecology class. It has to be on the topic of atlantic fish farming in BC. So I can take any stance I want, but anyone who knows me, and pays attention, already knows I have absolutely nothing good to say about anything that fucks with nature.

Nevertheless, I can come from any angle and really say what I want about it just as long as it follows the structure of a "technical report". So, I am trying to write a bit about it first so as to get my thoughts in line. Sometimes I have a really hard time figuring out my angle. Once I have it, it usually just flows. The thoughts are all there, they just aren't really lined up.

Here goes.....

It is important to clarify one thing first before diving into the topic of Atlantic salmon fish farming in BC. Atlantic salmon, as we commonly know them as, are in fact a member of the trout genus. Additionally, they are, as the name suggests, a species native to the Atlantic ocean.

Fish farming corporations from countries like Norway, Scotland and Chile, have moved their "farms" up here where the conditions are prime and environmental law is transparent. They would probably have colonized Alaska too, but believe it or not, Alaska has prohibited fish farming in its waters. Yes, Americans have us beat on this one. Why have they banned fish farming? Most likely because they trust the studies that were conducted in Scotland and Norway that revealed the direct and devastating impact that fish farms were having on wild fish stocks. They keyed into the fact that soon after the studies, when there were no remaining commercially valued native fish left to "harvest" in Norwegian and Scotish waters, who was coming knocking at their door looking to rent a space on the coastline? Was it too much for the Canadian to resist? At a time when rural coastal BC was suffering from a dwindling forestry industry, which they had come to rely on almost exclusively, the multi-million dollar industry of fish farming couldn't have come at a better time. It wasn't long before the BC government lifted the 1996 moratorium on open-pen fish farming in 2002, only to result in an explosion of fish farms that now blot BC's coastline like the jaw of a kid with bad acne.

Well that's all for now.