Four Fish Read online

  Reichert and others at Pew had heard reports that several samples of farmed salmon had shown higher levels of PCBs than wild salmon. Based on these initial hints, they decided to commission the largest study ever undertaken of farmed and wild salmon, with Ronald Hites at the University of Indiana leading the research in conjunction with David Carpenter.

  When Hites, Carpenter, and other members of the study examined the flesh of salmon from around the world, they found that there was an overall difference in PCB contamination between farmed salmon and wild salmon. This is not due to any kind of genetic engineering or because the water that farmed salmon swim in is in some way polluted; contamination in salmon comes from what salmon eat. PCB pollution occurs all over the world, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. PCBs enter the food chain when microscopic plankton absorb the chemical across their cell membranes. Small fish then eat the plankton and, because PCBs are not easily flushed from body tissue, retain increasingly greater amounts of PCBs the more plankton they eat. When small fish are ground up into feed pellets for salmon, PCBs are again transferred further up the food chain. Just as the little fish “bioconcentrated” PCBs in their flesh when they ate plankton, salmon bioconcentrate PCBs even more when they eat small fish. Generally speaking, PCB concentrations are amplified with every step up the food chain.

  But wild salmon, it turns out, eat differently from farmed salmon. Two species in particular—wild sockeye salmon and wild pink salmon—are practically filter feeders, subsisting on tiny shrimp and other small crustaceans. This near microdiet is one or more “trophic levels” below the fish-derived pellets that are typically fed to farmed salmon. Since PCBs and most industrial pollutants tend to amplify every step up the food chain, the lower on the food chain a salmon eats, the fewer contaminants a salmon is likely to have in its tissues. Added to this is the fact that PCBs tend to accumulate in fatty tissue. Farmed salmon average 15 percent fat content and wild salmon average around 6 percent, so wild pink and sockeye salmon have a bioconcentration of PCBs much closer to that of other filter feeders than to fish-only-eating farmed salmon. If you were to take those same wild Alaskan salmon out of their native environment, put them in a pen for a year, and feed them manufactured feed pellets from a contaminated source, their PCB levels would rise. Generally speaking, bad feed equals bad fish.

  But within this cardinal rule, there are also more subtle corollaries. Feed differs from region to region. In Southern Hemisphere countries (like the world’s second-largest salmon producer, Chile, for example), salmon are considerably cleaner. That is simply because, overall, there is far less industry in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern; therefore Southern Hemisphere feed pellets are correspondingly lower in industrial pollutants.

  But the subtlety of this information did not make it into the press. Like all information on food safety, it reached the public in binary fashion—wild salmon are good and farmed salmon are bad. And there was an immediate drop across the board in farmed-salmon consumption. Perceptual improvisations also occurred in a kind of toxicological game of telephone. Armchair environmentalists have often pointed out to me that farmed salmon have high levels of mercury. In fact, mercury contamination in farmed salmon is not a particularly salient issue. No significant difference in mercury levels has been found between farmed and wild salmon, and neither farmed nor wild salmon have dangerously high levels of that contaminant.

  The Hites and Carpenter study also spurred counterattacks from the salmon-farming industry, which claimed that there were important benefits from eating oily fish like farmed salmon that outweighed risks from PCBs. “Long” fatty-acid chains found in salmon, such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)—often referred to collectively as the omega-3 fatty acids—are used by fish to keep their cell membranes pliable in cold-water environments like coastal Greenland and Alaska. When eaten by humans, these amino acids have the same effect on human vascular tissue—keeping veins and arteries fitter and more youthful longer. The salmon industry argued vehemently that this effect was not being taken into consideration by the Pew-funded study. This position was amplified when the National Institutes of Health funded a study by the Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian. The Mozaffarian study compared the risks of cancer death from PCB poisoning related to farmed-salmon consumption with the risks of coronary heart disease death from not eating farmed salmon. When I spoke to Mozaffarian this past year, he told me he felt that comparing the PCB cancer risks of eating farmed salmon with the coronary risks of not eating oily fish like farmed salmon was like “comparing sesame seeds with watermelons.” Mozaffarian’s meta-analysis found that 23 cancer deaths per hundred thousand individuals were likely to occur if people ate three portions of farmed salmon per week. If the same hundred thousand people did not eat farmed salmon or other oily fish, 7,125 deaths from coronary heart disease were likely to occur. Carpenter and others have subsequently countered that they believe Mozaffarian’s selection from the scientific literature for his meta-analysis was not representative of the larger trends and failed to take into account preliminary evidence that PCB contamination in farmed salmon may offset the coronary benefits of omega-3 fatty acids that an eater of farmed salmon would likely obtain.

  Mozaffarian says he would and does feed farmed salmon to his two-year-old child. Carpenter maintains that farmed salmon is “dangerous food.”

  There is, however, one point on which Mozaffarian and Carpenter agree. A single 1.8-gram pill of omega-3 oil supplements, available in forms that are guaranteed PCB-free and harvested from sustainable sources, provides as much coronary benefit as eating salmon, farmed or wild.

