The project, which got its start when Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard wanted to make a film about the arrogance of humankind, turned out to be a film about salmon … and what we're doing to them.
The film uses salmon as a lens to tell a larger story about wilderness.
"It's about how we keep trying to control nature rather than allowing it to do what it does," said the film's director, Josh Murphy.
Artifishal looks specifically at how fish hatcheries and fish farms threaten wild salmon populations, which in turn has ecosystem-wide effects — all because of our desire to eat these culturally significant species.
"We fell in love with this wild thing and then we took too many of them and we degraded the environments that produce them," explained Murphy of the genesis of the film.
But instead of helping wild salmon recover, we've created hatcheries and farms to make more of them — at great cost, both economically and ecologically. The film explores the process, the tradeoffs and what's at stake if we continue down this path.
As Artifishal and its filmmakers travel around the country conducting screenings with community organizations, we spoke with Murphy about what he learned making the film and why wild salmon are so important.
It seems like the heart of this film is fish hatcheries, which don’t get a lot of attention. What did you learn about them?
There's this narrative that hatcheries are a good thing. But I wanted to know where that came from because there's no other animal that I can find that's mass produced, much less by a state or a federal government, and then released into the wild. It doesn't happen.
I found the story of George Perkins Marsh, who wrote a book in 1864 called Man and Nature about the irreparable harm humans were having on the environment. And that was a big thing. Creeks and rivers had been so degraded by industry, dams, mills and forest practices [that] he proposed that we should restore fish. He had just heard about this technique brought over by some French guys about how to take the fish eggs and milt and combine them. And he thought that this is how we'll solve the problem — we're just going to make more fish. Within five years of the Civil War ending there were fish hatcheries all over New England.
It played on our agricultural norms — we do this for chickens, sheep, cows — of course we're going to do this for fish. But we didn't realize that fish are going into an uncontrolled environment.
What are some of the risks to wild salmon from this?
Fast forward to today and now you have certain people who wanted to further degrade rivers, for example, people that want to develop the rivers for hydropower, and they're allowed to do that — they can dam the whole river and just put a hatchery at the bottom of it.
Hatcheries have enabled people to believe that you could control the river and still have fish.
And what we're realizing now is the science over the last 25 years says that's a completely false narrative. It's actually degrading the biological diversity.
By bringing fish into a hatchery, you're decreasing all of the natural selection that would have happened and so you're taking the fitness out. And then we started selecting certain breeds within a river, like fall-run Chinook, because it was easier and cheaper for us to produce those. But we only do that with economically viable species, not the biologically viable species. So we don't have, for example, hatcheries for lampreys, which are an important part of the ecosystem. And we don't have hatcheries for spring-run in many places or winter-run, which some rivers have. It's only fall-run.
I think the scariest thing is that in choosing as we are, we are actually degrading the fishes' ability to adapt in the future to things like climate change. They're becoming more like a monocrop.
The first part of the film is about hatcheries and then it jumps to fish farms. You show the risks of Atlantic salmon being raised in open pens in Pacific waters. Was this a commentary on that practice specifically or fish farms in general?
Net-pen salmon farms concentrate fish at unnaturally high levels, creating ideal conditions for disease, parasites and other health issues. Alta, Norway.
Ben Moon
In open net-pen aquaculture, when you have opportunities for the farmed fish to escape and interbreed with wild fish — when you have Atlantic salmon in the Pacific — one has to wonder, what are we doing? What's driving this? And it's just money.
There are other ways. There're opportunities for fish to be raised on land with either freshwater or saltwater with less harm to the wild environment. But we don't do it because we want more money. Floating a net in the ocean costs nothing. You don't even pay property taxes. You may have a license fee to the state, but that's it. And you get to dump everything into the water.
We may need to have aquaculture in the future and I think that it's a promising sector. But if we need more fish, if there's a demand for that, we need to do it in a way that does not harm wild fish.
