Arts, Faculty of
Sociology, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Berseth, Valerie
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Pacific Salmon (Onchorhynchus, spp.) are a socially and ecologically significant group of species. Many populations have been experiencing significant declines in North America. To compensate for these losses, Canada and other Pacific countries artificially breed and release millions of salmon every year. The biggest question for those that produce and depend on salmon is whether these artificially produced salmon can be understood, classified, and made sufficiently “wild.” This dissertation draws on interviews with 147 people in salmon management (scientists, managers, hatchery staff, fishers, environmental organizations), document analysis, and 88 hours of participant observation to examine how people understand and pursue wildness in the context of Pacific salmon. I compare how hatchery salmon have been framed in policy debates in Canada and the United States. I find that scientific uncertainty about the wildness of hatchery fish facilitated political and legal contests between actors with differing social and ecological values and interests. As a result, hatchery fish have been defined differently over time and space. I also examine the biopolitics of wildness in the context of hatchery practices. Emerging genomic science has shown that hatchery rearing domesticates salmon and negatively impacts survival, not only for salmon in hatcheries but for wild populations as well. Hatcheries have responded by seeking to produce salmon that are genetically as wild as possible, ultimately reshaping salmon at multiple levels, from genes to species. Finally, I employ a material-semiotic analysis of risk perceptions related to the possibility of selectively breeding hatchery salmon for characteristics such as climate adaptation. While respondents expressed concerns about climate change, for most, the risks of humans intervening in nature outweighed possible benefits of producing climate resilient salmon. However, there was interest in selective breeding as a means of genetically rewilding hatchery salmon. This study shows that wildness continues to be meaningful in the Anthropocene, but the proliferation of genomic knowledge and technologies have expanded the meaning and management of wild life. Although Western conceptions of wildness have conventionally excluded humans, the case of Pacific salmon demonstrates that wildness is understood and pursued as material and molecular interactions between humans and other species.
IN PURSUIT OF WILDNESS: GENOMIC SCIENCE, RISK, AND THE PRODUCTION OF WILD SALMON by Valerie Berseth B.A., York University, 2012 M.A., York University, 2014 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Sociology) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) March 2022 © Valerie Berseth, 2022 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: In Pursuit of Wildness: Genomic Science, Risk, and the Production of Wild Salmon. submitted by Valerie Berseth in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology Examining Committee: Dr. Ralph Matthews, Professor, Sociology, UBC Supervisor Dr. Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Associate Professor, Sociology, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Rima Wilkes, Professor, Sociology, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Terre Satterfield, Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, UBC University Examiner Dr. Emily Huddart-Kennedy, Associate Professor, Sociology, UBC University Examiner iii Abstract Pacific Salmon (Onchorhynchus, spp.) are a socially and ecologically significant group of species. Many populations have been experiencing significant declines in North America. To compensate for these losses, Canada and other Pacific countries artificially breed and release millions of salmon every year. The biggest question for those that produce and depend on salmon is whether these artificially produced salmon can be understood, classified, and made sufficiently “wild.” This dissertation draws on interviews with 147 people in salmon management (scientists, managers, hatchery staff, fishers, environmental organizations), document analysis, and 88 hours of participant observation to examine how people understand and pursue wildness in the context of Pacific salmon. I compare how hatchery salmon have been framed in policy debates in Canada and the United States. I find that scientific uncertainty about the wildness of hatchery fish facilitated political and legal contests between actors with differing social and ecological values and interests. As a result, hatchery fish have been defined differently over time and space. I also examine the biopolitics of wildness in the context of hatchery practices. Emerging genomic science has shown that hatchery rearing domesticates salmon and negatively impacts survival, not only for salmon in hatcheries but for wild populations as well. Hatcheries have responded by seeking to produce salmon that are genetically as wild as possible, ultimately reshaping salmon at multiple levels, from genes to species. Finally, I employ a material-semiotic analysis of risk perceptions related to the possibility of selectively breeding hatchery salmon for characteristics such as climate adaptation. While respondents expressed concerns about climate change, for most, the risks of humans intervening in nature outweighed possible benefits of producing iv climate resilient salmon. However, there was interest in selective breeding as a means of genetically rewilding hatchery salmon. This study shows that wildness continues to be meaningful in the Anthropocene, but the proliferation of genomic knowledge and technologies have expanded the meaning and management of wild life. Although Western conceptions of wildness have conventionally excluded humans, the case of Pacific salmon demonstrates that wildness is understood and pursued as material and molecular interactions between humans and other species. v Lay Summary Pacific salmon play important roles in the environment and coastal communities. Every year, hatcheries in Canada artificially breed millions of salmon and release them to support fishing and add to wild salmon populations. Researchers have found that hatchery salmon are genetically different than wild salmon and do not survive as well. I examine how wildness is defined, produced, and conserved in salmon management. I found that Canada and the U.S. took different approaches to defining hatchery fish as wild or not in policy, and hatcheries are changing their practices and using genomic science to make salmon that are as wild as possible. I also interviewed managers, hatchery staff, fishers, scientists, and environmental organizations about whether hatcheries should select salmon for characteristics such as climate resilience. While people were concerned about the risks of humans intervening in nature, there was interest in selective breeding as a way to rewild hatchery salmon. vi Preface This dissertation, including the identification and design of the research program, is the original intellectual work of the author. Interview data used in Chapters 3 and 4 was collected by me and two other research assistants as part of a Genome Canada-funded large-scale research project (EPIC4). I co-wrote the interview guides, including questions pertaining to my research interests, and co-developed the sampling frame. All other data collection, and all analysis of the data in this dissertation, was conducted by me. A version of Chapter 2 has been published as Berseth, V., & Matthews, R. (2020). Environmental Sociology and the Genomic Revolution. In, K. Legun, J. Keller, M. Bell & M. Carolan (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology Vol. 2 (pp. 342-359). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A version of Chapter 3 has been published as Berseth, V., & Matthews, R. (2021). How “wild” are hatchery salmon? Conservation policy and the contested framing of nature in Canada and the United States. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 1077-1098. In these chapters, I led the conceptualization, collected and analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscripts. Ralph Matthews reviewed the manuscripts and provided feedback during the publication process. I revised these publications for the purposes of this dissertation. This research was approved by the University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board, covered under the following certificate numbers: H16-00070, H17-00166, H17-03101, H18-02037. vii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................................v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vii List of Tables ............................................................................................................................... xii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. xiii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................xv Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1.1 The Changing Meaning of Wildness .............................................................................. 3 1.2 Conceptual Approach...................................................................................................... 5 1.2.1 Environmental Sociology............................................................................................ 5 1.2.2 Risk ............................................................................................................................. 7 1.2.3 Framing ....................................................................................................................... 9 1.2.4 Biopolitics ................................................................................................................. 10 1.3 Dissertation Outline ...................................................................................................... 10 1.4 Research Methods ......................................................................................................... 12 1.4.1 Interviews .................................................................................................................. 13 1.4.2 First Nations Research Involvement ......................................................................... 15 1.4.3 Documents ................................................................................................................ 16 1.4.4 Participant Observation ............................................................................................. 17 1.5 Summary of the Dissertation ........................................................................................ 18 viii Chapter 2: Environmental Sociology and the Genomic Revolution .......................................19 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 19 2.2 Bridging the Sociology-Biology Divide ....................................................................... 20 2.3 Critical Developments in Genomic Science ................................................................. 24 2.3.1 From Genes to Genomes: The Rise of Network Thinking ....................................... 25 2.3.2 Epigenetics ................................................................................................................ 27 2.3.3 Genomic Sequencing and the CRISPR Revolution .................................................. 28 2.4 An Environmental Sociology of Genomics .................................................................. 30 2.4.1 (Re)Constructing Nature ........................................................................................... 30 2.4.2 Genomics and Ecological Degradation ..................................................................... 34 2.4.3 Power, Ethics, and Environmental Justice ................................................................ 37 2.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 3: How “Wild” Are Hatchery Salmon? ......................................................................42 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 42 3.2 Defining “Wild” Life .................................................................................................... 45 3.2.1 Conserving Wildness in the Anthropocene............................................................... 46 3.2.2 Framing Wildness in Law and Policy ....................................................................... 48 3.3 Methodology ................................................................................................................. 52 3.4 Pacific Salmon, Genomics, and the Problem of Hatcheries ......................................... 54 3.5 The United States and the Endangered Species Act ..................................................... 56 3.5.1 Endangered Species and the National Marine Fisheries Service .............................. 56 3.5.2 Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001 ........................................................................ 58 3.5.3 Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2007, 2009 ........................................................................ 60 ix 3.6 Canada’s Wild Salmon Policy ...................................................................................... 63 3.6.1 A New Era of Conservation ...................................................................................... 63 3.6.2 What Is a “Wild” Salmon? ........................................................................................ 64 3.7 Discussion ..................................................................................................................... 68 3.8 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 71 Chapter 4: Producing “Wild” Salmon .......................................................................................74 4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 74 4.2 The Biopolitics of Producing Wildlife .......................................................................... 77 4.2.1 Wild as Genetic, Domestic as Threat ........................................................................ 79 4.3 Methodology ................................................................................................................. 82 4.4 Findings......................................................................................................................... 84 4.4.1 Genes – What is a “wild” gene/genome? .................................................................. 84 4.4.2 Individuals – How “wild” is this fish? ...................................................................... 86 4.4.3 Epigenetic – How “wild” are the fish in this environment? ..................................... 88 4.4.4 Broodstock – How “wild” are these fish? ................................................................. 90 4.4.5 Population – How “wild” is this river? ..................................................................... 93 4.4.6 Species – How “wild” is this species? ...................................................................... 94 4.5 Discussion ..................................................................................................................... 96 4.6 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 99 Chapter 5: Weighing the Risks of Selective Breeding ............................................................101 5.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 101 5.2 Risk and Climate Adaptation ...................................................................................... 104 5.3 Methodology ............................................................................................................... 109 x 5.3.1 Sample..................................................................................................................... 109 5.3.2 Interview Structure.................................................................................................. 110 5.3.3 Data Analysis .......................................................................................................... 111 5.4 The Emergence of Hatcheries and the Risks of Intervention ..................................... 113 5.5 Findings....................................................................................................................... 117 5.5.1 Risk Averse: Opposed to Selective Breeding ......................................................... 117 5.5.2 Risk Management: Open to Selective Breeding for Managing Existing Risks ...... 120 5.5.3 Risk-Taking: Open to Producing Climate Resilient or Robust Salmon ................. 123 5.5.4 Mixed Risk Responses: Ambivalent or Ambiguous? ............................................. 126 5.6 Discussion ................................................................................................................... 128 5.7 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 132 Chapter 6: Conclusion ...............................................................................................................134 6.1 Summary of Findings .................................................................................................. 134 6.2 Research Contributions ............................................................................................... 137 6.2.1 Changing Meaning of Wildness in the Anthropocene ............................................ 137 6.2.2 Expanding Biopolitics to the Molecular Level ....................................................... 139 6.2.3 Environmental Sociology and Genomics................................................................ 141 6.3 Strengths and Limitations ........................................................................................... 142 6.4 Future Research and Conclusions ............................................................................... 144 References ...................................................................................................................................148 Appendices ..................................................................................................................................188 Appendix A - Interview Guide, EPIC4 Scientists .................................................................. 188 Appendix B - Interview Guide, Canadian Government.......................................................... 191 xi Appendix C - Interview Guide, Nuu-chah-nulth Fisheries ..................................................... 194 Appendix D - Interview Guide, Fishing Industry ................................................................... 197 Appendix E - Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations ........................................... 201 xii List of Tables Table 1 Purposive Sampling Frame Matrix .................................................................................. 14 Table 2 Document Analysis by Document Type .......................................................................... 17 Table 3 Timeline of Policy Definitions of Hatchery/Wild Relationship ...................................... 53 Table 4 Respondents in Each Category of Risk Responses, by Interview Group ...................... 112 Table 5 Respondents Who Gave Multiple Risk Responses, by Interview Group ...................... 112 xiii List of Abbreviations BC British Columbia CA Canada CRISPR-Cas9 Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats CRITFC Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission CU Conservation Unit DC Dovetail Consulting Inc. DDT Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane DFO Fisheries and Oceans Canada DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid ENCODE Encyclopedia of DNA Elements EPIC4 Enhancing Production in Coho: Culture, Community, Catch ESA Endangered Species Act ESU Evolutionarily significant unit FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations GMO Genetically modified organism GSI Genetic stock identification NGO Non-governmental organization NMFS National Marine Fisheries Service NPAFC North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission NWIFC Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission PACER Public Access to Court Electronic Records xiv PBT Parentage-based tagging PNI Proportionate natural influence RNA Ribonucleic acid RSTA Royal Society Te Apārangi SEP Salmon Enhancement Program SING Summer Internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics SNP Single nucleotide polymorphisms UCCCRJ United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice UNEP United Nations Environment Program US United States USD United States Dollar USFWS United States Fish and Wildlife Service xv Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the incredible support of many people. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Ralph Matthews, who has continually supported my growth and development as a scholar. Thank you for helping me explore my ideas, including my tangents, and for encouraging me to “think in grey.” Dr. Rima Wilkes and Dr. Catherine Corrigall-Brown have helped me deepen my work with their insightful questions and comments throughout the development of this thesis. This work was made better and more enjoyable by the long, in-depth discussions I have had with colleagues and collaborators, including Timothy Hawkins, Dr. Jordan Tesluk, Max Chewinski, Laura van Wiltenburg, Dr. Rashid Sumaila, Dr. Grant Murray, Saul Milne, and many others. I am forever indebted to the people who provided their time, wisdom, insights, and words throughout this research. The participants in this study welcomed me into their circles, and in some cases onto their boats, to help me ground my work in the realities of human-salmon relationships on the West coast. The passion and care that people exhibit for Pacific salmon is a remarkable thing and gives me hope for the future. I hope that this dissertation gives people a small window into the dedication and spirit of people who devote their lives to salmon. I have also learned a great deal from salmon themselves about resilience in the face of changing and challenging environments and the importance of giving back to those around you. Similarly, I suspect I will always have a strong urge to migrate back to the freshwater streams of the Pacific Coast. To my family and friends, I do not have words to express how important you have been in this endeavour. Special mention goes to my partner, Dr. Glen Berseth, for joining me on many xvi salmon adventures. Elly Baptie, Heather McCarrol, and Dave and Joyce Baptie have been my emotional rocks. Thank you to Dr. Nicole Malette, Dr. Mabel Ho, Jennifer Adkins, and Dr. Kate Jaffe for all the enthusiasm and advice you have shared with me. Thanks also to the people who celebrated the highs and rode out the lows with me: Leela Steiner, Dr. Hélene Frohard-Dourlent, Amy Gould, Will Bennett, Kimberly Valentine, Adriana Brodyn, Tanvi Sirari, Dr. Espen Stranger-Johannessen, and many others. This work was conducted on Nuu-chah-nulth territory and the territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Secwépemc, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations. As a settler and a visitor to these territories, I am committed to a lifelong process of learning and unlearning how to carry out this work with respect, humility, and accountability. Finally, I am grateful to the organizations that provided institutional and financial support, including West Coast Aquatic, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the University of British Columbia, and Genome Canada, Genome British Columbia, and Genome Quebec. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Salmon hold enormous significance in the Pacific Northwest, both for the environments they traverse and for the communities that depend on them. As they make their journey from spawning rivers to the ocean and back, salmon feed webs of wildlife, provide nutrients for dense and lush “salmon forests,” and, by digging rock beds for their nests, reshape mountains and streams (Field & Reynolds, 2011; Hassan et al., 2008; Reimchen et al., 2003). Human societies have similarly been influenced by salmon. Pacific salmon are integral to the cultural practices, knowledge systems, and identities of Indigenous communities who sustainably harvested, stewarded, and managed salmon for millennia prior to colonization (Reid, 2020). They are also important cultural and economic drivers of Canadian society, sustaining economic and recreational activities on the Pacific coast.1 Yet, Pacific salmon have also been experiencing what Taylor (1999) calls an “excruciatingly long disaster” (p. 4). Compared to historical averages, many salmon populations have seen continued declines, despite sustained public and political attention and billions spent on efforts to reverse these trends.2 Salmon face a litany of threats throughout their life cycle – overfishing, dams, disease, predation, habitat loss, pollution, and changing marine and 1 Atlantic salmon hold a similar significance for coastal communities in Eastern Canada. However, the use of hatcheries has not taken hold in the Atlantic region as it has in the Pacific. Daniels and Mather (2017) described failed efforts to establish hatchery facilities in Newfoundland as stemming from a lack of financial support and opposition from recreational fishers who valued the sporting value of native salmon and feared that hatcheries would introduce inferior fish. 2 In Canada, the high-profile Fraser River sockeye salmon run exemplifies this. The federal government spent three years and $37 million to investigate the causes of the 2009 crash in Fraser River sockeye returns. The inquiry, led by Justice Cohen, concluded that there is “no smoking gun” responsible for the decline in salmon abundance (Cohen, 2012, p. 88). The Fraser River rebounded in 2010, but has since continued to decline, particularly following the 2019 Big Bar Landslide (Grant et al., 2021). 2 freshwater environments and ecosystems brought on by climate change. To compensate for these losses, Canada and other Pacific countries rely on artificial propagation (or “salmon enhancement”), manually breeding and releasing millions of young salmon into the environment every year. The biggest question for those that produce and depend on salmon is whether these artificially produced salmon can be understood, classified, and made sufficiently “wild” to coexist with wild salmon. The challenges of conserving wildness are not exclusive to salmon; similar questions are being asked in zoos (Braverman, 2015), rewilding programs (Lorimer, 2015), species reintroductions (Crowley et al., 2019), and forestry (Klenk & Larson, 2015). However, sociological scholarship in this area has thus far been limited, particularly with respect to the perceived risks and benefits of genomic tools. This dissertation examines artificially produced, or “enhanced” salmon as figurative and literal embodiments of human interventions into nature. Hatchery salmon, as transitional beings located somewhere in between “wild” and “domestic,” provide an opportunity to understand how humans are collectively wrestling with what it means to be “wild,” when and how to intervene in this process, and the implications of doing so. Although the Pacific salmon crisis has been intensively studied as a biological and natural resource management issue, producing salmon is at its core a sociological exercise. For one, salmon enhancement has its origins in human desires to bypass natural limits in the pursuit of economic growth. In the 1970s, governments in Canada and the United States sought to rapidly expand salmon fishing, while installing hydroelectric dams on rivers that provide salmon habitat for spawning (Lichatowich, 1999). Artificial propagation was seen as a panacea – people working in hatchery facilities could artificially spawn salmon that would supply greater fishing opportunities and global markets, while dams could continue to disrupt salmon habitats. Over 3 time, as people became more aware of and concerned with environmental sustainability, hatcheries shifted their practices, adding a focus on conservation to salmon production. Salmon production is also sociological in its current struggles to cope with unintended consequences. Mounting scientific studies of hatchery-produced salmon have revealed physical, genetic, and behavioural differences that are calling into question their “substitutability” for wild salmon (Foster et al., 2009). By interbreeding with wild salmon, hatchery-reared salmon can pass on characteristics that negatively affect the survival of wild salmon. Clausen and Longo (2012) describe this as the “tragedy of the commodity” – by commodifying salmon and producing them for harvest, humans have worsened, rather than resolved, the prospects for wild salmon. Viewed from the sociology of risk, hatcheries are a prime example of modern risks – a combination of industry, science, and technology, which has produced unintended consequences that threaten to undermine their legitimacy (Giddens, 1990; Rosa et al., 2013). A key aim of this dissertation is to examine how people involved in salmon production make sense of these risks and adapt organizational practices alongside new scientific information. 1.1 The Changing Meaning of Wildness The primary point of reference against which hatchery salmon are measured is wild salmon. But, what is it that makes a salmon wild? The meaning and value of wildness is rooted in cultural beliefs and worldviews about human relations with nature (Cronon, 1996; Vannini & Vannini, 2019). Western views of wildness have shifted over time, though they have 4 conventionally located wilderness outside of human society.3 This idea of wildlife and wild spaces as being untouched by humans is now confronted by a new narrative: that of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene posits that humans have so fundamentally altered the Earth’s climate and ecosystems that we have entered a new geological epoch. Though the Anthropocene has yet to receive an official designation, the idea of the Anthropocene has been widely taken up in public discourse (Lidskog & Waterton, 2016). This has prompted debate about whether there is any wild left (Doak et al., 2015; Kareiva et al., 2007, 2012; Soulé, 2014). The question of what wildness means in the context of the Anthropocene is considered across different aspects of salmon production from policy (Chapter 3) to hatchery practices (Chapter 4) and climate adaptation (Chapter 5). What is made clear through this work is that the concept of wildness has not lost its significance in the Anthropocene. Rather, wildness is being reconsidered in two important ways. First, wildness is becoming understood as a genetic phenomenon, as scientific research into the genetic distinctions between wild and captive organisms progresses and enters public discourse. How genetic interpretations of wildness relate to and interact with conventional cultural ideas about wildness is not well understood. Second, genetic wildness is being pursued as an objective for conservation. In other words, wildness is not merely a lens through which humans understand nature; wildness is also practiced, with material consequences for the organisms that are the target of such interventions. Hatcheries are an ideal setting in which to evaluate these two trends. 3 The view of wildness as untouched by nature underpinned the preservationist movement of the early 20th century and the creation of parks which are largely preserved untouched by human interventions (Cronon, 1996; Minteer and Miller, 2011). Wildness has also historically been entangled in the creation of national myths. This is particularly true in Canada, where ideas of nature as void of civilization have served as a backdrop against which settlers have laid claim to large swaths of land, dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their traditional territories and control over, and access to, resources such as salmon (Snow, 2005; Valadares, 2018). 5 Advances in genomic science have refined the ability for salmon producers to distinguish between hatchery and wild salmon at a molecular level. As a result, new genetic and genomic tools are being made available to the people that govern salmon production to shift the way that salmon are being produced. At the same time, scientific knowledge is not accepted wholesale by people outside the realms of scientific knowledge production, nor is it the only way of understanding human-nature interactions. Thus, the ability for governments to substitute wild salmon with artificially propagated hatchery salmon is not only a question of biology; it also depends on how people who interact with salmon understand and manage the risks of human interventions into nature. 1.2 Conceptual Approach 1.2.1 Environmental Sociology The present analysis of human-salmon dynamics is principally informed by environmental sociology. Environmental sociology arose in the 1970s as a field of study that centers on the reciprocal influences between humans and their surrounding environments. Dunlap and Catton (1979) distinguish environmental sociology from a “sociology of environmental issues” through its emphasis on environmental variables as analytically meaningful. Environmental sociology, therefore, is not limited to studying only “social facts” but brings to environmental issues an emphasis on how contextual social factors shape individual actions, behaviour, and interpretations of the world around them. This informs the approach taken in this study to engage meaningfully with salmon as part of the ecosystems in which participants are situated, as biological subjects of study, as commodities that are valued and produced, and as beings that act in ways that influence human lives, organizations, and societies. 6 Relatedly, this work is situated at the intersection of two main perspectives in environmental sociology: social constructionism and realism/materialism. Historically, constructionism and realism were starkly divided in opposition over the appropriate ways to conduct environmental research. Social constructionism starts from the position that environmental threats should not be taken as fact unquestioningly; social, political, and cultural processes shape how environmental conditions become defined as problems, or unacceptable risks (Hannigan, 2014). However, a strong constructivist stance has been critiqued for disregarding the material conditions of environmental problems, locating them entirely within the realms of socially defined thoughts and beliefs (Dunlap & Catton, 1994; York & Dunlap, 2019). Recently, there has been a convergence of work in environmental sociology that does not deny the importance of either social construction or material conditions. In his overview of publications in Environmental Sociology, Lockie (2015) notes that most contemporary work in environmental sociology emphasizes both perspectives. In this study, both social construction and realism are essential to the analysis. For example, people’s level of comfort with intervening into natural processes such as salmon reproduction is shaped by historical and cultural narratives about wildness and their trust in scientific knowledge in the face of uncertainty. However, whether people believe that climate change is negatively impacting the survival of wild salmon does not alter the reality that waters are warming to levels that salmon cannot survive (Einhorn, 2021; Rasmussen, 2015). Of particular interest in this study are: (i) how people understand, interpret, and re-shape the material realities of the environmental contexts in which they operate (Chapter 4, 5); and (ii) how some social actors use framing to strategically shift discourse and priorities to suit their interests (Chapter 3). 7 One goal of this thesis is to address the gulf between environmental sociology and genomic science. Following the genomic revolution, genomic science has been growing in its relevance to and applications in conservation, yet minimal attention has been paid to genomics in environmental sociology. There are some notable recent exceptions. Carrie Friese (2013; 2018) has brought a sociological lens to genomic applications in zoo cloning programs, genetic rescue of extinct species, and animal research models. Blue and Davidson’s (2021) work on genomic selection in forestry has made visible the assumptions of forest experts about uncertainty and public understanding of science. In Chapter 2, I provide an overview of major developments in genomic science and their relevance for different areas of environmental sociology. Through the specific case of hatchery salmon (Chapters 3-5), this thesis contributes to this burgeoning area of study by examining the social, environmental, and institutional contexts in which genomic tools are being evaluated. As the present research demonstrates, these advances also have direct, material impacts on the lives of salmon. York and Longo (2017) note, “the material conditions of animal existence can provide unique and important insights when incorporated into sociological investigations” (p. 35). As such, it is also important to consider the relevance of genomics for non-humans, as well as the limitations and uncertainties in scientific knowledge for how people come to know and interact with salmon. 1.2.2 Risk Risk is at the forefront of debates about hatchery production, whether in the risks that hatcheries pose to wild salmon, the risks posed by climate change to salmon and their ecosystems, or the risk of human intervention and the application of novel genomic technologies. While risk can be (and often is) viewed as a technical exercise based on calculating probabilities, 8 sociological theories of risk have been critical of such approaches. Sociological contributions to the study of risk have emphasized the critical contextual factors and social processes that affect how individuals and institutions perceive and respond to risk. Renn (2008) describes three principal elements that constitute risks: outcomes that have an impact on what humans value; the likelihood of occurrence (uncertainty);4 and the specific context in which the risk may materialize. Thus, risk perception and management are necessarily social and political, as they are culturally embedded and influenced by socially constructed beliefs and values about what constitutes a threat, as well as knowledge about social and ecological dynamics (Taarup-Esbensen, 2019). However, risks are not only socially constructed; there are hazards that can produce negative outcomes, regardless of whether they are assessed as threats by humans. To address this, Wong and Lockie (2018) have proposed a material-semiotic approach to risk. Drawing on analytical concepts from Actor-Network Theory, they outline three elements of this approach: (i) co-constitution, which asks how material entities inform the ways that social actors interpret and manage risk; (ii) emergent entities, which looks to the temporary and precarious networks of relations between humans, non-humans, and their material environments that are mobilized around risks; and (iii) enactment, which considers how socially constructed risk perceptions are deliberated and translated into practice. Wong and Lockie’s (2018) material-semiotic approach to risk analysis is employed in Chapter 5 to examine how people involved in salmon production, 4 Renn’s conceptualization of risk identifies uncertainty as a necessary pre-condition for risk. Uncertainty in this context refers to an incomplete knowledge of the likelihood of an outcome. This is not to suggest that uncertainty is only present in situations involving risks. For example, one can be uncertain whether it will be sunny tomorrow, but this does not constitute a risk unless the outcome could potentially impact a value. For further discussions of social dynamics involving a lack of knowledge, see Gross (2010; 2016). 