Books

Toxic - Richard Flanagan

"In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions.

What could be more appealing than the idea of Atlantic salmon sustainably harvested in some of the world's purest waters?

But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon?

Richard Flanagan's exposé of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring,

Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing.

From the burning forests of the Amazon to the petrochemicals you aren't told about to the endangered species being pushed to extinction you don't know about; from synthetically pink-dyed flesh to seal bombs . . . If you care about what you eat, if you care about the environment, this is a book you need to read.

Toxic is set to become a landmark book of the twenty-first century."

Read Richard's short but very powerful speech at a Town Hall rally in Hobart

Paradise Lost, a devastating documentary on the impact of the industry on our environment and people

The New Fish - Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli

"In the early 1970s, a group of scientists researched how to make more food for the growing population of the world. They sampled genes from salmon in 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers and designed a new salmon that was fatter and faster growing. This 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. But at what cost?

In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli took an in-depth look at Norway's role in the global salmon industry and produced 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."

Salmon Wars - Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and a former private investigator dive deep into the murky waters of the international salmon farming industry, exposing the unappetizing truth about a fish that is not as good for you as you have been told.

A decade ago, farmed Atlantic salmon replaced tuna as the most popular fish on North America's dinner tables. We are told salmon is healthy and environmentally friendly. The reality is disturbingly different.

In Salmon Wars, investigative journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins bring readers to massive ocean feedlots where millions of salmon are crammed into parasite-plagued cages and fed a chemical-laced diet. The authors reveal the conditions inside hatcheries, where young salmon are treated like garbage, and at the farms that threaten our fragile coasts. They draw colorful portraits of characters, such as the big salmon farmer who poisoned his own backyard, the fly-fishing activist who risked everything to ban salmon farms in Puget Sound, and the American researcher driven out of Norway for raising the alarm about dangerous contaminants in the fish. Frantz and Collins document how the industrialization of Atlantic salmon threatens this keystone species, endangers our health and environment, and lines the pockets of our generation's version of Big Tobacco.

And they show how it doesn't need to be this way."