time once again for community farm and we're very lucky to have back with us live in the studio this morning peter commutes and peter kenyon is professor of environmental anthropology at seattle central community college think they remove the community from that  he's also a commissioner at the puget sound salmon commission and founding a fisherman at loci fish company and he's in to talk about last weekend's containment failure at the farmed fish environmental disaster start out if you would and just tell us briefly a little bit about the puget sound salmon commission and also loci fish company sure the puget sound salmon commission is funded by a two percent tax that the small boat fishermen voted to institute and we're organized into the washington state department of agriculture and what we do is we do marketing for puget sound salmon we  do toxicology research and we you know we we want to make sure our fish are clean that we're that our guys are selling and just all sorts of things related to salmon and and then loki loki fish company is kind of an outgrowth of our family business it's been around well i've been a commercial fisherman since one thousand nine hundred two and we've run this little business where we have three or four boats and we supply seattle area farmers markets today were at district and we do co ops in the midwest and co ops up and down the coast here and we kind of combine our environmental commitments with our with our business you know so we try to make it a community oriented business now that's kind of what we do i describe actual aska so we've got another cycle of fish that's that we're going to be putting out of for the public here pretty soon so you like literally got into town like within a day when the news about this failure at this facility up on just off a cypress island right we were just coming by let me island actually and i got a call from  i guess the news director w they didn't know much about it and they they're going to have the state of washington on their program they asked me what kind of questions i should ask them and i said well why don't you ask some of these fish are safe to consume i mean which talking about farm salmon  is a concentrated animal feed operation and what's referred to as a calf oh and these are thousands and thousands of fish that are corralled with nets  and they're very susceptible to diseases in fact they're treated for all kinds of viruses they've been treated with antibiotics for bacterial infections there's a lot of parasite issues associated with these pens so i just i wanted the the station manager to ask the state have you vetted these fish i mean typically when they when they when you put  industrial meat out on the market it goes through a withdrawal period from drug withdrawal now these fish were just in the middle of this industrial process just suddenly released three hundred thousand of them into into puget sound  and yet the state of washington instead of mounting a serious cleanup effort i mean from my standpoint this is like exxon valdez except these are like smart bombs this is not just dumb oil this these are significant gear to try to corral and get these things out of the water column this is not just a sport fish bonanza the way the state wants to portray this i would not recommend eating these fish really there's there's a lot of issues from that from a health standpoint you know so so yeah i heard about it just as we were coming down and i've been working on this issue since for for at least twenty years twenty years ago there was a professor  washington arthur whitely i think one of the facilities in the san juan islands is named after him and he was saying back then he said these things are putting out more pollution into the water than municipal sewage plants and yet they were initially unregulated under the clean water act because there are there effluent did not come out of a pipe it was a not what's called a non point source of discharge and there's no other industry that gets this kind of exemption sound you know and we don't know all the effects of all this effluent coming out there was just an article in national geographic within the last year about the red tide explosions in chile and how the the chalange population is dependent on fish is very angry about the proliferation of fish farms i mean chile is very popular with unruly gins and the japanese and all these multinational corporations because they have very few environmental restrictions and so they've devastated the coastal ecosystems down there and so there's just all kinds of issues i'm kind of frankly amazed that we've been working on this for twenty years in these these fish farms are still permitted to operate i mean they could be operating on land they could be putting their fish in concrete ponds on land and containing what environmentalists call their extra analogies but instead it's much cheaper for them just to allow all the affluent just to go straight out into the into the wild ecosystem so they're really being subsidized by the destruction of wild ecosystem from from my perspective i was just looking at earlier this morning online some put up a link to some video that see shepard martin sheen boat had been shooting just like weeks ago right as well stuff going back to twenty sixteen and showing these pens up in british columbia and just the effluent flowing down from these these enormous pans that are just that appeared to be right with fish with salmon in them well this this has been a major struggle in british columbia for at least twenty years the industry came in to to british columbia initially it was norwegian backed salmon farms i don't know who owns it at this point the ownership here in puget sound is cook aqua culture which is a canadian firm there about a two billion dollar corporation and yeah there's just all kinds of effluent coming