9 harvest, and stewardship weigh the risks of climate change and the possibility for selectively breeding resilient salmon. This approach is commensurate with the emphasis throughout this thesis on the connections between social constructions and material realities and accounts for the social-ecological context in which novel genomic tools are being evaluated. 1.2.3 Framing Risk is also political. Different values and interests lead individuals and institutions to assess threats differently. In order to capture the political dynamics of risk assessment, this thesis draws on sociological work on collective action and framing. Framing research elucidates the strategic communication that people use to foster consensus (around defining grievances or claims, for example) and induce action on the part of constituents. Snow and Benford (1992) define frames as “interpretive schemata that simplifies and condenses the ‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environments” (p. 137). They describe four characteristics of frames. First, they are collectively produced through interaction, as opposed to individually held beliefs and meanings about the world. Second, frames are action-oriented; that is, they prescribe certain actions as appropriate, meaningful, or beneficial compared to others. Third, frames are flexible. They are constantly negotiated and transformed through interaction with insiders who identify with the collective and with groups and individuals outside the collective identity in question. Finally, frames can be studied by analyzing the social and cultural artefacts of movements, actors’ interpretations, and their interactions. Frames are key mechanisms through which actors in a social field strategically interact with other field members to advance their interests, secure alliances, and challenge opponents (Snow et al., 1986). Chapter 3 traces how the 10 wildness of hatchery fish has been framed and contested, politically and legally, by a diverse array of actors with different interests and objectives. 1.2.4 Biopolitics Biopolitics originated from Foucault’s (1978) account of the transition from sovereign power to take life or let live to the modern era power to make live or let die. Foucault’s original work and its subsequent expansion by scholars such as Rose (2007) and Agamben (1998) centered on human populations. Yet, biopolitics is useful for investigating power over life in all its forms – human and non-human, organism and ecosystem (Lorimer & Driessen, 2013). Recent social science scholarship on human-animal relations has employed the theoretical framework of biopolitics to interrogate the exercise of power over non-human life. In the realms of salmon production, the ability to produce salmon that are as wild as possible has emerged as a key priority in order to sustainably operate hatcheries and produce both conservation and economic benefits. Biopolitics is a valuable framework for interrogating which salmon are produced, how different forms of salmon life are valued or devalued, and how human interpretations of wildness translates into material differences in the salmon that are produced. However, the pathway to producing wildlife is not well understood, particularly with respect to genomic interventions. Chapter 4 examines this in detail, providing an empirically rich example of how salmon producers differentiate between wild and not wild forms of salmon life, using genomic science. 1.3 Dissertation Outline This dissertation is divided into six chapters. This first chapter provides an introduction to the issues of salmon production in hatcheries and the changing meaning of wildness. A major 11 focus of this dissertation is on how the meaning of wildness is changing in response to novel genomic science about human-salmon interactions. However, there has been a lack of scholarship at the intersection of environmental sociology and genomic science. Chapter 2 contributes to this gap through an overview of ontological (e.g., epigenetics) and methodological (e.g., Next Generation Sequencing) advances in genomic science. The key insight from this history of genomics is the potential for human activities to alter genes and the ways they are expressed. As the subsequent empirical chapters demonstrate, this understanding of genes as affected by human intervention (either intentionally or unintentionally), has implications for conservation policy and practice. Chapter 3 analyzes how wildness is framed in policy and legal debates in Canada and the United States. Emerging genomic science has called into question the wildness of animals produced through artificial propagation. What is at stake in defining wildness in law and policy, and how is the definition of “wild” life framed in political debates? This chapter builds on recent work on the meaning of wildness in the Anthropocene by drawing attention to the importance of framing in legal and policy debates. Chapter 4 looks within hatchery facilities to the biopolitical production of wildness. To address the problems of biodiversity loss and species declines, humans are artificially producing “wild” species for conservation purposes. How is the paradox of producing wildness translated into practice, and how do practitioners understand the meaning of wildness in this context? Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as well as 46 interviews with Pacific salmon hatchery staff and genomic scientists, this paper traces how wildness has come to be understood, produced, and managed as a function of genetics. This chapter expands current biopolitics research to consider additional scales at which humans are intervening in nature. This expansion 12 is facilitated by new genetic information and tools that are enabling the production of genetically wild nature. Chapter 5 focuses on the threat of climate change, asking: Should humans selectively breed species for characteristics that will make them resilient to climate change? This chapter draws on 105 interviews with people involved in salmon management decision making (government scientists and managers, hatchery staff, fishers, environmental organizations) to assess how people respond to the risks and benefits of selective breeding in salmon hatcheries. Much of the existing literature on perceptions of risk related to altering nature are based on quantitative surveys of the general public. This chapter contributes a qualitative and in-depth analysis of key informants involved in salmon management decision-making, in the context of existing institutional practices. The final chapter (Chapter 6) concludes with a discussion of the overall findings of this thesis, with particular focus on the transitional meaning of wildness and the paradox of producing and conserving wildlife in the Anthropocene and in a changing environmental context. It situates these findings in relation to other areas of environmental management and identifies priorities for future research. 1.4 Research Methods The aim of this study is to explain how the meaning of wildness is changing in response to novel scientific information about artificially produced salmon. This requires methodological approaches that can qualitatively assess how people interpret and give meaning to human-nature interactions, as well as a window into organizational practices that are not normally visible to the public (Weiss, 1995). Data was collected between 2016-2019 from several sources: interviews 13 with key informants (N=147), participant observation at salmon-related events, and analysis of documents pertaining to Pacific salmon. These methods have been widely used in environmental sociology to analyze human-nature relations (Baker et al., 2018; Besek, 2019; Espinosa, 2019; Friese, 2013). Data collection continued until saturation was reached and no new information was emerging during interviews and events (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Using multiple sources of data allowed for triangulation and corroboration of patterns and findings, and a deeper understanding of the issue (Flick, 2018). Specific methodologies are discussed in each chapter. Here, I provide an overview of data sources, analytical approaches, and how these data relate to the overall thesis. 1.4.1 Interviews Semi-structured interviews with knowledgeable informants were conducted to understand the perspectives of people who are directly involved in decision-making around salmon production and how organizational policies and practices may be changing to respond to new knowledge and changing environmental conditions. A purposive sampling approach (Shadish et al., 2002) was used to maximize variation among key informants in different areas of salmon production and management: Canadian government (science, policy, management, hatchery operations), fishing industries (recreational, commercial), environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), and Nuu-chah-nulth salmon managers and government representatives (see Table 1 for an outline of the sampling frame). Most respondents were identified through publicly available records and directories. This sampling approach was complemented by a snowball sampling question at the end of each interview asking respondents for recommendations about other relevant informants, and some respondents were identified through 14 participant observation at salmon-related public events. Subsets of these interviews were analyzed in Chapters 4 and 5 according to the specific research objectives in each chapter (see 4.3 Methodology and 5.3 Methodology for more details). Table 1 Purposive Sampling Frame Matrix Type of Institution Example Organizations Total (N) Genomic Science ▪ University and government research labs involved in the EPIC4 Project 16 Canadian Government (science, policy, fisheries management, salmon enhancement) ▪ Fisheries and Oceans Canada 32 Salmon Hatcheries ▪ Government-run hatcheries ▪ Community-run and public-run hatcheries 28 Nuu-chah-nulth Fisheries (government representatives, resource managers, biologists) ▪ Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council ▪ T’aaq-wiihak 15 Fishing Industry (commercial and recreational fishers) ▪ Sports Fishing Advisory Board ▪ Anglers Coalition ▪ Sport Fishing Institute 30 Environmental NGOs ▪ Pacific Salmon Foundation ▪ David Suzuki Foundation ▪ Watershed Watch Salmon Society 26 Total: 147 Interviews covered the following topics: (i) demographics and employment (e.g. education, job title, job duties, organizational mandates); (ii) views on the state of salmon (e.g. 15 abundance/declines, threats to salmon populations, climate change and adaptation); (iii) views on “wildness,” hatcheries, aquaculture; (iv) views on genomics risks and benefits and experience working with other types of knowledge (e.g. local, Indigenous knowledge); (v) relationships with other organizations and sectors related to salmon (see Appendices A-E for interview guides). Some respondents did not answer all questions, due to time limitations in the interview. Interviews were analyzed using multiple, iterative waves of coding, assigning codes to segments of text that relate to ideas, concepts, and practices of interest to the study. These codes were mostly generated inductively from the interviews and in some cases were generated deductively from background research (document analysis, participant observation) or prior literature, such as “risk-taking” (Zinn, 2016). During coding, careful attention was paid to unexpected or emergent ideas and patterns, as well as negative cases (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Respondents are identified in this thesis with a code number and their job title to maintain confidentiality. Similarly, the names of particular rivers, hatchery facilities, and salmon populations have been changed where necessary. 1.4.2 First Nations Research Involvement First Nations involvement in this study was facilitated through a research partnership with Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation as part of EPIC4, a multi-university research project funded by Genome Canada, Genome BC, and Genome Quebec. Dr. Grant Murray led the social science research teams on the EPIC4 project and established a partnership with Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation to conduct a community case study of Tla-o-qui-aht values and governance related to coho salmon (Cuw’it). Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation is one of 14 Nuu-chah-nulth Nations, each of 16 whom have their own governance systems and are represented by the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, a shared governance/coordinating body. I worked with Dr. Ralph Matthews, Dr. Grant Murray, Saul Milne (EPIC4, T’aak-wiihak Fisheries Manager), Tawney Lem (West Coast Aquatic) and Marc LaBrie (West Coast Aquatic) to organize a series of workshops on genomic science applications in salmon production and management. These workshops took place between 2018-2019 in different areas of Nuu-chah-nulth territory. Workshop invitations were extended to Nuu-chah-nulth representatives involved in fisheries management and governance and interviews were conducted following the workshops with participants. A total of 15 interviews were conducted with Nuu-chah-nulth representatives, covering the same core questions as the rest of the interviews in this study (with additional questions specifically pertaining to the workshops). These interviews are included in this study as knowledgeable informants who are involved in salmon fisheries management. This thesis does not aim to characterize Nuu-chah-nulth worldviews, traditional knowledge, or cultural values related to salmon; that work was conducted by Dr. Grant Murray and Saul Milne following an Indigenous methodology grounded in community-based research (Koop et al., 2021). In some cases, respondents described how they incorporate Indigenous knowledge alongside Western science in their work, but Indigenous knowledge itself was not collected through these interviews. 1.4.3 Documents Document analysis (Altheide & Schneider, 1996) was used to conduct background research, complement interview data, and to study how actors framed key issues in policy debates related to hatchery salmon in Canada and the United States. Documents included 17 archival documents (e.g., court transcripts), legislation, policies, government reports, and media sources in the United States and Canada. A summary of the documents analyzed is presented in Table 2 below. Table 2 Document Analysis by Document Type Canada United States Total (N) Acts 2 1 3 Court Documents - 9 9 Letters - 1 1 Policies 6 - 6 Reports 14 14 28 News media articles 22 6 28 Total (N) 44 31 78 1.4.4 Participant Observation Participant observation at several public events related to salmon provided additional context and background information for understanding the issues related to salmon conservation, production, and management. A total of 22 events, including policy meetings, conferences, workshops, symposia, and festivals were attended (N=88 hours). I acted as a participant-as-observer at these events, disclosing my status as a graduate student and describing the purpose of my attendance at these events (Babchuk, 1962). At these events, I observed who was present, which organizations or governments were represented in which capacity (e.g., host, keynote speaker), what issues were discussed, how they were framed, and agreements and conflicts among participants. The information gained through this observation was not directly analyzed as data in the thesis, but validated findings emerging through the interviews and provided 18 valuable context. Where possible, I engaged in “member checking” (Carlson, 2010) by following up during or after events with participants through interviews or informal conversations to confirm or validate my understanding of these issues. 1.5 Summary of the Dissertation The impetus for this study was the paradox of conserving “wild” life in the Anthropocene, an epoch distinguished by human influences on global ecological systems. Through my engagement with Pacific salmon and the network of people that artificially produce, manage, and catch them, another paradox emerged: hatcheries are actively producing wildness in the salmon they artificially reproduce. Hatcheries occupy a liminal position in between “fully wild” and “fully captive” and are guided by an institutional mandate to support the conservation of wild salmon. As a result, there is a constant negotiation about when and how hatcheries should intervene in salmon populations and an attention to the risks of this intervention. However, an accumulating body of genomic research has revealed genetic differences between hatchery-reared and naturally spawning salmon, undermining the legitimacy of hatcheries as conservation tools. The next chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the thesis by tracing the major developments in genomic science that underpin hatchery-wild debates. Chapter 4 compares policy debates regarding the wildness of hatchery salmon in Canada and the United States. Chapters 5 and 6 examine hatcheries in Canada, analyzing how past, present, and future risks to wild salmon are assessed and managed. 19 Chapter 2: Environmental Sociology and the Genomic Revolution This chapter is a revised version of an earlier published work: Berseth, V. & Matthews, R. 2020. Environmental Sociology and the Genomic Revolution. In K. Legun, J. Keller, M. Bell & M. Carolan (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology Vol. 2 (pp. 342-359). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2.1 Introduction Genomic science has changed the way that many people understand and interact with wildlife. Contemporary biology is now recognized as being so different from previous periods that it is said to have undergone a “post-genomic” revolution (Richardson & Stevens, 2015). To understand how the risks of human-wildlife interactions are understood and managed in the context of Pacific salmon, it is essential to first take stock of the monumental changes that have occurred in the realm of genetic science. This is necessary for two reasons. First, these developments have had a significant impact on the meaning of wildness through the introduction of new techniques and conceptual frames to measure and interpret changes in nature at a molecular level. Chapters 3 and 4 build on this, examining how genomic science has sparked debate in policy and in practice about whether hatchery salmon can be considered “wild” and how to foster wild forms of salmon life through artificial production. Second, to meaningfully contribute to current risk governance, sociologists need to be engaged with the most recent advances in fields that are offering technological solutions for future environmental problems. This is foundational for Chapter 5, which looks at the potential use of genomic-assisted selective breeding to adapt salmon to future climate conditions. 20 There are several sociological questions pertaining to genomics: How and when should genomic technologies be applied? What are the social and ecological consequences of doing so? How should legal and regulatory systems adapt to address the potential impacts of new genomic technologies on both humans and the environment? How should contemporary decisions account for intergenerational interests and well-being? Despite the relevance of these questions for environmental sociology, there has been little work at the intersections of sociology and genomic science. This chapter aims to build connective linkages between these fields to support the present case study of Pacific salmon and to contribute to a wider interdisciplinary engagement between these fields. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section characterizes the divide between sociology and biology and lays out an argument for advancing a sociological approach to genomic science, particularly in the environmental realm. The second section traces three major developments in genomic science and the relevance of these developments for reshaping the ways humans understand and interact with the natural world. The third section develops connections between recent advances in genomics and three core areas of environmental sociology: constructionism and realism, environmental degradation, and lastly power, ethics, and environmental justice. Finally, in the discussion, I summarize the contributions of this chapter for the dissertation as a whole and as a conceptual foundation for Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 2.2 Bridging the Sociology-Biology Divide Sociology and biology have historically had a complex and sometimes inimical relationship. As an emerging discipline, early sociologists distinguished their work from the natural sciences on the basis that social actions, institutions and identities should be explained 21 through references to social, and not biological, factors. As Meloni et al. (2016) note, this was not a total rejection of the natural sciences. For example, Durkheim adopted the metaphors of biology in his explanation of social cohesion but maintained that social facts can and should be studied independently of natural forces. In The Conservation of Races, Du Bois (1897) puts forth a definition of race that references but moves away from its biological origins. He writes, “What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life” (p. 7). For the most part, both disciplines have progressed fruitfully through this separation, though problems have occurred when social scientists have attempted to incorporate biology in the explanation of social differences. Social Darwinism, eugenics, biological theories of criminality, and sociobiology have provided warnings of the dangers of biological determinism and reinforced disciplinary divisions. However, this divide has also meant that sociologists and biologists have rarely engaged in cross-disciplinary conversations and sociologists have yet to fully engage with the developments that have taken place in biology over the past several years (Meloni et al., 2016). A growing number of sociologists have called for a sociological approach to the new era of genomics. There have been two special issues devoted to sociology and genomics (Guo, 2008; Parry and Dupré, 2010), a chapter in the 2009 Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Corrigan, 2009), and an article in the Annual Review of Sociology on the sociology of epigenetics. The recent history of genomics has also been explored in Science and Technology Studies (Wynne, 2005; Meloni, 2015; Rheinberger & Muller-Wille, 2017). A central concern is how to integrate current knowledge about human genetics with our understanding of social action, as well as what 22 effects genomic applications will have on cultures, institutions, bodies, identities, and well-being. These are fundamental issues for sociologists and biologists alike. Nonetheless, in these discussions the environment has often played a secondary role in favour of human genomics. Most references to “environment” refer to any non-biological factors that play a role in human gene expression, including social surroundings.5 This is significant for three reasons. First, at a fundamental level, humans and social systems are connected to other species and natural processes that make up the environment. In a prolific article, Ceballos et al. (2017) conclude that human activity has initiated the sixth mass extinction through, “massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization” (p. E6089). Biodiversity and genetic variation are essential to the survival of species and the ecosystems they inhabit. For sociologists studying environmental change and degradation, this is a pressing and significant issue at both global and local scales. Second, new genomic tools have also been applied to a wide range of complex social-environmental problems with the hopes of developing sustainable solutions. Climate change, extractive industries, global food security, and wildlife conservation are some of the issues that are being pursued actively within genomic science. It is critical to understand the impacts of changes in these areas for ecosystems and for human societies, cultures, and economies. Finally, as Chapter 5 demonstrates, advanced genomic technologies such as gene editing have also been accompanied by new and evolving risks to humans and the environment. For sociologists interested in the dynamics of the “risk society” (Beck, 1992), how these risks are evaluated by 5 Of the works listed above, we note that the Special Issue on “Nature After the Genome” in The Sociological Review Monographs (Parry and Dupré, 2010) is an exception. Several of the chapters deal directly with the relationship between human and non-human natures, how boundaries are drawn between what is natural or unnatural, and how understandings of nature are socially situated. 23 people with different knowledges, cultures, interests, and environmental values will affect the acceptance and regulation of new genomic technologies. There are also ethical issues relating to data ownership. For example, patenting genetic sequences and even whole genomes for some staple crops by private entities has increased relative to public IP ownership in recent years, prompting concerns that private interests are benefiting from and influencing the direction of genomic science (O’Malley et al., 2005; Jefferson et al., 2015). Environmental sociology is a field that is ideally suited methodologically and theoretically to address the ecological gap in sociological studies of genomics. Since its inception, environmental sociologists have been calling for sociology writ-large to “bring nature back in” to the sociological imagination (Catton & Dunlap, 1978; Carolan, 2005). This focus, as well as the field’s past marginalization from mainstream sociology, has pushed environmental sociologists to engage with a diverse range of disciplines, from geography and anthropology to climatology and biology (Pellow & Brehm, 2013). Indeed, many scholars have been engaged with the controversies surrounding the production and regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (e.g., Yearley, 2010). However, the field of genomics has changed so rapidly in recent years that it warrants a closer examination of the sociological relevance of these developments. Today, the meaning of “genetic modification” is changing. High resolution knowledge and technologies such as gene editing have increased our ability to modify organisms faster and more precisely than before. This has prompted us to consider how the social construction of nature relates to the reconstruction of genetic material. From a genomics perspective, nature is fundamentally material – from microscopic chromosomes to genetically diverse populations. At the same time, genomic applications introduce possibilities for humans to intervene in ways that 24 reflect socially constructed and sometimes conflicting values and cultural understandings about what forms of nature are acceptable or desired. This poses a challenge to the materialist-constructionist divide in environmental sociology. There is also a need to interrogate the effect that social systems have on the genetic makeup of organisms and species, particularly in the case of natural resources such as forestry or marine life. The social, political, and economic dimensions of the post-genomic era are as vital to understand as the biological dimensions themselves. Where are genomic technologies used, and by whom? How does access to genomic technologies map onto existing governance regimes and power dynamics at the regional, national, and global levels? What knowledges are produced, validated, or denied in this process? And how are public understandings of risk and nature evolving alongside these interventions? 2.3 Critical Developments in Genomic Science The term post-genomics is used to distinguish between the periods before and after sequencing the human genome in 2003. The “post” in post-genomics does not signal a move away from the genome, but a shift in how the concept of the genome is understood. Rather than discrete structures of genes that directly manifest as physical characteristics, such as eye colour or disease, genomes are now understood to be networks of diverse biological actors that shape gene expression and inheritance in response to environmental signals. What fundamentally distinguishes the post-genomic era from the period that preceded it is the epistemological shift from thinking about genomes as stable, permanent biological fixtures to understanding them as fluid and dynamic (Griffiths & Stotz, 2013; Meloni & Testa, 2014). This is a significant shift, as it introduces a new way of understanding human-nature interactions and novel methods for altering nature at a molecular level. This section traces three critical developments in 25 contemporary genomic science: the shift from studying genes to genomes, epigenetics, and gene editing technologies. 2.3.1 From Genes to Genomes: The Rise of Network Thinking Few discoveries have so fundamentally transformed our understanding of and interactions with nature as that of the gene.6 The concept shed light on two fundamental biological questions: What is the basis for variation in physical characteristics among organisms? and, How are these variable traits passed on to subsequent generations? In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick presented the helical structure of DNA, demonstrating that DNA functions as the molecular vehicle for heredity. This gave rise to a focus in the 1960s and 1970s on molecular biology, where researchers sought to decode how variations in nucleic acid were associated with physical characteristics. As sequencing and computational tools progressed, geneticists could identify and reference particular genes based on the order of nucleotides (adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine) (Rheinberger and Müller-Wille, 2017). The primacy of genes as an explanatory factor in biology and sociobiology, often termed “genetic reductionism” or “gene centrism,” was challenged by the picture of human genetic material provided by the Human Genome Project. There turned out to be far more than genes that controlled proteins and enzymes. As Evelyn Fox Keller (2015) writes, “The genome is not the organism. But neither is it any longer a mere collection of genes” (p. 9). One of the first surprises was that scientists found roughly one fifth of total genes, or “coding sequences,” they 6 The meaning of the “gene” has evolved significantly over the last century. Though the concept is still undergoing revisions, contemporary biologists broadly refer to genes as sequences of DNA or RNA that provide codes or blueprints for cells, instructing them to produce proteins or enzymes (Portin & Wilkins, 2017). 26 expected (Rheinberger & Müller-Wille, 2017). Of these, 98% seemingly had no purpose and were labelled ‘junk DNA’ (Stevens & Richardson, 2015). Genes viewed from the perspective of the genome appeared to be neither identifiable sequences of DNA, nor could they sufficiently explain how nucleotide sequences were coded and transcribed in the process of gene expression. To explain the mechanics of genes, genomes, and gene expression, additional actors and processes are required. In short, biology had to be reoriented around the logic of networks to account for the complex and dynamic nature of genomes. This move to ‘network thinking’ was helped by the creation of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) in 2003, which sought ‘to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome,’ as well as other species (ENCODE, 2018, p. 1). By 2012, ENCODE was able to ‘sound the death knell’ for the idea of junk DNA, demonstrating that 80% of the genome functions in a variety of roles, such as organizing genetic materials and assisting as intermediaries in the process of protein coding (Pennisi, 2012, p. 1). Much of the DNA previously thought useless is involved in a sophisticated, overlapping, multi-layered process of transcription and regulation. The picture of the genome that emerges is not a line of stretched out nucleotides sectioned off neatly into ‘genes’ that produce phenotypical traits, but a three-dimensional network– what Gerstein and colleagues (2012, p. 91) have termed a ‘human transcriptional regulatory network’. 27 2.3.2 Epigenetics Moving from genes to genomes has renewed biologists’ interests in ‘epigenetics,’ a field of biology that studies how outside factors alter gene regulation and expression without changing DNA. These factors can be related to the environment, including exposure to pollutants, carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and metals, or to lifestyle, such as diet and nutrition, behavior, stress, physical activity, and work habits (Alegría-Torres et al., 2011). Additionally, exposure to these variants is also disproportionately distributed along gendered, economic, and racial lines, as well as cultural patterns of consumption (Landecker & Panofsky, 2013). The ‘classic epigenetic mark’ is DNA methylation, where hydrocarbon groups called ‘methyls’ attach to DNA segments and multiply, interrupting the normal coding process (Schübeler, 2015, p. 321). More commonly described as ‘turning genes on and off,’ the outcomes range from the temporary suppression of protein to the permanent inactivation of an X chromosome, or the silencing of repetitive DNA strands. There is a possibility for this process to be passed to subsequent generations through transgenerational epigenetic inheritance even in individuals not exposed to that environment (Nelson & Nadeau, 2010). Current research on epigenetics has considerable potential for environmental scholars investigating the impacts that human activities have on humans and non-humans, as well as ecological processes. It also opens up issues of both the efficacy of regulatory schemes that deal with environment degradation and their ethical consequences. The picture that emerges here is that changes in social and/or environmental conditions can have enduring biological consequences for humans and non-humans, but the permanence of these changes and their underlying causes remain uncertain and difficult to interpret. This uncertainty can be helpful for innovation in science, but also creates problems for how the risks and implications of epigenetic 28 science are communicated in the public sphere (Pickersgill, 2016). For social scientists, this will require not only new theoretical understanding of epigenetics and human-nature interactions, but also new methodological approaches that integrate the methods of big data analysis with conventional methods so as to analyze large amounts of biological and social data at multiple scales (Liu & Guo, 2016). 2.3.3 Genomic Sequencing and the CRISPR Revolution The shift in focus from genes to genomes required the simultaneous development of ‘whole genome’ technologies. This encompasses a whole suite of varying new tools and techniques that enable biologists to process, analyze, and interpret the large amounts of information that are produced during sequencing. A key development has been ‘next-generation high-throughput sequencing’, which allows for billions of DNA strands to be sequenced simultaneously (Skowronski & Lipkin, 2011). By sequencing whole genomes, researchers have an unprecedented ability to identify segments of DNA, or “markers,” that correspond to predictable and heritable traits or characteristics of interest. This information can then be translated into applications such as genomic selection, whereby breeders can screen for or against desired or undesired markers in artificial reproduction (Davey et al., 2011). As is evidenced in Chapter 5, the potential use of genomic selection in managing and conserving wildlife is embedded in debates about risk, uncertainty, and the potential intersection with economic interests. One of the most explosive and controversial technological developments in recent years is the ability to carry out genome engineering. This method, called ‘CRISPR-Cas9’, uses a DNA cutting protein (Cas9) and a guide molecule of RNA to sever desired points in DNA (Jinek et al., 29 2012). As the host cell attempts to repair this break, the new segments of DNA are often mutated, effectively ‘knocking out’ the corresponding segment of DNA. The repair process can also be modified, such that a desired genetic sequence can be inserted, deleted, mutated, or corrected. While conventional genetic modification of plants and animals involves transferring genes from similar species, the simplicity of the CRISPR-Cas9 gives anyone with sufficient knowledge unprecedented abilities to make far more precise and extensive changes, not just to DNA but to the processes that regulate gene expression and heritability (Pontin, 2015). CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to insert precise codes into plants and animals to produce ideal traits for specific purposes like food production. For instance, genome editing (or gene editing) is being used on some staple crops like maize and cassava to mitigate climate change effects, increase disease resistance and nutrition, and usher in a new Green Revolution (Blumenstein, 2016; Arora & Narula, 2017; Mahfouz, 2017). CRISPR Cas-9 can also be used in reproductive cells to modify the DNA responsible for transmitting information through mitosis, spreading the changes to subsequent generations of cells and organisms. This process of ‘germline editing’ has potentially far reaching social and environmental consequences, such as permanently altering entire species, and has complicated the debates around gene editing and genetic modification. Some commonly cited risks of this process include irreversible changes, unintended effects, lack of informed consent from future generations, spiritual or cultural impacts, and inequality among those who can and cannot access the technology. For example, researchers working with mosquitos have also shown that making particular changes to the genome can spread these changes rapidly through whole populations, overriding natural heredity and evolution (Hammond et al., 2016). Most genes have a 50% chance of being passed on to offspring depending on whether they are dominant or recessive, but 30 scientists can create ‘gene drives’ that programs genes to cut segments of DNA and insert copies of themselves, forcing the next generation of organisms to inherit only the desired trait(s). This has sparked an international debate among scientists, governments, legal and medical communities, and the public about the risks of genome editing. In short, CRISPR-Cas9 promises to revolutionize how we interact with the building blocks of nature and intensify existing controversies over the ethical applications and governance of genomic technologies. However, there is also a tension between genomic technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 and the hype surrounding them. Fortun (2005) suggests that promises are an enduring characteristic of genomics as a field that is oriented towards providing solutions to future problematic genetic realities. The “promissory technologies” of genomics “cannot be reduced to empty hype, or to formal contract, but occup[y] the uncertain, difficult space in between” (Fortun, 2005, p. 158). Thus, there are areas where genomics will likely have ground-breaking impacts, and areas where it will fail to deliver or be met with resistance. 