We've been stalking salmon since the time of God How far do we go to the manufacturer wildness? It's not working that the people want it to be wild and that's what we're fighting for Humans typically adopt a command-and-control approach to environmental problem solving Here's the problem we can engineer our way around it Technology is great in so many realms of human experience But when you try to apply manipulation and control of Ecosystems through technology, you're often successful early on but then problems creep in later on One of the things that our modern society has done is to industrialize all the living things around us We have factories for living things And that includes fish Humans believe everything is for us so if there are animals in the world surely they are for us and surely we should just do anything we want with them or to them and Isn't that great? Well, I don't quite see it that way Fish are wild animal populations they're not made to Or evolved to or really capable of being used at the rate that people use them The whole myth of the Garden of Eden is a place where everything was granted and everything was beautiful and then because of human hubris We were doomed to a life of toil We are certainly casting ourselves out of the garden and dooming ourselves to a life of toil through our hubris This is a king salmon And the guys are pulling the fish off right with their ships him and We spot the fish like inserting a needle into their body cavity which forces air in and pushes all eggs out Then after their spawn here they go to the other side of the table there and we're Hunting we sample you fish We join the touch phone Be honest like Holman National Fish Hatchery is a mitigation hatchery. We're here because of Shasta Dam being built 1942 So the purpose of Pullman National Fish Hatchery is to mitigate for the loss of habitat due to Shasta Dam the creation of the dam prevented about 180 miles of river access for the salmon so here at Colman National Fish Hatchery arrays fall chinook salmon late fall chinook salmon and steal them Our production goal here is 12 million. So we released 12 million and we're trying to get a 1% return We were like 120,000 fish return 90 thousand of that would be caught in the ocean and in River sport fishery 20 thousand back to the hatchery and In ten thousand back to battle through Why do we need hatcheries well, I think you know populations going up waters You know concerned and so if you still would like to see salmon, I think we're going to need to have hatcheries unfortunately It would be nice to think that there would be enough water and environment to support salmon populations But without hatcheries, I don't think that would be a reality This is the Baker River Dam 265 feet high which stops millions of salmon from returning to their spawning grounds above the dam without company So the United States Bureau of fisheries has stepped in and saved the day by providing a free ride upstream It's the only way the salmon can be saved from dashing themselves to pieces against the stonework far below Humans have always sought themselves as superior to nature. You know, it's got us into a lot of trouble When the euro-americans came they believed the natural world was a big warehouse Storing commodities that they were obliged to make use of the tape They asked Spencer Baird the US Fish Commissioner What could they do to ensure that salmon runs would go on forever Baird told them you're not gonna be able to protect the habitat through regulations because they'd be unenforceable You're not gonna be able to protect him from dams because progress is gonna demand that dams be built And so he said what you need to do is take up artificial propagation The people that originally were the fish and wildlife Scientists weren't they were agriculturalists and since the 1800s Our Fish and Wildlife's agencies have been dominated by an agricultural mentality Just like a farm you raised him you put him out you harvest them That's the basis for fish and wildlife management in the US for ages and ages the fact is salmon must spend part of their life out in the wild and it wasn't until in the 70s that we really started evaluating. What are we doing when we leased hatchery fish into a stream The use of hatcheries was a promise that you could have salmon And you could also have the benefits of developing the river Put that next to the fact that 40 percent of the salmon are extinct in their historic range And the rest are protected by the Endangered Species Act You would have to say that that story didn't protect the things that we valued the salmon We've been relying on those same runs of fish those wild fish since the beginning of time When your health is their health, right? You're you're married in that way and I think that Union creates the sacredness to have that relationship with a single Species is real special You think about like the Sioux people and the Buffalo back in the day before everything was colonized But that relationship unfortunately was severed if We let these runs go then they are gone and I do not think that we as people who are on this planet now Should be okay with allowing Salmon to go extinct on our watch So the average person When they see a salmon, they see a salmon they see a finished product and it's perhaps at the end of their fishing line Perhaps in a restaurant on their plate, but they don't see the complexity of things that went into making that salmon Sam and I think have the most complicated You could also say wondrous life histories of I guess any fish They start life by hatching from eggs in a stream and Then they go out to the ocean when they come back they're much much bigger You're distilling the richness of the ocean and Enlivening it and then that enlivened distillation of the ocean propels itself upstream against gravity Sometimes they go well over a thousand miles inland where after laying eggs and creating the