Pathogenic proliferations: Salmon aquaculture,industrial viruses,and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism

Abstract

In this article, I ask how a virus associated with Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia (BC) can reveal geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements within the bodies and blood cells of fish. Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) travels through supply chains, ocean currents, and ecological interactions, and causes salmon to become at risk of ruptured blood cells and organ damage. This article proposes that PRV can be interpreted as a form of industrial waste that reinforces geographies of toxicity across multiple scales. I first situate the emergence of aquaculture in BC within colonial histories that continue to transform the coastal straits into contested sites of state-making. I then outline how multiple forms of life, ecological encounters, and unique hydrological conditions become entangled with industrial practices, giving rise to novel pathogenic proliferations. I end by describing how the appearance of yellow salmon hints at the potentially far-reaching presence of PRV, and I look to the bodies of salmon to consider how the expanding PRV footprint transforms regional ecologies and contributes to emergent toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. In forging connections between settler-colonialism, industrial landscape-making, and pathogenicity, I highlight how microbes can reflect and reinforce settler-colonial structures of dispossession. Moreover, in proposing that pathogens can be understood as components of industrial toxicity, I contribute to a reimagining of what industrial toxicants are and the forms they might take.

Introduction

During the springtime, the waters of what is now the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia, Canada, swell with thousands of young, juvenile fish. The salmon are freshly smoltified and their finger-sized bodies crowd in schools near the shoreline, feeding in the nutrient-rich waters before they ride the current through the straits and out to sea. These channels in the Strait of Georgia join with the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Fraser River, and Washington State’s Puget Sound to form the Salish Sea, home to the largest salmon migration route in North America. In the Cove, a small fishing community in Liǧ^wiłdax̌^w territories on one of so-called BC’s Discovery Islands, for some, the presence of the fish brings hope for the season to come. “It’s good you came to visit now,” Kenny, a lifelong fisherman and respected Liǧ^wiłdax̌^w Elder frequently tells me while bustling around his boat, because soon he will be out fishing and could be gone for a few weeks or maybe more. His cousin, Tsahaukuse, Hereditary Chief Gigame of the Liǧ^wiłdax̌^w Nation, seems sad when he talks about the new fish and the uncertain futures they will endure. “These poor baby fish,” he says, while gazing out of his living room window towards the Strait. “All these channels are poisoned from the virus in these farmed fish pens. If they don’t get eaten or stuck in the pens, they’re going to get all virus-ed up. Who knows how many of these fish will return in two or three years? This virus is killing our fish.”

Tsahaukuse was referring to Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), a virus associated with the open-net farm pens of Atlantic salmon that are scattered throughout his homelands. Salmon farming in the Salish Sea mostly raises Atlantic salmon in nets that extend into the water column roughly fifty feet in width and depth. Farms, often clustered in sheltered bays and inlets around Vancouver Island, can hold 500,000 fish and consist of several net-pens anchored to the sea floor. One result of this emergent turn in industrial food production is the proliferation of pathogens and the ensuing transformations that occur when pathogens become integrated within and move throughout new places, bodies, ecologies, and encounters.

Researching the political and ecological dynamics of aquaculture in the Salish Sea between 2018 and 2019 encouraged me to become what Celia Lowe might call a “viral ethnographer,” tracing human-animal-virus relations and the forms of multispecies sociality that enable viruses to participate in multiple human and other-than-human worlds (Lowe, 2017). Since PRV was first confirmed in Salish waters in 1992 (Mordecai et al., 2021), the danger— or lack thereof— posed by the virus has become a sticky and insistent question for those who are alarmed by increasingly dire Pacific salmon migration returns. A 2018 report detailed that 100% of Atlantic salmon sampled in Puget Sound were positive for PRV, ¹ reanimating anxieties over the apparent ubiquity of the virus. Contemporaneously, lawsuits like those put forth by the ‘Na̱mǥis First Nation sought a judicial review of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ (DFO) policy of not testing farmed Atlantic salmon for PRV before placing the fish into ocean net-pens. ² A diverse amalgamation of scientists, activists, fishers, and community members contended that, through the global trade networks that underlie the raising of industrial salmon, PRV had been imported to the Salish Sea. Pacific salmon, not having evolved with the virus, were at serious risk of contracting and spreading a potentially deadly pathogen.

As part of ongoing campaigns to enact stronger fish health protections, First Nations and their allies throughout coastal Vancouver Island and the Fraser River migration route search salmon spawning rivers and travel to sites of aquaculture production to monitor daily operations of farms, gather underwater video footage, and sometimes collect water and waste samples and serve the farms with eviction notices. While living in the Cove, I helped Tsahaukuse and Kenny in organizing several such reconnaissance trips that attempted to document the operations of and forms of pollution emanating from salmon farms in their territories. Meanwhile, the court-mandated decision date regarding whether farmed salmon smolts would be screened for PRV was soon to arrive. In preparation for the announcement, I participated in Indigenous-led direct-action events at aquaculture production sites, legislative offices, and in major cities that urged policy-makers to enact new PRV testing requirements. Seeking to understand how the US and Canada legislate aquaculture within a waterscape that is ecologically connected yet bisected by the US-Canada border, I also worked with a non-profit in Washington State that advocates for the removal of Atlantic salmon farms from Puget Sound. During this time, I interviewed scientists, fishers, and community members about PRV and broader changes within fisheries and aquaculture industries, attended public hearings and press conferences regarding aquaculture lawsuits and licenses, and collected public relations materials disseminated by organizations and agencies such as the BC Salmon Farmers Association and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Such experiences shaped how I came to encounter PRV—not necessarily as a discrete microbe, but as an expansive political agent, molded as much by colonial histories and industrial practices as by the movements of fish and water.