2.4 An Environmental Sociology of Genomics While the previous section provided an overview of major developments in genome science, the present section brings core theories and concepts from environmental sociology to bear on relevant aspects of the post-genomic era. 2.4.1 (Re)Constructing Nature Initially, environmental sociology was formed in response to the human exemptionalism that characterized mainstream sociological research (Catton & Dunlap, 1978; Dunlap & Catton, 1979). As the field developed, two distinct theoretical orientations to the human-nature 31 relationship emerged: the ‘realist/materialist’ approach and the ‘social constructivist’ approach. Early work in environmental sociology wrestled with the material reality of ecological resources and systems, and the constraints they placed on human social systems (Spaargaren & Mol 1992; Beus & Dunlap, 1994; Foster, 1999). In the 1990s, a new subfield of ‘social constructivism’ emerged, drawing on insights from symbolic interactionism and science studies, that engaged with the social and cultural processes through which nature is imagined and interpreted (Buttel & Taylor, 1992; Macnaghten & Urry, 1998). The realist-constructivist debate became contentious, with materialists defending the field against assertions that nature only exists as a symbolic construction, and constructivists arguing against objectivist science. Though the realist/materialist and social constructionist camps have made peace and few scholars today adopt extreme positions on either side, the issue of how to incorporate nature into sociological analysis continues to be debated. van Koppen (2017) identifies three issues that have yet to be fully resolved: (1) the role of natural objects and processes in social dynamics; (2) natural science explanations of social phenomena; and (3) the suitability of core sociological concepts and theories for dealing with natural processes. The growth of genomic technologies aimed at addressing environmental problems presents a challenge to dichotomous materialist-constructionist approaches. While the field of genomics is undoubtedly grounded in the material, present applications of genomic technologies offer the ability to reshape that material quickly and precisely according to needs and desires that are socially constructed. As Hannigan (1995) writes, “…environmental problems do not materialise by themselves; rather they must be ‘constructed’ by individuals or organisations who define pollution or some other objective condition as worrisome and seek to do something about it” (p. 2). A central task for environmental sociologists investigating genomics is not just 32 understanding the way that change is occurring to organisms and their environments, but also how and why certain ‘material’ conditions become identified as targets for genomic intervention. The new genomics disrupts conventional binaries of nature/culture, material/language, and reality and cannot be divided into either the social or material construction of nature (Woodgate & Redclift, 1998; Pellizzoni, 2016). As chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate, the divide between wild/domestic life is both material (differentiated through genetic differences between hatchery-spawned and naturally spawning salmon) and socially constructed (as symbolic representations of untouched nature worth protecting). Genome editing provides a clear demonstration of this point. While several scientists have called for a moratorium on human germline editing, the practice is already being used on plants, animals, and insects (Caplan et al., 2015; Wade, 2015). In an article published in Nature, Reardon (2016) describes this body of work as the ‘CRISPR zoo,’ a menagerie of animals that are in the process of having their genomes ‘reimagined’. Disease resistant bees, mammoth-like elephants brought back from extinction, female cows with more muscle for food production - these are some examples of ongoing work that will inform future applications. Some of these examples represent an acceleration of existing trait-based breeding methods that have occurred for centuries, where others, such as the use of gene editing to select for mammoth versions of elephant genes involve a greater level of human intervention into genetic processes. One area that germline editing has had a lot of attention is in pest control. For example, in New Zealand the arrival of gene drives has coincided with the growth of a grassroots environmental movement, Predator-Free New Zealand (Yong, 2017; MWLR, 2018). The country has historically had a rich diversity of unique bird species that have evolved to become flightless in the absence of natural predators. The arrival of humans brought invasive, non-native predators 33 including rats, stoats, weasels, and possums that are devastating bird populations, including the country’s beloved kiwi bird. The predator-free movement, championed by the late New Zealand physicist Paul Callaghan, has rapidly progressed in the last five years. In 2016, Prime Minister John Key announced Project Free 2050, a government program that would devote $20 million to ridding the nation of eight predator species by the year 2050. The plan relies on aerial drops of poison, trapping, and hunting, which are costly, can affect other fauna, and challenging in urban areas (Roy, 2016). However, CRISPR-Cas9 presents a faster, cheaper solution: if gene drives inserted in predators’ genomes force their offspring to inherit genes for sterility, entire species could be eradicated within just a few generations. The social and ecological risks of this technology are as powerful as its promises. Once released into the environment, a gene drive can quickly spread beyond political and natural borders, for example rewriting the genes of rats or stoats all over the world. Although these species are invasive and harmful in New Zealand, they may be vital to the cultures, ecosystems, and economies of other places. Thus, decisions that might normally take place at the local or national levels have become potential global problems. Additionally, the history of invasive species in New Zealand and elsewhere is testament to the difficulty of preventing transmission. Kevin Esvelt, one of the biologists who initially suggested gene drives could eradicate invasive species, has since reversed course, saying, ‘It was profoundly wrong of me to even suggest it, because I badly misled many conservationists who are desperately in need of hope’ (Yong, 2017, p. 1). Together with Neil Gemmell, Esvelt has publicly called for New Zealand to abandon its plans to use gene drives, stating that ‘now is the time to be bold in our caution’ and develop alternatives (Esvelt & Gemmell, 2017, p. 4). However, the political process for reviewing the technology is already underway. New Zealand’s top scientific body, the Royal Society Te 34 Apārangi has convened a multidisciplinary panel to consider the social, cultural, legal, and economic implications of gene drives for pest control, and public engagement is currently underway (RSTA, 2017). Cases like New Zealand’s Project Free 2050 demonstrate that science alone does not control decisions made about which risks are acceptable and what priorities will inform environmental management. An important and fertile area for future research will involve studies that theorize the relation between understandings of scientific risk, trust in science, and regulatory change in the context of new genomic knowledge. 2.4.2 Genomics and Ecological Degradation A central concern for environmental sociologists is the connection between human activity and ecological change. Genomics is playing an increasing role in both in diagnosing and presenting technological solutions. However, issues of environmental risk and destruction cannot be approached as solely technical or scientific problems because they are rooted in human activities. As such, understanding the causes and solutions must examine ‘how our social order developed its current treatment of the natural world’ (Brulle, 2000, p. 16). Several schools of thought have been developed to explain the social processes that contribute to environmental degradation. These have ranged from micro-level studies of individual environmental attitudes and values, most notably Catton and Dunlap’s (1978) New Ecological Paradigm, to macro-level theories of risk and modernity (Beck, 1992; Beck et al., 1994) and the political-economic causes of environmental declines, such as the ‘treadmill of production’ (Schnaiberg et al., 2002; Gould et al., 2008) or ‘metabolic rifts’ (Marx, 1976; Foster, 1999). Scholars have also identified institutions and cultural factors as key mechanisms through which the human-nature relationship is mediated (Yearley, 2005; Buttel, 2010). These frameworks can provide important insights into 35 the social and ecological changes that are taking place in the post-genomic era. To explore this further, we turn to the ocean and consider some of the connections between capital accumulation, genetics, and salmon conservation as examples of metabolic rifts. The world’s ocean sustains a rich biodiversity of plants, animals, and phytoplankton that in turn provide food, oxygen, and economic benefits for human populations globally, and in coastal areas in particular. However, human exploitation of these resources and degradation of the marine environment through climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction has changed the abundance and distribution of marine life (Barange et al., 2010; Halpern et al., 2015). This problem is exacerbated by high demands and market values for large, carnivorous fish, such as tuna, halibut, and salmon. The ability for prized fish populations to reproduce in sufficient numbers to replace harvested amounts is strained by the current rate of exploitation, at 80 million tonnes of fish harvested annually (Hazin et al., 2016). Extending Marx’s theory of metabolism to the marine environment, Clausen and Clark (2005) argue that the capital-intensive exploitation of fish stocks has created a ‘metabolic rift’ that has disrupted the natural cycles that sustain marine ecosystems and the human-ocean relationship. As Foster (1999, p. 381) has noted, the concept of ‘metabolism’ is both social and ecological, referring to the ‘the complex, interdependent process linking human society to nature’. Rifts are worsened over time as accumulation intensifies and spreads to other geographic regions and technological solutions are needed to sustain the economic system of accumulation. Two methods have been pursued to artificially produce salmon that can sustain social, economic, and ecological demands. The first is aquaculture, which applies the principles and methods of traditional agriculture to produce fish, plants, or shellfish. For salmon, this involves breeding smolts and raising them in nets that are suspended in the ocean for harvest. While 36 traditionally this has been done on a small scale, technological advancements have facilitated the ‘blue revolution’ of aquaculture to large-scale, multinational operations that produced over 167 million tons of fish in 2016 (Young & Matthews, 2010; FAO, 2016). The second method is through salmon hatchery programs, also termed ‘hatch and release,’ which breed juvenile salmon and release them into the environment where they mingle with their non-hatchery counterparts. These programs tend to be government-run but are viewed as critical supports of the commercial and recreational fishing industries, as well as a means of rehabilitating wild populations. In the United States alone, the National Fish Hatchery System generates over $900 million annually (Charbonneau & Claudill, 2010). Of these two approaches, aquaculture has received far more attention and opposition in the public sphere, in part because its methods of production, such as the use of growth hormones and pen rearing, alter the natural life cycle of salmon (Clausen & Clark, 2005). Conversely, hatchery programs are operated in a way that mimic natural processes, as the salmon they release spend most of their lives outside of hatchery environments. However, hatchery salmon have been shown to fair poorer in the marine environment than fish that spawn in the ‘wild’, suggesting that there is something about hatcheries that may be affecting their chances of survival. A growing body of research is demonstrating that the hatchery environment can cause ‘epigenetic reprogramming,’ or changes in gene expression that can reduce genetic fitness of offspring, and decrease the likelihood of survival, (Frankham 2008; Christie et al. 2012a; Le Luyer et al., 2017, p. 12967). This reduced fitness can also be inherited by future generations if hatcheries continue to use hatchery-born salmon to breed the next generation of salmon as is sometimes the practice (Araki et al. 2007; 2008). The issue is further complicated because hatchery salmon can spawn with naturally spawning salmon, challenging our understanding of what can be considered wild 37 or natural. In that sense, the issue of ‘what is wild?’ becomes a central one for production and conservation of fish stocks. Moreover, as Chapter 3 shows, there are also ramifications for how endangered species are counted and protected, and as a result, how lands and waters are used. The meaning of wildness in the post-genomic era is a considerable issue that also demonstrates the importance of genetic knowledge for ‘governing the commons’ (Dietz et al., 2003, p. 1907). Emerging genomic science is helping shed light on causes of and potential solutions to environmental degradation. As the case of salmon hatcheries demonstrates, human efforts to manage nature can cause genetic rifts in ecosystems. Genomics can illuminate disruptive effects about which we were previously unaware and that may reduce survival of the very organisms we intend to conserve. Put more generally, genomics can also prescribe courses of action for public and private institutions seeking to recover endangered species. At the same time, the science of conservation biology cannot be regarded as a neutral or objective ‘guiding hand’. Rather, I show in Chapter 4, applying genomics to conservation is biopolitical – it provides a logic for distinguishing between different types of ‘life,’ what is normal and abnormal, and what elements of nature to ‘make live, or let die’. 2.4.3 Power, Ethics, and Environmental Justice Thus far, this chapter has explored the relevance of genomics for human efforts to understand and manage other organisms and the natural environment. This section considers what the post-genomic era may mean for human-nature relationships and the overlapping issues of power, ethics, and justice. Environmental justice emerged as a social movement in the 1980s as activists in the United States fought against the disproportionate environmental burdens experienced by people of colour, Indigenous people, and low-income communities. The 38 movement prompted academic investigations into the distributions of environmental threats, such as pollution, hazardous waste, landfills, and power plants, along racial, class, and gendered divisions (Mohai et al., 2009). While the sensory and physical effects of exposure to toxic pollutants are relatively easy to document, it is more difficult to identify the pathways through which exposure causes harm at a genetic level. However, doing so is necessary to understanding the intergenerational harms associated with exposure. Over fifty years ago, Rachel Carson (1962) described this imperative in Silent Spring, writing, “…a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future…Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time, ‘the last and greatest danger to our civilization’” (p. 208). Genomics can contribute to epidemiological studies of exposure to environmental harms in two respects: gene-environment interactions, and epigene-environment interactions (Bollati & Baccarelli, 2010). With gene-environment interactions, the primary concern is how exposure to certain substances causes genetic damage that can be transmitted through genetic inheritance to the next generation, as well as whether some in the population are more susceptible to harms from exposure. As an example, Lourenço et al. (2013) found that mice near an abandoned uranium mine experienced serious damage to their DNA, causing genomic instability. Uranium mining has been a persistent environmental justice issue, particularly for Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States (Lovelace, 2009; Hoover et al., 2012). As we noted above, epigenetic interactions can also be inherited and successive generations may still experience disease-related effects of exposure from their ancestors even if the source of contamination has been removed (Wolffe & Guschin, 2000). Recent research has shown that DDT, the pesticide at the heart of Silent Spring, can cause epigenetic transgenerational transmission of obesity, kidney 39 disease, and ovary disease (Skinner et al., 2013; Manikkam et al., 2014). Kabasenche and Skinner (2014) argue that this poses an ethical dilemma in places such as Africa, where DDT is currently used as a cost-effective weapon against malaria. They suggest that decision-making processes and risk analyses need to be re-framed to account for threats to future generations at the most fundamental genetic level of their being. The issue of how decisions are made and by whom has been a central theme in the environmental justice movement. One of the Principles of Environmental Justice developed at the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit is ‘the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making’ (UCCCRJ, 1991, p. 1). Careful attention to procedural justice issues is especially relevant to current advances in genomics that may impact socio-politically on marginalized groups. Evaluations of risk are historically, culturally, and socially situated, meaning that there may be fundamental differences in the way that people perceive genomic knowledge and technologies. For some, this may be based on past experiences with unethical research, such as the use of blood samples or genetic materials from Indigenous peoples for research or profit without their consent (Smith, 2013; TallBear, 2013a). There may also be apprehension towards genomic ‘solutions’ to environmental problems because of cultural or epistemological differences in how human-ecological relationships are understood. An important illustrative case is New Zealand’s planned use of gene drives to eradicate invasive predators. For years, Māori have engaged with scientific and political debates regarding the use of genetic technologies in environmental management to protect biodiversity and maintain their guardianship rights over the land (Rixecker & Tipene-Matua, 2003). For many Māori, human intervention in genomic processes contradicts core spiritual and material values. To inform decisions in the current gene-drive debate, a panel of Māori and non-Māori 40 experts from law, biology, health, and mathematics has been formed. In a recent discussion paper, the panel outlined several Māori values that must be considered including: ‘…whakapapa (of the organism, as well as the relationship/kinship between humans and other species), tika (what is right or correct), manaakitanga (cultural and social responsibility/accountability, for example to other nations who value [the invasive species]), mana (justice and equity), [and] tapu’ (RSTA, 2017, p. 5). Though Māori have fought to participate in environmental decision-making processes, their role as ‘equal partners’ has been challenged by the complexities of genomic science (Roberts et al., 2004). This point is echoed by TallBear (2013a). In her book Native American DNA, TallBear provides a review of basic genomic science because otherwise ‘…we in Indian Country will find it difficult to accurately assess the risks and benefits…[of] genetic research. Indian Country will remain largely at the mercy of non-Native technical advisers…that stand to benefit from the geneticization of Native American identity (TallBear, 2013a, p. 40)’. Another barrier to environmental justice is the position of power held by genomic science in decision-making. As Kent (2012) and TallBear (2013b) argue, when there are discrepancies in knowledge claims, states tend to privilege claims made using genomic science over those made using Indigenous knowledge. This is not just an issue for genomic science but concerns Western science more broadly (Nadasdy 1999; Simpson, 2004).7 However, it does support the assertion that the application of science in environmental management is a cultural and political process. Debates regarding the environmental and social risks of genomic knowledge and new 7 It is important to note that Indigenous knowledge is not inherently oppositional to Western science in general (Butler, 2006), nor genomic science in particular. An example of work at this intersection is the Summer Internship for Indigenous peoples in Genomics (SING), which supports Indigenous researchers in developing expertise in Indigenous knowledge and genomics simultaneously (SING, 2020). 41 technologies are sites of contestation that are embedded in a larger struggle for epistemological authority and environmental justice. 2.5 Conclusion This chapter has drawn several connections between advances in genomic science and core areas of environmental sociology. In doing so, two key insights emerged. First, genes are now understood as part of complex and dynamic networks that are susceptible to influences from social and environmental forces, creating a valuable space for interdisciplinary research. Second, while much of the public and scholarly attention has focused on human applications of genomics, there have been rapid and significant environmental reforms across many sectors. Armed with greater knowledge about genetic processes and greater technological and computational resources, modern genomics is enabling researchers and practitioners to examine and manipulate nature in ways that are fundamentally different from those of the past. At the same time, scientific and political institutions are being confronted with the moral and ethical ramifications of new technologies like genomic selection and CRISPR-Cas9. These developments have wide-ranging social and ecological implications, from climate adaptation to the conservation of culturally significant species, to understanding the epigenetic effects of exposure to toxic pollutants in humans and animals. Environmental sociology has a vital role to play in the post-genomics era. Much work remains to understand how the genomic revolution is impacting and intensifying longstanding debates in the field of environmental sociology about risk, technological progress, the social construction and regulation of nature, and the production of knowledge. The following chapters explore these themes through an empirical examination of Pacific salmon in British Columbia. 42 Chapter 3: How “Wild” Are Hatchery Salmon? This chapter is a revised version of an earlier published work: Berseth, V. & Matthews, R. 2021. How “wild” are hatchery salmon? Conservation policy and the contested framing of nature in Canada and the United States. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3): 1077-1098. 3.1 Introduction Global declines in biodiversity create a paradox for conservation: to restore wildlife and wild spaces, which are conventionally understood as independent of human influence, greater human intervention is typically required (Cantrell et al., 2017). This has prompted debates about whether wildness truly exists, echoing earlier pronouncements regarding the “end of nature” (Latour, 2004; McKibben, 1989; Merchant, 1980). While we acknowledge the paradox of wildlife conservation in the Anthropocene, it appears that the concept of wildness has greater salience in the current environment, rather than a diminishing importance. Advances in our capacity to measure and understand anthropogenic environmental impacts are being coupled with technologies and strategies such as re-wilding, genetic resource banks, captive breeding programs, protected area management, and managed relocation. For many of these conservation approaches, nature is being biologically reconstructed with wildness as the goal. In this chapter, using the example of Pacific salmon, we examine how the boundary between wild and not wild species is defined and negotiated in environmental policy. Pacific salmon have a life cycle that is remarkable. Born in freshwater streams, juvenile salmon undergo a physical transformation to adapt to ocean saltwater, travel thousands of kilometers, and (in most cases) return to the stream where they were born to spawn the next 43 generation (Lichatowich, 1999). However, Pacific salmon are also dependent on human intervention for survival in many geographic areas. Faced with possible extinction resulting from overfishing and other threats, many countries initially turned to hatchery programs to support fishing industries and supplement natural-born populations (Taylor, 1999). Unlike long-term captive breeding programs aimed at rehabilitating species of concern, hatcheries artificially propagate salmon in facilities, where they are reared until juveniles and released into the ocean (Braverman, 2015; Taylor, 1999). Hatcheries are now considered an indispensable conservation tool, but the monumental scope of human intervention into the life cycle of salmon and their ecosystems has created a new dilemma. How do hatchery salmon fit into the landscape of policies designed to manage and preserve wildlife? How do different actors frame the idea of “wild” salmon and what are the implications of these framing debates? And, to what extent are wildlife conservation policies adaptive to changes in scientific and public understanding of what constitutes “wild” life? This chapter threads these questions through debates surrounding Canada’s Wild Salmon Policy and the United States’ Endangered Species Act 1973. Both Canada and the United States have established a network of hatcheries from California to Alaska, releasing millions of salmon annually. Both countries have also wrestled with the issue of how to classify and manage hatchery-produced salmon. In Canada, the line between hatchery and wild salmon was drawn in the Wild Salmon Policy after six years of negotiating among scientists, governments, and stakeholders. The same debate followed a different path in the United States, where a series of legal actions brought the question of hatchery salmon’s “wildness” under judicial review. Differences in the two countries’ approach mean that a salmon swimming freely in the ocean may become “wild” as it traverses geopolitical borders along its migratory route. 44 While it may seem to be a matter of semantics, there is much at stake in how a “wild” salmon comes to be defined in policy. If hatchery salmon are the same as wild, the population size of wild salmon is higher than if they are not counted as wild. The bigger the population, the fewer the restrictions on fishing, development, and habitat use. If they are not wild, their inter-breeding with natural-born salmon is potentially a threat to the sustainability of wild populations. We use the term ‘hybrid’ to refer to organisms that result from interbreeding between individuals from genetically distinct populations (Allendorf et al., 2001; Arnold, 1997).8 In some cases, hybridization can be beneficial by contributing to genetic diversity, extending the range of a species, or as an adaptive response to selection pressures. In other ways, hybridization can also mean the extinction of species as species lose their genetic and morphological distinctiveness, or through the spread of genes correlated with poor survivability (Doremus, 2010; Pfennig et al., 2016). Pacific salmon are not the only animals to experience hybridization. Similar issues occur in Atlantic salmon (Daniels & Mather, 2017), wildcats (Daniels & Corbett, 2003), zebras (Cordingley et al., 2009), wolves (Braverman, 2015; Fredrickson and Hedrick, 2006; Rutherford, 2018), and owls (Gutierrez et al., 2007). A wide range of “wild” animal and plant species are also augmented and released through large-scale captive breeding programs (Laikre et al., 2010). Despite the significance of laws and policies to the governance of such hybrid species, they have received limited attention. We build on this work to examine how the scientific uncertainties 8 Among social scientists, the term hybrid has also been used to refer to a bridge between the ontological separation of nature and society (Whatmore, 2002). 45 regarding wild species are framed and contested by state and public actors and how they become concretized in policy frameworks. Policies are a key site where these conflicts play out, as they represent the state’s official position on matters where science may be contested, prescribe courses of action, and often allocate resources towards specific objectives. Read together, the US and Canadian policy debates regarding Pacific salmon provide direct evidence of how species can be framed differently over time and across geographic and jurisdictional space. While the question of what is considered a species has long been considered the domain of natural science, multiple human interests and institutions come together to create the regulatory network through which conservation policies are developed and enacted. Debates over the wildness of Pacific salmon and other hybrid species demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the wild/not wild distinction both from conservation and socio-cultural points of reference. Through their categorical indeterminacy in science and politics, hatchery salmon offer an opportunity for empirical and ontological investigation into the processes through which nature is codified and given meaning. 3.2 Defining “Wild” Life Whereas sociologists have long discussed the social construction of nature, (Macnaghten & Urry, 1998), the Anthropocene prompts us to consider the social and ecological implications of nature’s biological reconstruction. In particular, we focus on the intersection of science and law, two tools that have been deployed in the categorization and management of non-human life. Historically, wildness has been conceived of in rather stark terms – as a binary between wild and tame, or sometimes, in situ versus ex situ (in the case of conservation). However, these distinctions are too limited to capture the multiple dynamic axes of human-wildlife interactions 46 on the boundaries of taxonomic classifications (Braverman, 2014). Here, we take up Braverman’s (2015) challenge to rethink how nature is defined, using the example of Pacific salmon and the controversial role that hatcheries play in their conservation and management in Canada and the United States. 3.2.1 Conserving Wildness in the Anthropocene Though conservation relies on scientific knowledge, the question of what constitutes “wildness” is bound up in ideas about nature, culture, and the relationship between humans and the non-human world. Environmental historians, philosophers, and sociologists such as Haraway (1989), Cronon (1996), Nash (2014), Nelson and Callicott (2008), and Vannini and Vannini (2016) have traced the range of Western9 scientific and cultural narratives of “wilderness” from dark and dangerous to sublime and pristine, untouched by humans. This binary view of wildness and society, or nature and culture, continues to underpin large-scale conservation policies, such as protected areas and national parks, and it informs a broad range of efforts to conserve and protect nature. The idea of a separate “nature” has been undermined by the extent of human impacts on the natural environment. Rapid population growth and resource consumption have propelled humanity to the far reaches of the earth, substantially altering the climate and causing mass extinctions (Barnosky et al., 2011; Rockström et al., 2009). The difficult question facing conservationists is what it means to conserve nature in the Anthropocene. One interpretation is 9 The Western view of wilderness as empty supported the dispossession of Indigenous lands through the legal doctrine of terra nullius and continues to inform contemporary environmental management (Mawani, 2007; Suchet, 2010; Watson, 2014). For some discussions of Indigenous perspectives on wildness, see Atleo (2011), Selin (2003), Nadasdy (2005), and Vannini and Vannini (2019). 47 that preserving wild nature for its own sake is no longer required. This approach, largely falling under the banner of the “new conservation” movement, has rekindled a longstanding debate. While traditional conservation is focused on preserving and restoring diverse species for their intrinsic and ecological value, new conservationists argue that nature is resilient enough to withstand ecological change, and that the priority should be on harnessing the full benefits of nature for humans (Kareiva et al., 2007, 2012). A point of contention between new conservationists and their critics is novelty. While new conservationists see new ecosystems and introduced species as inevitable, traditionalists have challenged this view on ecological and ethical grounds (Doak et al., 2015; Hunter et al. 2014; Kareiva et al. 2012; Miller et al., 2014; Soulé, 2014). Between the traditional and new camps are others who ask whether we can accept human-influenced nature as legitimate nature (Dudley, 2011; Marris, 2011, 2014; Naeem, 2011). The Anthropocene as a provocative set of ideas has brought to the fore fractures in the landscape of conservation and diverging goals, values, and principles (Minteer & Pyne, 2015). A critical task for social scientists (and a central aim of this chapter) is to investigate “how the end of nature scrambles traditional categories of analysis and grounds for action within environmental politics” (Wapner, 2014, p. 41). Traditionally, the foundational taxonomic unit for wildlife conservation is a species, which is “an interbreeding group of organisms that is reproductively isolated from all other organisms” (UNEP, 2019, p. 706). However, human intervention into animal reproduction, intentionally and unintentionally, has produced organisms that do not neatly fit established definitions. How do we reconcile populations that have been altered genetically or behaviourally as a result of human interventions? At what point does genetic interference drift far enough that it creates a new species? And, at what point does human intervention alter how animals are 48 classified in conservation policies? These questions have implications for efforts to protect and restore wildlife, as well as for when and where economic development is curtailed in the name of such protections. There is a burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship examining species that challenge or resist biological frameworks. Friese (2013) documents the use of cloning for endangered species preservation in zoos, arguing that the controversy surrounding this practice stems from conflicts in how nature and culture are (and ought to be) intermixed. Fredriksen (2016) uses the hybridization of Scottish wildcats with domesticated cats to demonstrate the limits of species-based conservation. Fredriksen (2016) asks, “If wildcats cannot be neatly separated from feral cats and hybrids then how should conservation practices proceed? And if the line is not drawn at all … what are the consequences for the practical task of protecting wild-living cats in Scotland?” (p. 697). The subject of where to draw the line between wild species and their human-influenced cousins is not just scientific, but politically contested. Rutherford (2018)’s study of coywolves and Crowley et al.’s (2017) study of beaver reintroduction in England show how multiple actors come to contest the wildness of hybrid animals. The categorical indeterminacy of these species provides the scientific and political space for debate, creating knowledge battlefields (Young & Matthews, 2010) in which science is marshalled by opposing parties to advance particular interests. 3.2.2 Framing Wildness in Law and Policy An understudied aspect is the way that societal goals for conserving wild species and spaces become concretized in law and policy (McDonald et al., 2016). At a fundamental level, legal frameworks and practices contribute to what Friese (2013) refers to as “world-making.” 49 They convey certain ideas about how species should be conserved, protected, harvested, and managed. They also often direct financial and human resources towards particular goals and re-orient existing networks and assemblages around non-human life. A prime example is endangered species legislation, which mobilizes a significant amount of resources, data collection, and conservation efforts, while limiting or halting public and private activities that may affect endangered species or their habitats. The result is that a small number of organisms can have an unusually large political and economic impact if they are listed as endangered (Braverman, 2015; Scoville, 2019). A critical element of this world-building potential is the biopolitical drawing of legal or political boundaries between species that are, or are not, worthy of being conserved. Friese (2013) points out the high value placed on wildness in this regard. Species and organisms deemed wild continue to be the primary objective of conservation efforts. At a more conceptual level, legal and policy documents reflect and reify particular cultural understandings of the human-nature relationship. More than mere imagery, the meanings that are attributed to nature have consequences for environmental decision-making. However, more often than not, nature refuses to conform to the neat and tidy boundaries that the law seeks to establish. In part, this is because nature evolves, producing a tense and frequently conflicting relationship between “static laws” and the “dynamic world” (Doremus, 2010). If the task of social scientists is to investigate how the Anthropocene scrambles traditional categories of analysis, the legal frameworks that govern human-nature interactions warrant consideration. Conversely, as we have discussed above, knowledge and cultural understandings similarly change over time. As Vannini and Vannini (2016) write, “What may appear as a fixed nature at first sight is instead very much the outcome of practices, discourses, and changing relations” (p. 27). Laws and policies are therefore sites where the nuanced and oft-disputed meanings behind 50 words like “wildness” are reduced to unambiguous prescriptions for action. Moreover, the definition of “species” does not have universal scientific consensus (dubbed the “species problem” in biology) (Coyne & Orr, 2004). To what extent the laws and policies governing wild life adapt to shifts in scientific and public knowledge is a relevant question. To understand how wildness is defined in policy and contested by various public actors, we employ a framing analysis. Frames are interpretive lenses that give meaning to collective experiences and guide action (Benford & Snow, 2000). By selecting certain words or ideas over others, actors can influence the direction of discussions and decisions in policy-making. Frame analysis has been used effectively in studies of policy debates (e.g., Crow and Lawlor, 2016; Hawkins and Holden, 2013), and environmental policy disputes in particular (e.g., Buijs et al., 2011; Fünfgeld & Mcevoy, 2014; Hilson, 2015; Shmueli, 2008; Lis & Stankiewicz, 2017). In part, this is because frame analysis is well-suited to an analysis of the “political game of interests” (Rein & Schön, 1996, p. 93). Rather than static objects, frames are developed, advanced, and contested through social processes of negotiation and debate between multiple actors.10 Benford and Snow (2000) describe framing as comprised of three different tasks: (i) diagnostic framing, wherein actors identify and describe problems; (ii) prognostic framing, which articulates a proposed solution; and (iii) motivational framing, which serves as a “call to arms,” inspiring others to act in accordance with the interests of the individual or collective advancing a particular frame. Framing can, therefore, be used strategically to define the problem at hand prescribe particular courses of action, and garner support from others (Snow & Benford 10 This process is both dialogical, as actors both situate frames within existing cultural repertoires and create new meanings through discursive conflicts, and relational, as discursive repertoires are produced through temporally- and culturally-specific networks of individual and collective actors (Lindstedt, 2017). 