Auteur




 Simen Sætre (b. 1974) is an investigative reporter who has been published in many languages. He has written six books, on themes including the international chocolate industry, oil states, and a spy in the Norwegian army. His thought-provoking books have been acclaimed and nominated for prizes.  





**Kjetil Østli (b. 1975) is a journalist and author. He co-runs the online magazine Harvest, specializing in nature writing. He has received several prizes and awards for his reporting and his four books, and his début *Cops and Robbers* earned him the prestigious Brage Award. **

Texte du rabat

"In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Simen Sµtre and Kjetil [stli took an in-depth look at Norway's role in the global salmon industry and, for the first time, produced a comprehensive evaluation of the detrimental effects of salmon farming. From lice to escapees, from concentrating the waste of sea pens in the fjords through which wild salmon swim to their natal streams to the fact that salmon farming causes a net reduction of protein reaped from the ocean, the results don't look good. Recent victories, such as the banning of net-pen fish farms in the waters of Washington State, are an indication that we are awakening to the environmental price of engineered fish. It is said that we will continue to make the same mistakes unless we understand them. The New Fish combines nature writing from Norwegian fjords, the coast of Canada, Icelandic landscapes and the far south of Chile with character-driven literary non-fiction and classic muckraking. The authors started with this question: What happens when you create a new animal and place it in the sea? This book will tell you the answer"--

Résumé

Eat more fish, the doctors say. But is the salmon you are consuming really healthy? 

 

In the early 1970s, a group of scientists researched how to make more food for the growing population of the world. They looked to the sea. They sampled genes from salmon in 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers and designed a new salmon that was fatter and faster growing. This was considered an amazing innovation and was the beginning of a new industry: salmon farming.

 

The industry spread from coastal Norway to Scotland, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the United States. Business boomed, jobs were created, and a new type of food, the farmed salmon, spread around the globe. People everywhere bought and enjoyed the abundant fish: grilled, poached, roasted, and as sushi and sashimi. They were grateful for this delicious, affordable protein. 

But at what cost? 

 

We now know that there were unintended consequences: some of these new fish escaped, competing for sustenance with other fish in the sea. The new fish spread diseases, salmon louse swarmed, and wild salmon stocks dwindles.  

In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli took an in-depth look at Norway’s role in the global salmon industry and, for the first time, produced a comprehensive evaluation of the detrimental effects of salmon farming. From lice to escapees, from concentrating the waste of sea pens in the fjords through which wild salmon swim to their natal streams to the fact that salmon farming causes a net reduction of protein reaped from the ocean, the results don’t look good. Recent victories, such as the banning of net-pen fish farms in the waters of Washington State, are an indication that we are awakening to the environmental price of engineered fish.

 

It is said that we will continue to make the same mistakes unless we understand them. *The New Fish *combines nature writing from Norwegian fjords, the coast of Canada, Icelandic landscapes and the far south of Chile with character-driven literary non-fiction and classic muckraking. The authors started with this question: What happens when you create a new animal and place it in the sea? This book will tell you the answer.

 

Échantillon de lecture

Prologue

Mankind conquers the world and sets its sights on the fish

 

Why did we domesticate fish? Or rather, why didn’t we do it sooner? Evolution gave us toes to stand with, bodies to walk upright with, fingers to grip and create with, teeth to eat with. We were able to hunt across long distances, tracking our prey until it collapsed and lay trembling before us.

We mastered fire, and that fire allowed us to cook, stay warm, and keep predators at bay. We spent less time chewing and more time thinking. Fat and nutrition from meat allowed us, high on energy, to take a new leap. Our bodies changed, our brains grew larger. More capacity for thought enabled us to plan. We learned to group together and work in teams. Some of us gathered nuts and berries and looked after children, some made clothes out of hides and tinkered with arrowheads, some kept watch or hunted. Our ancestors, unlike the animals around them, were able to accumulate knowledge and, in the warmth of the fire, share it. No need to reinvent the wheel. And so, as biologist E.O. Wilson puts it, “The stage was now set for the biggest-brained of African primates to make the truly defining leap to their ultimate potential.”

When Homo sapiens *bid farewell to its distant and close relatives—chimpanzees and baboons, *Homo floresiensis*and *Homo erectus—our tools were unrivaled. We spread across the globe. We were such skilled hunters that we wiped out the large animals that grazed where we roamed, such as the mastodon, the mammoth, and the Irish elk. Our relatives, the Neanderthals. are gone now, too.

Then something strange happened. Our ancestors thought, *Wow, it’s so lovely here! Should we stay? *We grew less inclined to roam forests and valleys, and in the end, we stopped. Ten thousand years ago, many of us abandoned the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life. We settled in humid and fertile areas. We established tribes, then villages, towns, and states. We got chiefs, laws, and rules—and looked upon nature through new eyes. Nature was now something we could exploit, conquer, plow, transform, cultivate. We had once searched for food, now we started to make and create food. The Neolithic Revolution was underway, the first of the agricultural revolutions. We didn’t necessarily live longer or get stronger, some research even suggests we lived shorter lives and were smaller in stature, but we multiplied. Oh, how we multiplied.

What was the reason for this change? One theory is that as we became more numerous, and there were fewer large animals to hunt, farming became more reliable. But if we assume that everything is about staying alive, we overlook something crucial about our species: the curiosity, the urge to create, the drive to take our fate into our own hands. We tamed and domesticated, we tried and failed. We cultivated wild wheat, rice, barley, lentils, peas, potatoes. We caught animals, and instead of eating them straight away, we kept them as livestock.

We caught the horse, a wild little creature from the grasslands, and bred it to be big enough to carry and pull loads. We tamed huge beasts of the field, the aurochs, and put them to work. We caught junglefowl and kept them for eggs and cockfights. We transformed the wild boar into a serene creature that provided plenty of meat, and we loved its bacon. New plants were harvested, more animals domesticated and from their bones, hides, and hooves we made our tools. Not only the horse and the cow, but also the cat, the guinea pig, the donkey, the mallard, the water buffalo, the camel, the turkey, the honeybee, the llama, the silkworm, the pigeon, the goose, the yak, the elephan…