Eco-warrior, Alexandra Morton, on her fight to save wild salmon, being gaslit by the Canadian government and her adventures in Green politics. She also dares people to sue her over her essential new book Not On My Watch:  How a renegade whale biologist took on governments and industry to save wild salmon.

“The salmon farming industry is harming wild salmon, is harming whales, is causing algae blooms and really needs to be controlled.”

Skaana shares stories about oceans, eco-ethics and the environment.

Join the Pod…… https://www.patreon.com/skaana

Spotify……………www.bit.ly/spotify-skaana
Apple Podcasts……..www.skaana.ca
The Orca Bites Podcast (on anchor) …….. www.orcabites.com

Skaana home……. skaana.org
Skaana on Medium…. orcatales.com
Our Latest Orca Videos… jpod.news

Facebook…….…..facebook.com/skaanapod
Twitter…………… twitter.com/leirenyoung
Instagram…..…….instagram.com/skaanapod

 

Books on Amazon and Classes

**Amazon links are affiliate links and support our podcast, thanks for clicking!

 

Significant Quotes:

“The salmon farming industry is harming wild salmon, is harming whales, is causing algae blooms and really needs to be controlled. I mean, at first I thought they just had to get off the wild salmon migration routes, but now I realize they just have to get out of the ocean completely, and if they want to continue, build a tank and get in it and operate from there.”(8:18)


“Doing all this damage was part of how they were making such a phenomenal amount of money. It’s really insidious.” (12:38)


“I cannot believe I have spent my whole adult life fighting salmon farms. It just seems ridiculous. But when I look at it from a global perspective I realize I’m part of a huge army across the planet that is trying to protect life on earth.” (12:55)


“When you have a corporation involved, they don’t really care how many fish there are. They just want that share price to go up. And so this is deadly, because it really is a cancer model. They need to grow, they need to grow, they need to grow, with no mind to the fact that they’re killing the very body that they’re in, which in this case is the ocean. I mean, they’re going to kill themselves off. They are killing themselves off in the process of following their business plan. It’s really deranged. It doesn’t make sense and it has to stop.”  (15:31)


“Nobody wants to buy fish that have killed off whales, never mind everything else.” (19:00)

 

“There’s nobody whose position in DFO is the health of wild salmon. There’s no director of wild salmon.” (24:48)


“We have the biggest salmon run in the world on the verge of extinction.” (29:29)


“I saw grizzly bears that no longer looked like Grizzly bears… they were emaciated.” (33:14)


Alexandra: I have to wonder at some level in government are people saying, “Oh my God, those fish… What?!  They’re still coming back? There’s still 20 of them?! Gosh darn it.” I don’t know. I don’t think people, I don’t think some level of government wants wild salmon at all.

Mark: That just gave me chills because I found myself asking the same question about the Southern residents.

Alexandra: I bet you do. Yep..

Mark: I feel like there are people in the federal government, you are going “Damn, there’s still 74 of them…. “

Alexandra: Yeah, and they’re having babies. ” (36:07)


“The salmon actually have the whole mating thing down. They can handle that.”  (42:30)


“And for the first time last spring, I set my big net and pulled it in and looked at the fish and, oh my gosh, they were fat and sassy. They were sparkly, blues and silvers, deep jet black eyes, not the cloudy film they get when they go by the farms and it was a feeling in my heart that I just really had to sort of stand back a minute and be like, what is that feeling? It was joy. It felt like my heart was ringing.” (48:00)

Please support our guests and our podcast.

 

launch of Operation Virus Hunter

Launch of Operation Virus Hunter (2016) Photo credits: Mark Leiren-Young

Timecodes

  • 0:00– Alexandra Morton – introduction
  • 1:40Mark’s welcome
  • 6:30Alexandra’s new book, “Not on My Watch
  • 8:18– “The salmon farming industry is harming wild salmon, is harming whales, is causing algae blooms and really needs to be controlled. I mean, at first I thought they just had to get off the wild salmon migration routes, but now I realize they just have to get out of the ocean completely, and if they want to continue, build a tank and get in it and operate from there.”
  • 9:37– The impact of fish farms
  • 12:38– “Doing all this damage was part of how they were making such a phenomenal amount of money. It’s really insidious.”
  • 14:33– Alexandra’s political adventure – running for the BC Green party
  • 15:31– “When you have a corporation involved, they don’t really care how many fish there are. They just want that share price to go up. And so this is deadly, because it really is a cancer model. They need to grow, they need to grow, they need to grow, with no mind to the fact that they’re killing the very body that they’re in, which in this case is the ocean. I mean, they’re going to kill themselves off. They are killing themselves off in the process of following their business plan. It’s really deranged. It doesn’t make sense and it has to stop.”
  • 19:00– “Nobody wants to buy fish that have killed off whales, never mind everything else.”
  • 22:14– Mark and Alexandra discuss their adventures with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans
  • 24:48– “There’s nobody whose position in DFO is the health of wild salmon. There’s no director of wild salmon.”
  • 29:29– “We have the biggest salmon run in the world on the verge of extinction.”
  • 33:14– “I saw grizzly bears that no longer looked like Grizzly bears… they were emaciated.”
  • 36:07– “Alexandra: I have to wonder at some level in government are people saying, “Oh my God, those fish… What?!  They’re still coming back? There’s still 20 of them?! Gosh darn it.” I don’t know. I don’t think people, I don’t think some level of government wants wild salmon at all. Mark: That just gave me chills because I found myself asking the same question about the Southern residents. Alexandra: I bet you do. Yep.. Mark: I feel like there are people in the federal government, you are going “Damn, there’s still 74 of them…. ” Alexandra: Yeah, and they’re having babies. “
  • 42:30– “The salmon actually have the whole mating thing down. They can handle that.” 
  • 42:35– Wild salmon breeding
  • 48:00– “And for the first time last spring, I set my big net and pulled it in and looked at the fish and, oh my gosh, they were fat and sassy. They were sparkly, blues and silvers, deep jet black eyes, not the cloudy film they get when they go by the farms and it was a feeling in my heart that I just really had to sort of stand back a minute and be like, what is that feeling? It was joy. It felt like my heart was ringing.”
  • 50:21– Mark’s conclusion
Alexandra Morton

