The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore

What happens when you introduce a new fish into the sea?

In the early 1970s, a group of scientists researched how to make more food for the growing population of the world. They looked to the sea. They sampled genes from salmon in 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers and designed a new salmon that was fatter and faster growing. This was considered an amazing innovation and was the beginning of a new industry: salmon farming.

The industry spread from coastal Norway to Scotland, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the United States. Business boomed, jobs were created, and a new type of food, the farmed salmon, spread around the globe. Salmon farmers became extremely rich.

But there were unintended consequences: some of these new fish escaped, wild salmon stocks dwindled, diseases spread, salmon louse swarmed. In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Simen S tre and Kjetil stli take an in-depth look at Norway's role in the global salmon industry and, for the first time, produce a comprehensive evaluation of the detrimental effects of salmon farming. From lice to escapees, from concentrating the waste of sea pens in the fjords through which wild salmon swim to their natal streams to the fact that salmon farming causes a net reduction of protein reaped from the ocean, the results don't look good.

The New Fish combines nature writing from Norwegian fjords, the coast of Canada, Icelandic landscapes and the far south of Chile with character-driven literary non-fiction and classic muckraking. The authors started with this question: What happens when you place a new animal in the sea? This book will tell you the answer.