In this article, I propose that Piscine orthoreovirus can be understood as a form of toxic industrial waste. Industrial methods of food production often amplify the ability for pathogens such as viruses to spread, replicate, and mutate rapidly. Avian influenzas evolve from chicken farms and become global in reach as they jump species boundaries between poultry, birds, and humans (Keck, 2019; Lowe, 2010). Porcine viruses kill hundreds of thousands of pigs per farm per week and become at risk of travelling through farmworkers’ fingernails and aerosolized manure (Blanchette, 2015). Viruses become a form of “feral proliferation” that appear in the wake of industrial experimentation and ecological simplification (Tsing et al., 2019). Microbes and pathogens are not frequently considered in analyses of toxicity; however, when the word “toxic” is etymologically related to the word “poison,” and Tsahaukuse persistently refers to his ancestral waterways as being poisoned by the virus, I bring attention to how a virus can arise as an industrially-shaped toxicant, expanding potentialities for recognizing microbes as a sometimes-overlooked form of toxic industrial waste. To take seriously Tsahaukuse’s assertion that PRV and other pathogens act as poisons is also not just a discursive proposition but seeks to center Tsahaukuse as a theorist and knowledge-maker with important contributions for thinking through the intimacies of interspecies relationships alongside the material consequences of ongoing colonialism and environmental injustice.

Intersecting systems of oppression such as colonialism and racialization remain absent within much fisheries literature from the North Atlantic and fisheries scholarship writ large is only just beginning to advance frameworks for thinking fish outside of human-centered, object-focused, and economic-based relationships (Knott et al., 2021). With attention to the ways in which geographies of pollution are generated and maintained, this paper takes up Christine Knott et al.’s (2021) call for feminist fisheries research to highlight how altered fishery and aquaculture arrangements contribute to and are shaped by intersecting capitalist, colonial, and human-exceptionalist frameworks in ways that exacerbate social inequalities including the violations of Indigenous rights and sovereignties. This paper similarly builds upon Reena Shadaan and Michelle Murphy’s (2021) invitation to expand conceptualizations of harm beyond individualized and body-centric narratives. Aligned with Indigenous environmental justice scholarship that advocates for a “more-than-body understanding of harm” (e.g. Hoover, 2017; McGregor, 2009; Tuck, 2009), Shadaan and Murphy urge scholars to place damaged bodies and landscapes within the multiple, interweaving forms of structural violence that underlie and perpetuate such harms.

While the manifestations of PRV’s toxic harm might be most visible at the scale of fish bodies and blood cells, industrial forms of landscape-making within what is now BC are only made possible through Indigenous land and water dispossession. Widespread violence against and displacement of other-than-human communities operates at the core of settler nation-building by cementing European settlement into soils and waters for the longue dureé, contributing to what Kyle Whyte (2018) might call “the ecology of settler-colonial domination” (134). Thus, in tracing how PRV makes geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements visible within the bodies and blood cells of fish, I offer a twofold engagement with toxicity. I consider not only how the toxic effects of industrializing waterscapes come to be embodied by fish in material ways, but also how fish bodies, the waters they move throughout, and the microbial worlds they carry with them become enfolded within the making and maintenance of toxic geographies of settler-colonialism across multiple scales.

A settler-colonial politics of salmon aquaculture

From the eastern seaboard of Canada to the fjords of Chile and Norway, the farm-raising of seafood is often interpreted as a technology of spatial control that alienates, reterritorializes, and redefines ocean spaces through new forms of marine enclosure (Knott and Neis, 2017; Marshall, 2001; Pitchon, 2015; Schreiber, 2003). Aquaculture literatures document how coastal waters that support diverse groundfish, prawn, herring, lobster, urchin, and scallop fisheries become further alienated from communities and longtime fishers as areas of the marine waterscape become incorporated into changing property regimes that grant exclusive user rights to aquaculture corporations (Knott and Mather, 2021; Marshall, 2001; Pitchon, 2015; Schreiber, 2003). In the Salish Sea, salmon aquaculture developed through practices of experimentation, both of techno-scientific design and of geopolitical exchange. The first attempts at farming salmon on the Pacific Coast in the 1970s tinkered with raising Pacific chinook and coho salmon (Keller and Leslie, 2004; Liu et al., 2013). They were generally regarded as failures. The salmon did not grow large enough, died, or escaped before they could be harvested (Keller and Leslie, 2004). The cost of raising the fish outweighed what small-scale farmers could earn at market, especially when entire stocks were lost to disease and equipment often needed to be engineered from scratch (Keller and Leslie, 2004). Atlantic salmon, however, could grow to market size at almost twice the speed and were already experiencing commercial successes in Norway and Scotland (Conley, 1997; Liu et al., 2013). By the 1980s, regulations such as the Aquaculture Act tightened environmental and economic monitoring in Norway (Lien, 2015), Canada’s political climate encouraged foreign investment through policies such as the Investment Canada Act (Keller and Leslie, 2004), and crises gripped Pacific salmon fisheries; such were the conditions that facilitated local and state governments to invite Norwegian-based aquaculture delegations, well-practiced in raising Atlantic salmon, to expand into Liǧ^wiłdax̌^w territories as part of new economic development programs.