out and the odd thing is that british columbia has pretty good salmon habitat and yet they've located these salmon farms along the migratory routes of the wild salmon and they've been having catastrophes in terms of wild salmon production a friend of mine in alexandra morton who is a whale researcher has been sort of the spearhead of this effort to expose that industry in british columbia for the last twenty twenty five years and she's worked with scientists they've documented different kinds of viruses that are that are coming out in the fish because seen rio virus there's there's just a lot of disease and the the british colombian government or the canadian government has actually suppressed some of the science there was a there was a canadian scientist named christy miller who documented the presence of certain viruses in these fish and they ordered her not to her research so if if your viewership wants to find out more about this there's a very good documentary about british columbia and the fight with it's called salmon confidential and it is on it's just search it it's out there salmon confidential very good background there's another european documentary on the salmon farming industry called fillet of fish oafish which really has a lot more to do with the toxins that are routinely found in in farm salmon so so yeah british columbia actually right now the first nations are occupying one of the farm salmon sites there's an ongoing occupation up there because this has ramifications for their wild fish this as ramifications for the purity of their shellfish and so they're very very concerned about it another thing one can observe in these videos is these farmed fish attacking eating small they called fingerlings salmon small well you've got the you've got the smolts that the fingerlings are heading out in the streams and then and then you've got the smolts that are you know about the length of your little finger that are swimming out this is one of the issues and that's been debated in british columbia is that the small it's can can swim directly into these pens and the pens are sighted in areas where they get maximum title flushing so they don't have to live in their own sewage so these fish can just swim right in there and you know sometimes like in the in the currents north of vancouver island you get five ten not currents and these fish the little fish that are coming out will shelter in in these pens and get sometimes get consumed i know they used to have underwater lights in these pens who would actually attract wild feed and reduce their feed cost so it's it's a you know it their main subsidized by the destruction of the wild fish the other issue with the smalls of course is that when they're coming back from the ocean after being out for two to three years and then they fall off as the fish goes into freshwater and there's probably some sort of mutually beneficial relationship there what happens with the salmon farm is that this is a location where these things can live the parasites twenty four seven three hundred sixty five days a year and then you get the small smoltz coming out heading out to the ocean and they cannot take the parasites  them and they have very high mortality and so we think this is a major cause of the decline of the british columbia and salmon industry i'd point out that washington state and british columbia  only places on the west coast that allow this industry to operate you know we think of the state of alaska as a conservative state politically they're actually quite progressive environmentally they banned salmon farming it's not it is not permitted and you just go across the border into from canada into into alaska in the samurai are quite healthy so you know this is it's kind of a zero sum game you know sometimes the salmon farming corporations will say oh we're just in this to deal with problems of world hunger you know like we really care about bangladesh you know they could they care about their white tablecloths first world market and they want to dominate  and but they're spending a lot of money on public relations right now and i'm i'm sure now they're going to be spending a lot more speaking of public relations it cook was it could farms  initially it was saying that there was just forty five thousand scaped fish and they were blaming the extreme tides brought on by eclipse eclipse somehow in this magical eclipse just like i mean it was it was it was it was i guess sort of humorous in a way that they would throw an absurd justification like that and somehow it would make it into the headlines of the seattle times yeah no i mean these tides were well within the normal range and and of course they had problems with meat and on these these pans i know that they'd they've been out working on them so this is not the first time this is happened i mean we had i believe escape of about three hundred thousand off mean bridge island in the mid ninety's cypress scientists facility and about twenty years ago also cypress island also had major escapes and because i remember on going this island where i spent a lot of my life those fish were just cruising around and people were catching him they were throwing little pieces of gravel into the water and the fish would come up because they're used to getting fed like a pellet like or goldfish you know and then it would come up and then people would dip in at them you know so this is not the first time this has happened this is sort of it goes with the territory when you when you allow salmon farming in and i just want to point out salmon farming is different from like hatchery production people may not know the difference i had sheree is essentially where you're you're augmenting wild runs and you're you're giving fish at a very small stage a head start and then you release them and then they have a natural they go out into the ocean i