potential for a new generation they die and Their carcasses feet dozens of kinds of animals get dragged deep into the woods a lifecycle of the salmon is actually the Transformation of the ocean into living beings that come ashore and become the biggest trees in the world Wild salmon represents something that is really important to us as human beings You have Native American cultures here that have evolved with the fish for 11,000 years you have you know families like mine that that fish for salmon and eat eat salmon and think about salmon and Then I think because this is the age of human impact that where there are wild salmon I think it represents our faith in mother nature that we allowed that to happen I was born to fish all of my earliest memories revolve around fish in some way or another As a young adult I've built my whole calendar year around the Skykomish spring fishery for a wild steelhead and That really became my obsession I Thought of hatcheries is something that actually kind of helped us as fishermen That there would be more fish in the river and we were allowed to kill the hatchery fish. So that meant a meal I Don't think I ever had one second where I thought about conservation at all I thought about getting enough money for gas and pizza so that I could fish all the time What I didn't realize was that we were really at the tail end of a long decline of wild fish In late 2000 they announced that the 2001 season would not happen that the state was gonna close down that Spring catch and release fishery because there were so few wild steelhead fish that even a low-impact Fishing season could wipe out the last of them There's really like a gut punch. I mean I had built this whole life around this fishery and now it's gone So that was in a lot of ways a wake-up call I started doing some research started reading started talking to people Talk to biologists talk to fish managers talk to other fishermen and I learned about the four H's Hydro harvest habitat and hatcheries. This is sort of kind of the impacts on salmon and steelhead people talk about And so I used that as a guideline and I started thinking about the Skykomish and You know, well, the habitats hadn't really changed over those ten years. It was pretty good There's no hydro. There's no dams the harvest as far as I could tell had remained relatively constant and yet we had this plummeting number of fish and so the one constant that I found is that hatchery had been Operating for the entire duration of the decline of wild steelhead I Think that was what started? Kind of my focus on learning more about the role that hatcheries play in in the decline of not just fishing opportunities, but a wild fish populations period And the dams came down on the Ola it was the largest river restoration in history We spent more than 320 million dollars to recover wild salmon But instead of letting them recolonize the river naturally the way they've evolved to do for millions of years We spent 17 million dollars to build a brand-new hatchery So now we're operating not just one but two hatcheries on a river that was restored for the benefit of wild salmon And we missed this huge opportunity to allow the river to return to being truly wild Oh Ho 92 88 no mark, no tag This is a team of interns and staff They are collecting our long-term data on salmon use of the l1 air short we then take these data compare them over the decade that we've been recording the information and look at the evolution of the l1 nearshore as the dam removal progresses As wild fish now recruit into this near shore area we see these large numbers of hatchery fish Our concern is that the hatchery species may be challenging the wild species that are trying to recover They are vulnerable to these hatchery fish either through predation or physical displacement or competition for resources The risk is that we're actually stunting the rivers ability to restore because these fish that Literally are the backbone can't restore because they're being pressured by these continued hatchery releases I Do think that humans by nature have an engineering aspect They like things to be orderly. They like things to be predictable. So that's what hatcheries give people The flip side of that is wild and Wilding your watershed Wilding does have great uncertainty to it. That's how wild works While they're scary, but it's a really important place in people's soul Did you guys see how we walked when we were walking up here we're walking along the Trees so we can look back into these two reds here where we know fish spawn The male's are the easiest to see usually so if there's males on there more than likely there's gonna be a female in there and then we'll sit there and Concentrate those the females are really hard to see they're like transparent half the time She's moving up. She's right straight between us. Yep Yep, moving up. Okay, cause Josh you digging right there right? Very pretty deep Typically what we see in a female is about 4,500 eggs Then we'll do the male's now Keep them separate keep the milk separate from eggs Then after we're done with checking for a cutter wire tag This is the part that has the coated wire tag embedded in the head and that would have information on the fish I Know some people are gonna view this as being brutal and Barbaric, but this is what it takes to collect our food stock at they all want facility It's a tool or tool to help recovery with stock When we we miss a female we feel like we've Failed our the fish itself because we know that those eggs aren't gonna survive as well as it would at the hatchery It's not the again from the cooler lay the buckets on the floor and then Divide the females from emails we have and put the milk in there Mix it let it sit for 30 seconds mix them again and then let them sit for another 30 seconds Way down 13 pounds into a bucket, let it bring in all the Burien food and milk put them in iota for for an hour and