What do we lose if we don’t have wild salmon?
There're the obvious benefits that salmon give to ecosystems.
So for example, right now in rivers that have hatcheries, there's often a fish weir on the river and the fish will swim up to it until they can go no further. So they've taken all of the nutrients that they have acquired in the ocean, and they swim up to that weir, turn the corner and they swim themselves into the hatchery. The hatchery kills the fish, takes the gametes, makes the new generation and throws the fish into a landfill. All of those nutrients that used to funnel from the ocean to the headwaters of these rivers are gone. That means all of the animals that relied on those nutrients no longer have that.
But we don't care because we just want to make more fish and release them. For who? Commercial and sport fishers. That's it. That means there's no other value that salmon have to anything else in the ecosystem. If fish are not seen as wildlife and they're only seen as food and fun, then we will just try to churn them out and manufacture them as quickly as we can because of the economic benefits.
But we don't do that for grizzly bears. We don't have hatcheries for deer, for elk, for waterfowl. When you hear the word "hatchery," it sounds quaint, but if we call these "fish factories," which is what they really are, people might consider the whole thing differently.
Raceways for raising juvenile spring Chinook salmon at the Sawtooth Hatchery, in Stanley, Idaho which is managed by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, and funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Ben Moon
What do you hope people take away from this film?
If we don't respect wild and we just try to replicate them in farms and replicate them in hatcheries, then we could lose wild altogether. What I hope the movie leaves people with is this kind of disquieting question, which is, are we at the end of wild?
If we are then that's a really frustrating reality. If, in fact, that's what we've decided, what then for birds? What then for bears? For elephants?
Some people just don't want to hear that because they're so focused on themselves — their livelihood or their recreation. But what about the rest of the entire ecosystem that relies on wild fish? It's not just about us. That is the arrogance of man — this whole story is just about us. And I think that's what we have to reconsider.
Fish are really indicators of water quality. I think about that in terms of the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine. If a miner was descending into a mine and the canary dies, it says to the miner, "don't go any farther." Right?
With fish it's like we're descending into that mine, the fish dies, and we just make more of them to put in the cage. It's telling us something. It's saying the environment can't support them. Fix that problem. Don't make more of them. We have to fix the disease, not just manage the symptom, which is a lack of fish. And until we do that, our future for wild fish, and our future for other wild things is in question.
Tara Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist,Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis.
Reposted with permission from our media associate The Revelator.
Eye-Catching Designs Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles
waterlust.com / @abamabam
The company sells a range of eco-friendly items like leggings, rash guards, and board shorts that are made using recycled post-consumer plastic bottles. There are currently 16 causes represented by distinct marine-life patterns, from whale shark research and invasive lionfish removal to sockeye salmon monitoring and abalone restoration.
One such organization is Get Inspired, a nonprofit that specializes in ocean restoration and environmental education. Get Inspired founder, marine biologist Nancy Caruso, says supporting on-the-ground efforts is one thing that sets Waterlust apart, like their apparel line that supports Get Inspired abalone restoration programs.
"All of us [conservation partners] are doing something," Caruso said. "We're not putting up exhibits and talking about it — although that is important — we're in the field."
Waterlust not only helps its conservation partners financially so they can continue their important work. It also helps them get the word out about what they're doing, whether that's through social media spotlights, photo and video projects, or the informative note card that comes with each piece of apparel.
"They're doing their part for sure, pushing the information out across all of their channels, and I think that's what makes them so interesting," Caruso said.
And then there are the clothes, which speak for themselves.
Advocate Apparel to Start Conversations About Conservation
waterlust.com / @oceanraysphotography
Waterlust's concept of "advocate apparel" encourages people to see getting dressed every day as an opportunity to not only express their individuality and style, but also to advance the conversation around marine science. By infusing science into clothing, people can visually represent species and ecosystems in need of advocacy — something that, more often than not, leads to a teaching moment.