Knott and Neis (2017) situate aquaculture on Canada’s east coast within an increasing trend of “ocean grabbing” in which appropriation of marine space and resources by state and private entities has detrimental impacts on preexisting community livelihoods and other-than-human inhabitants of the waterscape. Knott and Mather (2021) similarly propose that aquaculture exemplifies the transformation of the ocean into a commodity frontier, with marine waterscapes increasingly framed as spaces of under-utilized economic potential. Indeed, part of Canada’s national development plan involves expansion of the “blue economy,” with offshore energy, freight shipping, shipbuilding, and aquaculture poised as solutions to help Canada “build back better— and bluer” after economic downturns during the COVID-19 pandemic (Canada and Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 2021; CEDC 2021). Aquaculture’s ever-increasing dependence on “aquatic space frontiers” (Knott and Neis, 2017) transforms nearshore locations into a new type of resource or commodity wherein the hydrological and physical conditions of the waterscape itself are constructed as sources of economic possibility (Marshall, 2001). Tidal patterns, salinity, temperatures, water depths, and winds become part of a matrix of marketization wherein certain areas of the waterscape are deemed suitable for leasing and development and are removed from community control and access.

While studies of aquaculture in Canada have importantly illuminated how the frontierization of the ocean and the property regimes it engenders result in contentious social divisions (Knott and Mather, 2021; Marshall, 2001; Young and Mathews, 2010), the links between ocean grabs and settler-colonial structures that demand to be “territoriality acquisitive in perpetuity” (Coulthard, 2014:152) remain underexplored. Economic growth in BC is tied to the increasing appropriation of ocean space (Silver, 2014), and contemporary iterations of ocean grabbing fit within much longer histories of dispossession that continue in their attempts to erase Indigenous presence from the land and waterscape.

Since at least the mid 19^th century when the Hudson’s Bay Company linked Vancouver Island to geographically distant markets eager for minerals, fish, and timber, the Strait of Georgia has become a site of colonial conflict wherein Indigenous and settler uses of and movements throughout the waterscape come into friction (Stewart, 2017). Throughout the Salish Sea, systems of Indigenous marine tenure incorporate specific bays, inlets, and creeks within overlapping and intergenerational systems of stewardship held by specific people, families, communities, and nations (Reid, 2015; Silver, 2014). As British and Canadian projects of state-making unfolded, however, the Strait became a critical marine highway, a conduit for trade and transportation as well as a convenient waste dump, able to absorb waste from and therefore sustain logging, mining, and other forms of industrial development (Stewart, 2017). Indigenous forms of marine territoriality were deemed burdensome to the “modern marine economy” and as the Strait became positioned as an important international shipping route and resource frontier, physically violent and bureaucratic attempts to restrict Indigenous movements and fishing practices were common across the coast (Newell, 1993; Silver, 2014). Salmon aquaculture enters into a political context characterized by violent histories of exclusion in which appropriation and regulation of ocean space has long served as a catalyst for settler claims to jurisdiction within Indigenous territories.

From a fish’s point of view, too, life has long been shaped by Canadian state-making. Zoe Todd reminds us that fish, as political subjects within the settler-state, are subject to “the underlying human violence of capital, resource extraction and colonialism which shape Canada’s relationship to people, time and place” (Todd, 2018:70). Emerging salmon sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries practiced acclimatizing salmon in new environs, with Atlantic salmon moved to Vancouver Island, New Zealand, and Tasmania in part to appease British settlers who preferred Atlantic salmon (Evans and Harris, 2018; Lien, 2005). Hatcheries, meanwhile, guaranteed that population declines could be mitigated through the artificial propagation of new generations of fish. A steady source of salmon at-hand and a government agency ready to do the work of sustaining them facilitated the damming of rivers, logging of forests, and polluting of waterways (Lichatowich, 1999). From the early settlers who chose fish-abundant sites as appropriate homesteads (Todd, 2018) to the canning technologies that first enabled salmon to become BC’s most valuable export in the 1880s (Stewart, 2017), salmon themselves have also been subject to multiple and overlapping waves of colonization in ways that link settler-state claims to territory and jurisdiction with salmon bodies, movements, and populations.

Salmon aquaculture continues to envelop coastal waters into regimes of state property-making in ways that position the waterscape as already belonging to the settler-state, flattening Indigenous relationships with and responsibilities to ancestral territories. In some cases, entire communities were almost disappeared as bays came under the tenure of aquaculture companies and the province stopped granting residents the right to tie houseboats to the shore (Morton, 2021). In others, fishers lost access to prawn and crab grounds as new regulations delineated where fishing could no longer occur (Morton, 2021; Schreiber, 2003; Schreiber and Brattland, 2012). If, as Anna Stanley (2019) proposes, infrastructure can be understood as “a materialization of the settler-state’s jurisdictional claims,” then the increasing opening of ocean spaces to new forms of infrastructure, development, and industrialization must be understood “in relation to state struggles to exercise control over Indigenous lands and resources” (1141). Public-private partnerships help to (in many cases quite literally) cement settler-state claims to territory and jurisdiction within the material landscape. In part through these interweaving processes, aquaculture becomes a site through which structural systems of toxicity are able to encourage pathogens and parasites to cause toxic harm at the scale of fish bodies and blood cells.

The contested knowledge of PRV

In a fjord in Norway in 1999, pathogens — a longtime trouble for aquaculture operations — were materializing in unexpected ways. Salmon farmers began to notice that huge numbers of salmon in their care were lethargic and dying rapidly. Once the fish bodies were dissected, farmers and scientists found hemorrhages and lesions on the livers and hearts, mushy flesh, and soft, buttery muscles (Kongtorp et al., 2004). The disease was characterized as heart and skeletal muscle inflammation (HSMI) and the search for its cause intensified as it spread from pen, to farm, to fjord, soon appearing throughout Atlantic salmon farms in Norway, Scotland, and Chile (Di Cicco et al., 2017). A decade after its first appearance, scientists studying RNA samples from heart tissues of HSMI-infected Atlantic salmon discovered something curious in every positive sample: a novel reovirus, soon termed Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) (Palacios et al., 2010).