then lay them down till they I That's effectively artificial spawning in a hatchery There's been a lot of effort over the last several decades cataloging all of the genetic variation and populations of salmon and their cousins trout salmon have Developed an incredible amount of diversity that allows them to be particularly successful in the stream in which they were born a Huge river system will have huge salmon Some of them used to run up to a hundred pounds and the biggest rivers that had most challenging Falls that they had And then little coastal streams. They had mostly smaller ones, even though it was the same species, but they were genetically totally different Even in one river where you have one species of a certain size you may have the full run and the spring run of that species and those fish are Completely different they don't they don't interact or interbreed at all We've been stalking Salmon since the time of Darwin when we first discovered How to take eggs and take milk and combine them hatch fish put them back into freshwater. We literally knew nothing of Evolutionary ecology. We would have been flying blind We now know that Taking wild fish and exposing them to a hatchery environment breeding them hatching them rearing them for any amount of time. Really changes the genetic makeup Fish are very complex critters that have revolved in mother nature over thousands of years and there's things that happen at hatcheries that don't put them through those pressures that they face out a mother nature that can makes them so They're a fit fish what happens is you create a genetically inferior fish at the hatchery through all the Domestication and then those fish goes spawn with fish in the wild and that actually can degrade the genetics of the fish in the wild So they're not as fit either what we do with fish hatcheries is the same thing as growing a chicken Economically, it makes more sense to put a bazillion chickens in one place and it produces a really inferior chicken You know if nature can produce X number of fish in a river, let's dump more Young fish in there. It's absolutely wrong It's not increasing. Our number of wild fish. It's eventually gonna extra pay all fish Life diversifies in order to survive and humans do the opposite we simplify in order to make things easier for ourselves and by imposing Simplification on a world that has taken millions of years to so wondrously Diversify is a violent act on life itself Well, the fish toss is is that we take the fish that return to the hatchery So these are these are all the fish that were raised in the hatchery We have this tow to fish and I think there's probably a couple hundred fish in each tow and they get frozen to a solid Block and we just drop them down and break them up and refreeze them So they don't stick together no more and prep them for all the school groups Say good morning to Sheila We talked about the five reasons why we're doing this a little bit ago anybody remember you get those Yeah, the trees the trees what about the trees trees need the nutrients nutrients, right? So we partnered with the Nisqually Indian tribe who provides the carcasses from their a hatchery program, which used to be considered a waste product They're actually full of marine derived nutrients because when they leave the river system, they're about yea big when they come back. They're just Carrying so much goodness from the ocean So we teach his concept to the students the Chinook and steelhead in this watershed or threatened species so we inspire them to take action by getting these carcasses back into the upper watershed, which is actually very nutrient for Salmon I think they are very important for the ecosystem many animals eat them, but 138 vertebrae animals eat the salmon specifically I Like the stem tossing idea. I think it's a good help. But at the same time outside, it's the best idea The ecosystem and a specific way for a specific reason we can try and help them by reducing pollution But I don't think we should directly Interact with the salmon Wildlife and all about wildlife and let them run by their self and make their own adaptation The conversation is are there any wild salmon left? Show me a wild salmon show me, you know, a abundant number coming back a wild salmon And we just don't see it here in the Nisqually As much as I'd rather have wild salmon our hatchery salmon are important to us continued in our culture and our traditions No fur F. This is our church Now, this is our medicine here being on this river and I think people have a hard time understanding that Because this is what our ancestors did Since the beginning of time, you know They fished they hunted they gathered they protected what we have and and that's how we lived and and now we're in 2018 our salmon are depleted These are the raceways I was telling you about three hundred thousand in each one. Yeah ten All the fish He's going right now pulling all the head ones out We're managers as Native American people, that's what we do and we manage but we also have to adapt to the times People have a tendency to get enamored with what they wish was instead of what is There's a certain segment of the people of this area that want to blame hatchery fish for the decline of wild fish The biggest problem is too many people and salmon and humans don't coexist or a lot We're gonna build our houses along the rivers you need we're gonna build our towns and the estuaries you need We're gonna log before us you need we're going to take our drinking water out of the river you need We made that deal a long time ago We made the compromise already and by saying that you don't need hatcheries to provide some sort of fishable abundance You're saying you're going back on that deal There's a lot of runs in the northwest right now that it wasn't for a traverse they'd be extinct because their progeny matters Where those fish have blinked out they use hatchery fish to bring