LEARN8 Alexandra Morton ~ My Hero and I Meet

Alexandra ran the alarm bell years ago that something was going terribly wrong with our environment. Her focus then was the decline of the Killer Whale population, which led her to the decline of the salmon population which brought her to the alarming increase of the lice population. She has fought tirelessly for years, writing papers, standing up, taking government to court (and winning!) and now she needs our help. She's on a mission to get it.

She's walking down Vancouver Island to Victoria where our provincial government office is to bring awareness to the problems fish farming (primarily Norwegian) are causing in our waters. You can follow her along here: http://www.salmonaresacred.org/

During her talk tonight at our community centre, she brought up some very interesting food for thought. For one, as I understand it, my Canadian government established boundaries with a red zone around the Vancouver Island waters which was supposedly off limits for fish farming (to protect the wild fish), but the marker dots for the farms on her map showed otherwise. As she said, our government are breaking their own rules, they allow the fish farms to establish in a place they have a policy that says they can't. Why is that I wonder? If they can break this one rule in my little corner of the country, what else is under the covers?

This one grossed me out at the thought. These farm fish are in open pens, meaning nets. The fish get fed a lot of food (and drugs) every day, which unlike animal farming practices, isn't regulated meaning who knows what the food is, and then they poop it out. Lots of poop. And they live in nets remember, so guess where the poop settles? A video of a thriving sea bed compared to the barren sea bed a fair distance away from a pen had the audience and me gasping. Just because we can't see it doesn't mean there's not something fishy going on with the fish farm industry. If they were feeding their fish good things shouldn't the sea bed underneath be thriving or at least as good as it is where there aren't any fish farms?

There are better ways to farm fish then in open waters on the salmon migration routes this just has to stop and soon!

Norway isn't just coming to Canada either, apparently there are other countries where the same issue with lice has happened because of their fish farm practices. Heck even in their own country they've prohibited fish farms from some fjords where the salmon run, why is that? Think lice and spreading.

The one message I got today from Alexandra was we all need to stand up for this, she just can't do it alone any more. Well I'm standing Alexandra, and I will spread the word as best I can that this just can't go on. Sign the petition at http://www.salmonsaresacred.org

All you Canadians this is one thing you can do something about. If we don't do something as citizens of a great country, Oh Canada our home and native land will be in a very sad state of affairs indeed. Taken out by a teeny tiny bunch of lousy lice. Be very sure you want to vote for this government come election time, it's not just the lice that are lousy.

Here's a supporting article from Feb 1010 which says a lot but this caught my eye, Alexandra lives on the Broughton migration route and she was the first to notice the changes:

http://www2.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/story.html?id=45cdb91e-51ab...;