One more question on salmon aquaculture: Is there a way to grow salmon in pens without contact with the ocean?

Yes. In fact, they are doing some experimenting right now in British Columbia where they called for completely containerizing them.

So then all you have to do is turn the salmon into vegetarians, right?

Not exactly. People say: Well, we’ll feed them soy. And I’m a bit nervous about that, that’s like saying we’ll take all this corn and make fuel from it. That’s terribly inefficient. In the case of soy, why would you be taking perfectly good protein and feeding it to another animal that has to convert it?

And then, soy and corn are two of the principle crops being genetically engineered. Mainly Monsanto’s pushing it. They’re not being genetically engineered to be more drought-resistant or more nutritious, they’re being engineered so they’re more Roundup-ready. So we’re putting more pesticides into the environment with GE crops.

To me that means--step back and think about this--there need to be new ways of developing feeds. One thing we’ve thought about is fish offal, fish scraps. That’s a good use, it’s not commonly seen as a protein that feeds humans. Secondly, maybe it’s time to look at invasive species. Much of our focus on invasive species has been on prevention, which I think is the correct one. The problem is: What happens when you have invasive species established, how do you control them, and what’s the cost of controlling them? So oftentimes we want to poison them. That creates other problems in the environment. Hand-removal costs a lot. However, if we can find something to do with some of these critters, like the quagga mussels and zebra mussels which have now arrived, maybe we can find a way to grind them up and use them for fish feed. In this particular instance you will probably want to develop industries that are [set up to be] nonsustainable. You might wipe those invasive species out!

Has anybody experimented with that?

No, they haven’t. We’d like to push people in that direction. If you’re an entrepreneur, you look at what’s available right now. When you have sources of fishmeal coming from Peru or wherever, then you’re perfectly content and don’t look in any new directions.

And not a single scientist has jumped at this idea?

No, they want to just keep studying it. We tried to propose something like this [a fishery to control invasives] for the mitten crab and they said, “Oh my God, you can’t do that, you can’t have people profiting from them!”

They said: It could cause it to spread. We said: Bond the individuals doing this. They said: We don’t want to get these things in the market. We said: Limit the markets. Let them all go to Asia, where they came from and where there’s ample demand. We air ship fish all around the world. That’s just one example. I don’t think enough people are willing to consider new and innovative solutions to the problems confronting us. We’re trying push them into new ways of thinking.