them back I Would like to see us make how to fish as much like wild fish as possible I'd like to see us make them do as little harm to wild fish as possible And I'd like to replace habitat replace Culver's do everything You can to reduce the human footprint on salmon habitat and make sure that hatchery and wild fish. Both are here forever It kind of offends me when people say that all I don't care about their habitat, I don't care about conservative hunters and fishermen Sportsmen have always been at the front of conservation and habitat reforms if there's a problem we notice it and We'd like to address it and I just went The reason that I am involved in conservation efforts When I was younger is because I was hoping I'd see a result But as I get older I'm starting to think that's less and less likely Because again, we don't seem to as a society be willing to address the real issues Nature's gone you're viewing this through some Disneyland Idea that we can still do all this bad stuff and recover Sam Nope The southern resident killer whale population that I've been studying for 42 years began a serious decline around 1995 It was almost 100 whales Over down to 74 right now Salmon and orcas are just predator prey. They're like that. If you have a decline in the food you have a decline in the whales Most of those fish right now are hatchery produced and they're getting smaller and smaller every year They average 22 pounds and now they're averaging 8 and 10 pounds and the wild runs are being exterminated by the hatchery production and The whales will follow the wild fish to extinction The icon of the northwest is Starving a mother Orca whose calf died after birth is still carrying her baby 17 days Later researchers say that they're now concerned for the mother's health We had this whale coming in had a brand-new baby. One of our colleagues sought took a picture of her and By the time our got our boat got there 30 minutes later. She was dead and the mother started pushing the dead calf around Okay toward her daughter, go ahead Yeah, see if she does it again Well, she pushed this dead baby for 17 days You know as a tour a grief that went on and on and on we want to welcome you to our last task force meeting for this for this year governor Inslee convened this task force to Save the southern resident killer whales the easy fix that our own Washington State Department efficient while Isis Oh will just increase hatchery production by 50 million fish Well, wait a minute Why don't you look at what's happened with hatchery production and see that it's not working And you want to do more of what doesn't work? Nobody wanted to hear stop fishing that was almost untouchable It wasn't about whale or fish requirements it was all about Commerce Everybody wants to save the whales. Nobody wants to change our own way of life Is a very difficult choice for our society to look at what we're doing what we have done over the years in terms of fisheries management and Change the paradigm. I Didn't realize until about a month had passed how depressed I was I'm seeing all this before my very eyes and documenting it and that's the part that is troubling to me is that I'm gonna be in charge of keeping track of the extinction of these animals But if it's a lesson to our society that hey we got to change Maybe that's what I have to do We're gonna die of a loneliness of spirit with all the creatures gone Every year Idaho power partners with other biologists to raise and release 6.8 million chinook and steelhead the next generation of fish needs next generation ideas our innovative approach maintains abundant fish populations giving anglers a chance to land rack worthy steelhead fish on Pet trees are pawns in a game of political power The whole thing is about money fishing is a huge industry and every state is competing with each other for those dollars It's not about conserving our resources its perverting our resources on a short-term debt to get tourist dollars in in fact federal dollars to support Fish and wildlife agencies is based on how many license sales there are in each of those states The internal finances is that it provides power and wealth to the agencies themselves To build a new hatchery its millions and millions of dollars of high extensive automated piping and flow systems So you have lots of temperature control on lots of different fish rearing stations So you can raise different species up to different sizes and maximize production We've got the water coughs electrical costs building maintenance costs and Just the feeding cost of the fish So we're looking at plus or minus 20 million dollars in assorted costs throughout a year It's a major business and there's portions of that business that 20 plus employees are doing Year-round Pet trees are a perfect example of political pork They spread the hatcheries around their state. They're in almost every county of the state They target them on key members of the state Senate and the state legislature as a result They they buy the support of that local person These hatcheries are a subsidy to commercial fishermen recreational fishermen And it's being paid for by all the taxpayers I think one of the main reasons why it's important that people understand what's going on is just purely the waste of their money That's happening In Washington State alone. There are a hundred seventy four hatcheries producing more than 190 million salmon every year On the west coast over 90% of the quote-unquote wild caught salmon you find in markets actually came from hatcheries Between California, Oregon Washington and Idaho citizens pay for the release of almost 280 million fish per year Last year between the United States Canada Russia Korea and Japan five billion salmon were released into the North Pacific When I wrote my first book the Bonneville Power Administration was spending About a hundred and forty or 150 million dollars on their program since 1982 They spent