mean there are some issues google issues but you're not holding them in a concentrated animal feed off feed lot basically  so this is this is in the nature of the beast now of course the industry says well it's really not much of an impact these fish if they escape will not become resident and of course that's only one of the concerns about the escapees and it has been documented that in british columbia they do have resident at lenox salmon there's a professor at university of victoria named john volpi who actually snorkeled a lot of the vancouver and other places and found second generation it at lan ics that you know so when they're released from the pens you might have seen some of the pictures they're actually fairly distorted they look pretty ugly  a lot of them have this heart in heart and muscle inflammation they don't look very healthy but a certain percentage could well become resident now the state of washington the partner fish and wildlife  their wisdom actually tried to establish atlantic salmon about thirty forty years ago here in puget sound i mean this is crazy isn't it this is an invasive species they were trying to establish for sportfishing purposes and they were unsuccessful but of course at that time thirty forty years ago you had robust wild runs today you've got an endangered species act listings was chinooks you've got situations in which there are niches in the stream that are available to them to colonize so so one of the one of the concerns here is the spread of an invasive species into these habitats course i think probably the more concerning issue to the scientists is the spread of disease when this industry salmon farming was first established in norway in the one hundred eighty s they immediately got diseases in and from some of the egg sources in sweden and and they had to use wrote known which is a poison and completely eradicate two or three rivers to to eliminate some of the diseases that came in and then over the last twenty five thirty years you had disease issues in ireland that got transmitted to sea trout you've had disease issues in scotland and of course chile has had disasters so it's a very it's a very unsound industry and this is not surprising i guess what surprises me is that we've got a democratic governor in the state who's a conservationist and you know his department of ecology allows  operations to continue functioning you know despite all the evidence that's out there so yeah it's time to transition these operations on to land it even if you put them on land though i would have questions about sustainability of salmon farming mainly because salmon farming you're raising a car never is fish it's not like to law or say some of the traditional chinese forms of aqua culture we're actually feeding grain you're kind of recycling farm products this is a situation in which you have to go out and catch wild protein to feed a carnivorous fish to make more wild protein there's been various estimates as to how much protein is actually lost to the planet through salmon farming the chill lands did a study about ten fifteen years ago where they estimated that the reduction of wild protein to make one pound of salmon is about eight to one and now of course the salmon farming industry is claiming oh no we're getting down to the situation where we're hardly losing any protein at all and of course they're misleading the public because they're what they're doing is they're they're going from pellet to fish and they're saying well we we only use one point three pounds of pellets to mean one pound of fish but to get to that pellet it takes about twenty pounds of wild fish to make one pound of fish oil which is a major constituent takes about three pounds of wild fish here we're talking and show viz for each fish to make one pound of pellets and so chalange figured it was about an eight to one reduction so when this corporate industry says it's feeding world hunger i mean this is a this is ridiculous it's absolutely absurd so even if you put them on land you'd still have problems in my in my judgment with overall sustainability but if they did transition to land at least you would not be destroying the wild environment so beyond the economic motivation for the companies that are running these farmed fish operations what is the state of washington the oversight organizations what are they doing and why aren't they since you pointed out this has been going on for at least twenty years why are they stepping in and doing some about this it's politics the head of the washes state fish farmers was a guy named a senator a republican senator named dan swecker who pretty much shepherded this industry for years now on and on in and you know there's this is a big i mean cookoff we're culture is a two billion dollar industry i mean this is you know we're talking we're talking big money here and this this  scape comes at a very unfortunate time for this corporation because they have a major application pending in the streets i wonder if you can for a huge expansion of fish farm facilities and they want to cite these within a ten mile radius of the river and i mean here we've just we've just gone through and torn out those dams these dams that destroyed the l a law the law goes into the olympic national forest pristine habitat and it was blocked back around the turn of the of the twentieth century and it was a crime and they got a property right out of it and we finally bought them  out and the tribes have been in the forefront of this and some conservation groups like friends of the earth and and now we've got that open and now the department of ecology is considering approving a permit for a massive fish farm you know within the immediate vicinity of the river and of course you have a scapes there and it's nice it's a nice point of dispersal where everything could go straight into puget sound it could