"When people wear Waterlust gear, it's just a matter of time before somebody asks them about the bright, funky designs," said Waterlust's CEO, Patrick Rynne. "That moment is incredibly special, because it creates an intimate opportunity for the wearer to share what they've learned with another."
The idea for the company came to Rynne when he was a Ph.D. student in marine science.
"I was surrounded by incredible people that were discovering fascinating things but noticed that often their work wasn't reaching the general public in creative and engaging ways," he said. "That seemed like a missed opportunity with big implications."
Waterlust initially focused on conventional media, like film and photography, to promote ocean science, but the team quickly realized engagement on social media didn't translate to action or even knowledge sharing offscreen.
Rynne also saw the "in one ear, out the other" issue in the classroom — if students didn't repeatedly engage with the topics they learned, they'd quickly forget them.
"We decided that if we truly wanted to achieve our goal of bringing science into people's lives and have it stick, it would need to be through a process that is frequently repeated, fun, and functional," Rynne said. "That's when we thought about clothing."
Support Marine Research and Sustainability in Style
To date, Waterlust has sold tens of thousands of pieces of apparel in over 100 countries, and the interactions its products have sparked have had clear implications for furthering science communication.
For Caruso alone, it's led to opportunities to share her abalone restoration methods with communities far and wide.
"It moves my small little world of what I'm doing here in Orange County, California, across the entire globe," she said. "That's one of the beautiful things about our partnership."
Check out all of the different eco-conscious apparel options available from Waterlust to help promote ocean conservation.
Melissa Smith is an avid writer, scuba diver, backpacker, and all-around outdoor enthusiast. She graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and sustainable studies. Before joining EcoWatch, Melissa worked as the managing editor of Scuba Diving magazine and the communications manager of The Ocean Agency, a non-profit that's featured in the Emmy award-winning documentary Chasing Coral.
Later that night, we huddled around a fire in a sheep-shack tucked into a lenga forest on the edge of Valle La Gloria, sang rousing rounds of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Huemel" (that's the endangered deer that lives in the southern Andes), and considered why we had travelled thousands of miles by plane, ferry, bus and truck to spend Christmas in Patagonia's backcountry.
Nadine Lehner
Each of the 10 team members had signed up to spend nine days trekking through Patagonia's Aysén region with Chulengo, an expedition-centered company that aims to reconnect us with the wilds of the natural world and to challenge us to think hard about our roles as advocates for a healthier ecological future. Some came seeking adventure. Others came to foster a connection with self through challenge. Yet others hoped to reconnect with a part of themselves that had been put on the backburner. I had visited Patagonia years before, and came back to help lead the trip as if pulled by the force of a magnet.
Nadine Lehner
The symphonic peaks and endless steppe drew me back to Patagonia, but it was also something else. I think it had something to do with Patagonia's power to decenter you, to render you insignificant, to destabilize your sense of importance. Its sheer scale—the magnitude and improbability of its angles, the electric green barba de viejo moss strung across its trees—forces a shift in perspective. There's something both alluring and a little scary about allowing your sense of self to crack apart.
Patagonia's landscape has long held such power; now, it also enjoys new legal protections. In late January, Chilean president Michelle Bachelet signed into creation two massive new National Parks in the country's rugged south: Pumalín and Patagonia National Parks. Together, the new parks will preserve nearly 10 million acres of wildlands, an area three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks combined.
The creation of Patagonia National Park is one of the biggest conservation success stories in history—and it's as controversial as it is ambitious. The vision for the park has been spearheaded by American conservationist Kristine Tompkins and her late husband Doug Tompkins (co-founder of The North Face clothing company), who donated 1 million acres of private land to the park. The new National Park represents a monumental shift in how humans will interact with this landscape. As such, the project has sparked furious debate. Some people have resisted the conversion of rangeland to wilderness preservation, while others have embraced this evolution.
