When no fish farms existed, liberals loved the idea. It was another one of their favored nonexistent solutions.

Then the farming of fish actually got underway. The supply of farmable species skyrocketed. Salmon, once endangered, became the 'bison of the sea', saved by farming.

Hold on there.

In the first place, a lot of "liberals" and "greens" still support most forms of aquaculture and fish farming- including salmon farming.

They target salmon farming practices as problematic for fish farming for several reasons: it's an unsatisfactory substitute for wild salmon harvested from their natural habitats; hatchery fish are prone to epidemics; they lose their homing and nesting instincts and their natural prey and predator behaviors; they're penned in close quarters that lead to their water products being concentrated over a small area of sea floor, turning the offshore littoral areas where they're penned into manure dumps; they're fed with food meal that most often contains bioaccumulative toxins that result in the salmon flesh containing much, much higher concentrations of toxins like mercury and PCBs, as compared with wild salmon.

You contend that "salmon, once endangered, became 'the bison of the sea', saved by farming.' That's patently false. It also illustrates your ignorance of some basic features of the aquatic ecosystem. "Salmon" are not simply one species, as your statement implies; in fact, Atlantic salmon is one species, within the genus Salmo; Pacific salmon consist of several different species, of the genus Oncorhynchus.

Atlantic salmon are gone from most of their original range in North America; the runs are almost entirely extinct in the USA, except for a few remnant populations in Maine, and a marginally successful restoration project on the Connecticut River. They're also gone from much of their natural range in Europe.

Fish farming using fish spawned in artificial hatchery habitats do not make up for that loss. And hatchery smolts and penned salmon have proved to be terribly vulnerable to infectious epidemics, parasites- and, lately, to the massive blooms of ocean jellyfish that some scientists view as linked to ocean warming, and which almost totally wiped out the penned salmon of Northern Ireland's only salmon farm, in the year 2007.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-495480/100-000-farmed-salmon-farm-wiped-massive-jellyfish-invasion.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/2178959.stm

Penned salmon farming doesn't sound much like a practice designed to ensure the stability of the species, to me.

Additionally, your statement that "salmon, once endangered, [were] saved by farming" doesn't accord with the facts of the case at all, in relation to the fate of Pacific salmon species:

Final Hatchery Listing Policy & Salmon ESA Listings

On June 16, 2005, NOAA Fisheries Service issued its final Endangered Species Act Pacific salmon hatchery listing policy, final ESA listing determinations for 16 West Coast salmon populations, and six-month listings extensions for Oregon coast coho and 10 O. mykiss (steelhead and rainbow trout) populations. Below are documents associated with these actions.

On Mar. 16, 2009, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld NOAA Fisheries Service's hatchery listing policy for Pacific salmonids. The court's decision ends an eight-year chapter in NOAA's salmon and steelhead listings. It affirms the current listing status of 27 salmon and steelhead populations under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The good news for NOAA Fisheries Service, other federal agencies, and citizens with ESA permits and approvals, is that NOAA's decisions over the last several years relying on this policy do not need to be revised. The good news for ESA-listed species is that the court upheld the principle that a viable species is one that is self-sustaining in the wild. [italics added. ed.]

http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/ESA-Salmon-Listings/Salmon-Populations/Alsea-Response/Final-Listings-Hatchery-Policy.cfm

That decision- thankfully based on sound scientific principles of aquatic biology and wildlife management, instead of venality and denial- means that hatchery and farmed salmon are no substitute for wild populations.

As this happened, Greens turned against fish farming, just as they automatically turn against any human solution to an environmental problem.

agore, I've taken your side of the issue in regard to controveries over energy generation that you should know better than to lump us all together.

But in this case, it's you who appears to not have apprised yourself of the facts, or of the scientific principles required to interpret their significance.

Finally, much of the environmental community is on record as taking a "mend it, don't end it" approach to the salmon farming industry- check out this release from the Environmental Defense Fund, for instance:

http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?contentID=5323

I think it's a damned shame that we don't have healthy, restored ecosystem for wild salmon to raise themselves. In a better world, farming these species for food should be unnecessary. But if salmon farming can be done responsibly and with harm minimization, I'm not opposed to it in principle. However, it's no substitute for an ecosystem approach that protects habitats; curbs pollution and overfishing; and works to prevent the possibility of radical climactic alterations that might alter the entire biochemistry of the oceans, leading to results like coral reef extinctions, or the ascendancy of jellyfish species over higher vertebrate species like fish and marine mammals.

This is not rocket science. But it is science.

and their just another type of fish arent't they, but the kind you can make jellyfish sandwiches with instead of tuna fish. :)

Honestly the reason why these sorts of scolds never work is they are way to idealistic, and depend on putting parts of the planet off limits based on Western notions and philosophies.

And in suggesting this, they offend every other Non-Western culture who go out of their way to show their contempt by doing exactly what they have been told is a bad thing.

There are NO wild places left. The only solution is to find a way to incorporate the "so called wild world" into our own, and that will take the biggest change in the mindset of the animal fearing western world, who has yet to realize that for nature to survive, we can't expect 100% safety and we can't expect to cordon off thousands of square miles to save creatures who people will never see or encounter on a positive level and thus never care when they disappear. Case i point is the pronghorn antelope, a beautiful beast in the American West, dies in the 10,000s yearly, and nobody gives a damn, because the attempts to save them have focused on putting them in remote areas, where nobody sees them. Out of sight for humans means out of mind and forgotten.

Until those that want to save the ocean realize how stupid it is to "cut people out of the equation" in terms of seeing hearing feeling nature, they will fail and fail and fail and fail until there is nothing left - just ask any of the rapidly disappearing marsupials of Australia, as they are replaced by very visible cats and dogs.

People care when they can see, hear and even reach out and touch on occasions the wild things around them. Without that extinction is just a matter of time.