“We talk about robbing from future generations, but I have an 18 month old grandson,  and it’s really hard to look him in the eyes because we are taking away everything that I love and that he would love. We’re taking away the richness of life. We’re taking away the ability to survive. It really is a form of insanity that we do not act on this.”

“87% of the young salmon leaving parts of this coast… are heavily infected with sea lice.”

“They [First Nations] do not want salmon farms in their territory. They’ve been saying “no” for thirty years and yet one-third of the salmon farming industry in British Columbia is in their territory. And all the waste from these farms is pouring out whether it’s viruses, bacteria, drugs, fish waste.”

“I have to wonder, does he really know that he’s fighting me so that Marine Harvest and Surmac, whose owned by Mitsubishi, can put diseased Atlantic Salmon into the major migration routes of this coast? I just can’t believe that he actually knows that this is going on. Just on the surface, it looks really bad.”

“I was so convinced that if I lined up my words in the right order, remained calm, and gave them [DFO] all the evidence they would say, ‘oh, oh, oh, oh, there’s a better way to do this. Let’s get them off the migration route, let’s put less farms here…’ But no, they never listened to me. That began to concern me.”

“We all had such high hopes, and honestly this Minister is doing worse than Stephen Harper. I mean, we had the worst sockeye return ever in the history of studying sockeye. The DFO did not even blink. They don’t care. They don’t want wild fish. That is my assessment after years, decades of being on this.”

“Canada could become this remarkable leader in land-based aquaculture, which the markets want, and restoring wild fish using genomic profiling. I tell you, every country would come knocking on our door and saying, ‘How did you do that Canada?’”

“Keystone species means that if that species is removed, things start to collapse. It means it’s the key to the lock that opens the door to the whole ecosystem. Some people say to me, ‘ I don’t eat salmon, so I don’t really care.” Well, do you breathe? Because salmon are feeding the trees that make the oxygen that we breathe.”

“You can actually measure the size of the salmon run by looking at the growth rings of the trees.”

“They also feed over 1000 species from bugs, to orca, to eagles and bears, coastal communities. They are essential to First Nations culture and diet.”

“The gains financially, emotionally, spiritually and in every way are so much greater for wild salmon than farmed salmon”

“From the moment the salmon egg leaves the mother’s body, it’s feeding the world around them. There’s not a lot of species that are designed to feed the masses. They can feed all of us and thrive. They are so remarkable and they’re such a gift. They’re so important. They are a bloodstream. I don’t say that lightly. They go out into the open ocean and they are gathering the energy of the sun hitting the ocean. Because the sun hits the ocean and it creates this good plankton bloom which feed little fish, and then the salmon eat those fish. Then they bring that all back home and they defy gravity and they take it up the watershed and they feed the trees. Somehow we have lost that memory, that connection, that understanding. Sometimes the government feels to me like a berserk person on a lawnmower and he’s running over all the power cords and he’s cutting all the lines to our house. We’re not gonna have any hot water. ”

“Honestly, it’s a form of insanity where you cannot see the workings of life. Where you can’t see the gears and all of that is happening. You think you can just break all of that and get away with it. We’re not going to survive with this attitude.”

“People in British Columbia maybe don’t grasp how incredibly fortunate we are that we haven’t taken it completely apart. We’re getting there- we are disassembling it.

“I feel that a place on earth that still make clean air, water and food – whoa a covenant needs to placed on that right now. People in British Columbia  maybe don’t grasp how incredibly fortunate we are that we haven’t taken it completely apart…”

“I believe that Justin Trudeau is a good man… I believe that Dominique LeBlanc, our minister of fisheries, is probably a good man. He probably loves his children. They probably both do. And yet what they are both doing to their children, and ours, and us, and the whales, is unforgivable.”

Alexandra Morton (@alex4salmon) is one of Canada’s most famous eco-activists. The best-selling author’s fight to save the west coast’s wild salmon attracted the attention of the Sea Shepherd Society and  launched Operation Virus Hunter – a mission to publicize Morton’s research into open sea salmon farms. Tune in if you care about oceans, orcas, salmon or sushi.

“I’m determined not to let these salmon go down on my watch.”

Skaana podcasts connect you to news and experts and their discussions about environments, oceans, and orcas.

You can use the affiliate links below to support the pod.

Join the Pod…… https://www.patreon.com/skaana

Skaana home….. skaana.org

Facebook……….. https://www.facebook.com/skaanapod/

Twitter…………… https://twitter.com/leirenyoung

The Killer Whale Who Changed the World…. http://amzn.to/2pRNU1q

Gwen Barlee Memorial fund….  https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/GBMF

Links:

Support Alexandra Morton

On Twitter: @alex4salmon

Blog: http://alexandramorton.typepad.com

Official Website:  http://www.alexandramorton.ca

Follow on Facebook:  https://m.facebook.com/alexandramorton.wildsalmon/

Documentary:  http://www.salmonconfidential.ca

Legal Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/fightfishfarmslegal

Books on Amazon

**Amazon links are affiliate links and support our podcast, thanks for clicking!