Finding Salmon Space: Probing Global and Local Environmental Histories of Salmon Aquaculture

Salmon aquaculture is a global commodity industry that takes place in a multitude of local environments.  It has imposed substantial demands on the global fisheries (for the production of salmon feed), and has had a variety of impacts on coastal ecosystems.  It also supplies a substantial quantity of high-value fish for the global market.  For these and other reasons salmon aquaculture is a significant aspect of marine environmental history.  Yet it has not received very much attention from environmental historians.

That was the basic idea of my paper presented at the World Congress of Environmental History this past week in Guimar�es, Portugal.  Here are the slides, and some brief explanations, from my talk.

Salmon farming developed initially in Norway, but spread rapidly to other countries in northwestern Europe, North America, Latin America, and the South Pacific.  Norway remains the dominant player � producing almost as much as all other countries combined:

My approach in this paper was to outline the history of the global industry in terms of the formation of its various standardized components: fish, feed, pharmaceutical inputs, environments (pen design and site requirements), and expertise.

In the early days of the industry local sites of production used salmon drawn from local stocks.  Since then, however, strains of Atlantic salmon selected for maximum efficiency of production have spread throughout the industry, with many of these originating in Norway � the site of the most advanced breeding programs: 

Salmon are carnivorous, and so their feed is produced from other fish (with other inputs).  This feed (fish meal and fish oil) was originally produced near the local sites of production, often by the salmon farmers themselves.  However, it has since become itself the focus of an industry, that is based on the global transport and transformation of fish such as the Peruvian anchovy, herring, menhaden, and other low-value species:

Once the salmon aquaculture industry achieved sufficient size, it became a profitable market for pharmaceutical products, including vaccines for significant salmon diseases such as infectious salmon anemia, developed by major corporations such as Novartis:

Like other elements of the industry, the net pens that house farmed salmon were once produced locally � sometimes by someone with wood, nets, and a hammer.  Their design has since become standardized: built of steel, and able to withstand severe conditions, including storms and marine mammal predators.  Their development has been accompanied by the perfecting of siting standards for farms: the local environmental characteristics � water temperature, current, depth, oxygen content, etc. � that constitute optimal conditions for salmon:

The industry has also promoted the formation of a global network of expertise focused on technological development, and organized � as has often happened in the history of recent science � on the basis of a new scientific object: that is, the salmon body within the netpen ecosystem:

A chief result of these developments has been a steady lowering of production costs: it now costs today about only one third as much to produce a kilo of salmon as it did three decades ago.  One result of this is that the market for salmon has greatly expanded: about three times as much salmon is now sold each year as was sold three decades ago, and two thirds of that is farmed:

 But this global industry also has a variety of local dimensions:

"Global" industry standards of performance and efficient production are to some extent local standards developed in Norway (the industry leader), which have then been disseminated globally:

 While the industry produces a standard commodity, it is nevertheless often marketed as a local product, as seen in these examples from Canada, Norway, Iceland and Scotland:

 The industry is also situated in a variety of local environments, with a variety of specific local characteristics, such as the presence of other salmonid species (e.g. Pacific salmon in British Columbia, or sea trout in Ireland and Scotland) that may have locally-important ecological interactions with farmed salmon.  These are images of salmon farms from British Columbia, Ireland, New Zealand and Scotland:

These local ecological conditions are accompanied by locally-specific regulatory and political contexts.  The result (and I'm just sketching here a more complicated argument) is the co-production of both new ecosystems produced by the interactions between salmon farms and their local ecological context, and new regulatory systems.  This co-production is often made most apparent by the emergence of controversies about salmon farming that exhibit features of both local ecosystems and local social systems:

 And while there is a global network of scientific expertise, this network is rooted (as is often the case with global science) in specific local histories of scientific activities:

 To sum up: it's not enough to describe salmon aquaculture as either simply a global or a local industry.  Instead, it is both, with global features that are influenced by local contexts, and local contexts that are shaped by the global industry.  And I suggest that this global and local industry can be best understood as taking place in "salmon space":