By 2013, PRV was detected in 95% of gills and kidneys sampled from farmed Atlantic salmon for sale in markets around southwest BC (Morton et al., 2017). Several attempts at genomic sequencing suggest that the strain of PRV circulating in the Salish Sea is of Norwegian origin, in some cases clustered with a PRV isolate from Iceland (Di Cicco et al., 2018; Kibenge et al., 2013, 2019). The potential European origin of PRV could explain why it has different effects within Atlantic and Pacific salmon. While PRV leads to lesions in the heart and skeletal muscle tissue in Atlantic salmon, it can instead lead to lesions in the kidneys and livers of Pacific chinook salmon (Di Cicco et al., 2018). Lesions in the kidneys and livers have been identified as “jaundice/anemia disease” due to yellowing of the abdomen, eye, and internal organs, yellow fluid in the liver, and potential progression to liver and kidney failure (Di Cicco et al., 2018). The different bodily reactions stem from differences in Atlantic and Pacific salmon’s abilities to tolerate PRV in red blood cells. In farmed Atlantic salmon, PRV stays within the red blood cells. In Pacific salmon, however, the virus breaks down the cell wall of red blood cells and causes “cell death”; the cells loose functionality and burst, or “rupture en masse” (Di Cicco et al., 2018). Such observations hinted for the first time that PRV might cause pathologically different diseases in Atlantic and Pacific salmon, highlighting the unpredictability of microbes as they circulate between species.

Others, however, doubt the pathogenicity of PRV. As the BC Salmon Farmers Association states, “the virus is common but the fish on our farms are not sick.” ³ The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife similarly propose that “fish with PRV are healthy, and show no signs of disease.” ⁴ Since laboratory exposures of Pacific salmon and observations of Atlantic salmon in farms do not always yield the expected signs of illness, government agencies in Canada conclude that PRV acts in a “benign” manner (Myers, 2017; Siah et al., 2018). Since fisheries regulations prohibit the transfer of fish into open water if they are known to carry a disease agent, PRV’s pathogenic classification becomes an international legal question with high regulatory and economic stakes. To confirm PRV’s disease-causing capabilities would set into motion changes in farming operations, testing practices, and supply chains, jeopardizing the future of the industry regionwide.

However, it remains extremely difficult to monitor the health of farmed fish and the aquatic pathogens they carry. Since the farms are designated as private property and visitors are deemed a biosecurity hazard, accessing live farmed salmon is rarely possible. Only government agencies and aquaculture companies have the access and authority to test pre-market farmed salmon but, at least in BC, they are not testing for PRV. Max Viatori (2016) argues that the practices of ignorance-making that occur regarding the potentials for virus transmission between Atlantic and Pacific salmon reflect the state’s power to decide which kinds of scientific information are made public and which are kept secret. In this case, virus transmission becomes an official secret of the state, with the performance of secrecy working to produce state power (Viatori, 2016: 98). When claims to knowledge of PRV have become deeply politicized and with PRV and other aquaculture-related pathogens devastating salmon farms worldwide, many fishers and environmental advocates are skeptical of government statements that PRV is of low concern to Pacific salmon. ⁵ While fishers in the Cove waited in anticipation for what the spring and summer fish migrations might bring, even Pacific salmon caught far from the farms became specters of the potentially ever-present yet largely unknown presence of disease. As the emerging PRV research circulated in media, among friends, and in community meetings, some felt that they finally had an answer to the mystery of the disappearing and yellow fish, while others sensed the focus on PRV and aquaculture in general was too easy an explanation for coast-wide if not global salmon declines.

PRV as an industrial toxicant and the making of a toxic geography

State-wide disease response is contingent on what can be learned from PRV’s genetic material and classifications of microbes as pathogenic or not compel differing relationships with and responses from the state. Such delineations are complicated when multiple forms of life, unique hydrological and ecological conditions, and ambiguous boundaries between “domesticated” and “wild” ecologies become entangled within the aquatic worlds of the Strait. Steven Hinchliffe et al. (2017) ask what transforms microbes into pathogens, highlighting that the presence of a microbe alone is insufficient to cause disease. Julie Guthman (2019) summarizes that pathogenicity is situational, dependent more on “convergences of events that intensify relationships” than on “invasions of hostile species crossing space” (Guthman, 2019:32). In such understandings, the qualities that make a microbe become pathogenic occur through particular relations, circumstances, and encounters.

Recent approaches to toxicity similarly reposition attention away from “wayward particles behaving badly” and move toward an assessment of toxicity as produced, kindled, and provoked through a variety of social, historical, and ecological conditions (Liboiron et al., 2018: 333). Like the situations that enable a microbe to become pathogenic, the qualities that make something toxic are not always inherent or obvious. Uranium in the Earth’s crust might not be toxic, but it certainly is when it enters the bodies of miners (e.g. Voyles, 2015). Toxicity, like pathogenicity, is often a processual, relational emergence; substances meet bodies which meet watersheds which meet soils which meet bodies in a crescendo of toxic encounters.