51 1988). At the same time, frames are not immutable forces; Gamson and Meyer (1996) describe framing as a vulnerable process, subject to political struggle, both taking advantage of and creating political opportunities. Framing contests emerge when frames are countered by other actors engaging in debates over appropriate policy goals and outcomes (Dewulf, 2013). The empirical cases that are the focus of this chapter take place in two different contexts. In the United States, the debate over the wildness of enhanced salmon played out through a protracted legal battle over multiple years and in multiple jurisdictions. The actors involved represented diverse interests, but to successfully challenge the existing policy framework, they had to frame their arguments and present evidence according to the standards and customs of the United States legal system. This also meant that the power to count hatchery salmon as wild rested in the hands of the judiciary. Canada’s debate on wild salmon was channeled through a similarly lengthy but less adversarial public consultation process. Compared to the narrower legal process in the United States, there was a far greater number and diversity of voices feeding into the development of the Wild Salmon Policy. We will return to the significance of these differences. In both cases, the Wild Salmon Policy and the Endangered Species Act are part of a larger network of policies that regulate salmon hatcheries. However, in Canada, Pacific Salmon hatcheries are largely regulated at the federal level and are concentrated in one province, British Columbia. The situation is much more diverse in the United States, as each state pursues its own plan for hatchery programs, and hatcheries are found in Washington, Oregon, California, and Alaska. Though an in-depth comparison of each of these geographic and socio-political contexts is beyond the scope of this chapter, the Endangered Species Act debate provides a window into how the wildness of hatchery salmon has been publicly negotiated in the United States. 52 3.3 Methodology Data for this study include archival documents, legislation, policies, government reports, and media sources in the United States and Canada. Data for the United States includes judicial opinions and, where available, plaintiff and intervenor complaints for three court cases pertaining to the Endangered Species Act: Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001; Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2007; and Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2009. These court records are publicly available and were accessed by the first author through Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). Canadian data include reports on 22 public consultation meetings and public opinion surveys between 2000 and 2005. These reports were compiled by third party organizations contracted to observe the meetings, as well as produce summaries of the events. A limitation of this archival data is that they are not full transcripts. However, they represent the best available source of information on the consultation process and provide direct quotations from participants. These data were supplemented with an analysis of newspaper articles in both countries during the period of 2000-2010. By combining news media with archival data, we were able to examine how the framing of wildness occurred both in the closed-door spaces of court rooms and meeting rooms and in public discourse. Following Rein and Schön (1996, p. 93), we employed a frame-critical policy analysis, which has three objectives: (1) to name the issue terrain, (2) to identify the competing frames at work in a policy discourse, and (3) to specify the forums in which the discourse occurs. The analysis proceeded in two stages. First, we identified competing frames by coding the text for references to “hatchery/ies,” “wild,” “wildness,” “wilderness,” and “wildlife” (Schon & Rein, 1996). The relevant passages were analyzed for patterns in how different actors defined the problem of wildness, how they discussed hatchery salmon, what actions they prescribed, and 53 what other frames they contested. The second stage involved a comparative analysis of the two policy debates. We laid out a chronological account of each debate to consider how shifts in scientific and public understanding of “wildness” have been represented in policy over time and in parallel between the two countries. Table 3 provides an overview of the results of this comparative analysis. Table 3 Timeline of Policy Definitions of Hatchery/Wild Relationship Period Policy/Legal Case (US/CA) Hatchery Salmon Status United States Canada Prior to 1993 No distinction No distinction 1993-2001 Interim Hatchery Listing Policy, 1993 (US) Not wild 2001-2004 Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001 (US) Wild 2004-2005 Final Hatchery Listing Policy, 2004 (US) Wild if genetically similar to natural-born salmon 2005-2007 Wild Salmon Policy, 2005 (CA) Not wild, but wild in 2 generations 2007-2009 Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2007 (US) Not wild 2009-Present Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2009 (US) Wild if genetically similar to natural-born salmon There are several advantages of selecting these countries as sites for analysis. First, both countries struggled with how to define “wildness” in policy and use hatcheries to supplement declining wild stocks. Selecting multiple sites for analysis enables us to explore how the definition of a “wild” species varies across time and space, as well as different forums. Second, these countries are connected legally and materially by the nature of the fish they seek to manage. Pacific salmon have a vast geographic range in their migration and cross multiple jurisdictional borders in the process. This means that fishers in one country can intercept and 54 harvest fish produced by other countries. To mediate this conflict, Canada and the United States signed the Pacific Salmon Treaty in 1985 to ensure that national management of Pacific salmon fisheries management is consistent with the treaty agreement. Salmon can also stray across geopolitical borders, introducing the possibility for a fish born in the United States to cross into Canadian waters (Wadewitz, 2012). In these ways, salmon are active agents in shaping the geopolitical relations between these countries (Sundberg, 2011), but are still subject to a complex legal landscape. This creates the curious case of a “wild” fish that strays across the border and finds itself no longer “wild.” 3.4 Pacific Salmon, Genomics, and the Problem of Hatcheries There are seven species of Pacific salmon in North America: Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), chum (Oncorhynchus keta), coho (Oncorhynchus kisutch), pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka), steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarkii). For decades, many populations of Pacific salmon in Canada and the United States have declined in abundance and genetic diversity.11 The causes of this decline are numerous and complex, involving overfishing, habitat degradation, hatchery interactions, and dams, compounded by political conflicts over which factor and, more importantly, who is to blame (Johnson et al., 2018; Lichatowich, 2013; Noakes et al., 2000). Salmon hatcheries were devised in the 19th century to compensate for the vast amount of fishing that was occurring and the proliferation of dams that interrupted salmon habitat (Taylor, 1999). Hatcheries are facilities 11 There is significant variation in the health of stocks in the Pacific Ocean by species, geographic area, and time (Ruggerone and Irvine, 2018; Ruggerone et al., 2010). Alaska’s salmon fisheries, for example, are not yet experiencing declines in abundance (Arnold, 2009). 55 where workers artificially propagate salmon and rear them to a certain age, before releasing them into freshwater streams. Pacific salmon travel across the Pacific Ocean, returning to their natal stream once mature, where they spawn and die.12 Hatcheries in Canada release nearly 300 million juvenile Pacific salmon annually from 23 facilities and the United States produces far more – 70 hatcheries release over 2 billion salmon each year (Crafton, 2018; NPAFC, 2018). While hatcheries are remarkably successful in getting salmon to survive from eggs to juvenile fish (85–95% of hatchery salmon make it through this stage, compared to 1–5% in the natural environment), they fare poorer than natural-born salmon in later life stages (Reisenbichler et al. 2004). Advances in genomics have provided some insights into why this is the case (Araki & Schmid, 2010). Several studies have found hatchery-reared fish tend not to survive as well as naturally born salmon (Araki et al., 2007; Chittenden et al., 2008; 2010; Christie et al., 2016; Irvine et al., 2013). When hatchery salmon mate with natural-born populations, they pass on their genetic material. Over several generations, populations can become dominated by genes that are maladapted to the natural environment, resulting in lower reproductive success (Christie et al., 2014). In some places this has become acutely problematic. In the Columbia River, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest, approximately 80% of its salmon are of hatchery origin (USFWS, no date, a). A study of salmon genetics in the Wenatchee River, which connects to the Columbia in Washington, found that the size and age of salmon returning to spawn were significant genetic factors contributing to low reproductive fitness of hatchery fish (Williamson et al., 2010). The wildness of hatchery salmon is not only a relational 12 Steelhead are an anadromous form of rainbow trout. Steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trout migrate to the ocean and back to their spawning grounds multiple times, unlike most other Pacific salmon species that spawn only once before dying (USFWS, no date, b). 56 question – whether humans have had a hand in raising them – it is also a biological question, as salmon have been genetically altered through selection pressures associated with rearing in hatchery environments. Although we are limiting our analysis to the realm of conservation policy, it is important to note that the notion of “wild” as applied to salmon carries a different meaning in the seafood industry. Wild salmon producers, restaurants, and supermarkets frequently promote wild salmon as a sustainable option, particularly when contrasted with industrial salmon farming (Hébert, 2010). In this context, hatchery salmon are considered “wild,” even though they are reared in non-wild environments. 3.5 The United States and the Endangered Species Act Two questions drove debates in the United States around “wild” salmon: (1) can/should hatchery salmon be counted when listing wild salmon as endangered? and, (2) how should the government deal with the threats that hatchery salmon pose to naturally spawned salmon? These questions were put before the courts in a series of lawsuits where plaintiffs and intervenors challenged the policies and practices of the United States government.13 3.5.1 Endangered Species and the National Marine Fisheries Service The primary vehicle for conserving and protecting species at risk of extinction in the United States is the Endangered Species Act. There are several challenges with implementing the 13 Although they are not represented in the lawsuits discussed here, Native American tribes are active participants in the operation of Pacific salmon hatcheries, in scientific research on hatchery-wild relations, and in the policy-making process (CRITFC, 2020; Hess et al., 2012; NWIFC, 2016; Colombi, 2012). It is also worth noting that in the US, hatchery salmon are legally defined as treaty fish (U.S. v. Oregon; U.S. v. Washington). This means they are counted as part of the total harvestable runs, to which Columbia River treaty tribes are entitled 50%. 57 Act. For one, it lacks a clear definition of what is considered a “wild” species. This ambiguity is a problem in cases where segments of a wildlife species are propagated and released, interbreeding with the natural population. Another difficulty is that, in many cases, there are distinct groups within a species that have different life histories, genetic profiles, and chances of survival or extinction. The Act recognizes this and defines a species as “any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature” (Endangered Species Act, 1973, Section 3-15). In the 1990s, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued several policies that sought to implement the Endangered Species Act. To deal with the challenges discussed above, the Fisheries Service instituted the Evolutionarily Significant Unit Policy in 1991. This policy introduced the term “evolutionarily significant unit” (ESU) to identify genetically distinct salmon populations below the species level. Where hatchery fish are released into rivers that already have a wild population, an ESU can contain both hatchery and naturally spawning fish. The Fisheries Service drafted a second policy – the Interim Hatchery Listing Policy (1993) – to provide guidance on how to incorporate hatchery fish in its endangered species assessments. If hatchery salmon are counted as wild, large releases of hatchery fish may make it appear as though the whole population is healthy when in fact the natural population is in danger of extinction. Hatchery fish would then fall under the protections afforded to endangered species. The Interim Hatchery Policy emphasizes the agency’s responsibility to recover “natural populations” and that hatcheries should be limited in recovery programs to avoid risks to natural fish. When listing endangered species, the policy directed the Fisheries Service to count only the natural population. There was an exception for cases where the natural population is in imminent danger of extinction and hatchery fish are essential for recovery. In other words, the Interim 58 Hatchery Policy made a distinction between hatchery and wild salmon and prioritized protections for wild, naturally spawning fish.14 3.5.2 Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001 The first challenge to the wildness of hatchery salmon centered on the protection of a population of coho salmon. In 1998, the Fisheries Service submitted the ESU for Oregon Coast coho salmon to be listed as threatened. In accordance with the Interim Hatchery Policy, the Fisheries Service did not count hatchery stocks which made up as much as 87% of the salmon population (Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001). If they did count hatchery fish in their assessment, the population would not have been classed as endangered. Thus, where to draw the line between what counts as a wild salmon is at the heart of this case. Protections for the newly listed stock meant that industrial activities were halted on the Klamath River, including logging activities, road building, and irrigation for farming. This provoked a legal challenge of the Fisheries Service policy by the Alsea Valley Alliance, a group of building industry, farm, and property rights advocates. The Alsea Valley Alliance took the Fisheries Service to court, arguing that the agency’s decision violated the terms of the Act by making a distinction between hatchery and wild Coho salmon. They cited a previous judgment in Arizona that found that “distinctions below that of subspecies…are not allowed under the ESA” (Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001, p. 4). In other words, since hatchery and wild salmon are part of the same ESU, the Fisheries Service could not exclude hatchery salmon from the listing. 14 This distinction does not apply to progeny of hatchery fish who return from the ocean and spawn in the natural environment. 59 The Alsea Valley Alliance was successful in framing hatchery salmon as genetically indistinguishable from natural salmon. The presiding judge found that the Act requires listings of whole species or subspecies, writing: The NMFS listing decision creates the unusual circumstance of two genetically identical Coho salmon swimming side-by-side in the same stream, but only one receives ESA protection while the other does not. The distinction is arbitrary (Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, 2001, p. 4). Oregon coast Coho were delisted from the Endangered Species Act, business resumed, and the Fisheries Service was ordered to revise its policies. The ruling was criticized by environmentalists and fishers who argued the ruling was ecologically disastrous. Patti Goldman of the Earthjustice Defense Fund called it an “attack on salmon listings” (Goldman, 2001, p. 1). Bill Bakke, director of the Native Fish Society, said he feared “It may mean 20 populations along the West Coast could be delisted” (Robinson, 2001, p. 2). Some directly contested the court’s and the Alsea Valley Alliance’s framing of hatchery and wild salmon as indistinguishable. Jason Miner, conservation biologist for Oregon Trout, said the decision was “catastrophic… There is a factual finding that hatchery fish and wild fish are genetically the same, which is both inaccurate and vastly oversimplifies the complex biology of Oregon’s native fish” (Barnard, 2001, p. 1). A group of environmental and fishing organizations appealed, but were denied, while the Alsea Valley Alliance put public pressure on the Fisheries Service to follow through with the court’s orders to amend the Interim Hatchery Policy. Russ Brooks, the attorney representing Alsea Valley, told U.S. Newswire, “Environmental litigation groups lost their appeal … and now they are trying to skirt the law by politicizing the issue. It’s clear they’re trying to pressure the administration, but this is a matter of law, not politics.” (US Newswire, 2004, p. 1). In addition to framing the hatchery-wild debate as apolitical, Brooks 60 emphasized the need to align policy with science, saying, “It remains to be seen if the new policy will be based on sound science and meet the legal requirements of the ESA. If the new policy is too little, too late, we’ll be back in court” (US Newswire, 2004, p. 1). 3.5.3 Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2007, 2009 In the wake of Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans, the Fisheries Service revised its Interim Hatchery Policy following nearly 6 months of public engagement and expert review.15 The Final Hatchery Listing Policy (2004) maintained the term “evolutionarily significant unit” (ESU), but now required that hatchery fish be considered in determining whether a species should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Hatchery fish are counted as wild if they are genetically similar to the natural population: [Hatchery fish] with a level of genetic divergence between the hatchery stocks and the local natural populations that is no more than what would be expected between closely related populations within the ESU (a) are considered part of the ESU, (b) will be considered in determining whether an ESU should be included in any listing of the ESU… (NMFS, 2004, p. 37215) The agency reassessed the Upper Columbia steelhead along with 27 Pacific salmon ESUs that had been listed as endangered or threatened. The Upper Columbia steelhead were heavily impacted by the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1939, which cut them off from thousands of kilometers of spawning habitat. By 1997, the population had dwindled and was not self-sustaining, so it was listed as endangered. During the reassessment in 2004, the Fisheries Service considered the contributions of hatcheries along the Columbia River. They redefined the ESU to include both naturally spawning steelhead and steelhead from six hatchery stocks which 15 For the Fisheries Service’s response to public comments on the policy, see NMFS (2005). 61 were genetically similar. The estimated population size increased with the addition of the hatchery stocks, so the new ESU was downlisted from endangered to threatened. The decision to downlist Upper Columbia steelhead triggered a lawsuit in 2007. This time, the plaintiffs were a group of conservationists comprised of environmental groups such as Trout Unlimited and the Sierra Club, and fishers from the Federation of Fly Fishers. They argued that by counting hatchery fish as wild, the Fisheries Service violated its mandate to protect natural populations and to comply with the Endangered Species Act. The plaintiffs framed hatchery fish as genetically and physiologically distinct from wild fish, stating: In sharp contrast to the evolutionary processes that promote diversity in wild fish, hatcheries produce uniformity by mass producing salmon, often from relatively few adults, and selecting for certain traits (Trout Unlimited, 2005, p. 8). They further questioned the legitimacy of the Fisheries Service’ revised Hatchery Listing Policy: The Hatchery Listing Policy is highly controversial, lacks scientific support, and undermines the mandates of the ESA. … The inclusion of hatchery fish in wild ESUs is likely to adversely affect threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead, to contribute to cumulative impacts that are escaping NMFS’s scrutiny, and to be highly uncertain in light of the lack of scientific support for the policy (Trout Unlimited, 2005, p. 15). A group of intervenors representing the building industry, the farming industry, and property rights advocates joined the lawsuit, opposing the conservationists. Citing the ruling in Alsea Alliance v. Evans, they countered that the policy once again violates the Endangered Species Act by distinguishing between hatchery and naturally spawning fish. The intervenors were concerned that unnecessary listings would interfere with their livelihoods. The Fisheries Service defended its policy, arguing that it is consistent with the Act and with the best available science. The district court found in favour of the conservationists. The decision was based on two findings. First, the Final Hatchery Listing Policy violated the Act and the Fisheries Service’ mandate to 62 protect natural populations by including hatchery fish as wild and by discounting the harmful effects of hatchery fish on natural populations. The status determination of the Upper Columbia River steelhead ESU provides a clear example of how an evaluation of the entire ESU distracts from the risks faced by natural populations and departs from the central purpose of the ESA. (Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2009, p. 20) Second, the district judge found that listings must be based exclusively on the status and trends of natural populations. The Fisheries Service appealed the 2007 decision to the highest federal judicial authority, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 2009, the appeals court reversed the decision. While they agreed with the lower courts that natural-born fish are the primary focus of the Endangered Species Act and the Fisheries Service, they found that hatchery fish are not being simply counted as wild. In determining whether a species is endangered, the Fisheries Service considers both the positive and negative effects of hatchery stocks on natural populations. This satisfies the mandate and the requirements of the Act. However, the court stopped short of deliberating the “wildness” of hatchery fish and acknowledged the ongoing scientific debate: Trout Unlimited and NMFS are engaged in a good faith disagreement that is supported by science on both sides; indeed, … there is no scientific consensus concerning the relationship between hatchery and natural fish. In such situations, we stay our hand. (Trout Unlimited v. Lohn, 2009, p. 3282) As for the intervenors, the appeal judges concluded that the Alsea Valley Alliance v. Evans decision does not require hatchery and wild fish to be treated equally; rather, it finds that if hatchery fish and wild fish are part of the same ESU, they cannot be listed differently under the Endangered Species Act. The Upper Columbia steelhead and the other 26 populations were reassessed based on entire ESUs including hatchery fish that were genetically similar to natural 63 fish (Henry, 2004). In total, the process lasted 16 years, from the development of the first hatchery listing policy in 1993 to the conclusion of Trout Unlimited v. Lohn (2009). 3.6 Canada’s Wild Salmon Policy Around the time that the Fisheries Service was navigating the courts, Canada was engaged in its own salmon debate. The more that the Canadian government sought to protect wild salmon, the more it was confronted by the question of where hatchery fit in its approach to “wildness.” Although the Canadian debate was less adversarial in structure, it was no less contentious. Richard Beamish, a leading federal salmon biologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada, told the Globe and Mail that the complexity and emotions involved make the hatchery controversy akin to a religious debate (Mickleburgh, 2001). 3.6.1 A New Era of Conservation The 1990s were a time of crisis for Canadian fisheries management. Fishing rates had reached historic highs in the late 1980s and early 1990s and there was an assumption among fisheries managers that any problems with abundance could be solved through increasing hatchery production (DFO, 1998). Despite hatchery supplementation, Pacific salmon were steadily declining “partly due to natural causes but also exacerbated by the inability of managers to detect and react to changes in abundance in a timely fashion” (Noakes et al., 2005, p. 504). Faced with mounting public and political pressure, Fisheries and Oceans released a series of documents shifting their approach from maximizing economic returns to conservation and genetic diversity as the highest priority for the department (Irvine, 2009). A small number of 64 scientists and policymakers were tasked with realizing this new policy direction through the creation of a “wild fish policy,” the first such policy in the country. The Wild Salmon Policy is an ambitious and progressive effort. It identifies three objectives: (1) safeguard the genetic diversity of wild Pacific salmon; (2) maintain habitat and ecosystem integrity; and (3) manage fisheries for sustainable benefits. Similar to the Endangered Species Act’s “evolutionarily significant units,” the Wild Salmon Policy introduced the term “Conservation Units” (CUs) to aggregate of salmon populations with similar genetic profiles, life histories, and geographic distribution. The Wild Salmon Policy was noteworthy for two reasons. First, it was preceded by an unusually lengthy consultation process that sought input from Indigenous groups, stakeholders, and the general public. This engagement was planned for six months but stretched to six years. Ultimately, the government held 16 community forums with over 650 attendants and six stakeholder meetings with nearly 50 representatives from Indigenous communities, fishing industries, ENGOs, and academics. Input was collected through response forms distributed at events and from online submissions (Dovetail Consulting Inc. [DC], 2000a,b). These meetings were sites for the public to debate a range of issues pertaining to the policy – including hatcheries, economic sustainability, habitat protections, and genetic diversity. 3.6.2 What Is a “Wild” Salmon? The most significant feature of the Wild Salmon Policy is that it sets out a definition of a “wild” salmon. Prior to the Wild Salmon Policy, hatchery salmon were not distinguished from 65 wild in conservation laws,16 which define wildlife as animals that are “wild by nature” (Canada Wildlife Act, 1985; Species at Risk Act, 2002). However, this provides little guidance for how to classify and manage populations that have been propagated and released (Braverman, 2015). According to the Wild Salmon Policy (DFO, 2005), wild salmon are those that have “spent their entire life cycle in the wild and originate from parents that were also produced by natural spawning and continuously lived in the wild” (p. 1). This was a departure from the debate taking place in the United States, where the question was whether hatchery fish can be counted as part of a wild population. Here, the definition is explicit in stating that a salmon born in a hatchery is not a wild salmon. Wildness, instead, is a matter of degrees of separation and lineage. The Wild Salmon Policy also introduces the dimension of time. In populations that are no longer “wild,” there is a possibility that a salmon born in a hatchery may spawn in natural environment. Over two generations, the progeny of these fish become “wild,” painting a more complicated picture of the relationship between hatchery and wild salmon. As James Irvine, one of the policy’s authors, explains, “We recognised that a ‘continuum of wildness’ exists for salmon” (Irvine, 2009, p. 144). The continuum Irvine describes is not based exclusively on a biological spectrum of “wild” and “captive” genetics, but rather a social one, among people with different views of what they consider to be the criteria for a “wild” salmon. Diverse views on the meaning and consequences of “wildness” were present in the consultation process. The framework put forth in the Wild Salmon Policy was the first time that 16 Fishing regulations in British Columbia distinguished between hatchery and wild salmon to stipulate catch limits (British Columbia Sport Fishing Regulations, 1996). However, this distinction was not specified in environmental protections for endangered species or in policies aimed at conservation. 66 a line had been drawn so publicly between wild and hatchery salmon. There was little public disagreement with the policy’s emphasis on genetic diversity. Instead, there were differing views on the extent to which hatchery fish can be used to restore wild populations. Academics held the strongest views against the wildness of hatchery fish. The dominant frame advanced by academics was that hatcheries pose risks to wild salmon, with several arguing that there is no proof that hatcheries can be used to rebuild endangered or threatened populations. The priority should instead be on moving away from hatcheries and further reliance on human interventions. In an article for the Globe and Mail (Mickleburgh, 2001), University of British Columbia Professor Carl Walters said, There’s something crazy about a system where you continue to do something when there is so little benefit…We have to get rid of this engineering mentality that doesn’t want to trust Mother Nature, that believes we humans can fix any problem that we humans create. We need to be patient. Let the recovery of our forests drive the recovery of our salmon (p. 2). Environmental NGOs used a similar framing to discuss hatchery risks to wild salmon. The David Suzuki Foundation criticized the policy for being “silent on the future of high-capacity hatcheries, which have been important for maintaining large-volume, mixed-stock fisheries that have been so destructive to individual runs” (DC, 2000a, p. 20). ENGO representatives expressed concerns about the genetic influence of domesticated hatchery genes on wild salmon, citing examples such as the Strait of Georgia where hatchery Coho “seem to have displaced the wild salmon” (DC, 2000b, p. 13). An alternative suggestion was raised at one of the ENGO meetings: that hatcheries should be evaluated in terms of the genetic diversity of the salmon they produce and their fitness. At the opposite end of the spectrum were groups advocating hatchery production should continue, or even increase. Two frames were advanced here: one deemphasizing the risks posed 67 by hatchery fish and one emphasizing the similarities of hatchery and wild salmon. Commercial fishers predominately employed the first frame, arguing that production is essential and should be a high priority to address recent declines. Among sport fishers, many participants denied or expressed doubts that hatchery fish had any negative effects on wild fish. In its submission, the BC Federation of Fly Fishers wrote, “Is there any hard evidence that salmon runs have deteriorated as a result of loss of genetic diversity attributable to enhancement operations?” (DC, 2000a, p. 16). In a similar vein, the Campbell River Guides Association expressed “profound concern with regard to what might be termed the over-zealous pursuit of biodiversity, a goal to be achieved regardless of negative social and economic impacts” (DC, 2000a, p. 21). Many sport fishers also employed the “similarity” frame, expressing skepticism of the genetic purity of wild fish. Participants using this frame questioned whether there are any stocks that have not been influenced by hatchery fish. At the meeting of commercial fishery representatives, participants argued that there is too much emphasis on the cultural value of salmon, with many agreeing with the sentiment, “They’re just fish” (DC, 2000a, p. 15). First Nations participants expressed both concerns about the risks of hatchery fish to wild populations and support for continuing enhancement. Genetic diversity was frequently identified as the highest priority. The Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council called for the government to commit more clearly to conserving the full range of genetic adaptations and restoring the diversity of populations, using hatcheries as a last resort in the face of extinction. A participant at the Haida Gwaii forum said, “our priority should be to sustain wild fish; those are the only fish that will continue to sustain Haida Gwaii; we should be very careful in proceeding down the path of cultivation” (DC, 2000a, p. 28). At the same time, there were acknowledgements from participants that hatchery salmon play vital roles in some communities. A Sliammon First 68 Nations speaker at the Sechelt forum identified several benefits of First Nations-run hatcheries: “[They are] important to keep for the food-fish they provide – we get many people who come down and get the carcasses we don’t use here when they are still fresh” (DC, 2000a, p. 50). An anonymous submission at a community meeting wrote, “Half our community is First Nations people and they depend on fishing for their survival” (DC, 2000a, p. 51). There was a similar sentiment expressed by some fishers: “If we have to make a choice between no fishing and putting hatchery fish in, I know where my priorities lie” (DC, 2000a, p. 15). What is clear is that defining something as wild has social consequences as well as ecological implications, and wildness is one factor among many for people that depend on the continued presence of salmon. 3.7 Discussion Two dominant frames emerged in the debates: hatchery salmon as genetically indistinguishable from wild salmon, and hatchery salmon as a threat to wild salmon. The act of counting fish can drastically change depending on how hatchery fish are defined. Given the unruly cross-boundary migration patterns of salmon, this means that decisions in the United States about how hatcheries should be run can have significant spillover effects in Canada. Over roughly the same period, Canada and the United States have wrestled over how to locate hatchery fish in wildlife conservation, but moments of agreement between the two countries have been brief (Table 3 above). Regulatory boundaries between Canada and the US were drawn irrespective of ecological processes or Indigenous governance (Wadewitz, 2012). The result is a varied policy landscape where salmon traverse legal and jurisdictional borders, as well as 69 definitions of wildness. This is more than a legal oddity – it has material consequences for how fisheries and hatcheries impact their surrounding environments.17 These divergent approaches represent attempts to redefine conventional notions of wildness as the absence of humans, and to translate this into policy. In the United States, the discourse took on a static, binary approach where hatchery fish were framed as either “genetically similar” to natural-born salmon or not. Early policies of the Fisheries Service, the arguments of the plaintiffs, and the judicial rulings and policies reflected an essentialist view of hatchery fish that assumes they have been and will continue to be a static entity, wild or not. The revised Fisheries Service policy allows for some discretion in assessing genetic similarity, but wild salmon remain the default baseline against which hatchery salmon are measured. In contrast, the Wild Salmon Policy introduces a temporal component in the form of its “two-generation” rule, where the benchmark is a fish’s distance from the hatchery system. As a result, the policy recognizes the potentiality (Grove, 2009) of hatchery fish, the fluidity of genetics, and the role of adaptation to different environments (human-engineered and natural) in the criteria for wildness. This exemplifies recent academic literature in ecology, geography, and environmental studies that is rethinking the meaning of wildness as relational (Minteer & Pyne 2015; Wuerthner, 2014; Van Horn & Hausdoerffer, 2017; Vannini & Vannini, 2019). Shiva (2017, p. 88) argues “if we are going to redefine wildness, we have to simultaneously redefine humans as cocreators” who actively cultivate the wild. Many Indigenous knowledge systems similarly view 17 This issue is part of a broader debate about the impact hatcheries have on surrounding ecosystems. For example, there are studies showing that hatcheries contribute to a loss of salmon-derived nutrients in surrounding ecosystems, as these salmon return to hatchery facilities rather than the natural environment (Warren & McClure, 2012). 70 nature as dynamic, animate, and emphasize the entanglements between humans and their surroundings (Atleo, 2010; Berkes, 2017; Todd, 2018; Vannini & Vannini, 2019). For example, Norgaard (2019) describes lessons learned from Ron Reed, a Karuk cultural biologist, about how traditional Karuk management practices of tending to flora and fauna are rooted in social responsibility to the land, but also to family, community, and political sovereignty. Norgaard (2019) compares this way of understanding to Western notions of wildness, quoting Anderson (2005): When the first Europeans visited California, therefore, they did not find in many places a pristine, virtually uninhabited wilderness but rather a carefully tended ‘garden’ that was the result of thousands of years of selective harvesting, tilling, burning, pruning, sowing, weeding, and transplanting (p. 125–126). Though Western scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledge are frequently characterized as difficult to reconcile, the expansion of genomic science to include a more relational view of human-wildlife dynamics may create space for engagement and the co-production of knowledge. The types of frames advanced by actors were shaped by the venue of the policy debate. While the Fisheries Service engaged in public consultations when revising the policy, the major shifts in the status of hatchery salmon were driven by legal tugs of war over the dividing line between wild and hatchery salmon, with businesses seeking to prevent what they saw as unnecessary endangered species protection. For example, the Alsea Valley Alliance used legal precedent and the original intent of the Endangered Species Act to make their case. In contrast, the Canadian frameworks regarding hatchery salmon were driven by an extended public consultation process. There, a broader array of actors, including academics and First Nations, could discuss a wider range of frames, such as cultural values and food sovereignty. It also allowed for more reflection on the part of actors themselves, rather than through legal counsel. 71 These protracted public engagements meant that Canada had no formal policy response to the potential threat of hatchery salmon until 2005, nearly a decade after the United States began to deal with the risks. However, Canada’s policy remained stable. When Fisheries and Oceans conducted another round of public consultations in 2017, the overwhelming response was that the policy should not be changed, suggesting that there remains strong support across stakeholders and over time (DFO, 2018b). This is a remarkable feat since, as Taylor (1999) notes, salmon politics have historically been divisive and solutions to stock declines are “elusive because participants have little in common” (p. 4). Although scientific knowledge played a central role, this suggests that careful attention to process is critical in the development of wildlife policy. 