By May 2016, Greenpeace calculated that 39,000 tons of salmon washed up near the island of Chiloe in Chile. Six months later the government and the public have yet to reconcile their beliefs on the cause of the incident. According to Soberanes and Perez’ article, “The salmon crisis in Chile’s Chiloe Island,” government officials blame a “red tide” of algae as the main cause of the fish kill, completely independent of government authorization for the salmon industry to dump 9,000 tons of dead salmon off the Chilean coast. SalmonChile, of the Salmon Industry Association, defends this point of view stating, “The dumping happened 130 km off the Chilean coast… and in an area with current that move away from the continent.” However, Greenpeace
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This anthropocentric view is partly hinted at by the title, “The salmon crisis,” but most obviously by the term “39,000 tons of fish kill.” Let us consider a similar situation involving humans more directly. Say an algae bloom effected Ellensburg’s drinking supply and everyone in Ellensburg died. A reporter would never refer to the deceased as 2000 tons of people, to do so would marginalize the life of all those lives lost. The title then confirms the anthropocentric view, by calling it a salmon crisis. More than salmon died during the fish kill, every fish, bird, crab, and animal that ate algae (or even ate the fish that ate the algae) also died and washed up ashore. Comparatively, the term human crisis is never used in this way. If the economy fails, there’s an economic crisis. If all the ice caps melt, there’s an environmental crisis. If lead makes it way to a human water supply, it’s a water crisis. In this case it is not an algae crisis because the authors, in their speciesist view, don’t care about the algae effecting animals in the water, they care about the human animals living on shore. Would there even be an article if the algae bloom killed 39,000 tons of
This anthropocentric view is partly hinted at by the title, “The salmon crisis,” but most obviously by the term “39,000 tons of fish kill.” Let us consider a similar situation involving humans more directly. Say an algae bloom effected Ellensburg’s drinking supply and everyone in Ellensburg died. A reporter would never refer to the deceased as 2000 tons of people, to do so would marginalize the life of all those lives lost. The title then confirms the anthropocentric view, by calling it a salmon crisis. More than salmon died during the fish kill, every fish, bird, crab, and animal that ate algae (or even ate the fish that ate the algae) also died and washed up ashore. Comparatively, the term human crisis is never used in this way. If the economy fails, there’s an economic crisis. If all the ice caps melt, there’s an environmental crisis. If lead makes it way to a human water supply, it’s a water crisis. In this case it is not an algae crisis because the authors, in their speciesist view, don’t care about the algae effecting animals in the water, they care about the human animals living on shore. Would there even be an article if the algae bloom killed 39,000 tons of