you know it's so because he is looking at this right now people should be writing letters to to jay inslee saying this is not appropriate in our waters we want to get this industry under control they can prepare vide options you know they if if you put these facilities on land they could buy land and used in washington or some other place removed from the salt water get relatively inexpensively yeah they'd have to raise their price to cosco but you know that's that's what we have to do to protect our natural environment why spend all this money trying to save salmon and fix all our coverts do all this work if we're just going to put this invasive industry out there doesn't make any sense you know the so we've got the state of washington you know one time one time i was given a talk on on farm salmon and i was i was on a panel with a department of ecology representative and they were trying to mimic this safe seafood guide that the monterey bay aquarium puts out you might have seen it's a little pocket guide and it got green eat these fish yellow caution and red avoided and of course the monterey bay aquarium has had a read on farm salmon for the whole time well in the state of washington came out it gave it a green and and i and and so the little guy that came up in the state of washington had a green for farmed salmon to have a little asterisk on it said this may be controversial so i asked this woman from the department of ecology i said you know how could you put a green you know farm salmon and she said look don't give me problems here i had to fight for that asterisk i mean she she knew but the political pressure was intense and we've also got the federal government through the national oceanic and atmospheric administration that's also heavily pushing this industry so we're up against some captured agencies i think i hope because he is not captured here at the state level but i think it is  at the federal level the noah and so their own way we can combat that is by getting the word out and of course a disaster like this in a way will help us and where is this farmed salmon being sold you mentioned costco you know i think i know costco's one i mean it's probably the predominant salmon that sold in the united states and there have been surveys done  as to whether or not it is honestly represented in restaurants and other places and huge percentage is being represented as wild salmon when they sell it i mean so there's there's a lot of misrepresentation to the consumer  had to fight to get food coloring regulations supposedly in the us in the food supply food colorings out it has to be listed as an ingredient well of course all the farm salmon has food coloring added and  and we had to fight to get that regulation enforced and so sometimes it's enforced we also had to fight to get country of origin labeling and the u s government just repealed that under threat from i think it was nafta i believe it was mexican and and canadian beef farmers that did not want that they felt that was a trade restrictions so we got that removed so we're having a hard time getting consumers understand what they're eating and and so the fish is is you know it's a mainstay in sort of the upper middle class food supply in the united states so where do you recommend people find out more information on this and how do they relate their wishes to washington state well like i say those those who documentaries are salmon confidential and fillet of fish would be good places to start food and water watch is a activist organizations put a lot of information out on this the mangrove action project which is actually based imported angeles and deals primarily with shrimp aqua culture but also salmon i don't i am looked at their web site lately but they have been in the forefront of making the public aware about the stuff the david suzuki foundation in british columbia has been  doing great work on this for twenty years i'm sure if you go to their website they would have resources as well right and how can people find out more about loki fish company well  loki fish dot com just go to our website or check your facebook page out or just stop by the farmers market today do you district or to morrow it ballard or west seattle or broadway and we'd be happy to talk to you we try to combine our our fish sales community farm and we are very lucky to have back with us live in the studio this morning reverend harriet walden reverend harriet walden is founder and director of mothers for police accountability in two thousand and thirteen she was appointed co chair of the seattle community police commission and she serves as a board member for the national coalition for police accountability and she is also host and producer of the mother's justice became co chair of the community police commission in two thousand and fourteen of the point in two thousand and thirteen very good start out to tell us about mothers for police accountability and your motivation found festival to one of my sons was in a car with three other young people and my my youngest son was in the house i was not at home the police stopped the car as it turned on twenty one thousand jackson said they were looking for drugs and  d guns and so what they never searched the car and the escalated to the fact that four boys got arrested and they had never had a criminal record none of them was a high school graduate on the way gang activity and lots and lots of young people was with taking the position i mean the police was stopping them putting guns that they had there was pretty good on the ground and the young people is tired of being jacked and that's what they call they got what is the tickets all the time from going from garfield across the street to ease els got the jaywalking tickets and they were always been stopped so anyway and my kids kind of got beat up they didn't get rodney king the