fifteen billion The General Accounting Office Did a survey and they showed that hatcheries consumed 40 percent of that the big question is Who pays for the raising of the fish? And who gets the benefits fish that go out of the Columbia River? circle around Alaska Some fish even as far as Russia your survival rate goes down to point zero zero one and so on Some of those fish we figure cost over a thousand dollars The eniac hatchery on the upper Columbia was producing spring chinook salmon that were costing Sixty eight thousand thirty one dollars per harvested fish State and federal agencies plant more than a hundred million rainbow trout in waters across the United States every year Some of our most protected wilderness Areas places high in the mountains where you're not even allowed to ride a mountain bike there pick a wildflower Taxpayer spend money every year to drop millions of non-native fish by airplane or helicopter Just so visitors have something to catch Billions of dollars of citizen public money is spent to support something that clearly does not work We're on a path to where there eventually will be. No fish and we will have spent billions of dollars to get to that point Your other thing is that fish know how to do all this They know how to live in those environments. They know how to reproduce so if we allow fish to get back to being fish and doing what they do in those environments in pulling back some of our infrastructure Restoring streams. We reap the benefits free of charge The concept in the earliest days of settlement in the West was that was god-given right to take from it what we could Times change needs change Understanding of our place in the universe changes and the world's becoming a smaller and more crowded place But this understanding that we have to take care of the land that it's not infinite It won't continue to produce and provide for us unless we look at it and manage it responsibly That is a relatively new concept Managing our water resources is important than our agricultural pursuits. But also this water has tremendous values to this fishery and This fishery is one of the great fisheries in the world and our local economy is based on that So for us to succeed, we need our our community and our river systems to be as healthy as possible Going back aways. This is really the place in Montana where the concept of a wild fishery started there were hatchery raised fish that were put in here based on the idea that The more fish we had in the river the more fish would be caught by fishermen the better our economy would be Then lo and behold they discovered something very surprising We were doing estimates now on the mez and we're seeing a lot of young brown trout in the lower river But the next year there would be gone One of the first things I kept seeing is we stocked the best waters the waters that had The best fisheries were the ones where we were put in catchable. I Proposed a study leave north alone. Don't stock. It will take varney not stock it and take Odell Creek Which it has never been stopped the stock yet and see what happens The first year that we didn't stop Barney the upper river the population of brown trout doubled and the quarter swim Woodstock gödel Creek the population halved We didn't know we were doing damage Figured well where there's two out there and we put two more in we've got four fish now and that's better than two fish Well, that's not the math that works in reality once That information became available to the masses. No Dell studies That maybe our dollars were being loudly spent. In fact, we were destroying what we're trying to protect well, they said any waters that had self-sustaining trout populations could not be stopped period and It came policy Shortly after that program was initiated you saw the population of this river just skyrocket with wild fish We started our fly shop in 1979 a few years after The hatchery program was absolved on the Madison River and we were fortunate to catch that wave of a wild trout fishery We saw an increase in the number of anglers that came to Montana came to the Yellowstone area and specifically Southwest, Montana To experience those wild fisheries and that's what really kicked in the fly-fishing business is at that time People are more attuned to healthy River because they see what's happened here They see the whole cascade of everything that benefits because of a wild trout fishery including a local economy The one thing that came out of this to me is the change in behavior of the humans when they saw that They won't become a given fish that they become more vigilant and Habitat becomes more important when they realize that's how they get their fish As most of you already know We had a major eruption occurring at 8:32 approximately this morning on Mount st. Helens It does appear that the northwest flank of the mountain seems to be gone When Mount st. Helens erupted in 1981, but it was a massive explosion it tore off about one-third the top of the mountain most of that effluent went down the Toutle River Basin The consequence is that the river were startling The upper Canyon of Tula was totally d vegetated there were chasms of volcanic effluent Anything living in the screen was virtually destroyed It brought back a sense of hopelessness at that point there is de feeling that evolution and Recolonization of rivers may take tens of thousands of years As a result that meant that no more hatchery fish were put into it What became evident in the Tula river system? Is that the steelhead in particular? Came back above what they were prior to the eruption five years later by seven years later. They more than doubled So those first years of the total river were a prime example of What wild fish can actually do in the most absolute adverse conditions if they are not constrained by? having to intermix with hatchery populations Unfortunately as the Tula River began to show that it can Produce