We keep hearing about climate justice, but what does that really mean?  And what do fish have to do with this?  Climate justice is about taking action to slow the rate of climate change while also taking action to ensure that the impacts of climate change are not felt disproportionately by some people more than others.  Similarly, fish justice is about taking action to prevent the catastrophic loss of our west coast fisheries, while at the same time ensuring that the people who live on this coast can still have some seafood on their table.

Archaeology tells us that First Nations have been living on this coast for over 9000 years.  First Nations tell us that they have always been here, since time before memory.  However you look at it, the First Nations on this coast have been co-existing with salmon for many, many years.  These days, there aren’t always enough salmon for the First Nations to eat through the winters.  And it’s not just the salmon.  When I travel to communities in the Great Bear Rainforest, I hear stories about how the abalone are all but gone, the eulachon don’t show up in the rivers anymore, and the crab populations are being threatened by over-harvesting.

From an ecological perspective, there is much that urgently must be done to protect healthy marine ecosystems. Marine protected areas would be a good start, as would maintaining the moratorium on oil tankers.  Particularly in a climate changing world, we need to protect ecosystems to allow species to adapt to the changing conditions.  

The health of the oceans is such that we simply must take less in order to allow the stocks to recover.  As people who live on this coast and eat what comes from the sea, all of us can play a role in this.  Eating less seafood, or choosing to only eat sustainably harvested seafood, would go a long way towards supporting the health of marine ecosystems.

When we take less, the question then becomes, how do we fairly distribute the reduced amount that is now available?  This is where the question of justice comes into play.

First Nations have depended on food from the ocean since time immemorial.  Their rights to harvest food from the ocean are protected in Canada’s constitution.  If there is a reduced amount of seafood being harvested, we need to ensure that First Nations can still have seafood on their table.   Which likely means that the rest of us need to make do with less.

This is not what is currently happening.  Commercial salmon fisheries ship the salmon to stores and restaurants far from the coast.  Sport fishers ship boxes and boxes of frozen fish home, all over the world.  Each time I am on the coast in the summer, there are stacks of fish in boxes waiting at airports and I wonder how much of the haul ends up freezer burnt and wasted.  The First Nation people I work with watch all this fish being flown away, and then can’t always find the fish to fill their own freezers.

The people who live on the coast see what is happening in the ocean.  They tell me the sport fishery for crab has so severely depleted the stocks this past summer that they couldn’t find any crab to eat.  They tell me that giant Humboldt squid are washing up in the hundreds, a species never seen before in this part of the world that is possibly moving north due to climate change. They tell me which rivers had salmon this year, and which ones didn’t.  They tell me the bears are so hungry their ribs are sticking out. In some places, they tell me the bears never came at all this year, and they wonder if they died because there were so few salmon the year before. 

It’s high time we started respecting the voices from the coast, listening to their conservation concerns and respecting their Aboriginal rights to the fish.  It’s time we started making choices ourselves to take less so that more is available for First Nations and for conservation.