  The lower-forty-eighters and Europeans who eat the bulk of the world’s farmed and wild salmon are endlessly obsessed with prolonging life and avoiding long-term health risks. But the native people who catch wild salmon today, like the Yupik nation of the Yukon Delta, seem to have an increasingly tenuous hold on existence. A bad turn of fate can be all it takes to make a tribal member voluntarily leave this troubled world, particularly if that tribal member is a young person. While I was out at the Waskas’ salmon-smoking camp, a pickup truck in the Yupik town of St. Mary’s drove off the road and killed two of the teenagers inside.

  “Now there’s gonna be eight suicides,” Jac Gadwill said.

  He looked as if he hadn’t slept. It was unclear whether it was the deaths that had kept him up or the Arctic summer sun, pouring in the windows of the Kwik’pak Fisheries bunkhouse all night long.

  “It’s true,” Jac said to me. “You’ll see.”

  A little while later, we crammed ourselves aboard a single-engine airplane and took off into the fog. The Yupik nation is an archipelago of settlements strung up and down the width and breadth of the Yukon Delta—an area about the size of the state of Oregon. Some of the encampments disappear when the river shifts—a wily river that can freely slip its banks is always a sign of good salmon country. Other settlements grow into villages and begin the slow creep toward a kind of modernization. And though the different outposts are separated by vast amounts of space and time, crises are somehow shared. It therefore behooved Jac Gadwill to fly to St. Mary’s and comfort the families of the victims, to help stem the loss in some way.

  Jac’s long legs doubled up against his body. The readout on the navigation system in the plane said NO USABLE POSITION. DEAD RECKONING ON. The moment the plane left the ground, Jac broke off our conversation and fell asleep on the shoulder of his companion, Chong Cha (Ci Ci for short). Ci Ci owns a chain of nail salons in Olympia, Washington, and has an elaborate white pattern painted on each of her very long fake fingernails. She was only up for a visit and seemed anxious to leave again. She prefers it when the fishing season is over and Jac takes his winter vacation from Kwik’pak and lives with her in Olympia.

  En route to St. Mary’s, we stopped in the village of Kotlik, one of Kwik’pak’s satellite fishing stations. Because salmon are always on the move, Kwik’pak must mai
ntain several different harvest and shipping operations—a logistical nightmare in country that barely has any infrastructure at all. Jac had just installed an electronic time-card system for the employees in Kotlik, and he was eager to get it up and running. The moment we landed, he awoke, and we sprinted out of the plane. We quickly hopped aboard two waiting ATVs and trundled along a warped, slick boardwalk. Soon we had pulled up to a new loading dock at the side of the river. Jac pointed to an older, dilapidated dock just next door.

  “I built that dock out of scraps that floated down the river a few years ago. Got weathered in for three days while I was doing it. Slept on the floor of that trailer. No food.”

  He looked around and squinted toward a field in the distance. “Now we got it so we can fly a Herc in here and fly it out to Seattle with twenty thousand pounds of fresh salmon. Get it to New York in a day.”

  Back when Jac Gadwill first began working in the Alaskan seafood business, the idea that anyone in New York would want a fresh Yukon king salmon on his or her plate would have seemed preposterous. The thought of building an airport to accommodate such a difficult logistical feat would have seemed outright crazy.

  But thanks to the taste for fresh salmon that farmed salmon developed and also thanks to the fear of PCBs in farmed salmon that the Hites-Carpenter study propagated, there is today an ever-growing market for fresh wild salmon. A market large enough to make flying a Hercules C-130 transport plane to a remote dirt runway at the top of the world twice a week seem both reasonable and potentially profitable. Seven-odd years after the Hites-Carpenter study came out, the debate about PCBs and salmon has gradually faded into a gauzy haze, and farmed-salmon consumption, as well as salmon farming in general, which both dipped after the study was published, have continued to grow again. But so, too, has demand for fresh wild salmon. In fact, in the last twenty years, consumption of all salmon, farmed and wild, has doubled. And it is here that it seems the environmental community who would use fear of PCBs as a tool for raising awareness should take heed. PCB contamination is clearly an issue of concern and one that should be addressed. We should not be dumping dangerous chemicals into the ocean, into a place we depend upon for our food. But questions about how we should go about farming domesticated fish and how we should go about catching wild ones is another set of concerns that needs to be addressed directly. The real dilemma at hand for consumers is the original issue that motivated the commissioning of the Hites study in the first place: salmon farming is in dire need of reform, and wild salmon stocks are under intense pressure and severely reduced in their range and potential. Industry has recently figured out a way to strip PCBs from salmon feed, but no one has figured out a way to bring huge amounts of salmon, farmed or wild, to market that is sustainable over the long term.

  For if we were to rely solely on wild salmon, we would inevitably come up against the essential imbalance that exists between the needs of people and the requirements of fish: the imbalance that happens when humans choose wild Yukon kings over farmed ground chuck. Because of the way that people have altered the environment, there really are very few rivers like the Yukon in the world. Rivers where the water is cool and rich in oxygen. Rivers that flow and shift relatively unimpeded, where dams don’t block passage and large, valuable old trees fall into rivers and create slack water for salmon juveniles. And it’s unlikely that there will be such rivers ever again. Humans now outnumber wild salmon by a ratio of seven to one. What would happen if every human on earth demanded wild salmon instead of farmed salmon? Instant extinction.