"The way you understand the region's history impacts how you conceptualize its proper use," Nadine Lehner, co-founder of Chulengo and former executive director of Conservación Patagonica, told us around the fire that soggy Christmas night.
Consider, to take just one example, the Jeinimeni Valley through which we were trekking, which makes up the northern extent of the new Park. It has only existed as a national reserve for the last 20 years. Before that, settlers utilized the area for agricultural, often to graze sheep. In pre-Columbian times, the nomadic Tehuelche people inhabited the area, traveling to the highlands to hunt game. Each of these periods marks a shift in humans' engagement with the landscape. Each has had a different impact.
The word "Patagonia" evokes images of wildness. Many think of Patagonia as an icon of the last "untouched" places. Words like untrammeled and unspoiled, virgin and pristine, punctuate descriptions of the place. Is Patagonia wild? Absolutely. The landscape boasts snow-scoured peaks, hanging glacial lakes, and unfathomably blue waters. Is it untouched? Parts of it. Is it wilderness? That's a loaded question.
The fact that we took refuge on Christmas evening beneath the leaky roof of a refugio once used by sheep herders to graze their flocks speaks to the complexity of those questions. To arrive at our camp, we bushwhacked across thorny understory in shin-deep mud and waded through waist-deep rivers clean enough to drink from. The sound of glaciers pouring melt-water through rock made up the soundscape.
It was easy to imagine this place was remote enough to have eluded human impact. But the romanticized notion of it being "untouched" dissolved as we took shelter beneath the tin roof built by shepherds in decades past.
"[Ranching] has been so much more than just an economic center in the region," Lehner said. "Ranching has been both the primary economic activity and the cultural identity for a very long time."
In an effort to re-wild the Valle Chacabuco landscape, which now forms the centerpiece of the new Park, Conservación Patagonica removed 25,000 sheep, 5,000 cattle, and 400 miles of fence, moving what once was Chile's third largest sheep ranch out of production and into conservation.
"If you go around the region and ask people what they love about this place, the word that comes up over and over is 'tranquilidad' or 'calmness,'" Lehner told us. "Tourism is a complicated game because it has the potential to disrupt that."
Independently of the park's creation, the region has undergone vast changes. The road into the area is improving, and 3G reaches more places than ever before. The region's tranquility will evolve regardless of an increase in eco-tourism. By affording protection to an area that might otherwise have faced development, the park may ultimately play a role in safeguarding the region's tranquilidad, though it may look different than in years past.
Linnea Bast
The morning after Christmas, I woke early to head to the river where I watched the sun slide across the water braiding down the valley. A Magellan goose regarded me through inky eyes as she herded four chicks into the water. Across the river, a waterfall cascaded into glacial moraine. The spray caught the sun and threw a shimmering brocade of light onto slick black rock.
Enormous forces created this place: glaciers had carved entire valleys as rivers moved tons of rock. I thought about home, and what it means to feel at home in a wild place. How do we foster a sense of belonging—not of the natural world belonging to us, but of us belonging to the natural world?
One answer: Create experiences that remove the boundaries that ordinarily stretch between us and the natural world. Take away the cars, phones and faucets. Take away the beds that separate our backs from the ground. Invite our bodies into the presence borne from plunging into glacial lakes. Dissolve the distance that spreads between us and our human-as-animal selves.
"I hope that our generation comes up with a new word for conservation," Lehner said the night before as the fire died. "Because it's easy to think that conservation ends with creating national parks, when really it's just the beginning. We're standing on the shoulders of giants to be able to walk in these places, and the work each of us needs to do when we walk away from them is different. To borrow a phrase from Doug Tompkins, 'It is important to consider how each of us will pay rent to live on this planet.'"
For each of us, this work will manifest in diverse ways. Lehner's exhortation sounded to me like an invitation to dig into. So I dove head first into the river. I shocked my body into the present and allowed my tangled thoughts about wilderness to turn toward the reality of the present: shivering, cold and at home in a truly wild place.