fish back we went to the hatchery programs again hatchery numbers went up wild fish went down same old story Loss of faith in nature is the problem nature knows how to make fish work The best thing that we as human beings can do and if the salmon and steelhead ask of us just get out of our way Famously have to fight their way upstream to spawn but thanks to hydroelectric dams that's become increasingly difficult But don't worry because as we found out recently America is on it. I'm Ben Tracy in Washington State We're going to introduce you to a pretty sweet piece of technology known as the salmon camp In your darkest moments of despair When you see a world torn apart by war, I want you to remember that video and think we can do great things You can do wait Humans believe we can do anything and everything all the time and that can-do spirit has gotten this far and Made a lot of changes in the world certainly made a lot of us able to continue living at gigantic population densities But it has its limits and we don't understand anything about those limits an example of a good myth is Icarus Icarus was a tinkerer and he wanted to Free himself from the bounds of Earth and gravity he wanted to fly so he made wings he made wings of wax and He flew Because he didn't sense any limits he flew too close to the Sun the Sun melted his wings And he came crashing down to earth so the greater truth in that is beware of hubris exercise some humility and Be careful when you're tinkering I'm 55 years old now been living with my salmon fishing all my life. I Tried to follow my heart I mean, I'm not rich in money But I've had 6,000 days on some River so all around the world which makes me rich in a different way The sama fishing Norway is central to all the small towns that are Located on a river and in the old days the salmon used to be the thing that was feeding the people It's special special to Norway Now it's also special in the other way because the second biggest industry is this fish farming thing. That is now It's threatening to kill. What's the original fish? We were so stupid our so stupid because when they started fish farming I thought oh, hey This is a solution to everything we farm the fish and they don't have to kill our wild fish They don't have to kill the fish. I want to fish for and the stocks will go up and all will be fantastic In very short time we learned that the sealers were killing the wild small living in the river fewer fish were coming up You know, they say that one of these farms out here They produce as much shit than the whole town of Oslo and they are sleeping in the fury When it's polluted enough you move to another location and you can pollute another place Then there are more fish escaping from the William fish farms than all the Norwegian wild salmon rivers produce and they mix With the wild stock and they destroy the unique DNA of the fish All of us got the biggest Atlantic salmon in the world there are more fifty pounders caught here than anywhere else There's quite a big difference on the river that I see today The DNA on the alto salmon is not like it was before I See no difference between a fish farm and a hatchery fish because of gene pollution you Get escapees from these fish farms sometimes millions of fish escape and then they breed with wild fish dumbing down the genes for reversing natural selection weird evolving these fish I really always wanted to see see one of these farms We got into our wet suits then we jumped into the sea Sneaked up to one of these farms a New on I was going to see a lot of fish but I didn't think it was going to be that bad It was so full of sick fish They had fungus they looked like esses they were Wounds big as my hand Nobody should eat this you show this to the moms. They want to feed the kids with it They will never buy one of these things It was like if you should walk into a farm where you have cows that would have big wounds bleeding and lying down barely breathing Who would heed that? No one but these things are happening under the surface You know Nobody knows about this The thing is we lost one thing here and we lost the respect for the ecosystem We're the guys that should protect the rivers protect them from all kinds of farms and hatcheries and all this My Responsibility is not to feed the people in the world Okay If I have a responsibility it is to say when I see things are wrong with what I like And what I love and that's the rivers and salmony Solution is there and that is to get these into the closed tax If it will double the price of the salmon it's worth it. What's the price of an ecosystem what is worth? Together not one. What is your emergency? I Had them and I are on our boat in secret Harbor and the middle system is breaking apart It's huge. And the whole thing is buckling. There's a Workbook that looks like it's about ready to go in the water I'm super manic to me Well, what just happened Was that there was a catastrophic failure? one of the net pens off of Cyprus Island completely imploded The fish that escaped our Atlantic salmon They're not Pacific salmon. We're talking three hundred and five thousand exotic species are now polluting Puget Sound These fish are going to be entering into our rivers competing with our wild fish and the spawning grounds competing with them for food Bringing diseases and parasites and viruses to these wild fish and it's it's a disaster When I heard the 300,000 Atlantic salmon escaped into the ocean environment I immediately kind of dropped everything and knew that This was something that I needed to go and document because I knew that no one else was getting the underwater side of things I didn't expect to see the level of destruction that I saw the Pens were totally split open and Completely destroyed there were holes all through them that the Atlantic salmon have escaped from and there was a few fish left Gasping caught in the nets. But other than that the fish were