The Environmental Threats of Genetically Engineered Salmon

Written by Juliana DeVries, Eco-rep for Wallach

Genetically modified foods have been a controversial issue since their invention. Genetically modified foods have the potential to solve world hunger and vitamin deficiencies, but yet at the present moment, we are not taking advantage of this opportunity. GE foods are not helping the poor, but are only hurting our ecosystems and possibly our health.

At the present moment, the FDA is deliberating over whether genetically modified salmon that can grow to three times the size of regular salmon can be released into the ocean. This is an alarming fact, since these GE organisms are potentially very harmful.

Even GE salmon raised in farms pose problems to the environment and to human health. Eating farmed salmon in exposes you to antibiotics, which are a health concern because a human that consumes massive amounts of antibiotics in their food may become resistant to antibiotics for illnesses that person may acquire. Farmed fish are also fed pink pigment to keep their color the same as wild salmon who get their color from the pink bottom-feeders they eat in the ocean. If the farmed salmon were not fed this dye, they would be an unappetizing dark gray. GE salmon would pose more even risk than regular farmed salmon, because GE salmon are usually fatter than normal salmon, and pollutants accumulate in fat, so they have a higher risk of poisoning.

Farmed fish also have a tendency to escape into the wild. For example, in 2000, 170,000 salmon escaped from a fish farm in Maine. If genetically modified fish are exposed to wild populations, they could out-compete wild populations and infiltrate the fragile ocean ecosystem. Because of their large size, the GE salmon would be desirable mating partners for the wild salmon. It has also been suggested that GE salmon be made sterile. Though this would solve the problem of containing the GE traits, if wild salmon are selecting and mating with the sterile fish instead of with the wild salmon, the population of salmon could decline rapidly.

Genetically modified foods do have the potential to help the world. Sometimes the benefits outweigh the risks as in the case of “Golden Rice”—a type of rice genetically modified to contain vitamin A and helps with the absorption of iron. The seeds are free of charge in attempt to bring this product to poor people in Asia who are in dire need of these vitamins. Salmon, on the other hand, helps very few people, and creates health and environmental concerns.

From an environmentalist’s standpoint, I also view the introduction of GE salmon as a threat not only to our health and our ocean ecosystem, but also to the natural world as a whole. The salmon is a romantic fish. We picture hundreds of salmon jumping in a waterfall and nature seems right. The perversion of this scene seems like a direct attack on nature itself.

Right Issue, Wrong Winner

Awarding Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize for increasing understanding and awareness of global warming seems a bit like giving the Nobel Prize in Literature to a publisher. The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admirably casts global warming as a political issue, but it neglects the work of activists who have sought far more significant political changes than Gore has dared to support.
In his film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore treats the political effects of climate change as universal, noting its link with the drought preceding violence in Darfur and the severity of Hurricane Katrina. However, the real political effects facing humanity in the coming years will be far more skewed because of the imbalance of power between industrialized nations, who created this problem, and the impoverished nations, predicted to suffer its worst consequences.
Wealthy countries, along with industrializing nations like China and India, have practiced a fingers-in-ears policy for decades toward climate change that has created the bulk of the greenhouse gases threatening our planet. While the Netherlands recently invested in floating houses and Australia in a massive, wind-powered desalinization plant to prepare for floods and droughts on the horizon, the African nations that will likely suffer worse consequences from climate change are left with few resources to brace for a problem they did not cause and could not prevent.
Gore’s work to place this issue in the public consciousness, as well as the IPCC’s work confirming the links between human activity and warming, represent a vital but insufficient portion of the political battles that global warming necessitates. Part of Gore’s political career was dedicated to making climate change an issue of national policy by opening hearings on Capitol Hill and by participating in the Kyoto Protocol. Since leaving politics, he has traveled the world presenting a slide show that eventually became the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, started an Emmy-winning, interactive television network with environmentally themed programming called Current TV, and started the Alliance for Climate Protection to disseminate information about lifestyle changes that reduce carbon consumption. His portion of the Nobel Prize money will be donated to the alliance.
There is a problem with the Nobel Committee’s decision to celebrate Gore’s lifetime of work. Since leaving office, he has treated climate change as an issue best addressed by individual changes in consumer habits, not through policy reform. Carbon consumption may be slowed by the conscience-pricking of Gore’s work, but only to the extent that it is caused by the everyday decisions of consumers. Efforts to hold powerful nations accountable for their debt to the world and to promote environmental policy changes move far beyond the scope of advice offered by An Inconvenient Truth, such as, “Buy a hybrid car (if you can afford it).”
The Nobel Committee’s dual recognition of the IPCC’s science and Gore’s populism left out a crucial third element: the scores of activists who have been addressing this issue politically for years. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a nominee for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, tried to bring legal action against the United States for violating the human rights of the Inuit people by emitting greenhouse gases that have already begun to threaten their way of life. Born in northern Canada, Watt-Cloutier has been an activist for much of her life, and she used her positions as President and International Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference to protect Inuit culture from extinction.
As sea ice disappears in the Arctic, a region that suffers the greatest of global warming’s effects, a way of life disappears as surely as if threatened by human warfare. The Inuit are only the first of many groups whose continued existence on this planet will be made impossible by the drastic changes our planet faces in the coming decades and centuries.
By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a U.N.-supported panel of scientists and an already internationally recognized political and media figure, the committee chose to lend the immense moral weight of its support to groups who already controlled the public eye and have yet to use their power toward ends as radical, necessary, or humanistic as those of Sheila Watt-Cloutier.

Jonathan Basile
The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and Comparative Literature.
He is also an EcoRep for Furnald

October 28, 2007 4:28 PM