Pathogens are largely absent in analyses of toxicity — perhaps because pathogens are considered organic, “naturally occurring” material, while toxic substances are often associated, in everyday situations and historical etymology, with the inorganic: human-produced chemicals, synthetic materials, and industrial pollutants (Liboiron et al., 2018). Max Liboiron et al. (2018) explain that the term “toxicant” evolved to refer to human-made substances produced through industrial processes, such as pesticides, DDT, or BPA (334). While toxicants might be “characterized by human creation via industrial processes,” they go on to clarify that “toxicants also include minerals that may occur ‘naturally’ but exist in particular forms, locations, scales and orders of effect because of industrial and capitalist processes,” and give the example of lead in urban drinking water (334). In the case of PRV, the boundary between industrial toxicant and natural pathogen might be troubled when we understand this particular virus as a form of industrial waste, whose form, scale, and geographic distribution are inseparable from the colonial, industrial, and capitalist processes that underlie its constitution.

To be sure, there are heated debates about whether PRV is “naturally occurring” in the Salish Sea or whether it is a consequence of the trans-Atlantic trade networks and industrial husbandry practices that propagate the salmon farming industry. Unable to source Atlantic salmon eggs on the Pacific coast, eggs were historically shipped to BC from hatcheries in Scotland and Iceland (Morton, 2021: 39, 58). Despite warnings from government bureaucrats that the large-scale introduction of Atlantic salmon would result in the emergence of diseases not seen before on the BC coast, 30 million live Atlantic salmon eggs originating from five countries were imported to BC between 1989 and 2009 (Morton, 2021: 152). For scientists and legislators who monitor aquaculture practices and supply chains, the emergence of previously undocumented viruses was unsurprising. From Infectious hematopoietic necrosis (IHN) virus which travelled with North American hatchery eggs to Europe and Asia (Dixon et al., 2016), to the emergence of Infectious salmon anemia (ISA) virus in Atlantic salmon farms in Chile following egg imports from Norway (Vike et al., 2009), the movements of pathogens around the world through international trade and transportation networks is well founded.

While aquaculture might make pathogens mobile, it also makes salmon farms places where evolution happens quickly; as one scientist described it to me, the pens are a “petri dish of viral amplification.” Studies of industrial plant and animal agriculture have long forewarned that homogenized landscapes and monocultures disrupt ecological balance and cause ecosystems to become more vulnerable to disease, infestations, and so-called pests (e.g. The Pew Commission, 2008). Within industrial landscapes, however, biological processes do not unfold without the help of historical contingencies, technical interventions, and political-economic incentives. Infrastructures of incubation are actively built when other-than-human forms of movement, encounter, and evolution are also embroiled within changing material practices and political-economic processes (Gerhart, 2017). Whether through forms of soil tilling that accentuate the ability for soil-borne fungi to colonize the vascular tissues of strawberry plants (Guthman, 2019) or the infamous coffee leaf rust that thrives in the unshaded plantations of modern coffee production (Perfecto et al., 2019), it is specific landscape forms that prioritize certain forms of life over others—similar to systems of toxicity that “reproduce some forms of life at the expense of others” (Liboiron et al., 2018: 337) — that often invite microbes to become pathogens that proliferate beyond factory walls, plantation crops, or farm boundaries (Tsing et al., 2019).

Ocean and wind-fueled currents that move through narrow channels in between archipelago island chains might also amplify PRV’s pathogenic proliferations. The particular passage that connects the Cove with surrounding waterways is renowned for its strong tidal patterns, narrow channels, and cold, nutrient-rich waters. Billions of tons of water are flushed in and out of the passage with each tide change (Hume, 2004). Yet, being nestled between Vancouver Island and the mainland of North America provides shelter from the harsher waves and winds of the Pacific Ocean proper. The constant movement of the waterscape and the strong tidal patterns that flush through hundreds of sheltered bays and inlets are credited with providing ideal conditions for marine life of the area to thrive; they also, however, exacerbate the widespread dispersal of industrial waste such as pathogenic particles.

I asked several community members why the farms were constructed in these particular channels. Their answers were always the same: because of the cold, fast-moving waters. As one frustrated homeowner near Seattle told me, using air quotes to emphasize her words, “the reason they’re located where they are is because of the fast-moving water and they [the aquaculture companies] talk about ‘the flushing action’ the ocean currents provide. I think, well okay, but where is all this waste being ‘flushed’ to? Puget Sound is not a toilet bowl!” The cold, fast-flowing waters are praised by aquaculture companies for providing the “best water in the world for raising the best salmon,” ⁶ aided by the “flushing action” of ocean currents that enables viral discharge, waste, and chemical residues to be flushed from within net-pens themselves. However, such entanglements also cause the more expansive waters of the Strait to become enveloped within the making of potentially toxic geographies.

Viruses and the diseases they engender also emerge alongside and can be exacerbated by other forms of feral proliferation. Copepod sea lice parasites find plentiful hosts on the bodies of salmon within the nets of a salmon farm and transfer to young free-swimming salmon as they migrate through the channels in which farms are anchored (Krkoš ek et al., 2005). Salmon and sea lice often travel together. Like pathogens, lice also move with ocean currents, appearing along the coastline in tune with the rhythms of water and fish movement. Sometimes, other species like the bacterium rickettsia colonize the bodily lesions left behind by sea lice (Gerhart, 2017). Scientists like Nylund et al., (1994) and Kibenge (2019) worry that sea lice infection or methods used to mitigate lice infection might serve as new vectors for disease transmission or trigger a viral progression to disease within a fish’s already weakened immune system. In a familiar refrain, however, industry lobbyists downplay the potential consequences of lice infestations by making claims to the lice’s “naturally occurring” presence within the waterscape. ⁷ Sea lice, like pathogens, remind us not only that the boundaries of salmon farms are highly porous (Lien, 2015:72), but also that salmon farms are places where new forms of transformative multispecies sociality take place.