  Except that Western civilization, with its imperative to select and improve, has for the moment tried to tweak the number of wild salmon. Though the Yukon remains a very pure wild-salmon domain, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s operations now stock many millions of hatchery-raised fish into the state’s more southerly rivers every year to “supplement” wild production. Today nearly one in three “wild” Alaska salmon begins its life in a hatchery. This was a trick that was tried in the salmon rivers of the lower forty-eight to very ill effect. In Washington, Oregon, and California, hatchery-bred salmon were often introduced into rivers to which they were not endemic. As the fading wild populations diminished, the introduced hatchery fish ended up displacing the wild spawners, wreaking havoc on the original population of fish. Soon those salmon rivers were on human life support. If humans stopped stocking fish in most western rivers of the lower forty-eight, the salmon would all but disappear.

  In Alaska the picture is more complex and, according to Alaska Fish and Game managers, more carefully thought through. Nowadays, Fish and Game officials told me, Alaskan hatchery supplementation is river-specific. Two- to three-inch baby salmon that are put into Alaskan rivers come from parents of that same river. The Copper River is stocked with fish whose parents originated from the Copper River. Diversity is maintained throughout Alaska, managers say, by preserving the specific genetic integrity of each stocked river.

  But as one salmon farmer pointed out to me, the genetics of these “wild-stocked” fish are still heavily skewed. In nature one of the greatest selection pressures on wild salmon is the weeding-out that happens during the highly vulnerable transition from egg to juvenile fish. In a natural river system, free of any human manipulation, as many as 80 percent of all eggs die before hatching. By putting stocked fish in a wild system, fish that have already been artificially reared from egg to two-inch juvenile, fisheries managers are circumventing one of the greatest natural-selection pressures of all. They in effect let bad eggs live and grow to pass on their bad genes to future generations. Who knows if those hatchery-raised fish, when they mature and lay their eggs, will produce offspring capable of surviving the full cycle of the wild gauntlet?

  Indeed, it’s possible that many Alaskan salmon no longer contain the genetic wherewithal to endure. A large chunk of wild Alaskan salmon may already be on human life support without our really knowing it. The confounding thing is that there is no way of finding out if we’ve gone too far. The only way to learn whether the salmon we’ve stocked in Alaskan rivers can endure is to stop stocking them. If “wild” Alaskan runs then disappear afterward, it will mean that we’ve made a terrible mistake.

  I couldn’t help but think that in a way the future of wild salmon and the future of the Yupik people were somehow sadly parallel to each other. Without some kind of outside management—the many grants and loans and education incentives and tours to the lower forty-eight that the federal and state governments provide to the seven thousand remaining members of the Yupik nation—it’s doubtful whether any native Alaskans would stay in the Yukon River floodplain, this land that is at once rapturously beautiful and staggeringly depressing. If we continue as we’re going, Alaskan salmon may need similar support to stay viable. Yearly stocking may become as imperative for their survival as food stamps are to the Yupik.

  The Cessna airplane carried Jac Gadwill and me farther toward St. Mary’s. The families of the teenagers who had died in the overturned pickup truck awaited Jac’s condolences. Besides being Kwik’pak’s acting representative at the time, he is a big, comforting presence, and there seemed to be an atavistic need for him to attend the mourning. But the cloud ceiling had fallen considerably, and Jac peered through the windscreen of the airplane at the dull, empty landscape ahead.

  “We ain’t gonna make it,” he said.

  “We might make it,” the much younger bush pilot said, dipping the plane down a couple hundred feet into a patch of smoother air.

  Jac lowered his head and whispered in my ear with a barely audible rasp, “We ain’t gonna make it.”

  Suddenly he looked weary. A tiredness seemed to seep out of his bones and into mine. For a while Jac had believed that he was in his mid- to late fifties, but the previous year at the Boston Seafood Show a colleague who’d known him for most of his many years as an Alaska fish trader added things up and pointed out to him that he was in fact sixty.

  “Do you really need to do all
this?” I asked him finally.

  “I tell ya, Paul. I made a million dollars in a day once,” Jac said offhandedly. “Other times I say I came to Alaska with six hundred dollars in my pocket and it’s taken me twenty years to make back my six hundred dollars.” Then a pause. “But no, I guess I did all right in the end. I guess I’m kind of doing it for this,” he said, pointing at his heart. “See, I’m a Catholic, and I kinda think that people, when they end their life, should have done something worthwhile.” He grew silent and looked out the window, then muttered, “But this thing is all-consuming.”

  “Are you grooming a successor?” I asked, fishing perhaps too aggressively for a good quote. Jac looked at me over the tops of his glasses, recognizing the switch in tone, demanding greater sincerity. “I mean,” I rephrased, “ever think of retiring?”

  “Ha!” he said, reaching across the aisle for the dragon-lady fingernails of his companion. “Ci Ci here is my retirement.”