Last night in my ever increasing appetite for redundant information I found myself reading and researching salmon statistics. As in Canadian salmon, specifically looking for BC salmon and where it ends up and who gets to eat it.

I found some detailed charts from some department of agricultural what-not and puzzled out the numbers thinking them pounds of fish until I read the word dollar. The statistic that jumped out was the increases and decreases. UK down 22%, America up something similiar, Japan and China up 119% and 118%. Sadly despite epic searching there was no firm date to be found anywhere on the data.

The most ridiculous thing on the page was the copyright sign to Her Majesty the Queen at the bottom. What precisely does she own the stats on who eats salmon? Or the salmon itself?  Puzzling.

I happened to hear a clutch of this program driving somewhere last night and sought out the rest of it online. Her point about growth has resonated with me all day long, that it is a ludicrous idea that we’re peddled — growth, growth, growth, why, why, why? (rather than sustainability? or even shrinking?)

For almost forty years, Alexandra Morton studied orcas near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Those whales eat sockeye salmon. When Morton learned that these fish were endangered, she decided to save the salmon, in order to protect her whales.

Last fall, during an unanticipated and completely amazing run of Sockeye salmon, Paul Kennedy visited with Alexandra Morton near the shore of a feeder stream of the upper Fraser River, in Northern British Columbia.

Listen to the episode of IDEAS here