Not on My Watch How a renegade whale biologist took on governments and industry to save wild salmon

by Morton, Alexandra

• ISBN13: 9780735279681
• ISBN10: 0735279683
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2022-09-06
• Publisher: Vintage Canada

Summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.

Alexandra Morton came north from California in the early 1980s, following her first love—the northern resident orca. Then, in 1989, industrial aquaculture moved into the region, chasing the whales away. Soon Alex had shifted her scientific focus to documenting the infectious diseases and parasites that pour from the ocean farm pens of Atlantic salmon into the migration routes of wild Pacific salmon, and then to proving their disastrous impact on wild salmon and the entire ecosystem of the coast.
     Alex stood against the farms, first representing her community, then alone, and at last as part of an uprising in which ancient Indigenous governance resisted a province and a country that wouldn't obey their own court rulings. She has used her science, many acts of protest and the legal system in her unrelenting efforts to save wild salmon and ultimately the whales—a story that reveals her own perseverance and bravery, but also shines a bright light on the ways other humans doggedly resist the truth. Here, she brilliantly calls those humans to account for the sake of us all.

Author Biography

ALEXANDRA MORTON is a field biologist turned activist who has done groundbreaking research on the damaging impact of ocean-based salmon farming on the coast of British Columbia. She first studied communications in bottlenosed dolphins and then the sounds of captive orcas at Marineland of the Pacific in California. She then moved to the remote BC coast and found herself at the heart of a long fight to protect the wild salmon that are the province's keystone species. She has co-authored more than twenty scientific papers on the impact of salmon farming on migratory salmon, founded the Salmon Coast Research Station, has been featured on 60 Minutes, and has been key to many legal and protest actions against the industry, including the recent First Nations-led occupation of salmon farms on the Broughton.