eyes i can't say that but they did get beat up and as a result of that myself and for my neighbors or people that i knew women i asked them to help me and we started mothers against police rassmann at that time that was  all that to build bridges and to make relationships and so we are going to do in the ebb and also do in the flow one of the things that you were key in bringing about here up like that and he got shot and then a few years before that a elderly man had gotten killed out at a house in a seattle housing building out in the you district he was seventy two and so it became really apparent to us that well you know the beginning about this and then there was the man who held up the city with the sword yeah that's right all day long and after that event norm stamper in the police department was convinced that  that we were right and we needed to have police officers trained to be able to handle people who haven't a mentally ill crisis and we went to portland first i may have a road in a police car i never did a ride along they couldn't trick me to so they could be observed for seventy two hours and the police that was trained in portland wore a little like a little something on a lapel so when they were out working in the areas where people were homeless or mentally ill the people could recognize  and the city it was supposed to be trained all the offices was supposed to be trained and and something happened with that it was still just volunteered and he had he had he had  retired to nightstick and so the police officers only had pepper spray as part of their so called to use other than an other than that lethal weapon the gun and then mothers was part on part of a less lethal option task that's why people don't have to sign tickets in seattle anymore they just give you the ticket you don't have to sign it because of that case so in a way and then after the j came to town it was memorialized and the settlement agreement and the intervention here because it's too many people and it's too many people who actually have a bad day and you know our motto is that you cannot kill everybody who is mentally ill or having a bad day you must have people trained to be able to handle people and now with what is happening seattle we have so many people living on the streets and so many people who are on the edge and anybody can have a mentally ill crisis because that doesn't mean that that that's your state forever but at this particular moment you are having a crisis and you need to be handled and such a way that you can live food crisis and not die in the midst of the crisis and so we worked really hard with that and really quite upset about the shooting i mean you know i mean it's like well after all these years it didn't work and we've had lots of incidents where it has worked but when it goes bad when i went just not working it goes bad it goes bad badly and this was to me was it was bad so we're going to be really watching this case and connecting the dots and want to know about how could  supervisor not know that the officer did not have his taser it seems to me that it was a something that's going on and i want to know when the last time the chief or anybody has been the roll call i mean because if this is happening now and the d o j is still in town was going to happen when they leave when the families what's going to happen to the hammers in town that you know you got the judge and you know what he did that's the other day so he said you know not so fast no green light so so that's why i'm real concerned about this case is there a lack of anybody who's watching and i mean we're supervision that you know so you could tell  got a lot of passion around the shooting of try lena and then the mayor in minneapolis i think she said justin didn't have to die and we feel the same way that charlie and i didn't have to die you know i mean it's a big race really is happening big time now since a black police officer has shot away a woman you know and black officers have had a lot of restraint across america because they know it's a double standard a black police officer know it's a double standard and he knows that in a minute he can get he can get brought up on charges or treated in a way that white officers are not treated so this is an interesting case to watch because of you do the stats on it is very few times in citizen oversight here in seattle and or in the city is the police guild police officers guild can you talk about what you see as the hurdles with dealing with the gold what i see is a hurdle here is the city and i think they've been at the table and the management has worked for seven years without a contract and and so over time i mean when i first started this i actually thought it was the guild i mean you know years management because the gil and management as part of the police commission they've always been at the table they've never not been at the table they have actually worked on a lot of the recommendations now some of them they did not vote  car or you an officer things might work differently then then what the citizens might think so so they've always been at the table the pressure need to put on the city the city needs to negotiate fair and to  the stay at the table that's that's what the problem is in seattle is not to kill it is and i learnt that in the last four years i did not know that in two thousand and twelve i did not i was like everybody else but for management absolutely different but because because you don't know because the city doesn't tell the community what they might be you know going in to work on then  on the bus and everybody is blaming them for not for standing in the way of police reform in this city they're not standing in the way of police form in cleveland and all the other places maybe in baltimore and all the other places that could be nd then you get the people on the other