The question of PRV’s “natural” occurrence is fundamentally centered on whether humans are responsible for PRV’s presence in the Salish Sea (e.g. Lien and Law, 2011). However, pinpointing exact human involvement is difficult in a situation in which viral particles and parasites can be carried by fish across vast distances, fish are subject to combined, interweaving stressors that already render fish vulnerable, and the waters of the Salish Sea have been subject to experiments that seek to transplant and raise Atlantic salmon since at least the late 19^th century. Even if PRV might be “naturally occurring” in the sense of having an ahuman presence, the scale and intensity of industrialized salmon farming suggests that Pacific salmon beyond net-pens are likely being exposed to PRV and other pathogens and parasites on a scale not experienced before. Reassurances of the natural occurrence of pathogens and parasites further obscures the colonial and industrial conditions of possibility that foster microbial evolution and absolves responsibility from particular human actions in cultivating ecologies of pathogenicity. To render these particular pathogens and parasites “natural” would be to forget long histories of colonization and industrialization that have transported microbes along with projects of empire, practices of simplification and intensification that are remaking aquatic ecologies in their wake, and how industrialized aquaculture is entangled with settler-state struggles to assert jurisdiction over marine space. When each salmon farm can potentially shed 65 billion viral particles per hour, ⁸ PRV might be, according to biologist Alex Morton, “the biggest industrial spill in the history of British Columbia.” ⁹

PRV at the intersections of salmon bodies and watersheds

Amidst tense state and scientific calibrations that struggle to determine the pathogenicity of PRV, concerned coastal residents seek to document the spread of industrial waste such as pathogens by learning how to interpret signs of viral presence in the bodies of fish and throughout surrounding ecologies. As many salmon enthusiasts can attest, the bodies of salmon tell stories. Biologists and fishers can read signs of disease in salmon’s eyes and records of stress in scales (Aerts et al., 2015). Increasing stressors and histories of migration can also create distinct markings within the bands of a fish’s “ear bone” otolith; for Heather Swanson (2017), tracking otolith patterns provides a way to perceive how political-economic arrangements and processes of landscape transformation become quite literally calcified within the bodily constitutions of fish. Fish bodies have also long acted as ecological sentinels and sites of toxic accrual. Think of concerns over bioaccumulation of mercury, nuclear waste, and pesticides. Their bodies are interpreted as litmus tests that gauge conditions of surrounding ecologies — when thousands of dead fish appear in lakes or rivers in a fish kill or dead zone, it is usually taken as a sign that something is wrong.

Many months after the juvenile smolts had embarked on their springtime out-migrations, yellow Pacific salmon began washing up along river beds across Vancouver Island. We waited in anticipation for the salmon returns that would reverse the usual downstream flow of nutrients and bring the sustenance needed to give life to terrestrial ecosystems and coastal forests. Salmon were arriving in rivers; many, however, were dying before spawning. Their bodies floated limply at the water’s surface. Sometimes fry rearing in rivers or birds perched on rocks fed on the dead adults. Writing of the fish she encountered not too far from the Cove, Alex Morton observed: “They were robust good-looking fish, except for the blush of yellow. However their organs told another story… Their gills were exceptionally pale, they should have been bright red. Their livers were a strange yellow colour. The normally small, crisp-edged spleens were huge and swollen.” ¹⁰ The yellow color indicated liver problems and the pale gills suggested poor oxygenation and troubles within the red blood cells — all too resonant of the jaundice/anemia disease identified in Pacific chinook salmon that were infected with PRV.

When Alex first moved to Musg̱amagw Dzawada̱’enux̱w territories to study the vocalizations and migratory patterns of whales, she never expected that decades of hard work would be dedicated to tracking sea lice and salmon viruses. However, for Morton and other coastal residents who lived aboard boats and float-homes, worked as deckhands and commercial fishers, and learned from the sights, smells, and sounds of the archipelago, changes associated with the farms became quickly apparent (Morton, 2004, 2021). Atlantic salmon were soon found in fishing nets and local rivers (Morton, 2004: 210; Morton 2021: 27). Acoustic harassment devices deterred whales from embarking on their ancient migrations through the area (Morton, 2021: 31; Morton, 2004: 207). Boils and sores began to mark the bodies of coho salmon while chum salmon made their way through the inlets of the coast only to die soon after migrating past farms (Morton 2004: 202; Morton, 2021: 27). Since then, Alex has combined scientific methodologies and advocacy organizing to become a vocal critic of aquaculture as she follows sea lice, pathogens, and other forms of pollution through the waterscape.

In recent years, Alex travels to rivers across the coast armed with gloved hands, medical scissors, a small razor blade, vials filled with a fixing agent, a cooler, and a camera, carefully investigating salmon bodies on the riparian edge. In a public awareness video published in 2019, she reaches into the river and pulls out a dead Pacific chum salmon. As feared, gills are pale instead of their distinctive red, liver is turned to the color of mustard, and the spleen is exceptionally enlarged. Cautiously slicing a small piece of the pale heart, just a few millimeters in diameter, and placing it into a labelled container, she works, fish by fish, river by river, to document the dispersal of yellow salmon and, along with them, evidence of the potentially far-reaching presence of PRV.