3.8 Conclusion The process of defining and categorizing wild salmon in policy is founded in what Foucault calls a “grid of knowledge constituted by natural history” (Foucault, 2005, p. 139). Natural history, through taxonomy, assigns an order, a structure, and a specific language to nature by isolating what can be observed. Advances in genomic science have rendered visible what was previously invisible, enabling debates about the genetic similarity of salmon at the sub-species level. However, new scientific knowledge has not settled the question of whether hatchery salmon pose risks to natural populations. Instead, the uncertainty became an opportunity through which salmon were framed through culturally and historically specific lenses, including Western scientific knowledge and economic interests (Lien & Law, 2011). The commodification of wild salmon, the value of access to water, the value of commercial and recreational fishing industries – these factors underscore what is at stake in debates over labels 72 such as “sustainable,” “wild-caught,” “natural,” as well as “endangered” or “wild” (Foley & Hébert, 2013; Hébert, 2010; Knapp et al., 2007). The debates over hatchery salmon show that wildness remains relevant, even as the idea of the Anthropocene takes hold in public discourse. Wildness in these instances operates as both a means of separating or differentiating nature, and as a benchmark against which the success of conservation efforts is measured. At stake is not only the sustainability of the species, but also the sustainability of industries and communities that rely on continued propagation of salmon. Thoreau (1862) famously wrote that “In wildness is the preservation of the world” (p. 17). While this is clearly reflected in the legal frameworks aimed at conserving wild salmon, the curious case of hatchery salmon flips Thoreau on his head. Through hatcheries, humans intervene into the agency, evolution, and genetic makeup of salmon that hybridize with their natural-born counterparts, blurring the wild/not wild boundary in policy and in practice. Human activity has so greatly altered the life cycles, productivity, and habitats of species around the world that conservation in the Anthropocene is increasingly reliant on further intervention – in other words, “In humans is the preservation of wildness.” However, the reality is far more complex. Human intervention through hatcheries has been shown to genetically alter the salmon they were created to conserve. In doing so, they destabilize the meanings and that have been ascribed to wild salmon as well as their place in human political and ecological assemblages. The Anthropocene can prompt conversations about how we relate to the non-human aspects of environments, and our obligations to “better science, better politics, and new forms of human–environment relation” (Lorimer, 2015, p. 34). The cases presented here show different attempts to wrestle with the ambiguity and the tension between the neat lines drawn by policy and the wild life that defies such boundaries. Rather than viewing this 73 tension solely as a problem to be solved, we suggest that it provides an opportunity to examine how state actors reconcile scientific uncertainty, conflicting claims to nature, and the ambiguous place of organisms altered through human intervention. 74 Chapter 4: Producing “Wild” Salmon 4.1 Introduction 2005 was a landmark year for Canada’s management of Pacific salmon. After six years of negotiating and public consultation, Fisheries and Oceans Canada – the federal department responsible for salmon management – announced the Wild Salmon Policy, an unprecedented commitment to the conservation of wild salmon. In doing so, however, the department needed to define what constitutes a “wild” salmon. They concluded that a wild salmon is the product of spawning in the natural environment for two or more generations. This definition excluded the millions of salmon that are produced every year in hatcheries along the British Columbia coast. Hatcheries are facilities where staff artificially breed and release salmon into the natural environment to supplement and restore wild populations. These fish were excluded on the basis that hatchery fish are so altered at a genetic level through domestication that they cannot be considered “wild.” A growing body of genomic science has shown that hatchery propagation has negative effects on population fitness, diversity, and behaviour (Berejikian & Ford 2004; Araki et al. 2008; Christie et al., 2012b; 2014). However, rather than moving away from artificial propagation in hatcheries, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has reshaped the institutional practice of producing salmon, embracing the seemingly paradoxical aim of producing salmon that are as close to wild as possible. This chapter interrogates what it means to produce a wild salmon. Wildness is typically understood as existing independent of human intervention. However, salmon hatcheries actively seek to produce wildness. While there has been increasing scholarly interest in the spaces between “fully captive” and “fully wild” (Braverman, 2014; 2015; Friese, 2013; Lorimer, 75 2015),18 there have been few empirical studies of what it means to produce approximations of wild life. This gap is particularly conspicuous considering the biodiversity crisis which makes human interventions into nature increasingly necessary (Clement & Standish, 2018). Drawing on sociological and geographic literature on biopolitics, conservation, and animal studies, this chapter pursues two objectives. First, it traces how wildness has come to be understood, produced, and managed at a molecular level. Second, it considers how advances in genomic science have expanded the range of human interventions into nature, from the molecular (e.g., genes, genomes) to the collective level (e.g., populations, species). The proliferation of genetic science has shifted the way that people think about and interact with nature (Braun, 2007). Biermann and Anderson (2017) argue that, as conservation has been increasingly reoriented towards the molecular level, “genes themselves have emerged as entities to be valued, protected, and policed” (p. 5). The molecularization of human and non-human life is becoming a central focus of biopolitics, a body of scholarship concerned with how modern governance fosters some forms of life, while letting others decline. This is most acutely seen in the context of breeding programs, where decisions about what forms of life should be fostered are translated into material realities in the biological makeup of captively bred populations. By intervening into the reproductive processes of Pacific salmon, hatcheries are a primary site where the state manages “lineages, reproductive practices, and bodily and genetic forms” (Biermann & Anderson, 2017, p. 5). Hatcheries are thus biopolitical in their mission and 18 “Strong” definitions of wild nature as spaces and organisms that have never been altered by human intervention were characteristic of preservationist approaches to conserving nature (Taylor, 2016). Contemporary conservation continues to distinguish between in situ (wilderness) and ex situ (captive) conservation, though recently this dichotomy has been expanded to recognize inter-situ dynamics and the continuum of human-nature interactions (Braverman, 2015). 76 operation, as they monitor and control the collective life and death of Pacific salmon through the differential valuation of wild life over domesticated life. Conservation is largely oriented towards species as its fundamental unit of analysis (Braverman, 2015). Recently, biopolitics scholars have sought to move beyond the focus on species to consider how individuals are implicated in and affected by species-focused conservation (Braverman, 2014; Chrulew, 2011; Fredriksen, 2016; van Dooren, 2016). Yet, managing salmon as genetic beings introduces additional levels at which decisions are made about what forms of life should be fostered: Which salmon are desired for breeding purposes? What proportion of hatchery fish in the larger population can the natural system support? How many hatcheries should operate, for what purpose, and where? Focusing on individual salmon or at entire salmon species overlooks the myriad decisions in between that affect what forms of life is being conserved. Without denying the importance of species as an orienting logic in conservation, this chapter seeks to broaden the biopolitical framework by asking what decisions are made between individuals and species. In doing so, it draws attention to the multiple, interconnected actors and decision-making frameworks used to govern wild life. This approach is informed by Biermann and Anderson’s (2017, p. 10) appeal to expand “the possibilities of what conservation involves and who is authorized to take part in debates and decisions about what life should be protected, how, why, and for whom.” Through 46 interviews with individuals involved in Canadian hatchery management, I assess the many interconnected levels of biopolitics in salmon management and uncover how hatcheries have adapted institutional practices in response to novel genetic ways of defining wildness. The chapter begins by describing the empirical setting of this study, Pacific salmon hatcheries in Canada, and the objectives driving salmon enhancement. The next section sets out 77 the analytical framework of biopolitics, traces the reconceptualization of wildness as a genetic phenomenon, and the simultaneous framing of domestication as a threat. I find that wildness is managed and produced at six levels in hatcheries: genetic, individual, epigenetic, broodstock (mature male and female salmon used in breeding), population, and species. The chapter then discusses three issues that emerged from the interviews: (i) expanding the scales of biopolitics in conservation; (ii) the role of power and knowledge in decision-making; and (iii) the rise of genes and genomes as orienting principles in conservation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of expanded scales for biopolitical conservation in other areas of environmental governance. 4.2 The Biopolitics of Producing Wildlife The term biopolitics originated from Foucault’s (1978) account of the transition from sovereign power – the right to take life or let live – to biopower in the modern era, which is exercised throughthe right to make live or let die. Governance in this modern era is characterized by the right to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault, 1978, p. 138). Biopower manifests in two ways. The first is what Foucault terms “anatamo-politics,” or power over individuals, focused on disciplining and optimizing the body’s capabilities in order to sustain economic growth. The second is “biopolitics of the population,” the control of species-level biological processes such as birth, death, reproduction, and various metrics of “health.” While Foucault’s analysis did not extend beyond humans, a wealth of research has expanded on his original ideas to study human-nature interactions, and particularly in the realm of conservation (Braverman, 2015; Frederiksen, 2016; Lorimer & Driessen, 2013; Rinfret, 2009). 78 Biopolitics as an analytical approach calls attention to the social processes through which life itself is differentiated and valued. The connection between biopolitics and conservation lies in the field’s overt focus on saving life, pairing biology with value judgements of which lives should be actively supported and which represent risks to species of conservation concern. This is predicated on the production of difference in order to categorize bodies, such as through taxonomic classifications or along several divides: normal/abnormal, pure/impure, natural/unnatural (Biermann & Mansfield, 2014). These divisions translate into policies and practices with material consequences for the targets of biopolitical interventions. Thus, an objective of biopolitical research is to trace the underlying logics, narratives, and forms of expertise that support and legitimize the exercise of power over human and non-human life. What of wildness? As Collard (2012) notes, biopolitics is not only exercised on captive or domesticated animals such as livestock – humans also monitor, regulate, and intervene in the lives and movements of wild animals. To this, Braverman (2015) adds that contemporary conservation cannot be understood in reference to the extremes of “wild” and “tame.” Rather, conservation today involves the production of knowledge about how wild a species is, and greater degrees of wildness are more desired and valued.19 A consequence of viewing wildness as something that can be produced genetically is that the pursuit of creating wild nature can justify the expansion of biopower through interventions into “ecosystems, species, and bodies” than would otherwise be accepted in conservation (Biermann & Anderson, 2017, p. 8). This is 19 Most notably, the contemporary movement to “re-wild” nature takes this to its core. Rewilding encompasses a range of actions aimed at restoring landscapes to prehistoric or premodern states of ecosystem functionality, such as through the re-introduction or restoration of keystone species (Lorimer, 2017). 79 exemplified in techniques such as artificial breeding and genetic modification, where undesired characteristics are weeded out or minimized in the pursuit of a desired outcome. Thus far, much of the focus in non-human biopolitics has followed Foucault’s original emphasis on anatamo-politics at the level of individuals and biopower at the level of species. In part, this is because conservation privileges species as its fundamental unit of analysis. Srinivasan (2014) observes that although individual animals are sometimes considered, it is predominately higher levels of organization – at populations, species, and ecosystems – that are treated as the appropriate ontological scales for directing attention and care. However, the rise of genetics as an orienting logic in conservation invites a re-examination of the scales at which biopower operates. For example, genetic hybridization between domestic and captive animals makes other biological scales such as breeding pairs and families salient to conservation. Hennessy (2013; 2015) showed that in efforts to conserve endangered tortoises, the genetics of parents are critical to producing offspring that carry on the right “alleles” to produce the desired lineage. Expanding the focus of biopolitics research beyond the dichotomy of individual and species is critical to fully capture how conservation distinguishes between desired and undesired forms of life and how these differences are made material through further interventions. 4.2.1 Wild as Genetic, Domestic as Threat A central theme in contemporary biopolitics research is the consequences of “the molecular turn,” wherein life has been reconceptualized in relation to genetic inheritance (Braun, 2007; Hennessy, 2015; Rose, 2007). Genetic data has been valuable for conservationists seeking to understand “how evolutionary processes such as genetic drift, selection, and migration shape genetic and phenotypic variation of natural populations, and population structure,” and (ii) 80 “describing the effects of low effective population size on genetic variation and population viability” – a phenomenon commonly referred to as bottlenecking (Shafer et al., 2015, p. 79). The development of genomic sequencing can generate far more detailed information about domestication, adaptation, variation, population health, and population history, at increasingly lower costs, while providing this information to policy-makers to inform conservation goals and decision-making. This advance is attributable to several Next Generation Sequencing techniques, including transcriptome sequencing, whole-genome resequencing, and genotyping of variable genetic markers (e.g., SNPs). Most significantly for the present discussion is the ability for genetic and genomic science to identify biological markers of difference (Lorimer, 2015) between wild and captive populations. In the context of wildlife conservation, the pursuit of wildness has encompassed: (i) a spatial focus on restoring and protecting wilderness and wild habitat, and (ii) an embodied focus on wild as the antonym of domesticated. Though the definition of domestication is broad and unresolved, it is usually defined as a reciprocal relationship in which organisms mutually influence one another, producing differential physiological or behavioural outcomes. Domestication is frequently located historically in the context of human evolution as a moment in time where humans mastered nature, transforming the progression of human societies in the process (York & Mancus, 2013). Zeder (2015) argues that changes at a genetic level are the closest physical approximation and most compelling indication that domestication has occurred. This marks the transformation of wildness into a biological phenomenon that can be measured and managed, shifting the ontological scale for conserving wildlife from the level of ecosystems or species to the molecular level of genes. In practice, this translates into biopolitical efforts to 81 separate genetically pure and impure animals, reducing the risk of genetic pollution and hybridization among wild and domesticated populations (Fredriksen, 2016). The molecular turn can be seen in efforts to understand hatchery salmon as genetically distinct from wild. Whereas most salmon do not survive the initial stages of life, hatcheries provide a safe environment, food, and a better chance at survival – between 70 and 80% survive those initial years (egg-to-smolt), compared to just 6% without hatchery help (Beamish et al., 2012). Young Pacific salmon then follow their natural migration routes, travelling great distances across the Pacific Ocean for several years and returning to their natal stream where they spawn and die. During the brief time that juvenile salmon spend in hatcheries, they become adapted to the hatchery environment, decreasing the likelihood that they will survive the marine environment (Frankham 2008; Fraser 2008; Christie et al. 2012a). In a study of coho salmon, Le Luyer et al. (2017) found that captive rearing environments enrich certain biological functions that may affect marine survival for hatchery-reared salmon. What is at stake in the biopolitical production of wild salmon is both social and ecological. This body of research provides a possible explanation for some of the reasons why hatchery fish have been shown to have poorer survival in marine environments. This reduced fitness can be spread through multiple generations if hatcheries continue to use hatchery-born salmon to breed the next generation of salmon (Berejikian & Ford 2004; Araki et al. 2008). This is a concern, as salmon act independently of human management frameworks, sometimes returning not to the hatchery as intended but to nearby freshwater systems, where they mate with naturally born salmon. Producing salmon that are closer to wild is therefore integral to the success of hatcheries as conservation tools and to their legitimacy as ways to manage sustainable fisheries. 82 The implications are significant. Pacific salmon are highly economically valued species, supporting commercial ($108 million USD annually) and recreational ($238 million USD annually) fishing industries in British Columbia (Gislason et al., 2017). Moreover, they are culturally invaluable, both for Indigenous communities for whom they are cultural keystone species, and for non-Indigenous coastal communities (Bottom et al., 2009; Garibaldi & Turner, 2004). The question remains, how are hatcheries adapting to evolving scientific evidence of genetic risks, and how does this alter the salmon they produce? 4.3 Methodology The data for this study come from 46 interviews conducted with genome scientists and government officials working for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), the Canadian federal department responsible for managing fisheries and protecting oceans and freshwater ecosystems from human impacts. This research was conducted as part of a larger genomics study titled Enhancing Production in Coho: Culture, Community, Catch (EPIC4). Geographically, this research is located in British Columbia, Canada, where the vast majority of Pacific salmon hatcheries operate in Canada (MacKinlay et al., 2004). I followed a purposive sampling method (Weiss, 1995) to identify knowledgeable informants that are involved in the Salmon Enhancement Program (the federal program responsible for managing hatcheries) including in hatchery operations, management, and research pertaining to hatchery salmon genomics. The data for this study comprises interviews with 27 hatchery workers at 15 hatchery facilities,20 13 20 Hatcheries were included in this sample if they are part of the federal Salmon Enhancement Program hatchery system. As a result, one interview with an independently owned and operated hatchery was not included. 83 government staff working in the Salmon Enhancement Program, and 6 federal genomic scientists. The sample maximized variation in hatcheries for size and production goals (harvest, conservation, education). Interview questions followed three lines of inquiry: (i) respondents’ views of conservation and wildness (e.g. “In your opinion, what is it that makes a salmon wild?”); (ii) respondents’ views of the purpose and efficacy of hatcheries (e.g. “What do you see as the main purpose of hatcheries?”); and, (iii) respondents’ familiarity with and assessments of the risks and benefits of genomics in general and as applied to hatcheries. This third category covered a series of questions related to genomic applications in salmon hatcheries, including: genetic diversity mapping, refined Conservation Units, parentage-based tagging, and epigenetics. Prior to constructing the interview protocol, the authors conducted a review of newspaper articles pertaining to Pacific salmon hatcheries in Canada and the United States from 2000 to 2015. This background research informed some questions asked (e.g., whether there are behavioural or genetic differences between hatchery and non-hatchery salmon) and facilitated the development of initial codes that were used in subsequent data analysis. I analyzed the data in three steps. First, I developed an initial set of codes related to (1) definitions and meaning of wildness in hatchery and non-hatchery salmon; (2) hatchery goals, risks, and practices; and (3) genomic science applications in hatchery management based on existing scholarly literature (e.g., MacKinlay et al., 2004; Le Luyer et al., 2017), and background data analysis of newspaper articles. These codes were used to deductively identify relevant segments of text, and inductively generate additional codes from the interview transcripts, negotiating differences in coding where they emerged (Campbell et al., 2013). Multiple readings of the coded texts were conducted to identify emergent patterns and to reduce the data to the 84 most relevant and meaningful codes. These codes were analyzed for themes that summarized the key findings (Attride-Stirling, 2001). Four questions guided the analysis: (i) How is wildness defined? (ii) How is wild/domestic life valued/devalued? (iii) What practices are used to produce wild life? (iv) What form(s) of life is being targeted for intervention? The themes were then stratified according to the ontological scale (Srinivasan, 2014) at which wildness is managed, starting with individual salmon, then broadening outwards to their immediate environment, then to families of salmon, populations, and finally salmon species. 4.4 Findings Interviews with people working in hatchery and salmon management revealed six levels at which wildness is understood and managed: genes, individuals, epigenetics, broodstock, populations, and species. The following sections expand on each of these levels in turn, exploring how wildness is defined and how this definition is translated into the practice of producing salmon in hatcheries. 4.4.1 Genes – What is a “wild” gene/genome? Distinguishing between hatchery and wild fish begins at the molecular level. There were two predominant ways in which respondents characterized what differentiates wild and hatchery genes. The first relates to a salmon’s lineage. For a salmon to be considered wild, a defining characteristic is that its genes are inherited from salmon that are also wild. As a reflection of this, one respondent defined a wild salmon as “a genetically wild salmon that’s a fish that’s parents were wild, and [also its] grandparents, … it is adapted to live in the combination of mountain 85 stream and ocean that we have in British Columbia” (Participant 29, Hatchery biologist). Over time, the genes that helped previous generations of salmon survive are passed to their progeny. This connects to the second way that respondents defined “wild genes” – as the product of natural selection. There are local adaptations that distinguish salmon coming from different river systems and different regions, contributing to the diversity of genetic material among “wild” salmon. Selective pressures in the natural environment, such as predators or disease, confer advantages to individuals with certain genetic or genomic material that contributes to their survival. From a conservation perspective, the degree to which human activities contribute to these selection pressures can affect the genetic makeup of organisms typically considered “wild”. As one hatchery technician explained, “Even a heavy fishery on the outside of a stream that has no human impact on it, can change the genetics because you’re fishing for a size or you’re taking the early part of the run.” Just as “wild” fish become adapted to their particular streams, hatchery fish similarly adapt to the hatchery environment, which is intentionally free of diseases, parasites, predators – anything that would lower survival. This lack of natural selection preserves some genes that would not survive in the natural environment. A hatchery manager described this problem, saying: There is probably 80 percent of the fish we release would never make it in the wild so there is no real selection pressure on those fish to, you know, have genetically stronger ones or whatever… it’s allowing fish that may not otherwise survive, and then potentially come back and reproduce. So, you potentially are propagating genes that are less successful in a natural environment. (Participant 13, Hatchery manager) Thus, for respondents working in connection to salmon hatcheries, understanding how human actions alter wildness at a molecular level is foundational to the decisions made at all other scales of conservation. 86 4.4.2 Individuals – How “wild” is this fish? The dominant framework in Canada that defines a wild salmon is the Wild Salmon Policy, wherein wild salmon are defined as two generations removed from the hatchery system. This means that in order for hatchery fish to become wild, they must stray, spawn in the wild, and have their progeny also return to spawn in the wild, creating a fish that meets the threshold for wildness in Canada. Determining whether or not a salmon counts as wild is more than a scientific exercise – it is critical to salmon conservation. One of the main objectives of hatcheries is to produce fish to be caught by fisheries. However, hatchery fish released in large numbers can mix with wild salmon populations in the river, including wild salmon that are conservation concerns. Thus, although hatchery fish are valued as fish to be caught, they may bring greater fishing pressures to struggling wild salmon stocks. The ability to distinguish between hatchery and wild fish would enable fisheries managers to restrict fishers to catching only hatchery salmon, minimizing the risks of hatcheries to wild salmon. Because it is impossible to distinguish between hatchery salmon and wild salmon based on physical appearance alone, hatcheries mark individual salmon bodies before they leave the hatchery. This is done primarily through clipping or removing the adipose fin, a small fin on the back of Pacific salmon close to the tail. However, due to a lack of resources and political pressure, most hatchery salmon are not marked. The resulting patchwork of marking across British Columbia means that physical markings cannot be relied upon to distinguish salmon. A community advisor describes the problem with using marking to differentiate wild and hatchery salmon: You know, in hatchery programs we talk about marked, unmarked hatchery versus wild but that doesn’t really ... just because it’s an unmarked fish doesn’t mean it’s a wild fish. There’s lots of unmarked juvenile salmon, especially Coho release. So, I think going by 87 the Wild Salmon Policy that would be my definition. (Participant 125, Community advisor) Still, even if mass marking were achieved, there is no way to tell if a salmon returning with its adipose fin is the first or second generation removed from the hatchery. This is where genetic science can be (and in some cases already is) used to render visible the markers of hatchery lineage. Rather than a physical tag, fisheries departments use genetic stock identification (GSI) to connect individual salmon to genetically defined stocks. In such cases, molecular-scale data about genetic inheritance are bridging individual- and population-level conservation and connecting salmon across space and time. Moreover, genetic analysis of individual fish can trace the contributions of hatchery-adapted genes, even if the fish being analyzed is taken from a system without a hatchery. This information can guide decisions at higher levels, such as broodstock selection where salmon could be screened out if they are not “wild” per the Wild Salmon Policy’s definition but were not physically marked as hatchery fish. It is important to note that not all respondents supported the Wild Salmon Policy’s definition of wildness. Some considered hatchery fish sufficiently “wild” because they only remain in the hatchery for a portion of their life. For example, this hatchery worker considers a salmon that spawns outside of a hatchery to be essentially wild: So, I’m not too worried about all this. Wild salmon, I think yeah, you make some guidelines, two generations of wild is a horrible definition. I think yeah, okay, if you want the one generation, as long as you’ve got the vast majority spawning, successfully spawning in the river, I think it’s going to work out. (Participant 55, Hatchery manager) A hatchery worker at a different facility echoed this sentiment: Some groups seem to think that if you ever touch a fish in any capacity, it's no longer wild, you know. So, I consider these fish that we work with, all wild stock fish, even though we have enhanced component of the run. … We let them go into [the] creek. When they come back, they spawn in [the] creek. They're still …spawning in the same 88 time, same place, as their siblings and parents were. You know, so, they're still wild fish. (Participant 63, Hatchery technician) For the majority of respondents, the brief time that salmon spend in the hatchery system is enough to deem their life history distinct from that of a “truly” wild salmon, though respondents differed on whether a wild salmon has to be two-generations removed, per the Wild Salmon Policy. As one hatchery manager explained, In the United States, a wild salmon is just considered one that was hatched not in a hatchery. I tend to see that. If a fish has lived its entire life in the wild, I think tends to be wild salmon. (Participant 46, Hatchery manager) For others, two generations doesn’t go far enough. This “strong” stance on wildness is reflected by one hatchery manager: To me a wild salmon would be a strain or a certain stock of fish that hasn’t been manipulated or changed in any way from its natural habitat, or natural patterns and routines and that. It’s been able just to carry on how it always has. (Participant 28, Hatchery manager) These sentiments demonstrate the complex mix of meanings ascribed to wildness in contemporary conservation, from ideas of a pristine wilderness to one that welcomes human intervention. 4.4.3 Epigenetic – How “wild” are the fish in this environment? The next step looks outside the individual to its surroundings. The predominant question at this level is how the environment in which a fish is reared affects its wildness. A new method for analyzing genomic information – epigenetics – can help shed light on some of the possible pathways through which hatcheries domesticate the salmon they produce. Epigenetic science is bringing together two facets of wildness that have previously been conceptualized as distinct 89 forces: nature and nurture, or biological determinism and environmental conditions. As one hatchery biologist explained: It’s not so much the genes itself, the DNA code itself, but it’s things that activate various aspects of the DNA code and there’s this epigenetic thing where you can have the same genetics, the same DNA code but it will respond slightly differently based on other things that are outside of the DNA code and that’s really interesting science. (Participant 29, Hatchery biologist) From an epigenetic perspective, the difference between hatchery and wild salmon is not the presence of wild or domesticated genes, but how any given gene becomes differentially expressed depending on the “wildness” of the environment. Thus, the target of biopolitical intervention at this level is the built environments of hatcheries. To produce fish that are more wild, hatcheries need to create spaces that can produce fish that are more likely to survive the journey to the ocean and back. In response to emerging epigenetic studies, some hatchery managers and staff are working with genomic scientists to conduct experiments by altering rearing environment, altering existing socio-ecological assemblages (Daniels & Mather, 2017). This ongoing “wild experiment” (Lorimer & Driessen, 2014) involves creating an environment that more closely resembles the natural conditions, by introducing debris and natural materials, altering feeding methods, or simulating predators, for example: In terms of in the hatchery itself, some of our hatcheries use what they refer to as a semi-natural approach. So, instead of just having large concrete empty ponds starting to put things like Christmas trees into there. Some of them float around with rubber ducks, or we’ve got a couple places where they’ve actually taken pink flamingos and started scaring them, trying to simulate a predator from above. We’ll start to feed them from below, so that’s something we do for a week or two before release. Instead of feeding them from above like we do normally, have food being injected in from below, like natural food like krill or things like that so they become used to forging and finding the food on their own. (Participant 46, Hatchery manager) 90 While uncertainty remains as to the relative significance and permanence of environmental genomic changes for survival, epigenetics is actively shaping hatchery decision-making with the aim of fostering salmon that are as close to wild as possible. 4.4.4 Broodstock – How “wild” are these fish? If lineage is a foundational lens through which hatchery staff and management define wildness, then the practice of breeding is critical to understanding how wildness is produced. To safeguard against potential genetic risks posed by artificial propagation, hatcheries in Canada aim to use wild salmon for their broodstock (DFO, 2016). As described above (ii. Individuals), unmarked hatchery salmon are impossible to visually differentiate from salmon originated from the natural environment. Even where marking is used, it is still impossible to ascertain whether an individual fish was born to parents were also produced by natural spawning. The only way for hatcheries to determine whether they are using wild salmon in their broodstock is to use genomic analysis. Parentage Based Tagging (PBT) is a method that uses genomic sequencing to compare an individual salmon’s genetic makeup to a reference database of salmon that have passed through hatcheries. As one genomicist explains, this means that an individual salmon caught in the ocean can be analyzed for its genetic connections to hatchery lineages, down to the specific parents used in artificial propagation, the hatchery of origin, and the brood year: One of the key things for the management of our species was not only telling what stock fish came from, ‘cause we knew we could do that, but also providing an age to that fish. And so, by assigning it back to the parents you establish the brood year and, hence, the age of the fish as well. (Participant 110, Genomic scientist) This information is critically important to hatchery managers in the selection of individual salmon as broodstock (Beacham et al., 2019). It also further refines existing knowledge about the 91 genetic risks that hatcheries pose to wild fish: “parentage-based tagging…allows you to construct a pedigree and that allows you to look at differential survival and differential reproductive output of hatchery versus wild fish” (Participant 26, Genomic scientist). One hatchery where parentage information is being used to guide breeding is Hatchery 124. A nearby run of Chinook salmon in the Narrows River is both genetically unique and has been experiencing declines in survival. To restore the Narrows run, Hatchery 124 has been analyzing the genetics of the fish it uses to breed the next generation “to get back to just a pure Narrows fish” that existed before enhancement (Participant 59, Hatchery staff). A hatchery manager at another facility describes this process: They catch the adults but they don’t take the eggs and sperm right there – they bring them back to Hatchery 124, tag each fish with a number, take a DNA sample off each one, send it to the lab, and in two days they know if the fish is a Narrows fish. (Participant 134, Hatchery manager) There is a consequence of pursuing genetic purity, however. Any fish that is discovered to be from a different river is killed. This has generated some disagreements between hatchery staff at Hatchery 124 and other hatcheries, some of whom support this intensive conservation effort and some who see the killing of non-Narrows fish as unethical and a waste of effort. In particular, opponents view straying – where salmon return to a different river than the location of their birth – as natural behaviour and something that has helped contribute to genetic diversity. Killing fish that have come to Narrows River from other rivers violates their views of ethical human-nature interactions. This is exemplified by the following exchange with a hatchery technician: Q: Do you see any other sort of risks or ethical issues associated with genomic tools like [parentage-based tagging]? A: Just the culling of fish that don’t need to be killed. I mean, it’s – if you catch every single fish out of every single river, I guarantee you, they’re not going to be all Hatchery 124 or all Narrows or all Swift Current, there’s definitely going to be 92 straying. I think that’s genetic diversity working naturally, instead of us trying to achieve that on our own, to try and make some sort of ideal strain of fish, which – who’s to say that these Narrows fish that they caught originally with this Narrows DNA? That could have been a Swift Current and Narrows fish that made that salmon … they’re not going to have a true strain. (Participant 73, Hatchery technician) Another application of parentage-based tagging is to mimic natural mate pairings by selecting for fish that are not direct siblings. When asked about parentage-based tagging, a hatchery technician said, “So, parental based tagging… We sample a fish and go, ‘Oh, that's Mike and Debbie. They’re brothers and sisters.’ We won’t spawn those.” (Participant 63, Hatchery technician). This gives hatcheries another means of producing salmon that are closer to wild by minimizing the inbreeding that can potentially occur in hatcheries, where a handful of salmon are used to generate thousands of offspring. From the view of hatchery staff, PBT is a promising way forward for salmon conservation and management but has yet to be implemented across all hatcheries. Yes, [parentage-based tagging is] absolutely on the radar. PBT is really, really valuable. It’s just going to be a matter of do we have these, people space and lab time and lab money to actually go through thousands upon thousands of DNA tags? (Participant 7, Hatchery manager) The optimistic but qualified reception by hatchery staff to parentage-based tagging methods demonstrates the difficulty of changing the way that salmon are produced in response to novel scientific tools and information. Institutional practices are slow to shift. At the same time, the level of broodstock and genetic lineage is one of the scales at which we can most clearly see a burgeoning analytical capability for how hatcheries manage for wildness. 93 4.4.5 Population – How “wild” is this river? At the population level, wild and domesticated life is intermingled, as there are fish from both hatchery and natural origins occupying similar space in rivers. Wildness, therefore, is assessed as a function of how much enhancement has altered salmon-bearing rivers and streams. Respondents identified multiple risks that hatchery fish can pose to wild populations, including overcrowding rivers, consuming the limited amount of food, and mating with wild populations. In developing annual plans for hatchery production, several measures are taken to minimize the risk of hatchery influence on “wild” salmon in the same rivers. Hatchery biologists and genomic scientists assess whether hatcheries should alter the number of fish they produce, when they should release hatchery salmon, and which rivers and creeks should be used to release hatchery salmon. A community advisor explained the significance of these decisions: I think the key is maintaining that sustainability in making choices about your expectations for that particular system where, if it is enhanced, at what proportion are you enhancing and what genetics are you trying to maintain? … So, if I get a group that wants to go into a stream and say, “You know what, I think there’s not enough fish … we’re going to take all the fish out of there and we’re going to enhance.” No. That goes against our Wild Salmon Policy and we want that proportion of wild salmon. Domestication, it’s a guideline, and it’s going to come down to choices. There’s certain systems where 95% of the Chinook in the system are enhanced fish. (Participant 18, Community advisor) Respondents also saw the question of proportional wildness as key to the overall success of hatcheries: Success for this department – I’ll just speak for the hatchery itself – is if we did enough enhancement work and enough stock assessment work that wild stocks could return and we wouldn’t have such a high hatchery contribution in the rivers and the watersheds around here. (Participant 47, Hatchery manager) A newly developed framework for understanding and quantifying the amount of wildness in a river is the Proportionate Natural Influence (PNI) (Fast et al. 2015). The proportion of hatchery-origin fish can be compared to the proportion of natural-origin fish, dividing the proportion of 94 hatchery-origin fish by the sum of the proportion of hatchery- and natural-origin salmon in a given area. The resulting percentage can be compared to a linear continuum between “fully wild” and “fully hatchery,” providing stream-by-stream assessments of wildness. This information can be used in decisions about the number of fish that each hatchery should be producing, and where they should be released. With PNI, the wildness of a population becomes a quantifiable phenomenon that can alter hatchery operations at a more refined level than Conservation Units (see 4.4.6. Species below). 4.4.6 Species – How “wild” is this species? The taxonomic use of the term species to classify and delineate groups of individuals is complex and disputed but is often defined in relation to reproductive isolation. That is, a species is a community of populations that are reproductively isolated from others – as Braverman (2015) writes, “a species is a protected gene pool” (p. 298). The question of whether hatchery and wild salmon constitute the same species has been the subject of political, legal, and scientific debate (Berseth & Matthews, 2021). In Canada, for the purposes of management, the federal government groups salmon into Conservation Units (CUs), which are defined as: “a group of wild salmon sufficiently isolated from other groups that, if lost, is very unlikely to recolonize naturally within an acceptable timeframe (e.g., a human lifetime or a specified number of salmon generations)” (DFO 2005, p. vi). Therefore, by definition, hatchery fish are excluded from Conservation Units. At this level, wildness is impacted by the overall composition of large, high-volume hatcheries and small-scale conservation-oriented enhancement projects. Management decisions involve creating annual production plans, which set out the number of salmon that hatcheries 95 produce and assessing where and when to open or close hatcheries. These decisions are based on several factors, including the delicate balance of economic and conservation interests. The current built infrastructure for hatcheries originated decades ago during the push for huge salmon production for fisheries supplementation. An assessment biologist explains the consequences of this for conservation: I mean, some of these hatcheries have been there for 30 years or whatever. … Like the objective of the program originally was to double the amount of fish that was available for harvest. … It’s only recently we’ve moved more and more into rebuilding objectives. So, if it’s a rebuilding objective then yes, you are trying to rebuild to a wild population so that’s when you want as little intervention [as possible], but if it’s a harvest objective and you’re just putting them out there to be caught maybe you want dumb fish, you know what? However, when asked about how often decisions are made to close hatcheries, there were few respondents who had encountered hatchery closures. Even if the department decided to close hatcheries to minimize their impacts on wild salmon, doing so would likely prove difficult as these practices have enormous public support. A senior hatchery biologist described efforts to close hatcheries in the 1990s, which were met with “huge community pushback” by the “huge fan club” that supports hatcheries. It is interesting to note that managing for wildness at the Conservation Unit level is operationally difficult in ways that some of the genomic applications in hatcheries are not. This sentiment was expressed by another hatchery biologist: Some of the stuff that’s been hush hush, like questions about hatchery/wild interactions that nobody really wanted to talk about. … Shutting down a hatchery used to just be – you wouldn’t even mention that, and now it seems to be more if we have to shut down a hatchery, we shut down a hatchery, right? I mean it will go up to the Minister and it probably won’t happen, but at least we can provide biological rationale as to “this is why, these are the impacts, the risks, and it’s not meeting whatever objectives that it’s intended to meet.” (Participant 1, Hatchery biologist) 96 Several respondents also noted difficulties in implementing Conservation Units in their work at the hatchery level. [A] Conservation Unit is pretty big and broad, and we have, you know, for example, one Conservation Unit for coho on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, but each river system has its own distinct, genetically different stock. And so, Conservation Units are a pretty broad-brush approach…. (Participant 56, Hatchery manager) Another staff member at the same hatchery pointed out the implications of this “broad brush approach” to conservation for fishing pressures on wild salmon: Well, it gets tough when you’ve got a multiple [hatchery] system. … if they’re fishing our stock and this is a bad thing about the hatchery, that we’re producing fish for people to catch. They’re also going to be catching that stock because that fish doesn’t have a flag on it saying, “I’m from X hatchery and you can’t keep me.” So, hatcheries have their bad points also because they are devastating some of the natural fish or killing off some rivers, there’s nothing that anybody’s going to be able to do about that. (Participant 37, Hatchery technician) The inability to prevent fishing pressures from incidentally targeting wild runs of salmon suggests limits to the biopower exacted through hatcheries – there are aspects of the human-nature relationship that cannot be wholly addressed through genomic technological advancements and hatchery reforms. The picture that emerges from these interviews is an ongoing struggle with the genetic risks that hatchery-produced salmon pose for wild salmon. Smaller changes in hatchery practices, which seek to produce fish that are “more wild,” are more possible than through more drastically shifting the landscape of human intervention into salmon at the highest levels. 4.5 Discussion Rather than a singular definition of wildness, interviews with hatchery staff, managers, and scientists revealed a multi-faceted and multi-layered concept. Although respondents made 97 references to Western ideas about a pure, pristine wildness separate from human interference, these references were intermingled with another idea – that wildness is a function of genes. This suggests that genetic science has not replaced conventional ideas about wildness, but that the meaning of wildness is being transformed by both new genetic knowledge and changing cultural understanding of the role of wildness in nature. Pacific salmon hatcheries have operationalized wildness as a genetic phenomenon at multiple levels. At the molecular scale, genes are understood as wild or not based on genetic inheritance and their adaptation to conditions in the local natural environment. It is these processes – inheritance and adaptation – that contribute to the domestication of hatchery salmon over time. In just one generation, hatchery-produced salmon become adapted to captivity (Christie et al., 2012a). Because hatcheries protect juvenile salmon from the selective pressures that weed out weaker salmon in the early years, they produce salmon that have poorer fitness in the natural environment. Hatcheries’ artificial environments also produce salmon with different epigenetics, or gene expressions, than their natural counterparts in ways that negatively impact their ability to survive. These effects make distinguishing between individual wild and hatchery salmon and tracing lineages a priority for hatcheries. Unintentionally using hatchery-adapted salmon in their broodstock means that hatcheries amplify these effects among salmon families. Without the ability to distinguish between wild and domesticated salmon, hatcheries are challenged in their efforts to operate as tools for salmon conservation and as a sustainable means of supporting fishing industries. Trying to balance these objectives of conservation and production has raised questions about how wild salmon rivers are (and should be), and whether hatcheries should be scaled back or closed to mitigate risks to wild populations and whole 98 species. All of these ontological scales, between the molecular and the species, are important to understanding what it is that makes a salmon wild. This raises questions about where and how biopower operates. Salmon hatcheries are sites where the state exercises its power over nature to “make live” and “let die.” However, not all forms of salmon life are desired and valued. Domesticated life in the form of maladapted genes, altered epigenomes, and individuals born of hatchery lineages (or born in the hatchery themselves), are actively discouraged in policy and practice. At the same time, a range of techniques of power are used to foster salmon lives that are closer to “wild.” Some technologies, such as genomic sequencing, fin clipping, and parentage-based tagging, are aimed at distinguishing between valued and risky life. Others are more direct in their interventions, such as reshaping the physical spaces in which salmon are raised and culling fish that threaten pure lineages of threatened stocks that are being restored. A third category comprises tools of assessment - proportionate natural influence calculations and management plans – that seek to quantify wildness at higher scales and adjust the scope of human interventions into the natural environment. As Srinivasan (2014) and others (Friese, 2013; Fredriksen, 2016) have argued, biopolitics involves ethical dilemmas about whether and how to care about individual animals while trying to conserve whole species. However, by expanding the present analysis to all levels at which wild life is produced, a more complex picture emerges. Genetic flows between hatchery and wild populations demonstrate the importance of a multi-scalar analysis for understanding wildlife management. Looking only at the species level – in this case, the Conservation Unit – would neglect issues of broodstock, epigenetics, river compositions (PNI), and the difficulties in distinguishing between hatchery and wild fish. 99 Genomic science provides an expanded suite of tools and concepts to categorize and classify salmon along wild/domesticated lines, but its translation into broad-based conservation practice has been uneven. This reflects both practical challenges, such as lack of resources, and organizational objectives that seek to balance between human and salmon well-being. Within hatcheries, one of the priorities for technicians and hatchery managers is how to produce hatchery fish that are as wild as possible. These decisions and practices reflect the way that people defined wildness, factoring in both life cycle and genetics, with the hope that over time those fish will support a self-sustaining wild population (or, at least, minimize the risks that hatcheries pose to wild salmon survival). Outside the hatchery, Fisheries and Oceans staff responsible for salmon management are faced with decisions that involve balancing conservation objectives with the goal of producing fish to harvest – for First Nations, commercial, and recreational fishers. These decisions are less flexible, involve more public input, and are made in the context of external political influences. While some hatcheries are engaging with genomic science in concerted efforts to change, there has been a slower institutional shift at higher levels of management. 4.6 Conclusion From the conventional view of wildness as that which is apart from humans, the dilemma facing conservation scientists and practitioners is paradoxical. To conserve the wildness of species in the natural environment, careful and concerted effort is required at multiple levels of management. In fact, wildness is multi-faceted, shaped by cultural worldviews, time, geography, and interactions between and among organisms and their environments. I find that attending to the multiple levels at which the genetics of wildness is managed, we can see some parallels to 100 recent scholarship on wildness as relational (Collard 2012, Wuerthner 2014, Van Horn & Hausdoerffer 2017). Vannini and Vannini (2019), for example, describe wildness as the spiritual force of vitality present in the multiple entanglements between organisms. Over long periods of time, this vitality contributes to dynamism and change in wild life. Advances in genomic science, such as epigenetics, provide an avenue for more carefully investigating how conservation efforts alter wildlife on a molecular level and prompt us to consider what such changes mean for human and non-human interactions. The present study has implications for understanding conservation more broadly and the role of genetic and genomic science in wildlife management. There has been considerable debate about how to bridge the gap between genomic science research and applications in conservation (Garner et al. 2016, Shafer et al. 2015). I found that even though hatchery staff and managers are not experts in genomic science, they have deep knowledge about the salmon with which they interact. They are also aware of the genetic risks involved in hatchery production and are evolving practices as new tools are introduced. At the same time, for some staff working in hatcheries, official guidelines and policies may not reflect their own view of wildness or their ethical views of how to care for the populations they are working to conserve. To better understand whether and how genomic tools are reshaping conservation biopolitics, it is critical to examine to what extent decisions are being made across institutional and demographic scales and in connection to other forms of knowledge. 101 Chapter 5: Weighing the Risks of Selective Breeding 5.1 Introduction Climate change presents an opportunity to investigate how people understand and evaluate interventions into nature. While changes in environmental conditions are often the primary driving force behind evolutionary adaptation in species, the rate of change occurring as a result of anthropogenic climate change is outpacing the ability of many species to adapt. Adaptation research has conventionally focused on how to adapt human societies and built environments to projected environmental changes. Recent scientific advances are shifting focus to another question: whether to adapt nature to new climate realities. Genomic science is at the forefront of efforts to assist nature’s adaptation to a rapidly changing environment, whether through relocation and assisted migration (Hewitt et al., 2011), gene banking (Rajasekharan, 2015), genome editing (Fernandez i Marti & Dodd, 2018), or using genomics to alter breeding practices (Reusch & Wood, 2007). The present study examines the latter approach – selective breeding – and how people involved in salmon conservation and management weigh the risks of this proposed technology. Determining where and how to intervene, as well as the role of scientific and technological innovations, necessitates deliberation among diverse actors with different priorities and understandings of attendant risks and benefits. The idea that scientific and technological advances are evaluated as potential sources of risk is not novel (Wynne, 2002). What is new is the context in which these technologies are being evaluated. Climate change and narratives of the Anthropocene bring an urgency and a sense that nature is undergoing changes that exceed planetary boundaries that support functional ecosystems. This is coupled with increasing complexity and uncertainty, such that decision-102 making necessarily involves acting without the knowledge required to anticipate and calculate risk. This chapter extends this discussion, asking to what extent people are willing to alter nature at a genomic level and how they weigh the social and material risks of doing so against the risks of climate change. While risks are typically considered in relation to potential benefits, this chapter focuses on how people weigh the relative risks of three different factors: interventions into nature, climate change, and inaction, and the level of risk that people are willing to accept in using selective breeding to achieve beneficial outcomes. Recent scholarship in environmental sociology suggests that people may be more open to intervening in nature to deal with the scope and severity of the threats posed by climate change. Bowden (2017, p. 63) suggests that the Anthropocene is marked by “the creation of an entirely new kind of problem” and requires an unprecedented level of ingenuity. Similarly, Lidskog and Waterton (2016) argue that global environmental changes are calling into question the suitability of established risk concepts and governance processes for global environmental threats. Zinn (2016) proposes that we have shifted to a risk-taking society, marked by accepting that the world has been pushed beyond the ability to regulate natural processes necessary for supporting life. A second feature of the risk-taking society is the availability of new knowledge of varying degrees of uncertainty that can guide adaptation. This knowledge is accompanied by an ethical obligation, as not acting is itself a path with potential risk. Finally, nature is more open to manipulation in the risk-taking society. At the core of this lies a change in perceptions about the human-nature relationship, from one based on preservation and protection to one that involves “active shaping” (Zinn, 2016, p. 392). The empirical setting for this study is the potential use of selective breeding in Pacific salmon hatcheries. Many Pacific salmon populations, particularly sockeye, Chinook, and coho 103 salmon, are declining compared to historic averages (Grant et al., 2019; Price et al., 2019). The factors contributing to this decline are numerous and intersecting, involving habitat degradation, pollution, dams, disease, and declines in ocean productivity. Climate change exacerbates these issues and introduces new threats, such as warming waters, extreme weather events, and changing ocean salinity. In response to these conditions, genomic sequencing can identify traits associated with higher survival under projected climatic conditions (Franks & Hoffman, 2012) and this information can be used to select for desired characteristics in hatchery propagation. This method is also potentially contentious, as previous research has shown that the cultural meanings and values associated with “wildness” and “naturalness” affect how people perceive the risks of novel technologies (Hansen, 2006; Visschers et al., 2017). There is a need for research that examines how novel technologies are assessed in the context of complex and long-standing human-nature entanglements (Harrison et al., 2019). Gene technologies bring with them a non-trivial amount of uncertainty (Blue & Davidson, 2021) and, in applications such as selective breeding, involve re-shaping the material world according to a set of criteria. This raises critical questions about whose values are involved in designing this image, based on what knowledge, and how decision-makers determine acceptable levels of risk and uncertainty. There has been growing scholarly attention to perceived risks of “tampering with nature” (Hoogendoorn et al., 2021; Raimi et al., 2020), but this work has been largely limited to public surveys on altering nature in abstract terms. In contrast, the present study employs a material-semiotic approach to risk (Wong & Lockie, 2018). Starting from the position that risks are neither wholly constructed nor wholly objective, Wong and Lockie (2018) look to how human actors, organizations, and non-human actors interact with the material world to produce and act on risk assessments. Embedding discussions of risk in applied contexts can 104 provide insight into how decision-makers translate abstract ideas about intervening in nature through contextually specific local histories and environmental conditions (Gannon & Hulme, 2018). The study begins by tracing the emergence of hatcheries as institutions where humans intervene in the life cycle of salmon through artificial propagation. The results section outlines three responses to the risks of selective breeding: Risk aversion (opposed to selection under any circumstances), Risk management (open to selection to address risks of current interventions), and Risk-taking (support breeding salmon for survival and climate adaptation). This is followed by an examination of those respondents that did not fall neatly into one of these three types of responses, asking to what extent respondents may reflect ambivalence or ambiguity in their support for, or opposition to, selective breeding. The discussion reflects on the surprising finding that selective breeding is not only seen as a possible solution to future climate risks, but as a way to address the problems stemming from past alterations of nature. It also situates the debate about selective breeding in the broader context of the Anthropocene, including the implications of the three risk responses for different approaches to salmon management, and calls for a reorientation of our focus towards the risks to nature from further interventions. 5.2 Risk and Climate Adaptation The dominant orientation in climate adaptation research has been aimed at human societies and the factors that contribute to differences in exposure, vulnerability, resiliency, and adaptive capacity (Berrang-Ford et al., 2010; Bennett et al., 2016; Carmin et al., 2015). There has been comparatively less sociological attention to the dynamic forces involved with adapting nature to climate change. Yet, the question of whether to alter nature is fundamentally an issue 105 for sociology. Recent work in environmental sociology has shown how diverse values, conflicting interests, and scientific uncertainty make social conflict over interventions into nature inevitable (Cilia, 2019; Dietz, 2017; Friese, 2013; Lidskog, 2016; Stuart et al., 2020). Climate change presents an additional layer of ethical complexity. Since climate change is driven by humans, some arguments hold that humans have an ethical obligation to intervene to prevent extinctions, while others maintain an opposition to intervention regardless of the risks (Dietz, 2017). Where conservation efforts were conventionally aimed at preventing extinctions through protecting and restoring suitable habitat, the rate at which biodiversity loss is occurring has shifted this focus to more direct forms of intervention, including rewilding, assisted gene flow, assisted evolution, artificial selection,21 and genetic engineering (Corlett, 2017; Gaitán-Espitia & Hobday, 2021). Genetic and genomic science plays an increasing role in these efforts. One potential method for mitigating the threat of climate change – genomic selection – identifies genetic markers associated with survival under projected climate conditions, and then uses this information in artificial breeding programs (Isik, 2014; Gienapp et al., 2019; Blue & Davidson, 2021). Genomic-assisted selective breeding is just one example of a host of novel methods currently being debated for plant- and animal-based climate adaptation. Hajjar et al. (2014) argue that these tools are inevitable, saying “…solutions to this complex climate change mitigation 21 Artificial selection is a general term that encompasses any pressure introduced by humans, intentionally or unintentionally, which is distinct from natural selection by the environment. Selective breeding is a more specific form of artificial selection, wherein humans intentionally choose individuals from a population to preserve and proliferate characteristics of interest (Gregory, 2009). This selection can be guided by a focus on phenotypes (i.e. physical characteristics), genetics, or by genomic science (often termed “genomic selection,” “genomic-assisted selection,” or “marker-assisted selection”. In the context of climate adaptation, artificial selection is sometimes referred to as “assisted evolution.” 106 problem will reside in the use of biotechnology in one form or another” (p.1526). At the same time, it is frequently acknowledged that biotechnologies are controversial, particularly in conservation contexts where they are less frequently used than commercial settings (Hartman, 2017; Kohl et al., 2019; van Oppen et al., 2015). To date, little research has examined the social implications or perceived risks of selectively breeding wildlife. Some insights can be drawn from studies of similar interventions such as geo-engineering, gene editing, and assisted migration. This research has shown that people are more likely to oppose adapting nature when they perceive interventions as unnatural or amoral (Hoogendoorn et al., 2021; Kohl et al., 2019; Thomas et al., 2018), when they distrust science and technology (Raimi et al., 2020), when such interventions seem likely to result in uncontrollable outcomes (Bellamy et al., 2017; Carter et al., 2021; Hoogendoorn et al., 2021), and when interventions are compared to other climate mitigation and adaptation options (Scheer & Renn, 2014). There is also some evidence that the descriptions of such technologies matter (MacDonald et al., 2020; Kohl et al., 2019). For example, Asayama et al. (2017) found in focus groups with Japanese citizens that using the term “climate emergency” generated greater support for geoengineering research than “climate change”. Recently, Rami et al. (2020) have introduced the Aversion to Tampering with Nature scale to measure varying levels of comfort with altering nature and predict support or opposition for technological interventions. A limitation of the existing body of knowledge about aversions to altering nature is that much of this work relies on surveys of the general public. While public involvement is essential to the democratization of science and environmental governance, less is understood about how experts, practitioners, and decision-makers evaluate such interventions (Hagerman & Satterfield, 2014; Clement & Standish, 2018). This gap is critical, both because experts have a deep 107 knowledge of the risks at hand and because they play key roles in proposing policy and institutional change. Another issue is that the focus of public perception studies is frequently limited to abstract questions about intervening in nature, rather than in the context of specific actions (Hagerman & Satterfield, 2014). While abstractions enable large, quantitative studies across diverse groups, a consequence is that they disconnect perceptions of risk from the material interactions present in human-nature assemblages. Risk is not only a product of social norms and interpretations. Perceptions of risk shape, and are shaped by, interactions between humans and the material world. The life cycles of salmon and their physical health, for example, are central to the question of whether to selectively breed for certain characteristics. As a result, there is a need to investigate how people assess the risks of interventions in the context of actions already being taken and specific contexts, such as the case of salmon. Wong and Lockie (2018)’s material-semiotic approach to risk offers a more integrative approach. Drawing on actor-network theory, the authors outline three components of their approach: co-constitution, emergent entities, and enactment. Co-constitution is concerned with “what and how material entities inform and constrain the ways that social norms, cultures, individuals, organizations, etc. mediate, manage, and/or interpret risks” (Wong & Lockie, 2018, p. 1086, emphasis in original). It allows for the possibility that ecosystems, technologies, and non-human actors may behave in ways that defy human risk calculations. It also asks how social constructions of risk “simultaneously re-shape the world in their own image” (p.1086). This issue is germane to genomic technologies such as selective breeding where governments and diverse publics may have different images of what characteristics are desirable to propagate and what threats require such reshaping. In other words, if concerns about climate change outweigh 108 concerns about human-altered nature, it is likely that this will lead to favourable assessments of the risks of genomic selection in breeding. The second element, emergent entities, looks at the “temporary and potentially precarious networks” of relations between organisations and institutions that govern risk (p. 1086). These networks are organized around different elements of risk management, such as physical infrastructure, policies and procedures, and cultural narratives. As new technologies are introduced, new actors are brought into the fold, shifting existing power dynamics. The changeable nature of emergence can be used to look back, tracing how the present field of actors came to be enrolled in risk networks and invites questions about what future organisational configurations might be needed to realize different adaptation pathways. Enactment refers to the way that perceptions of risk are translated into action through deliberation, decision-making, and management actions. In other words, enacting risk involves both social constructions of risk and “the material manifestations and consequences of those perceptions” (p. 1088). This approach not only recognizes that people experience risk differently based on experience, knowledge, and values, but that perceptions of risk may differ because a central risk problem may be constituted differently from the perspectives of different risk networks. An example from the world of genomic science is the potential for selective breeding to be perceived as an unacceptable risk in conservation programs and as the solution to climate risks in agriculture. In both contexts, the technology remains the same, but the risks of its implementation are constituted by different assemblages of actors and organizations with differing mandates. 109 5.3 Methodology 5.3.1 Sample The data for this study come from 105 interviews with individuals representing a range of organizations involved in salmon conservation and management. The choice of key informants involved in salmon decision-making reflects Wong and Lockie’s (2018) assertion that risk assessment should include the perceptions of actors that would directly impact the outcomes or probabilities of potentially hazardous actions. Following a purposive sampling strategy, online staff directories were used to identify knowledgeable informants engaged in decision-making with respect to salmon management (Weiss, 1995). This was complemented with a snowball sampling question at the end of each interview in which we asked respondents for recommendations about other relevant informants. Canadian government representatives were recruited from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), the federal department responsible for managing fisheries and protecting oceans and freshwater ecosystems from human impacts. Among government staff, interviews were conducted with genomic scientists (N=6), policy-makers and resource managers (N=23), and hatchery staff (N=28). Environmental non-governmental organization representatives (N=23) were identified through background research (including internet searches, newspaper article analysis, and policy document review), participant observation at salmon-related events, and snowball sampling through government interviews. Recreational (N=10) and commercial (N=8) fishing representatives were identified through publicly available listings of fishing advisory boards and industry advocacy organizations. Representatives from Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations (N=7) involved in fisheries management and governance were identified through a series of salmon genomics workshops 110 held in Nuu-chah-nulth traditional territory between 2018 and 2019 as part of a Genome Canada-funded research project. 5.3.2 Interview Structure The author, along with two other research team members conducted interviews between 2017 and 2018. Jones et al. (2014) found that the use of on-site interviews where visual cues were available to respondents (e.g., creeks) improved the quality of responses to questions about natural resource management. To reflect this, most interviews were conducted on site at the respondent’s place of work, with a handful of interviews taking place at coffee shops. For fishers, hatchery workers, and ENGO staff, this meant interviews were done on boats, in hatchery facilities, or along rivers and streams. For managers and policymakers, interviews were conducted in their offices, and for scientists, interviews were conducted in offices and laboratory spaces. Interviews with Nuu-chah-nulth representatives were conducted by phone following in-person workshops in Nuu-chah-nulth territory. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed for analysis, with the exception of one interviewee who requested not to be recorded. In that case, detailed notes were taken during and following the interview. The interview schedule covered five thematic areas: (i) job duties and organizational mandates; (ii) status of salmon populations and threats they face, including climate change; (iii) views on and involvement with current fisheries management practices and strategies, including hatcheries; (iv) respondents’ familiarity with and assessments of the risks and benefits of genomics, including using genomics to inform selective breeding in hatcheries; and (v) interactions with other organizations and sectors. With respect to selective breeding, respondents were asked, “In your opinion, should hatcheries selectively breed salmon for specific 111 characteristics? Why or why not?” If respondents replied in the affirmative, they were asked a follow-up question: “For what characteristics?” Where respondents discussed hatchery operations, I triangulated responses with policies and guidelines published by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to improve credibility and check our understanding (Moon et al. 2016). 5.3.3 Data Analysis Interview transcripts were analyzed using NVIVO12 qualitative analysis software. The data analysis focused on responses to the question above regarding selective breeding. In some cases, respondents introduced the idea of selective breeding elsewhere in the interview, and those responses were also coded as part of the analysis. Responses were at first coded broadly as “support” or “oppose.” A more detailed inductive coding round followed, wherein responses were inductively coded according to the specific risks or benefits listed as reasons for supporting or opposing selective breeding (e.g., playing God, climate resilience) (Campbell et al. 2013). The data was reduced by removing outliers (i.e., codes with fewer than five references). The codes were then compiled into three categories: Risk Aversion (opposition to selective breeding), Risk Management (support for selective breeding to manage current risks), and Risk-Taking (support for selective breeding for climate resilience or robustness) (Table 4). These categories are not mutually exclusive, as some respondents expressed support for selective breeding in some contexts but not others (e.g., supported increasing size but opposed creating monocultures). As a result, the percentages displayed in Table 4 exceed 100 per cent. Table 5 provides a more detailed look at “mixed responses,” showing the number of participants who expressed different combinations of risk responses. 