WHERE The Avilés Trail, Patagonia National Park, Aysén, Patagonia, Chile
GETTING THERE It's not easy to get really far away. From the Chilean capital of Santiago, fly to Balmaceda. Make your way to Coyhaique, take a bus to Puerto Ibañez, catch the ferry across Lago General Carrera to Chile Chico, and find a kind soul to take you across Patagonia's eastern steppe to the trailhead at Lago Jeinimeni.
WHEN TO VISIT The window between November and March is your best bet—though expect to be hailed on any time of the year.
CAMPING You'll find puestos—or lean-to's—along the route that offer varying degrees of shelter. Fires are not permitted outside these structures. Leave your iodine and water filters behind; the water here is as clean as you'll ever find.
SURVIVAL TIPS Know proper river-crossing techniques. Bring trekking poles to help in deep crossings. Make sure to buy a copy of Map for Good's recently completed topo map of the area, and know how to read it.
WHAT TO WEAR Don't forget your gaiters! You'll be able to gloat when your bare-legged companions spend hours picking burs out of soggy socks.
ADDITIONAL INFO Read about Tompkins Conservation's work to protect ten million acres—an area the size of Switzerland—here. Want to experience a polar plunge in one of these parks for yourself? Sign up for a Chulengo expedition here.
Reposted with permission from our media associate SIERRA Magazine.
- How the Wonder of Nature Can Inspire Social Justice Activism ›
- 10 Million Acres of New National Parks Created in Chile ›
DE ÚLTIMO MINUTO!!!! La Corte Suprema pone la lápida definitiva al proyecto de Haggeman y Cox !!! SE TERMINÓ MEDITE… https://t.co/Be6DAPGjYU— Puelo sin Torres (@Puelo sin Torres)1514598681.0
This double victory came on the heels of several significant green accomplishments in 2017. This included the opening of South America's first geothermal plant, a gift of more than 400,000 hectares (ha) (roughly 1 million acres) of land in Patagonia for conservation, and the Environmental Court's final ruling to uphold the momentous 2014 decision against HidroAysén's proposal to build five mega-dams on the Baker and Pascua Rivers. The latter event was the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists and HidroAysén's two parent companies, Colbún and Endesa Chile, who just recently were forced to liquidate the hotly contested project.
The Chilean government's commitment to biodiversity conservation and renewable energy earned outgoing President Michelle Bachelet the title of UN Champion of the Earth. However, recently re-elected President Sebastián Piñera, a neoconservative billionaire, has followed a pattern of prioritizing free markets over free rivers. To safeguard Patagonia's rivers from harmful development in the long term, it will be critical for his government to go a step further and transfer water rights back to local communities, which would support conservation with Indigenous knowledge of the environment.
Here are more details about each of these two projects and why Chile's authorities put a stop to them.
"Puelo Without Towers": Upholding the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Puelo River in Chilean PatagoniaAmanda Maxwell
Originating in the Puelo Lake of the Argentine Andes, the Puelo River flows west toward the Pacific Ocean in confluence with the Manso and Torrentoso Rivers. It is also the lifeblood of the local economy in nearby Cochamó, which centers on ecotourism and fishing. As the below documentary film shows, Cochamó community members and their mayor were deeply divided over the project, which risked degrading the landscape in order to construct a 60 kilometer-long (37 miles) transmission line connecting Mediterráneo S.A.'s $400 million, 210 MW run-of-the-river plant to the main grid in Puerto Montt.
The campaign to protect the Puelo River from the hydroelectric energy complex had become a protracted legal battle. Under the banner "Puelo Sin Torres" (Puelo without Towers), local community members united with environmental lawyers, activists, members of Parliament and celebrities to block the project.