Each migration season, the search for yellow fish becomes an urgent call to action. Salmon advocates take to social media, urging those who live near salmon spawning rivers to pay careful attention to the returning salmon. Detailed instructions direct residents to photograph yellow coloration or pre-spawn mortality, along with dates, locations, and if possible, gills and organs. An almost impromptu citizen-science crowd-sourcing project, a kind of “popular epidemiology,” (Brown, 1997) endeavors to detect and map the embodied, physical, and potentially pathogenic geographies the salmon are enrolled within. However, the opportunity to document pathogenic presence is fleeting. Soon after death, the salmon bodies will decay amongst the decomposing litter of the river bed, rendering bodily signs of PRV, along with the genetic material desperately sought to prove its presence, too degraded to be of diagnostic use. Many yellow fish are found far from the farms in the straits; however, the yellow color hints that the fish might have encountered PRV-infected salmon or waters at some point during its life. For those who are concerned about the presence of PRV within the ecosystem, the yellow color is taken as a sign of the meeting between Atlantic and Pacific salmon; it becomes a visual manifestation of viral encounters, and a sign of the pervasive presence of the aquaculture industry, even in sometimes surprising and seemingly unconnected places.

Scholars of environmental history and feminist science studies who insist on the “corporeal crossroads” (Alaimo, 2010), the interconnections and co-constitutions of bodies and places (e.g. Alaimo, 2010; Langston, 2010; Nash, 2006), teach us that bodies — human or otherwise — are enveloped in cyclical transformations with the places in which they are embedded. As bodies are transformed by place, they, too, transform place itself. Bodies become a site through which to make visible the “out of sight,” less-than-spectacular forms of “slow violence” described by Rob Nixon (2011). Yet, such forms of bodily evidence remain unpersuasive to the state if it remains unknown where or when pathogenic exchanges occurred. For scientists and policy-makers who desire certainty in the cause-and-effect relationship between PRV, salmon mortality, and aquaculture practices, the inherent mobility of salmon poses a seemingly impossible challenge for pinpointing the exact locus of viral infection. Everyday movements and the multi-causal factors that underlie many forms of illness often thwart the ability to establish connections between place and exposure (Langston, 2010; Nash, 2006). The change to a yellow coloration is normal, some argue, salmon always change color when they return to freshwater; even if the yellow fish are found to be positive for PRV, it would not necessarily follow that PRV induced disease, contributed to a premature death, or that PRV came from the farms. Since PRV cannot officially be confirmed without expensive and largely inaccessible genetic testing, Alex and Tsahaukuse and their virus hunting colleagues are rarely able to meet the thresholds of proof demanded by state agencies. Meanwhile, the ways in which water, fish, and microbes move throughout the Strait continues to confuse state and laboratory-based designations of what counts as disease and pathogenicity.

Toxic geographies, revisited

While the toxic effects of PRV might be most clearly visible at the scale of fish bodies and blood cells, toxicity also transcends individual bodies, particular places, or specific moments in time (e.g. Cielemęcka and Åsberg, 2019; Liboiron et al., 2018; Sandlos and Keeling, 2016). Socioeconomic, political, and environmental injustices and the forms of toxicity they produce are at once deeply place-based yet fundamentally structural. Within one register, PRV makes physical changes in the waterscape that materialize within the bodies and blood cells of fish. When pathogens that emanate from Atlantic salmon farms travel through ocean currents to become a potential source of cell death and ruptured organs in fish, the spread of PRV can be considered as contributing to a quite material and embodied toxic geography of aquaculture.

Within another register, PRV and aquaculture more broadly are also part of a reordering of space and society according to the desires of settler-statehood. Shadaan and Murphy (2021) posit that a decolonial, feminist framework for understanding toxicants in the US and Canada must account for structures of settler-colonialism and racial capitalism that underlie the production and uneven distribution of toxic materials. Industrially-produced toxicants, they argue, are colonial and capitalist violence made material, only made possible through settler-colonial relations with bodies, lands, and futures. To relegate harm only to the molecular or bodily level would be to obscure the broader structures of violence that reproduce toxicity across space and time.

The proliferation of parasites and pathogens through aquaculture is situated within ongoing forms of violence that stretch across generations, ecosystems, and species boundaries. Beyond carving the waterscape into patchworks of contended jurisdictions, aquaculture writ large, structured according to a fish-as-food resource extraction framework, is incommensurable with the relationships of reciprocity and responsibility in which salmon are enrolled. The Elders from whom I learn teach me that salmon are generous beings. They sustain entire ecosystems, and after death, their bodies nourish the soils and streambeds from which future life will emerge. They are also knowledge-keepers. When they migrate upriver, they bring with them ancestral knowledge, stories, memories, and familial relations. A fish is never just a fish when it is also a gift, a relative, and an ancestor (e.g. Mueller, 2017; Schreiber and Brattland, 2012). Structures of salmon governance continue to devalue Indigenous relationships with other-than-human beings in favor of economic, scientific, and legislative frameworks that are unable to account for salmon as relatives to whom we are responsible and with whom we share responsibilities (Risling Baldy, 2021:166).

The development of salmon farms within Liǧ^wiłdax̌^w territories utilizes global trade economies to reinforce state jurisdiction within the Strait while the combined processes that elicit toxicity cause the bodies of fish and waters of the Strait to become poisoned. PRV and other forms of pollution are not just technical problems but emerge as agents of ongoing dispossession that reinforce geographies of toxicity in ways that alienate folks like Tsahaukuse and Kenny from their ancestral territories and other-than-human kin (see also Sandlos and Keeling, 2016). As Billy-Rae Belcourt (2014) argues, through the increasing territorial acquisition on which industrial animal husbandry relies and by figuring other-than-human bodies only as commodities to be integrated into global economies, settler-colonialism “re-makes animal bodies into colonial subjects to normalize settler modes of political life”; “the animal body… [becomes] the fleshy material (ity) against and through which settler-colonialism is materialized” (5–9). Settler law becomes inscribed upon land and waterscapes through the creation of state and private properties and these geographies become expansive and expand into unforetold futures through the forms of waste they produce. In a region where Indigenous territories are both terrestrial and marine, and kin are both human and other-than-human, geographies of toxicity are accentuated both through the historical processes that incorporate coastal waters into regimes of state property-making and through the rise of industrial practices that cause novel pathogenic proliferations. In these ways, not only does the spread of PRV contribute to quite material transformations within the salmon migration route, it also contributes to more pervasive and systemic toxic geographies of settler-colonialism.

