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It is possible to farm fish responsibly and in an ecologically sustainable way. But it costs more. This year I read a thesis by a student at the University of Michigan that detailed the vast ecological damage being caused by salmon farms in Chile (the main source of salmon in the US, and the main reason why salmon today costs a small fraction of what it did twenty years ago). Some of the major problems:
* Runoff from the vast amounts of salmon waste, which creates dead zones in the southern Pacific.
* The usual problem of monocultures anywhere, the salmon concentrated in a small area are susceptible to disease (especially lice -- who knew) and are treated with vast quantities of antibiotics, which also run off and do their usual damage.
* Salmon are carnivorous fish, so farming them requires enormous quantities of other fish as feed. You may think that you are sparing the wild sea fish by eating farmed salmon, but in fact every pound of farmed salmon was created by devouring eight or ten pounds of wild sea fish caught by long-net trawlers, the very mechanism that is scouring the oceans clean of all fish life.
* Salmon farms in the ocean can and do get free, with the result that North Atlantic fish stock (the kind grown in farms) are taking over what is left of the ecosystem of southern Pacific oceans.
Etc. It is important to note that each of these problems can be and has been solved in Norway, which operates model salmon fisheries (keeping the salmons in ponds isolated from each other and the ocean, feeding them with protein from non-wild sources, etc.) But that costs more. The irony is that the ecologically devastating Chilean salmon farms are owned and operated by... Norwegians. Oh well.
The upshot of all this is that I have simply opted to give up all fish "for the time being" -- that is, until the oceans recover. Though the rate we're going, that probably won't be for a long, long time.