gone into the marine environment and clearly unaccounted for good guys Galactica guys Remove Diver from the water immediately. This is classified as trance passing. We suggest you, please halt these operations Ciphers fish bar over and out is an extremely charged scene It seems like it's a big secret what's going on under there? and the last thing that these companies want is people to go under and actually see what's going on because then these stories that they're telling The public it's so easy to poke holes in them when you get footage of what's actually going on in the farms The concept of an emergency response plan is it's a bit humorous It's basically tell the commercial fishers and the recreational fishers to go out and fish because now we have more fish for you It's like telling the people when the Exxon Valdez spill Free oil go collect it Every single day. Our public trust is being undermined by the pollution that these pens are putting into our sound the viruses parasites pharmaceuticals that are going into our waters The industrial model is to make as much money as you can as quickly as you can regardless of the environmental consequences What we're seeing today what we've seen over the last couple of days are those environmental consequences coming home? It turns out that Washington is the only West Coast state that allows Open water net Penn salmon farms To me. It's really an outrage that this is even allowed You know I think anybody who's concerned with the state of the environment and our planet thinks about the future and especially if you have children you Start to feel like okay, what's the world gonna be like for them? It feels really important to me that they participate in protecting their own future We're so busy these days that to be unified on these things whether it's fighting to make sure that their salmon in the future or Going out to catch fish Those become really precious times for a dad who's watching his kids grow up really fast We thought we'd go out there with a few boats and wave some signs around and protest it But it turned out that people from all walks of life that used the sound or enjoy living near the sound a healthy sound Were also outraged The Suquamish tribe was there to protest There were commercial fishermen there. There was a whole fleet of kayaks. There was a lot of sport fishing boats I mean there was even a guy on a jetski carrying a sign around We spent the few days ahead of time making some signs to carry and laughed about sort of what we would say on what the slogans work But underlying it all I think the kids feel like they're able to participate in in the things they care about And I think we made our point because now here we are months later and there's actually three pieces of legislation That are pending affecting net pens Wild salmon are threatened by these sorts of facilities the day-in day-out impacts to our magical majestic Salish Sea cannot go unchecked It is unconscionable that we are spending tens and tens of millions of dollars to protect and recover wild salmon We would allow an invasive species to be introduced to our ecosystem. Mr. President They're at 35 VA 12 May to excuse having received a constitution majority's second substitute Senate bill 66 is declared passed the title of the bill will be the title of the Act Hey, no Hey, no, hey Hey Hey, yeah The Yurok belief is that we have been here since the beginning of time At one point this earth was a lonely rock in the universe floating by itself and Began to get sad and his tears became the ocean and it finally came to be what we have today The wall gave the spirit people started creating this world And one of the things they had done was made a relationship between us and the salmon the Salmon will put here so they could sustain us and that we would always have a food source And that way we would always live it. We would always be prosperous We also have a story of we don't take care of this world and there are no more salmon Then there will be no more need for free rock people The 2002 fish kill was really the like canary in the coal mine It was a low water year, but AG got their water If you divert that much water and flows get so low on the Klamath You will have some kind of major fish disease outbreak That's exactly what happened 70,000 adult salmon died all within the Klamath River the dead fish were lining the banks you know three four layers deep and it smelt like death in a wild river Nothing like that happens, right? That is not a natural thing The future if it goes unchanged it is going to be the destruction of salmon species on the west coast of the United States The tribe voted not to have a commercial salmon season this year because of the low projected numbers and The subsistence amount was the lowest. I think I've ever seen Tribal members used to live almost solely on returning fish runs and now this year we get less than one fish per person How can you possibly look at that and not realize that there is a gigantic problem here? These reductions are the salmon runs. The big picture is is they're affecting our health We know those omega oils those Omega threes and sixes and salmon are very heart healthy That's why we have a lot of elders that live to ripe old ages But the point is is that what's gonna happen down the road what's gonna happen to our people? When your society when your culture when your belief is connected directly to the world around you when you're raised with the sins that you are a part of everything in your surroundings in your natural environment It does something to who your community psychology and Mindset when you start to see that world crumble and break as The decline of salmon runs come back. You can see it threat correlation with the decline of us as a people It's just a disruption of the whole sort of cycle of the tribe and what we do as a people Because that fishing isn't there and I think when that happens then