While the uneven distribution of toxic burdens and the geographies they generate are structurally produced and sustained, they are also lived within and moved throughout by way of the mundane encounters of everyday life. The violences of living within toxicity might be slow, incremental, and sometimes unspectacular, but they are often “plain to see,” felt, and embodied for communities forced to live within toxic environments (Davies, 2019). Back on the docks of the Cove, the anticipation of spring slowly waned into a fishless summer in 2019. We waited for fish that never came. Kenny never left for his awaited fishing trip. Fishers reported that Pacific sockeye salmon were nowhere to be found. Photographs circled social media displaying salmon with lesions and yellow livers. We did not know it at the time, but we were in the midst of what would soon come to be known as the worst Pacific salmon return in Canada’s history (e.g. Kelly and MacMahon, 2019). When Tsahaukuse expressed concern that the virus might impact the region’s juvenile salmon, but we would not know until several years later when the fish did or did not return, the salmon migration route becomes imbued with new anxieties that compound each year. The fish returns correlate with senses of hope, futurity, and intimate engagement with other-than-human worlds. When the fish do not return and the waters are rendered poisoned, it is not only waterscapes, ecologies, and salmon bodies that become at risk, but intergenerational lifeways and connections to ancestral homelands also become refracted through the pathogenic politics that are slowly transforming the region’s salmon migration routes.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have attempted to place the bodies and movements of fish and the microbial worlds they carry with them alongside large-scale geopolitical regimes. Attending to PRV reveals how geographies of aquaculture that connect places like Chile, Norway, and North America, encounters between fish and microbes, and ongoing settler relationships to land, water, and other-than-human forms of life become inscribed within the bodies and blood cells of fish. From the red blood cells of individual salmon and tidal currents that disperse viral particles throughout migration routes, to the continued transformation of the ocean into a site of property-making, aquaculture and its associated pathogens come to reinforce geographies of toxicity across multiple scales. These toxic geographies are at once ephemeral, appearing through vague and haunting traces of missing or discolored fish, structural, dependent on industrial food production systems and the increasing appropriation of marine space, and embodied, manifesting as fish meet other fish who meet lice who meet fish who are already weakened by warming oceans and polluted rivers. Anthropologists have recently encouraged ethnographic practices interested in other-than-human life and ecological change to “better learn to see social histories in material form” (Swanson, 2019:272). The bodies of fish can generate insights into these social histories and provide a way to see how state and capitalist power come to take corporeal form. Taking the bodies of fish seriously as forms of evidence that tell stories of livability, encounter, and ecological change is a way of caring for and remaining responsive to the movements and cycles that entangle heterogeneous forms of life within the Strait. It also allows fish to be interpreted as colonial subjects and political agents that exist both within and beyond human-centric and object-focused relationships.

However, recognizing the harms that pathogens and parasites can cause at the bodily level is not enough to understand how emerging forms of multispecies sociality take place alongside relationships of violence, inequality, and power. By centering pathogens and the toxic geographies that underpin their emergence and materialize in their wake, it becomes clear how the practice of farming salmon entangles fish bodies and aquatic ecologies with processes of industrialization and state-making. Farmed salmon, as BC’s largest agri-food export, become part of a nation-building project that strives to strengthen Canada through bolstering international trade and exports, particularly as they occur between Canada, Europe, and the US. Private capital becomes wielded to anchor settler-state claims to territory within the waterscape and the continued transformation of marine space into a commodity able to be leased and developed by global corporations further negates the ability for Indigenous nations to govern their marine territories or to practice good relations with their other-than-human kin. Thinking through how contemporary methods of other-than-human domestication and the pathogenic proliferations they produce can disrupt Indigenous forms of marine territoriality also expands upon what counts as dispossession—often considered a fundamentally land-based (i.e. not water-based) and past-tense occurrence.

Moreover, understanding that intensive aquaculture cultivates pathogens along with salmon positions PRV to be recognized as a form of industrial waste, expanding conceptualizations of what can be considered an “industrial toxicant” and helping to reimagine what toxicity is and the forms it might take. Toxicity, as structure, process, and encounter, exists within knotted webs of history and relationality. Emerging pathogens can have heightened repercussions when co-infection with sea lice and other viruses, stressors related to climate change and habitat loss, and intergenerational accumulation of other industrial toxicants already render salmon vulnerable. The pathogenic proliferations that occur in the wake of widespread ecological simplification prompt a further examination of how industrial processes of landscape-making, pathogenicity, and settler-colonial occupation are made through one another. While scientific consensus has centered on confusion over the virus’ place of origin and its potential to cause harm in Pacific salmon, there is less recognition that the practice of aquaculture itself contributes to the conditions of possibility that enable pathogens and parasites to emerge with ferocity, or that the processes of industrial landscape-making that give rise to such pathogens are only made possible through ongoing forms of dispossession and colonial relationships to land, water, and other-than-human forms of life. It is my hope that by locating toxicity both within the bodies of fish and within the systems of their material constitution, we can better comprehend how microbes become pathogens that are also industrial toxicants that enfold bodies, ecologies, and settler-colonial desires for territorial acquisition within the contours of each other.