112 Table 4 Respondents in Each Category of Risk Responses, by Interview Group Interview Group (N) Risk Averse (%) Risk Management (%) Risk Taking (%) Don’t Know (%) Genomic Scientists (6) 33.3 66.7 50.0 0.0 DFO Policy/Management (23) 65.2 34.8 21.7 8.7 Hatchery Staff (28) 67.9 63.0 14.3 3.6 Fishers (18) 44.4 38.9 33.3 5.6 ENGOs (23) 69.6 34.8 26.1 13.0 Nuu-chah-nulth Management (7) 42.9 85.7 14.3 14.3 Total 58.1 45.7 23.8 7.6 Note: Cells shaded according to value from low (lightest) to high (darkest). The totals exceed 100 per cent, as some responses contained more than one category of risk response type. Table 5 Respondents Who Gave Multiple Risk Responses, by Interview Group Interview Group (N) RA, RM (N) RM, RT (N) RA, RT (N) RA, RM, RT (N) Genomic Scientists (6) 0 1 0 1 DFO Policy/Management (23) 1 0 2 2 Hatchery Staff (28) 8 1 2 1 Fishers (18) 1 2 1 0 ENGOs (23) 2 3 1 1 Nuu-chah-nulth Management (7) 1 1 0 0 Total 13 8 6 5 Note: RA=Risk Averse, RM=Risk Management, RT=Risk Taking 113 5.4 The Emergence of Hatcheries and the Risks of Intervention As part of its mandate to sustainably manage fisheries in Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada produces 300 million Pacific salmon annually from 23 hatchery and spawning channel facilities and supports 19 community-based operations, most of which are operated by First Nations governments (NPAFC, 2018; DFO, 2018a). Hatcheries are facilities where workers take in mature salmon and manually propagate a new generation of salmon. The salmon that are spawned from this process are reared at the hatchery to mitigate the substantial losses that typically occur in this early life stage (Lichatowich, 1999; Taylor, 1999). They are then released into freshwater streams adjacent to hatchery facilities, where they swim out to the ocean and return to the same stream years later to spawn and die. Rather than isolated outposts, hatcheries typically engage with their surrounding communities in a network with First Nations and municipal governments, environmental stewardship and conservation organizations, recreational and commercial fishing industry advocates, and interested members of the public. They are located along rivers and streams, sometimes immediately below dams, sometimes nestled in urban backyards, but more often in forested areas. Hatcheries were introduced in North America in the 1700s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that hatcheries became a focus of Canadian salmon management. In 1977, the federal government launched the Salmon Enhancement Program (SEP) with the aim of producing enough salmon to double the number of salmon caught every year. However, the material realities of ocean productivity and declining survival rates of Pacific salmon fell increasingly short of the fishing expectations built up during SEP’s early years. Over time, the federal government began to incorporate conservation objectives into its hatchery programs, adding an objective of rebuilding salmon populations that are in serious decline. 114 I think in the seventies we started to think about some of the conservation objectives, but those were not very high priorities. … I think of hatcheries today as the culmination of conservation-based objectives and economic objectives. (Participant 135, Stock Assessment) I mean in the early days it was strictly to augment fisheries. Runs were strong. The idea was we’ll produce a whole bunch more fish to create even more fishing opportunities. But as ocean survivals have dropped drastically, a lot of places became conservation hatcheries and were just keeping the stock alive. (Participant 101, Hatchery technician) At the same time, hatcheries have also become understood as potential sources of risk to wild salmon. A growing body of scientific research has found that hatchery fish can increase fishing pressures on wild salmon, they can increase competition for resources, and they pose several genetic risks, including inbreeding, domestication, and reduced genetic fitness (MacKinlay et al., 2004). These risks, if left unchecked, could undermine the use of hatcheries as conservation tools. To monitor and manage these issues, the Salmon Enhancement Program employs Support Biologists with specialist expertise in bioengineering, fish health, and veterinary medicine. They also work closely with genomicists in Fisheries and Oceans’ genomics labs to investigate and devise management solutions to the risks of hatchery breeding. One genomicist described the problem, saying: If you have really good conditions, their survival rate doesn’t appear to be as bad as… or any worse than a wild fish, but challenged with not enough food, not enough resources, other kinds of environmental perturbation there’s pretty good evidence that hatchery fish will not do as well. (Participant 75, Genomic scientist) Concerns about the risks of artificial propagation have shaped hatchery norms and practices, fostering an awareness among hatchery staff of the responsibility to breed healthy salmon. Since the inception of the Salmon Enhancement Program, there have been institutional genetic management guidelines for mitigating known “biological risks” based on the experiences 115 in other parts of the world (DFO, 2016). Hatchery managers and staff described two overall principles that guide hatchery practices: wildness and randomness. Wild salmon, according to the Wild Salmon Policy are defined as fish that spawn in the wild from parents who also spawned in the wild. By contrast, hatcheries are artificial interventions into the salmon life cycle because, by design, they remove the selection pressures of the initial life stage to increase the numbers of returning salmon. This alters the genetic fitness of hatchery populations, affecting survival and reproductive fitness, and producing fish that are materially different from wild salmon. When hatchery salmon stray from the hatchery and mate with wild salmon, they can pass on genetic characteristics that reduce their progeny’s survival potential. To avoid domestication, hatcheries aim to use wild salmon to propagate the next generation of hatchery fish. As one Salmon Enhancement Program representative says, this practice “keeps the selection process from going too far towards hatchery fish” (Participant 46). Once salmon have been chosen for breeding, staff then follow guidelines for how to mate them together. This is based on a principle of randomness – female and male salmon are chosen at random. The rationale for random mating is that it ensures that hatcheries are not influencing salmon populations by selecting for particular traits. However, there is not universal agreement among hatchery staff about these guidelines. In particular, the idea of randomness does not feel “natural” to some, as salmon, like humans, choose their mates. One hatchery technician said, “Hatcheries are unnatural…. We select their mates, you know? In nature the female looks at her choice and she’ll choose him. We make that choice ourselves” (Participant 54). Advances in genomic science have meant that hatcheries can now take a closer look at how their programs are shaping the physical makeup of salmon populations. The markers which are used to match salmon to their populations have become more refined, from microsatellite 116 DNA in the 1990s to Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). SNPs provide several advantages over microsatellites, including ease of genotyping individuals and the ability to genotype individuals at large numbers of SNPs (Beacham et al., 2019). However, analyzing SNPs was too cost prohibitive initially to replace microsatellites as the dominant approach. A new method – genotyping by sequencing – has significantly reduced the cost of genotyping hundreds of SNPs, enabling Fisheries and Oceans Canada to genotype individual salmon at far greater quantities than before (Beacham et al., 2019). The management implications of this technology are potentially vast. Information about the genomic makeup of hatchery fish can be used to map out genetic variations in migration patterns, productivity, and survival. Individual salmon can also be traced back not just to their hatchery of origin, but also to their specific parents. Beacham et al. (2019, p. 9904) proffer that “the use of parentage‐based genetic analysis increases our ability to identify, monitor, and possibly maintain variation within populations as they face the future challenges of environmental degradation, climate change, and ongoing harvest and predation.” Markers are currently being used to identify the genomic basis for climate tolerance in marine and forestry contexts (Beaulieu et al., 2020; Dixon et al., 2015; van Oppen et al., 2015). Although hatcheries do not currently select salmon to breed based on particular traits, as one Fisheries and Oceans genomicist stated, doing so is an imminent possibility: One question that comes to bear when it comes to hatcheries is, would we ever try to help along the adaptation of fish to climate? … It’s possible that our role of hatcheries could change a little bit. If we had a situation where we really understood resistance to high water temperature stress – and we do already know something about that, there are markers that are out there – if we could, that might be something in the future. It’s like, “Well, the population is going to be gone” or “We’re going to select to breed the individuals that carry the resistance markers to high water temperature stress and hope to get a more robust fish, there’s a possibility of that. Given the choice of losing populations 117 entirely or adding this component in, in a natural way … I do see adding a component of breeding programs, which we already do, but adding marker-assisted selection. The question of whether to selectively breed for survival or climate resilience is an important emerging debate that challenges existing institutional practices and norms, particularly around the importance of random breeding and wildness. To what extent are hatcheries and the people who interact with them willing to intervene? 5.5 Findings Respondents described numerous climate-related changes to the marine and freshwater environments believed to be negatively impacting salmon survival, including rising temperatures, acidification, changes in food availability and timing, drier creeks in summer, heavier windstorms, flooding, shifts in the range of salmon and other species, and more exposure to diseases and pests. Selective breeding offers hatchery staff and salmon managers a tool to fine-tune the breeding process in the hatchery, such that there is greater emphasis on producing salmon from families that have greater genetic resilience to the threats of climate change. However, rather than a single debate – for, or against adapting salmon to a changing climate – respondents demonstrated a wider range of views, including many supporting the use of selective breeding to manage the risks of past interventions. Three primary risk responses emerged from these conversations: risk aversion, risk management, and risk-taking (Table 4 above). 5.5.1 Risk Averse: Opposed to Selective Breeding Nearly 60% of respondents indicated some opposition to selective breeding, with 30% opposing the use of selective breeding under any circumstances. The most common concern 118 expressed by people who opposed selective breeding was the fear of humans “playing God.” Rather than a specifically religious appeal, respondents expressed a precautionary approach to aleatoric uncertainty, or the inability for humans to fully know the outcomes of their interventions. For example, one recreational fisher said, “I don’t know how smart we are, I guess. My faith in our ability to be smarter than nature is kind of limited. I think we always have to be really humble when we do those things” (Participant 109). Hatchery staff drew on specific examples of situations where they witnessed unintended consequences of human intervention. One hatchery manager pointed to broader ecosystem dynamics, saying: To change anything, you know, what are you going to do to the environment that they’d come up to? Breed a superfish that can handle low and warmer waters? … It’s the Kootenay Lake thing all over again. We just leave it alone. (Participant 47, Hatchery manager) The reference to Kootenay Lake harks back to the 1960s when the government in British Columbia attempted to boost stocks of kokanee salmon in Okanagan Lake, which had been depleted by overfishing. They had success introducing Mysis shrimp into Kootenay Lake and thought introducing shrimp into Okanagan Lake would provide a food source to sustain the kokanee population. However, the shrimp were able to avoid predation by the salmon, instead feeding on the kokanee’s existing food source: zooplankton. The shrimp became competitors, contributing to kokanee decline and leading to a moratorium on fishing (Shepherd, 2000). Now, the hatchery manager says, “there’s a commercial harvest on the shrimp, year after year after year.” Cautionary tales accumulated over the course of workers’ careers provide an important lens through which future potential interventions are interpreted. Environmental NGOs were the group most likely to oppose selective breeding for reasons of “playing God,” though their responses were more based on general views of ethical human-nature interactions. 119 I’m not fond of humans as God. … Most of the problems we’re having today were unforeseen consequences so I’m loath whenever we start talking about messing with biology on any kind of grand scale, yeah. (Participant 91, ENGO representative) I'm not saying we should, but it’s an interesting thought balloon to work it through, how that might – how you might save or allow a population to adapt to climate change. … I think from a genomics point of view we haven’t even begun to think of it, or had the conversation as a society whether we should. Because that really is – that’s recreating the dinosaur. That’s playing God. (Participant 5, ENGO representative) The idea that selectively bred salmon are akin to resurrected dinosaurs relates to another common concern: that breeding salmon for particular traits is unnatural and departs from what respondents understand as “wildness”. Some invoked the image of creating a “frankenfish,” a term often used in Canada to describe genetically modified aquaculture salmon (Cox, 2020; Dehaas, 2016). More often, people opposed the idea of creating populations of hatchery fish that differed from naturally spawning salmon. Several respondents compared hatcheries with aquaculture operations, which farm fish in closed containment. There, selective breeding is used to produce salmon with market-desired qualities (Longo et al., 2015), as opposed to hatcheries which aim to produce salmon that are “as wild as possible” (Participant 131, Hatchery manager). I’m very cautious about breeding for specific characteristics. I think that’s what the aquaculture sector is doing, and I don’t know if we can turn the dial back. I think we should be sticking to what we understand as wild salmon genetic diversity. (Participant 74, ENGO representative) This emphasis on wildness was not only based on socially constructed notions of an untouched wilderness – it was grounded in a concern for the material realities of altering nature at a genetic level. Because hatchery fish intermingle with wild populations, any unintended consequences of selective breeding would not only affect the survival of hatchery salmon, but all salmon. I think most of the hatchery operations that are operating in Canada are integrated broodstock programs so wild- and hatchery-origin fish are allowed to intermingle. I think 120 as long as that is a key objective our programs, we need to be careful to not create selection pressures that are producing fish that are different from our wild population. (Participant 52, Resource manager) We’re dealing with something that should they escape – and they will – they will pass these characteristics on and, interbreed them and, they’ll – it’s not a good thing. (Participant 34, Community advisor) Chief among these unintended consequences is the loss of genetic diversity that would help salmon survive environmental changes. This perspective was most commonly shared by resource managers and commercial fishers. Genetic diversity is prized as an insurance policy against climate change and is an important consideration for respondents weighing the risks of selective breeding against the threat that climate change poses. For example, a commercial fisher said, “diversity produces stability and diversity in a lot of things – in various stocks, in genomes, genetic integrity – diversity is the key to me to success” (Participant 79, Commercial fisher). Managing for wildness in terms of genetic diversity is key, as one fisheries manager described, reflected in policy: That’s the whole point of the Wild Salmon Policy, right? Is to try to maintain that genetic diversity … if it didn’t matter, we could pump out as many fish as we possibly want out of a hatchery out of a single stock, but then of course you just raise the risk that you’re going to lose that particular species of that particular stock because they don’t have that genetic variability that allows them to fight off the next disease, or the next parasite, or withstand climate change and everything. And really, at the end of the day, evolution or natural selection does a much better job of selecting for those characteristics than humans do, no matter how brilliant we might be. (Participant 2, Fisheries manager) 5.5.2 Risk Management: Open to Selective Breeding for Managing Existing Risks A second type of response was an openness to selective breeding, not to address future risks but to correct or manage the risks of current interventions. Compared to risk aversion and risk-taking, which focus on future threats to salmon, the risk management perspective is 121 backward-looking. The main logic underlying this view is that humans already intervene in ways that have altered salmon from a “wild” and untouched state. This is evidenced by the physical and genetic differences between hatchery and wild salmon. Selective breeding was seen as a way to correct for human mistakes by producing salmon that are closer to what respondents view as “wild.” As one genomicist explained, I mean, you could use genomics to try and keep them wild. Or you could use genomics to try and change them, right? You can use genomics both ways. So, the use of genomics itself is not the problem. It’s what you use the genomics to do essentially, you know? … If you try to use the genomics to keep the genetic diversity high, maybe you’re actually helping them – keeping them wild. (Participant 110, Genomic scientist) However, there was no universally accepted idea of what it means to produce a wild salmon. Chief among the issues respondents identified were domestication, size, and genetic diversity. Domestication is a risk derived from rearing fish in artificial facilities. By design, hatcheries remove the natural selection that occurs in the early part of salmon life cycles. As a result, hatcheries produce salmon that are well-suited to the hatchery environment but are not as capable of surviving the natural environment after leaving the hatchery. Over time, these differences can manifest at the population level, particularly if hatchery fish are used to breed subsequent generations. For respondents, selective breeding was seen as a critical tool for mitigating the risk of domestication by increasing the genetic diversity of salmon produced in the hatchery: At least with the DNA, you know you’re not breeding siblings, you’re widening the gene pool as far as you can … I’d like to be able to do that to make the wildest fish we can. … and if the Wild Salmon Policy really is our guiding document, [selective breeding] should be the tool. (Participant 134, Hatchery manager) I can see that being beneficial to make sure that, you know, they haven’t completely homogenized the genetics of the hatchery …. They have to monitor and say, “Oh, we need to add some more diversity in here. We need to limit this family reproducing”. (Participant 87, Nuu-chah-nulth fisheries manager) 122 There were further conflicting views regarding size. It was commonly observed that hatchery salmon tend to be smaller than their natural-born counterparts and more likely to return before they have reached sexual maturity. The current approach of randomly mating salmon parents in the hatchery goes against what many respondents consider to be natural processes of mate selection, where big fish pair up with big fish. As one hatchery staff member explained, “I don’t think fish naturally would select a partner that’s radically different than its own size. I think large fish would tend to seek out another large partner…” (Participant 101). While selective breeding could be used to increase the size of hatchery salmon, bigger salmon are also desired for recreational angling and commercial market values. Campbell River, it’s known for its big fish. … and to be able to have that – the lure of the big fish – it will still bring people here even if there is not lots of them. Is it something that the higher-ups will support us in doing? I don’t know. It’s something I would like to do. (Participant 13, Hatchery technician) Some expressed concerns that this could lead to an overemphasis on producing unnaturally large salmon for harvest. One hatchery manager described a recent encounter with a local recreational fisher who was unhappy with the small salmon he was catching: “And he said… ‘I want you guys making 30 pounders, you’ve got to make bigger fish’ … It’s so self-absorbed, right? It’s like, this is what I want” (Participant 134). The economic value of selective breeding introduces a new source of risk: that hatcheries might veer away from conserving nature and more towards nature that is intentionally designed for human purposes. As an ENGO staff member said, I think unless there’s a lot of oversight, the characteristic that might be considered best by a fisherman might be size, fighting abilities might be another one. … I don’t think we should do it to make it better for us, I think we should do it to make it better for the fish. And typically, when humans do something, it ends up being better for themselves. (Participant 45, ENGO representative) 123 Thus, debates about whether to intentionally produce bigger salmon is illustrative of the complexities of intentionally altering nature. Breeding larger salmon is entangled with the risks of deviating from natural mating practices and social concerns about greed and the overexploitation of salmon populations (Clausen & York, 2008; Longo et al., 2015). To deal with the uncertainty of how selective breeding might be used, several respondents suggested a slow-and-steady approach, using “trial runs” (Participant 61, Nuu-chah-nulth fisheries manager) or conducting “safe experiments” (Participant 110, Genomic scientist) in one hatchery before expanding to others. 5.5.3 Risk-Taking: Open to Producing Climate Resilient or Robust Salmon The least common response was that of risk-taking. Approximately 23% of respondents supported selective breeding to help salmon survive and adapt to changing conditions. This view is exemplified by a hatchery technician, who contextualized selective breeding in the historical trajectory of human interventions into nature: This is what humans do. We modify our environment. We modify our environment to make it easier for us to live. And if we don’t modify our environment, we’re not going to survive in the future, especially with global warming. … and yeah, if we can modify them to help ourselves and modify them to survive … I think both goals have been satisfied. Yes, I understand the debate between “wild” and hatchery fish, and we have, you know, one side of the fence is it’s wild, leave it alone, don’t touch, can’t touch, can’t do anything because wild knows what it’s doing and it’s – but [if] they can’t adapt, they can’t adapt. (Participant 133, Hatchery technician) A recurring rationale among risk-takers was that doing nothing was likely to mean that salmon would not survive without intervention. This is not to suggest that respondents in this category universally supported manipulating nature, but when weighed against the risks that climate change and other threats pose, selective breeding was deemed an acceptable response. Genomic 124 scientists were the group most likely to emphasize the potential benefits of selective breeding for survival, though they constitute a relatively small proportion of the sample (N=6). Compared to risk averse and risk management responses, which focused on the risks of intervention itself, risk-takers were responding primarily to ecological threats to the survival of salmon. This translated into particular visions of the salmon they would like to see produced. Broadly, there were two images of an improved salmon that emerged: a robust salmon, and a climate-resilient salmon. A climate-resilient salmon needs to be resilient to increases in water temperature. This is not mere speculation – respondents drew on first- or second-hand knowledge of temperature changes already occurring in British Columbia. This is particularly acute in freshwater creeks and streams where salmon spend their first fragile years and return as mature adults to spawn. Hatcheries rely on natural freshwater sources for the salmon they raise in the facility, so they are not independent of temperature changes. As temperatures increase, there is less oxygen available for salmon and salmon must expend more precious energy as they swim. Some respondents described selective breeding as providing a helping hand when salmon cannot adapt quickly enough. A salmon habitat specialist summarized the process of weighing climate and intervention risks: This is the hottest weather that we’ve had in maybe ever, in terms of extent of this heat wave and this is going to be the new norm. There’s climate models that show us moving to San Diego and so things are going to be very different here and we’re probably going to lose our sanity. And if we can select for salmon that are able to survive in our temperatures… it would be great for us to believe that we could just be like, “Let’s leave everything and it’ll all come back.” I mean, it does a pretty good job of that, but we’ve already messed things up so much that it’s probably not going to happen by itself. (Participant 4, ENGO representative) 125 Climate resilient salmon were also described as more tolerant to lower levels of oxygen, more adaptable, and salmon that spawn earlier or later in the season, depending on what is most advantageous for dealing with changing climatic conditions. The idea of a robust salmon is less specifically tied to projected environmental changes and instead aims to improve a salmon’s chance for survival. Survival is measured by the number of fish that return to the river or hatchery and is seen as a measure for success of the hatchery program. For hatchery managers, selective breeding is a tool that makes sense in the context of organizational operations and can even help mitigate the effects of shrinking budgets. One Salmon Enhancement Program biologist described an ongoing trial at some hatcheries, in partnership with Fisheries and Oceans genomic scientists, to tease out the connection between size, age, and survival: “So, that’s generally what we do. We do trials to determine what’s going to happen and will it work, and then if we think that it has an application in operations then we would potentially operationalize it” (Participant 1). They saw selective breeding for disease resistance or temperature resistance as an idea for another trial. In addition to size, age, and disease resistance, robust salmon were also described as strong, more fertile (e.g., females returning with more eggs), with good quality eggs. For those that did not have a specific image in mind of what a robust salmon looks like, there was a trust in science and, specifically genomic science, to identify genetic factors that can help or hurt salmon and can be used to help nature. Two fishers express this sentiment in their responses: With the information that you guys are trying to get with what works and what doesn’t work, I mean, if you can do that, you could maybe – I shouldn’t say “engineer,” but you could get a decent breed of fish that could withstand the new changes of our environment. (Participant 57, Commercial fisher) 126 Once you reach a certain point, you know, it’s all about there’s that healthy wild population. And it gets to a point where, okay, we have to do something, and then my opinion’s like, if it’s a hardy fish it’s better off … I’m sure [genomicists] are looking at what makes salmon more hardy – coming from different places, and is it temperature… are they going to survive better there, and stuff like that. (Participant 88, Recreational fisher) 5.5.4 Mixed Risk Responses: Ambivalent or Ambiguous? Not all respondents fit neatly into the three categories above; roughly 30% of respondents expressed more than one type of response (Table 5 above). How can we understand these responses? Do they indicate a degree of ambivalence or ambiguity among decision-makers and practitioners about the potential use of selective breeding? Asayama et al. (2017) distinguish between the concepts of ambiguity and ambivalence. Ambiguity refers to “incomplete knowledge or epistemic pluralities (e.g., framings, perspectives, assumptions)” (p.83). Overall, there were few respondents (7.7%) who did not know enough about selective breeding to assess the risks and benefits. This suggests that the debate about selective breeding for wildlife management is generally unambiguous. Compared to novel technologies such as geoengineering, selective breeding is already used in other applications, such as aquaculture. Therefore, it is not surprising that people involved in salmon management have formulated an opinion on this method. Ambivalence is related to normative judgements and refers to an inability to choose between two opposing normative views (e.g., pro vs. con). Its antonym, multivalence, is characterized by “multiple, divergent normative positions within the debate” (Cairns & Stirling, 2014, p. 33). The overall diversity and firmness of responses suggests that the debate about the merits and risks of selective breeding is multivalent – characterized by a range of normative views. Responses that straddle the three identified categories do not necessarily indicate an 127 inability to choose. If the categories were plotted on a continuum from most risk averse to most in favour of taking risks, mixed responses that straddle categories make intuitive sense. For example, respondents concerned about the smaller size of hatchery fish compared to their naturally spawning counterparts supported selecting for bigger sizes (Risk Management), which in their view also contributes to long term survivability in a changing environment (Risk-Taking). There are similar overlaps between the Risk Averse and Risk Management categories. For example, respondents may not share the same understanding of what it means to “play God”. This exchange with a hatchery technician reveals both an aversion to playing God (Risk Averse) and an openness to using genetic science to help hatcheries refine practices to operate more in line with what is natural (Risk Management): I think that hatcheries should be trying to do as close to what is natural as possible. I don’t think they should be breeding for bigger fish, or you know, breeding to extend or shrink timings. I think what they should be trying to do is mimic as best as they can what’s happening out there. … What we’re supposed to be doing is making fish for people to angle for, not playing God, right? … I do think that scientific findings, collecting the data, and going through the data can help us at the hatcheries just to try to do a – not that we’re doing a bad job now, but you know, down in the future – fine tune things a little bit if need be. So yeah, I think that’s important. (Participant 28, Hatchery technician) Even among people who expressed views at both ends of the spectrum (Risk Aversion and Risk-Taking), their responses did not suggest wavering between normative positions, but a different understanding of what it means to intervene and a different way of prioritizing risks. As one recreational fisher explained, “playing God” through non-native species introductions is an unacceptable risk to wild salmon, but selective breeding is a way to help: I don’t think you want to introduce a salmon species that is not native to the area. As you can see with the Atlantic salmon coming into these fish pens and they get loose and they create quite an issue, right? If there’s genetic modifications that can be made to help their 128 [Pacific salmon] survival, then I agree with that. We’re not playing God, but we’re playing help. (Participant 106, Recreational fisher) Similarly, an environmental NGO representative described the specific conditions that would have to be met for the risk of selective breeding to be acceptable: If you could find out that the sequence of alleles that were necessary for a salmon to survive 23-degree river water in the Fraser River, and it was a choice of either manipulating that genome in order to be able to have that fish survive, I think it would be better than having them all dead, right? So, it would be, certainly, a tool in the toolbox to be utilised in cases of stock survival. If they were utilised, you know, in terms of genetic manipulation to say, “Oh, we’re going to manipulate all these things and we want them all to swim home to this spot,” that might be an issue. (Participant 102, ENGO representative) This respondent was not struggling to choose a course of action. Like others, he was weighing different motives and outcomes that would increase or decrease the acceptability of the risks of selective breeding. 5.6 Discussion An ongoing focus of sociological research is the meaning of risk in the context of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene narrative has brought public attention to the fact that humans have altered much of the natural environment at a fundamental level. Current modelling predicts vast changes in the distribution and ranges of many socially and ecologically important species as a result of anthropogenic climate change (Pecl et al., 2017). Adaptation is not only aimed at reconfiguring the physical and social infrastructures of societies at risk; it also sets its sights on nature as something to be “actively managed, designed, reinstated and changed” (Zinn, 2016, p. 388), particularly in the case of genomic applications. Altering nature for human purposes is not new. Writing over three decades ago, Giddens (1990; 1991) articulated this as “socialized 129 nature.” According to Giddens (1994), nature has been so altered intentionally and unintentionally that it is more accurate to say that humans live in “socially organized environments.” For Giddens, the primary issue was the proliferation of risks to humans from this modified environment. For our present examination of climate adaptation, the issue is reversed: how do humans perceive the risks of further altering species and ecosystems to ensure their survival through climatic changes? In the case of Pacific salmon, people’s relative openness to intervening in nature did not reflect an overall preference for risk-taking, even among respondents with a background in genomic science. Instead, respondents expressed a range of views on the conditions under which selective breeding could be considered acceptable. In particular, there was a difference in risk tolerance between those that trusted science to help salmon adapt and those that distrusted human abilities to predict the outcomes of selective breeding (in other words, the ability to “play God”). This is consistent with existing research on perceptions of tampering with nature (Hoogendorn et al., 2020; Raimi et al., 2020). An unexpected result was that nearly half of respondents saw selective breeding not as a solution to future environmental threats, but as a means of managing the risks of past and present interventions. Local observations about changes in the physical characteristics of salmon (e.g., size) and behaviour (e.g., spawning times) formed the basis of knowledge among people without specific genomic expertise about the risks of hatchery intervention. This was accompanied by a growing awareness among decision-makers of genomic evidence of hatchery risks, as well as cautionary tales of interventions gone wrong and normative beliefs about how humans should interact with nature. Still, respondents were not calling for the removal of hatcheries. Instead, many saw selective breeding as a way to adjust present interventions to 130 minimize the differences between hatchery-produced salmon and populations that spawn in the natural environment. Given the history in Western cultures of depicting wildness as pristine, untouched nature, it may seem paradoxical to suggest that selective breeding can be used to produce salmon that are “more wild.” Borrowing from Siipi’s (2004; 2008) observation that there is no singular definition of naturalness, I suggest that wildness, too, must be understood as a multi-dimensional concept. That is, something can be understood as wild based on its history (whether it has been influenced by humans at any point in its life history), or something can be understood as wild in terms of its properties (its functions, features, or characteristics). Similar to Harrison et al. (2019)’s study of hatchery salmon in Norway and Wales, the British Columbia case demonstrates that there are multiple technological and cultural definitions of wildness that are present in debates about how humans relate to and produce nature. In the context of salmon breeding, a salmon that is selectively bred may not be wild from a historic perspective in that it came into being through artificial selection. However, it may be produced with a genetic or phenotypical profile that is close to salmon born outside of the hatchery. The present study has implications for science communication. Carter et al. (2021) describe scientists and science communicators as willing to engage with people who are “ambivalent” or “supportive” of biotechnologies, but less enthusiastic about engaging with those who are “deeply opposed.” However, these camps are too narrow to capture the diversity of views present in this study. The debate over selective breeding and its attendant risks can be characterized as multivalent, owing to the presence of multiple normative positions. Respondents were not struggling to choose between these stances; rather, there was diversity in how they understood the risks of altering nature and in their relative levels of risk tolerance. Science 131 communication would be better served by engaging across the spectrum, as there may be more common ground than public survey responses suggest. Given the range of views across and within professional backgrounds, a transparent and democratic deliberation of where and how novel technologies such as selective breeding are applied in the pursuit of climate adaptation is warranted. In particular, engagement between scientists and governments, practitioners, and stakeholders should be specific to how novel technologies might be applied and how they relate to past and present interventions. These different views on risk also have important implications for salmon management and policy in the context of a changing climate. First, they suggest that risk perceptions are in part reflective of the pace of intervention. A common refrain among respondents open to genomic technologies was that any intervention should be slow, measured, and conducted as a trial before widespread adoption. Second, they underscore the need to consider multiple types of risks when developing climate adaptation policies and approaches. While biological risks have been at the forefront of salmon policy development (Chapter 3) and hatchery reforms (Chapter 4), there has been less attention to the social and cultural risks associated with interventions in salmon lives. The present study shows that part of what determined responses to selective breeding was which dimension of wildness they valued. For Risk Management respondents, it was more important to have salmon that are wild by property (genetically or physically similar to naturally spawning salmon) than salmon that are wild by history (never altered by humans) and selective breeding was a tool to achieve that goal. Conversely, people who were Risk Averse placed greater emphasis on salmon that are wild by their history, drawing comparisons between selectively bred salmon and resurrected dinosaurs. Institutions should consider both material and 132 cultural risks when deliberating climate adaptation approaches and the potential use of novel technologies. 