side the negotiators from the from the from the guilds that yet but it's all secret while it's happening and it is a secret here that well but actually the city council has an ordinance there that people really don't understand that people that we were trying to make that ordinance a little bit stronger and clearer that before they going to negotiation you can cut in the city council and kind of talk about the things that you want to see on there and what we thought is that the city should also have some you know what are they looking for so people can can kind of know what's going on but it is bargaining i mean it is just like all the best bargaining for across america it is  bargaining once they go and then negotiation it is absolutely secret and over the years they have instead of paying an increased salaries for police officers they've instead traded away important facets for citizen oversight things like that well i mean i think that one of the things that complain about that pete holmes did change is that they had their own flaw firm that i think that represented the police and ambre mino was one of those was one of the attorneys for for that firm that represented police but now the city represents the police  you know as long as he's still a police officer so that part has changed but see they haven't had a contract in years and so if you don't have a contract to offices you know a lot of stuff that can't be trained up to the new policy because the new policy so have to be worked on a negotiated on as a change of working conditions and then they can you know get get trained on the new policy so as long as they don't have a contract then there's some areas where they need to you know why everything is not working together not only for their safety but also for the safety of other people so if you were put in charge of this whole process and given the power to make significant changes what would you focus on well you know the use of force now under the d o j and with the monitor and also with the help of the c p c that that's probably best use of force policy than we've had in a that's a problem because that the computer is immediate but i would work on community relationships and also helping people understand what understanding the policy you know what i mean so people and also re taking the size of the individual that what else could type of training could have been there for them to use instead of deadly force i mean of course they had the options of the taser i mean they still had pepper spray i mean they could have used pepper spray and then rapidly took the children out of the apartment because you're going to have to get the children out you know but she would probably survive the children a lot of probably will to survive too because you just get the kids out and you can't have children ingrained in people i mean you know you just walk by people and afraid and in this no words in the dictionary for white phobia because we have way more the fear and the last five hundred years then then we have way more the commission needed more power resources well it needs more resources and course now when we didn't actually get a green light yet and so that means that there are some things that we i don't know if we can go forward on had the auditor position i mean and that out of position is being expanded to be so we have the resources that's absolutely necessary and more people i mean we don't have enough commissioners to actually get the work done right now i mean it was supposed to have fifteen we haven't had fifteen and while we wanted to extend that to twenty one and there's been a couple people couple of letters the chief didn't think it was a good idea the pete holmes or now is a letter that came in from task judge retired judge carol also that in thinking that was a good idea but we think it's a good idea because a lot of work to be done and even if you want to twenty one at most times you're not going to have no more than fifteen or sixteen people at that meeting if everybody came but it's a lot of work to get and it's a lot of policy review engagement out and engage in the community and also you know just getting the places we have a hybrid here between the way that we set it up because a lot of places the complete civilian review has not been working i mean because number one it's hard to to compel the to get where you need from from the police you know and that kinds of stuff plus there's the budget you know you the strength of of any oversight is can be killed just a few minutes left so how can people interact with the commission how can people interact with your organization mothers for police accountability well the commission has a website i  public public laws here in washington state and the meeting us from nine to nineteen noon usually we in the u s will tell but it's always on the website and we have a facebook didn't do facebook live this past tuesday but we have a great communication engagement person mentee and she does a great job working on that i believe even have a call in future where people can listen not calling with russians that's right that's right yeah they got all the technology i mean because we had a lot of people young people who actually know how to do that and and and actually getting the word out there  a lot of work and and so i just wanted to just acknowledge the commissioners and the staff for actually hanging in there because it's been tough at the end of the day a lot of people don't want police reform this not always the police skill is of the people who you might not you might think want police reform but at the end of the day they don't police reform so it's it's been a rocky road but we decided to stick with it one of my daughter's first phrases possibly your first phrase actually with her first three which three word phrase anyway at the age of two was burn it down