all of us feel pain, you know it's like we cream before the Hat a Lot of times when you're grieving or when you're you know, hurting over something you turn to drug and alcohol And so we're seeing spikes in drug and alcohol rates. There's an opioid crisis on the reservation right now There's suicide crisis on the reservation right now all of these things are connected in part because When you take away the river you take away the fishery you take away That core component of who we are as a people and then it kind of falls apart and people start getting in trouble That's where we are now and that's why you have all those other sort of issues arising in our community Oh Boy It's a traditional game of sticks, it's actually one of the few pieces of Yurok culture that never went away You have a stick and you have a tonsil take the tousle and make it go through the goal And you do that any way you can Today we play of no hitting with a stick. No stabbing, you know, I go Jean and no choking. Other than that Everything is game and everything is fair to play If you can take it and you can give it out a little bit you get a play It teaches those lessons in life that's important to your ought to be tough to be respectful and to fight regardless of what the size differences I think it lends a lot to why when we get into conflicts or when we get into fights I had like the dam we don't care who the biggest Richest man in the world that who owns it because we'll play up Every day of the week We don't care We all kind of came back together and decided that this was when we were gonna fight the FERC license for the dams expired there was this opportunity to pursue dam removal and so That's where the fight went Federal state and local lawmakers has come up with a way to do what Congress could not Get the water and the fish in the Klamath River flowing freely again We're starting to get it right after so many years of getting it wrong This is the crown jewel of salmon country this is it right here The people want it to be you wild. They want it to be what it was before the dams before colonisation before agriculture The work that the tribe is doing is to redirect the energy to a place where we're focusing on that comprehensive restoration to get the wild runs back as opposed to agreeing to some kind of short-lived political Compromise like the hatchery ideas that really just put band-aids on You know gaping wounds The approaches we're here forever and we want those wild salmon to be here forever And that's what we're planning to pour and that's what we're working on having a wild river having the wild salmon it Puts the community back together and it gives them purpose and it allows us to fulfill that initial promise that we made to the Creator right about taking care of this river and living in a balance with us and When you do that as a people you feel good That's like the ultimate self determination That's the ultimate sovereignty is to be able to live in a way that is consistent with your own cultural values And that's what we're fighting for You could say that everything we learn we learn from the stories that we are given You could also then say that all the problems we have are symptoms of stories that were wrong Stories, we told ourselves and stories we passed on where we misunderstood things deeply If hatcheries were successful and we're addressing the situation we would be having this discussion today The underlying causes of the problems are still there and after all these years we're still Having to put fish out there every year to keep them going Perhaps it's time to pull back and question. Is this the right path forward? How far do we go to manufacture wildness before we realize what we're really doing and Think about alternative approaches like protecting and restoring wild things There's no right way to do the The right thing is to work on our rivers that we've destroyed and turned into sewers and dammed up and Fix that so that we have wild fish This little issue is just a reflection of what we're doing to the whole planet It's more than just our relationship with fish it's how we're trying to control nature rather than work with nature A life without wild nature a life without these great iconic species is an impoverished life If we lose all wild species we're going to lose ourselves Good as a show you We'll be rolling in the water Good answer Laughs You
I'm not going to try and start a huge debate here. But I encourage everyone to hear the other side of the story on the hatchery issue. I used to subscribe to this anti hatchery dogma that's en vogue in the fly fishing world myself until I really got to know both sides of the issue.
This film doesn't tell the full story. It cherry picks the worst examples of failed hatchery practices when there are success stories and better practices being used in some systems that are both helping native fish and providing fishing opportunities.
Edit: I want to be clear, this rant is only referring to the practice of hatchery rearing fish in rivers for sportfishing/commercial harvest in the wild. Netpen aquaculture is a separate issue from what I'm talking about.
I want to add one more tidbit here as well: I am friends with several current/former board members of the organization that they worked with in making this film. I have heard from more than one source that there is an often repeated phrase internally of "anything we have to do to get those gear chuckers off the rivers." - so take that how you will, but some of their motivations and one-sidedness isn't as wholesome as they're selling.
I am not going to post arguments for/against or any sources here, but there is a lot of information out there on the topic from both sides and I encourage anyone who wants to be educated to check out all of it. I'm glad I did.
It definitely got me thinking about limiting out on hatchery fish as much as possible and never eating salmon that isn't from AK.