the film forum library tutorial contact

Healthy Fish Need Clean Environs by Elizabeth Grossman Guest Commentary, The Oregonian, August 29, 2003

Your Aug. 3 editorial, "Salmon: to eat or not to eat?," missed an opportunity to point out that the ultimate goal in ensuring that salmon are safe to eat should be to restore the natural systems that encourage the production of wild salmon and to make sure that PCBs and similar pollutants are prevented from entering the world's waterways, rather than simply reducing or avoiding PCBs or determining what quantities of PCBs are healthy to ingest. In addition to delivering persistent toxic substances to the dinner table, the fishmeal that fish farms rely on is made from wild fish, contributing to a trend fisheries biologists have dubbed "fishing down the food chain," a major factor in depleting the world's wild fish stocks. Awareness and avoidance of toxic substances is essential, but the clarion cry should be for restoring the health of our riparian and marine ecosystems.