The Mediterráneo dam project's evaluation process and environmental impact assessment bedeviled the environmental alliance with a series of legal obstacles. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the Third Environmental Tribunal's resolution that Mediterráneo's contracted anthropological study of the socio-ecological impacts on Indigenous people was inadequate. The Tribunal accepted the claim of José Cayún Quiroz—an Indigenous environmentalist from the Mapuche community of Domingo Cayún Panicheo located in the Los Lagos region—who pointed out a series of messy errors in the study's methodology. Mediterráneo's consultants had carried out two studies, comprising 37 families. But out of that pool, eight families were excluded from the analysis, and 14 more families were not even registered.
The politics of responsible decision-making with respect to Indigenous claims to sovereignty and territory have become particularly contentious in the borderlands of Argentina and Chile. Land disputes have turned deadly, sparking mass protests and social unrest. While the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires free, prior and informed consent for use of territory and natural resources, the Chilean government has labeled Mapuche people as "terrorists."
Rather than righting these historical wrongs, Mediterráneo and its Environmental Evaluation Service insisted that their research design necessitated uncomprehensive forms of qualitative data collection. They also acknowledged the presence of Indigenous communities, yet maintained—against an abundance of firsthand testimony—that they would not be affected by the development. Ultimately, the ethnographic evidence was insufficient to support Mediterráneo's claims.
Preserving Life in Aysén
Lake Yulton in Aysén, Chile
The Cuervo River hydroelectric power plant proposal would have been located in the remote Patagonian region of Aysén, which features stunning landscapes with exceptional biodiversity. The project's owner Energía Austral—a joint venture between Swiss mining company Glencore (66 percent) and the Australian firm Origin Energy (34 percent)—put it up for sale after it went through environmental permitting in 2013. The $733 million, 640 MW project would have included two dams, flooding 13,000 ha (32,000 acres), and joining the Yulton and Meullin lakes. However, the Environmental Tribunal annulled Cuervo's environmental assessment because the project's owner's mitigation measures for the loss of forest cover and wetlands were insufficient.
For local citizens of Aysén, the Cuervo project was the latest iteration in a series of proposals dating back to 1990 that Chile's environmental authorities have ultimately rejected. In resolute opposition to the dam, residents formed groups like the Coalición Ciudadana por Aisén Reserva de Vida (Citizens' Coalition for the Aysén Life Reserve), and together they pointed out why the project was so poorly planned. First, in addition to the obscene flooding of lakes and forests, the dam would have been built on the active Liquiñe-Ofqui fault line. The project would have put the nearest city of Puerto Aysén—located just 46 kilometers (28.6 miles) downstream—at serious risk. And second, similar to the above lack of consent in the Puelo River case, Energía Austral failed to meet the International Labor Organization's (ILO) Convention 169 standards on Indigenous consultation for the Cuervo project. This made the false equivalencies in the company's proposed compensation measures for ecosystem loss especially egregious.
According to the Environmental Court of Valdivia, "The Owner has not been able to determine in a qualitative or quantitative manner that the forests or wetlands to be compensated are equivalent."
In addition to annulling the environmental permit, the sentence therefore orders the Committee of Ministers to reopen the procedure. If the company is unable to verify its proposed compensation of ecosystem loss, then the committee must process the previous appeals. For now, citizens and environmentalists are hailing the decision as another "tremendous success" in the popular Patagonian struggle against large hydro.
Restoring Justice Through Water Rights
These positive legal decisions give much cause for celebration, but they also mark a significant turning point in the global movement to protect Patagonia's rivers. While we should certainly relish the moment and express our contentment, it bears reminding that the fight is not over. Companies like Mediterráneo still hold considerable water concessions in Chile.
Chile's entrenched corporate elites have a clear interest in continuing their foul legacy of socio-ecological destruction. Nonetheless, the incoming government has an opportunity to provide a healthier future for Patagonia and the planet, by building on this new hopeful trend and transferring water rights back to Indigenous Peoples and civil society.
Local residents in Chilean Patagonia
Want to learn more about the ongoing threat of hydroelectric energy development on rivers and biodiverse populations in Chilean Patagonia? Check out our interactive map.