5.7 Conclusion This chapter has examined how decision-makers weigh the risks of climate change against selectively breeding salmon that can better withstand future environmental conditions. While climate adaptation research has predominately focused on human vulnerabilities, the case of Pacific salmon demonstrates the need for a more inclusive approach that considers the risks to non-human nature from further interventions. It also underscores the need for research on human alterations of nature that are empirically rich and embedded in the context of existing material and semiotic relations (Wong & Lockie, 2018). The responses above show the complexities of human-salmon interactions and the many roles that hatcheries play in supporting ecological, social, and economic values. Abstract ideas about human-nature relations were present in some responses, but the debate about whether to adapt salmon to climate change cannot be disentangled from the past and present history of salmon management. What does this mean for the future of hatcheries? The accumulation of evidence demonstrating genetic differences between hatchery and “wild” salmon has provided support for increasing the role of genomic science in assessing hatchery operations (e.g., Le Luyer et al., 2017). This reflects a longer trend in hatcheries, as concerns about genetic risks to wild salmon have been enacted through policy (e.g., Wild Salmon Policy) and organizational practices and norms (DFO, 2018a). The rise of genomic science has changed how people view hatchery production, redefining salmon bodies at the level of genetic markers which can be harnessed to produce salmon with particular characteristics. Genomic science and hatchery risks are, 133 therefore, mutually dependent and co-constitutive as the technological process of measuring and mitigating risk through a genomic lens justifies further interventions at a molecular level. The growing assemblage of scientific and technical experts brought in to manage the risks to hatchery-bred salmon and salmon spawned in the wild have drawn criticisms for their “techno-arrogance” (Meffe, 1992), namely the idea that humans can innovate our way out of hatchery risks – and the inability for “salmon technocrats” to agree on solutions to the decline of wild salmon populations (Lackey, 2003). Selective breeding for climate resilience may receive the same criticisms, making effective communication between scientific researchers and decision-makers all the more necessary. Recent scholarship has advocated greater attention to gene technologies, and genomic selection in particular, as a key site where further interventions into nature are being debated (Blue & Davidson, 2021). An essential part of this research agenda is interrogating how different values, knowledges, and risk preferences are asserted and legitimized in the debate about adapting nature to a changing climate. 134 Chapter 6: Conclusion The paradigm of wildlife conservation is changing. Advances in genomic science have introduced new ways to measure and understand human interventions into nature. This is occurring simultaneously alongside global environmental changes that are having devastating impacts on wildlife and ecosystems. The present study is motivated by a desire to reconcile the paradoxes of artificially producing wild animals, and of conserving wild life in a time marked by anthropogenic alterations of global ecological systems. This dissertation uses the case of Pacific salmon production in North America to examine their unique challenges to ‘wildness’ at the species and sub-species level. It further demonstrates how growing genomic knowledge is changing understanding of the genetic implications of environmental regulations and salmon management practices. In this concluding chapter, I consider how the preceding conceptual and empirical chapters speak to the transitional meaning of wildness in the Anthropocene and their implications for future research. 6.1 Summary of Findings Overall, the thesis uses theoretical frameworks and approaches developed in sociology (e.g., framing, biopolitics, material-semiotics of risk) to characterize the debates surrounding artificially produced wildlife and explain how people make sense of these changes and adapt environmental practices in response to new scientific information. Chapter 2 lays the foundation for a sociological approach to genomic science and Chapters 3, 4, and 5 empirically investigate the case of Pacific salmon. Taken together, these chapters provide novel insights into changing dynamics of human-wildlife interactions. 135 Chapter 2 directly addresses an important gap in the field of environmental sociology. Genomic science has changed the way that many people understand and interact with wildlife. Genes are now understood as part of complex and dynamic networks that are susceptible to influences from social and environmental forces, creating a valuable space for interdisciplinary research. However, there has been a lack of scholarship at the intersection of environmental sociology and genomic science. This work builds connective linkages between these fields by translating recent advances in genomic science for a social science audience and discusses their relevance for core areas of environmental sociology. In Chapter 3, I conducted a comparative analysis of how wildness is framed in policy debates about artificially produced salmon. I find that the debate over whether hatchery salmon can be counted as wild is made possible through emerging genomic science about the differences between hatchery-born and naturally spawning salmon. This debate is not limited to scientific discourse. Hatchery-born salmon occupy a position at the threshold of scientific and cultural definitions of wildness and this ambiguity facilitates political contests among groups with divergent values, interests in conservation, and views of the human–nature relationship. Critically, these debates are not merely thought exercises; particular frames become concretized in policy frameworks, with social, ecological, and economic implications. As a result, hatchery salmon have been regulated differently across time and geographic and jurisdictional space. The comparison between debates in Canada and the United States are illustrative of the importance of how such debates take place. In the United States, deliberations about the wildness of hatchery salmon were channeled through the legal system. Canada took a more open approach, soliciting feedback through an extensive public engagement process. The result was a long process of overturning results in the United States, while Canada has maintained a stable and publicly 136 supported approach to hatchery salmon over the same period. This chapter builds on recent work on the meaning of wildness in the Anthropocene by drawing attention to the importance of framing in legal and policy debates and the political nature of classifying wildlife as “wild”. Chapter 4 takes the same question – what is a “wild” salmon? – to examine the way in which wildness is managed in the hatchery system of British Columbia. If, as Chapter 3 demonstrates, Canada has decided to exclude hatchery salmon from its definition of wild salmon, the consequence is that hatcheries face a fundamental challenge to their legitimacy. The salmon they produce artificially can breed with wild salmon over time, potentially spreading genes that are maladapted to the natural environment as they mate with wild salmon. To mitigate risks to wild salmon, hatcheries in Canada have sought to produce salmon that are as close to wild as possible. This chapter asks, how is the paradox of producing wildness translated into practice, and how do practitioners understand the meaning of wildness in this context? Drawing on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as well as 46 interviews with Pacific salmon hatchery staff and genomic scientists, I trace how wildness has come to be understood, produced, and managed as a function of genetics. I find that hatcheries use a range of techniques informed by genomic science to produce salmon that are as genetically wild as possible. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with past and present debates about wildness, Chapter 5 situated such debates in the context of future risks. Most literature on climate adaptation refers to how human societies and organizations adapt to new climate realities, this chapter shifts focus to animals, asking whether humans should selectively breed species for characteristics that will make them resilient to climate change. This chapter draws on 105 interviews with people involved in salmon management decision making to assess how people with responsibility for environmental management respond to the risks and benefits of genomics-assisted selective 137 breeding as it is carried out in salmon hatcheries. While responses to novel technologies are frequently plotted along a support to opposition continuum, I found that respondents weighed multiple risks and benefits, supporting selective breeding in some contexts while opposing it in others. Many saw selective breeding, not as a tool for addressing future risks, but as a way to fix the mistakes of past interventions and now produce salmon that are “more wild.” This suggests, paradoxically, that further interventions may not necessarily be perceived as violating values of naturalness or wildness. Much of the existing literature on perceptions of risk in tampering with nature are based on quantitative surveys of the general public. As a result, reported information about the general population’s perceptions is decoupled from the institutions and decision-making processes that are critical in determining whether and how novel technologies are adopted. The emergent findings from this chapter suggest that deliberations around novel technologies need to be presented in the context of existing institutional practices. 6.2 Research Contributions This dissertation makes three thematic contributions to literature in environmental sociology and the broader interdisciplinary corpus of research on wildlife conservation: (i) It provides new insights into the changing meanings of wildness in the Anthropocene; (ii) It demonstrates how biopower is expanded alongside new scientific information, and (iii) It advances an environmental sociological approach to applications of genomic science. 6.2.1 Changing Meaning of Wildness in the Anthropocene The narrative of the Anthropocene suggests that humans have so fundamentally altered global ecosystems that they have ushered in a new geological epoch (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). 138 This has fostered scholarly debate over whether any truly “wild” life remains (Doak et al., 2015; Kareiva et al., 2007, 2012; Soulé, 2014). The present case study emphasizes that wildness has not lost its significance in the Anthropocene. Rather, people involved in salmon conservation and management paradoxically pursue wildness as an objective of their interventions. This dissertation offers a starting point for understanding this paradox through its engagement with salmon genetics. I argue that the meaning of wildness has undergone significant changes alongside expanding knowledge about salmon genes and their interactions with their surrounding environment. To reconcile the paradox of producing wildness, we need to expand what we consider to be wild to include animals that may be altered by human interventions but that carry physical properties of wildness. This has important implications for the regulation and management of wild life. With respect to regulation, the policy debates in Chapter 3 show that wild has remained a somewhat ambiguous term. It wasn’t until it became possible to distinguish between hatchery and wild salmon on the basis of their genetic differences that courts and governments in Canada and the United States had to come to a determination about exactly what it means to count a salmon as wild. As a result, wildness in both countries is now defined with respect to both properties (e.g., genetic similarity) and history (e.g., two-generations removed from hatchery production) in legislation and policy frameworks. Chapter 4 illustrates how this new understanding of salmon as wild by genetic properties translates into practice, as hatchery staff actively pursue salmon that are more genetically wild at multiple levels, from the molecular to the collective. Still, not everyone values these dimensions of wildness equally, and this manifests in differences in management decisions. For example, some hatchery managers who heavily prioritize wildness 139 by properties have partnered with genomic scientists to experiment with the physical design of their facilities in the name of mitigating epigenetic domestication effects. This multi-dimensional view of wildness also has implications for how novel technologies are assessed. Chapter 5 takes this to the question of whether hatcheries should use genomic knowledge to selectively breed salmon for particular characteristics, including resilience to climate change. Respondents differed in the levels of importance they placed on salmon as being wild by its history (e.g., by limiting or preventing interference by humans), or wild by its properties (e.g., genetically diverse, adapted to the natural environment, or having sufficient wild ancestry). Differences in values and priorities with respect to the dimensions of wildness manifested in differences in how respondents emphasize different dimensions of wildness informed their willingness (or hesitance) to use genomic science to adapt Pacific salmon to projected climate conditions. Adopting a multi-dimensional view of wildness can address the ambiguity that has characterized debates about where and how to protect and manage wild species and can help focus communication between genomic scientists, practitioners, and the public about new climate adaptation strategies. 6.2.2 Expanding Biopolitics to the Molecular Level Biopolitics, is the study of the power over life in all its forms – human and non-human, organism, and ecosystem (Lorimer & Driessen, 2013). Recent social science scholarship on conservation has employed the theoretical framework of biopolitics to interrogate the exercise of power over non-human life in a wide range of contexts, including captive breeding (Friese, 2013; Hennessy, 2013), hybrid species management (Fredriksen, 2016), and rewilding (Lorimer, 2017; Ward & Prior, 2020). While there has been frequent acknowledgement in this literature of the 140 importance of genes as conceptual schemas in conservation (Biermann & Mansfield, 2014; Chrulew, 2011), there has not previously been a fulsome examination of how genomic tools and knowledge are deployed to manage and conserve non-human life. Chapter 4 takes this as its principal focus, showing how desirable forms of salmon life – those that are closer to wildness – are distinguished from markers of human influence. This production of difference, through genomic science and in combination with local knowledge among hatchery staff, has implications for the ways that hatcheries physically reshape salmon at multiple levels, from the molecular to the collective. In the early years, the goal of hatchery production was simple – to produce increasingly more fish for catch. Today, salmon enhancement targets a wider range of objectives – conservation, genetic diversity, Indigenous rights, economic development, and recreation. To realize these diverse aims, hatcheries exert greater biopolitical control over salmon birth, death, and reproduction at multiple scales, from the molecular (e.g., genes, genomes) to the collective level (e.g., populations, species). This is made possible by advances in salmon genetic and genomic science, and the tools that they generate. Thus, the proliferation of genomic tools has enabled hatcheries to both expand and refine their use of biopower through genomic sequencing, broodstock screening, epigenetic modifications to rearing environments, and population genomics. That is, biopolitics is expanding human interventions into new areas of salmon biology, such as the modification of environments to alter salmon epigenetics, and refining its existing focus on salmon reproduction by advancing the ability for hatcheries to screen for desired or undesired lineages. This biopolitical expansion and refining has not been an even process. I found greater institutional adaptability to novel genomic science within and across individual hatchery facilities, and less flexibility at higher organizational levels, where political contests influence 141 decisions about salmon production. There, the pursuit of wildness must contend with other priorities and cultural values and, as the policy debates in Chapter 3 illustrated, a politically contentious field of actors. 6.2.3 Environmental Sociology and Genomics At a broad level, this thesis advances a sociological approach to genomic science. Following the genomic revolution, the way that we think about and interact with nature has changed – there is vastly more knowledge available, faster, and at a more affordable rate, enabling unprecedented interventions into organisms and ecosystems. As genomic technologies become more accessible to wider audiences, they are accompanied by debates about morality, risk, and uncertainty. Sociology has much to add to these conversations, particularly through its careful attention to the contextual factors that mediate individual and collective values, beliefs, and actions. However, environmental sociology has not been at the forefront of research on the implications of genomic advancements, or their applications for environmental problems. Chapter 2 traces developments in genomic science and draws several conceptual linkages to core areas of environmental sociology. Then, Chapters 3 to 5 demonstrate how applying sociological frameworks such as framing, biopolitics, and material-semiotics to genomic issues can advance research on the implications of such technologies. Throughout, this dissertation has drawn attention to the dynamic interactions between social constructions of “wild” nature and the material reshaping of salmon and their environments in the context of past and present interventions through artificial breeding, and through possible imagined futures that are presently being debated. I argue that sociological contributions to such debates are needed now when people are grappling with the risks and benefits of genomic technologies and knowledge, rather 142 than after such technologies have reached the level of public mistrust that past genetic technologies have experienced, such as genetically modified organisms. 6.3 Strengths and Limitations One of the principal strengths of this dissertation is its rich empirical foundation in the case study at hand. A substantial body of data were collected and analyzed from several different sources, including: 105 interviews across a wide range of institutions involved in managing and conserving Pacific salmon; documents from news media, government, legal, and participant observation; and, at salmon-related events. Following a qualitative methodology enabled me to obtain deeper reflections from participants about their views, values, priorities, and practices. The use of semi-structured interviews and open-ended questions allowed respondents to raise issues that I had not previously identified as significant. Indeed, the central focus on the changing meaning of wildness emerged through pilot interviews with genomic scientists, who described their work on hatchery-wild interactions. Triangulating findings across these different sources strengthened the research outcomes in three ways: (i) by validating emergent patterns I identified during data collection and analysis; (ii) by validating the purposive sampling frame I created for interviews; and (iii) by providing me with opportunities to learn about and check my understanding of important contextual information, such as the life cycle of salmon, which was critical to the interdisciplinary work at hand. Another related strength of this research is its breadth across different institutions and individuals with varying types and levels of expertise. The issues facing Pacific salmon populations are complex, stemming from multiple overlapping areas of society, including harvest (First Nations, recreational, and commercial), habitat (e.g., dams, pollution, urban development), 143 and hatchery production (facilities, management, biology). This complexity informed the research design used in this dissertation, wherein I undertook a purposive sampling approach to maximize participation from respondents involved in diverse areas of Pacific salmon production, management, and conservation. There are also some limitations to the present study. First, though the data used in this study were collected over three years (2016-2019), it is cross sectional and is therefore limited in its ability to demonstrate changes in attitudes or behaviours over time. This is particularly relevant for Chapter 5, wherein I examine respondents’ willingness to selectively breed salmon for particular characteristics, including resilience to climate change. As the effects of climate change become more apparent in salmon habitats and as salmon populations change in abundance, it is possible that the participants of this study may be more open to novel technologies that can prevent further losses. This may be particularly true if salmon populations that hold cultural significance, such as Fraser River sockeye, are further threatened. Recent research has shown that personal experience plays an important role in how people perceive climate risks, though the effect diminishes over time (Bubeck et al., 2012; Duinen et al., 2015; Vasileiadou & Botzen, 2014; Lefevre et al., 2015). Whether personal experience translates into greater willingness to accept the risks of biotechnologies is still unclear. The choice of case study – Pacific salmon hatcheries in British Columbia – provided a fertile setting in which to conduct sociological research on human-nature interactions. However, there are also some contextual factors that differentiate this setting from other similar contexts. First, compared to other Pacific countries, Canadian hatcheries release the fewest Pacific salmon annually. This does not necessarily affect the relevance of the findings for other Pacific contexts, but it does mean that the magnitude of risk from hatchery-wild salmon interactions would likely 144 be greater in countries that produce vastly more hatchery salmon. Second, although Canada and the United States are geographical neighbours and salmon traverse national borders throughout their life cycles, the two countries have taken very different approaches to managing wildness. Where Canadian hatcheries aim to only use wild salmon in their broodstock to minimize domestication effects, the United States uses hatchery salmon in their broodstock. This variation reflects different strategies for managing fisheries and the broad continuum of hybrid spaces between “fully wild” and “fully captive” in conservation (Braverman, 2015). Third, there are likely differences in how people perceive the risks and benefits of applying genomic technologies to alter animals, such as salmon, compared to plants or fungi. 6.4 Future Research and Conclusions This dissertation provides a basis for several avenues of research. First, there is a need for further research on the acceptability of genomic applications for dealing with environmental problems. There are several ways that genomics can and is being used to adapt non-human life to climate change, including assisted migration, gene editing (e.g., CRISPR), and transgenics. Understanding where and how people support different forms of interventions will be important for informing the development of climate adaptation policies. Indeed, here has been little work done examining how people compare the risks and benefits of different genomic technologies. For example, is selective breeding perceived as more natural and more acceptable than assisted migration of salmon outside their natural ranges? This research would require careful attention to how genomic technologies are described to participants and how they are understood. Moreover, there may be pre-existing opposition to anything that is associated with “genetic modification,” which has been the subject of public controversy in many countries. Genetic modification is 145 commonly conflated with transgenics (taking genetic material from one organism and inserting it in a different species) but all the above examples involve modifying genetics in some form. As noted in Chapter 5, some respondents associated selective breeding with genetic modification, and a few expressed concerns about creating “frankenfish,” a term that has predominately described transgenic fish in Canada. Qualitative methods could provide a means of probing for nuanced differences in meaning and risk perception across genomic applications. One of the main findings of this dissertation is that Canadian hatcheries actively seek to produce salmon that are as close to wild as possible. Yet, respondents also discussed other values and priorities that are factors in decision-making about what forms of salmon should be fostered, such as resilience, abundance, and recreation. Though the production of “wild” salmon was the focus of this research, it would be valuable for future research to consider how other values differentially alter salmon production. For example, there is enormous value placed on recreational fisheries. How do hatcheries engage in biopolitical decision-making to produce fish for sport, such as prioritizing certain species for production? How do values other than wildness alter the network of individuals and systems of knowledge involved in determining how salmon should be produced, for what purpose, and at what level of risk? These questions can be comparatively examined at the national level, particularly between Canada and the United States as countries that share similar salmon populations but have taken very different approaches to managing risks to wild salmon. Jasanoff and Kim (2009; 2013) introduced the idea of a “sociotechnical imaginary” to draw connections between national identity and the promotion of certain technologies. Sociotechnical imaginaries are “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 120). Future research should consider how 146 genomic technologies are adopted in environmental policy and practice in relation to “distinctive national visions of desirable futures” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, p. 121), and the implications of this for how non-humans such as salmon are the organisms at the center of such interventions. Finally, as discussed above, there is a need for longitudinal studies of risk perceptions in the context of genomic awareness, particularly with respect to climate adaptation strategies. It is possible that peoples’ assessments of what constitutes an acceptable risk may change in response to major climate events (e.g., flooding, wildfires, drought), changes in the abundance of valued salmon runs, or declines in other species that are part of salmon ecosystems. To better understand whether Zinn’s (2016) observation of a shift towards risk-taking is occurring in response to climate change, future research should consider methods that can capture changes over time, such as cohort studies, or longitudinal qualitative interviews. Longitudinal research should also consider the adaptive strategies used by salmon and other non-humans. Wong and Lockie (2018) call for greater consideration of how the material world matters as an actor “in the making of (risk) cultures and norms or in the selection of risk” (p. 1084). Many research participants described salmon as resilient and capable of pursuing survival strategies, such as straying to new rivers when landslides or development block access to their intended spawning grounds. Over time, these strategies may result in salmon moving towards more favourable habitat, with different implications for communities that experience loss and those that experience greater abundance. What is a wild salmon? Though seemingly simple, this question is embedded in public, political, and scientific debates about what it means for humans to intervene in, and alter, other forms of life. Salmon hatcheries began in Canada in the 1970s as a means of addressing past problems created by overfishing and habitat degradation, while optimistically turning salmon 147 into commodities that can be mass-produced. Today, hatcheries play an additional role: that of conservation and ecological stewardship. Their ability to fulfill this role depends on how they interact with naturally spawning salmon. Over time, studies of salmon genetics have shown that salmon reared in hatcheries are made different at a molecular level and present several risks to the naturally spawning salmon they seek to assist. 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As the e-mail invitation and the consent form indicate, this research project investigates the development and movement of genomic knowledge from the lab to potential implementation. You have been asked to participate because of your involvement in the development of scientific knowledge surrounding the use of genomics for coho salmon enhancement. First, I will ask you a few questions about your background. Then, I’ll ask about your lab and the EPIC4 Project. Then I’ll ask you about salmon and your views on nature, and we’ll finish with some questions about the project’s outcomes. The interview will take between 60-90 minutes. (Go over consent form with respondent) Section 1. Respondent’s Background 1. What is your educational background? 2. How long have you been working in this lab? 3. How would you describe what you do in this lab? 4. What is your current position in the lab? 5. How do you define success in your work? Section 2. General Lab Questions 6. Do you work closely with anyone else in this lab? If yes: Who? Why? How often? 7. Do you ever consult or work with anyone in a different lab? If yes: Who? In which lab? Why? How often? (Daily/Monthly/Weekly/Every 2 weeks/Other) 8. Are any of these people involved in EPIC4? If no: If it were up to you, would you work more closely with other labs? Why/why not? 9. Do you share your research findings with anyone outside academia? If yes: Who/what organization? How often? Why? a. If it were up to you, would you work more closely with other groups? Why/why not? 10. If I were a new employee in this lab, what should I know about working here? 189 Section 3. EPIC4 Project 11. From your perspective, what are the main issues or problems that EPIC4 addresses? 12. What is your understanding of how this project developed and where it is going? 13. What does your lab contribute to the EPIC4 project? 14. What would indicate success in this project overall? 15. Do you think there are any obstacles to reaching the project’s goals? If yes, please specify. 16. In your opinion, how likely is it that the project will succeed? Why/why not? 17. What do you think are the benefits of this project? 18. Are there any possible negative outcomes associated with the project? 19. Do you think that parentage-based tagging (PBT) is a good approach? Questions for Principal Investigators: 20. Did you have to convince any of your colleagues to apply PBT to coho salmon? 21. Are there any of your science colleagues who have expressed concern about the success or outcome of the project? Why/why not? Section 5. Salmon Science and Management 22. Coho salmon returns are down significantly in British Columbia. What do you think are the reasons so few coho salmon are returning? 23. Do you think it is important to revive coho salmon stocks? Why/why not? 24. How is genomics an improvement over existing approaches? 25. Are there any possible uses of genomics in coho salmon management beyond the scope of EPIC4? 26. Do you think that hatchery programs are an appropriate way to address declining coho salmon populations? Why/why not? Probe: viewpoints on commercial fishing, dams, human development 27. What do you think the role of hatcheries will be in the future given new directions in gene technology? 28. Will this project develop an appropriate technology for aquaculture? If yes, how? If no, why not? 29. If successful, do you think that the tools developed in EPIC4 will change the aquaculture industry? Why/why not? Section 6. Views on Nature and Salmon 30. As you likely know, there are sometimes distinctions made between wild and non-wild salmon. In your opinion, would there be any basis for making that distinction? 31. What makes a salmon ‘wild’? 32. In your opinion, is there a difference between “wild” and “natural?” 33. In your opinion, what does the public think makes a salmon wild? 34. Do you think that hatchery-produced salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 190 35. Do you think that aquaculture salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 36. Between hatchery and aquaculture salmon, is one more wild than the other? Why or why not? 37. Do you think that PBT-informed breeding impacts a salmon’s status as wild? 38. Are there any ethical issues that are specific to PBT? If yes: What do they involve? Are there different ethical concerns for farmed salmon? If no: Why not? 39. Would you see it as more ethical to try to use genomics-assisted selective breeding to revive coho salmon numbers in BC; or to refrain from using genomic-assisted selective breeding in the hopes that the problem can be otherwise solved? Why or why not? Section 7. Communication and Outside Groups 40. Who is the main audience of your work? Probe: Academics? Industry? Public? Government? ENGOs? 41. How do you think they might use the findings that come out of the project? (ask for each group) a. Would you be working closely with any of these groups? If yes: What would you be doing? 42. How do you think the public would respond to the EPIC4 project overall? 43. Are there any particular groups or agencies that might be supportive of this project? Why/why not? 44. Are there any that might oppose it? Why/why not? If yes: Do you think any of their concerns are legitimate? Why/why not? 45. Do you think that your lab (or perhaps the EPIC4 team at large) has a responsibility to respond to these concerns? Why/why not? If yes: What is the best way to do this? 46. Have you come across any opposition to or misunderstanding about the project so far? If yes: How did you respond? What was the outcome? 47. Given the opportunity, do you think that a public forum would be a useful avenue to discuss coho enhancement? Why/why not? If yes: Would you participate in such a forum? Why/why not? Conclusion That is all I have for you on my end - do you have any further comments or questions about the content of the interview or about the project overall? If I needed to clarify some comments you made, or if I had any follow up questions, is it possible for me to contact you at the e-mail through which we have been communicating? If not, how would you like me to get in touch with you? Great! Thank you so much for your participation. 191 Appendix B - Interview Guide, Canadian Government Introduction Thank you for taking time today to speak with me about the EPIC4 Genomics Project. As the e-mail invitation and the consent form indicate, this research project investigates the way that scientific knowledge is evaluated and implemented by different groups, including government agencies. You have been invited to take part in this research study because you are currently employed in a federal or provincial department that is related to the project. First, I will ask you a few questions about your background and your work. Then I’ll ask you about salmon and fisheries management and we’ll finish with some questions about how your department communicates with other groups or organizations. The interview will take between 60-90 minutes. (Go over consent form with respondent) Section 1. Respondent’s Background 1. When did you start in this unit/department? 2. What is your current position? 3. How would you describe what you do here? 4. What is your educational background? 5. What are some of the major issues your unit deals with? 6. How does your unit relate to other units in this department? 7. Are there any challenges to working with other DFO units? 8. What are your department’s mandates? 9. What would success look like for your department? 10. If I were a new employee in this unit, what should I know about working here? Section 2. Views on Nature and Salmon I’d now like to ask you some questions about your views on salmon and nature. 11. In British Columbia, we often hear the term “wild salmon.” In your opinion, what makes a salmon “wild”? 12. Is there a difference between the concepts “wild” and “natural” or do they mean the same thing? 13. Do you think that hatchery-produced salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 14. Are there genetic or behavioural differences between hatchery salmon and naturally born salmon? 15. Do you think that aquaculture salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 16. Between hatchery and aquaculture salmon, is one more wild than the other? Why or why not? What are the main differences? 192 17. Who do you think should be responsible for determining what counts as a “wild salmon?” a. Does this distinction matter? 18. How would you describe the state of salmon fisheries today? 19. Have there been any noticeable changes in recent years? Probe: Overall trend? Last 10 years? 20. What sources of information do you use to find out how salmon stocks are doing? 21. What are the characteristics of a successful salmon run? 22. Has climate change had any impact on fisheries or how they are being managed? If so, how? 23. What is the value of salmon in your opinion? 24. How important are coho compared to other species on the Coast? Section 3. Salmon and Fisheries Management 25. Do you think it is important to take steps to revive (or protect existing) coho stocks? Why/why not? 26. How does your department balance the demands of human development and the demands of salmon when managing rivers and other waterways? 27. Are you familiar with the Wild Salmon Policy? If yes: a. Does the WSP relate to your work in any way? If so, how? b. How has the WSP been implemented? c. What changes are being made to the policy? 28. What do you think is the purpose of hatcheries? a. Has this changed in recent years? b. How well do you think hatcheries meet these goals? 29. Do you think we still need hatcheries in the future? Why, why not? 30. In your opinion, should hatcheries selectively breed salmon for specific characteristics? Why/Why not? a. For what characteristics? 31. Does scientific research play a role in your work? If so, how? 32. Are there any challenges to incorporating science in fisheries policies or management practices? 33. What role does scientific research play in how resources are allocated at DFO? Section 4. Genomics 34. Have you dealt with similar types of projects previously? If so, which one(s) and how? 35. Do you encounter genomics, genetics, or DNA in the course of your work? If so, how? 36. In your opinion, are there benefits to using genomic tools or knowledge in fisheries management? 37. Are there any risks or ethical issues with using genomic tools or knowledge in fisheries management? If yes: What? Does DFO address those risks? 193 38. Some of the work in EPIC4 is related to parentage-based tagging. Are you familiar with Coded-wire tagging and parentage-based tagging? If yes: What are your thoughts on PBT and CWT approaches? 39. The tools from EPIC4 may also help redefine Conservation Units for coho salmon. Are you familiar with Conservation Units? If yes: How would you describe them? Are there any challenges for managing salmon according to CUs? Section 5. Communication and Outside Groups This last section asks about how your department communicates with outside groups. 40. How would you describe your department’s relationship with First Nations? 41. What role do First Nations play in fisheries management, if any? 42. Has this role changed in recent years? If so, how? 43. Do you expect this to change in the future? Why/why not? 44. Are there any changes you would like to see happen? 45. How does your department consult with First Nations? Has this changed in recent years? If so, how/why? 46. Does Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) play any role in fisheries management? If so, how? 47. Do you have any experience with TEK? If yes: How would you describe your experience? 48. In your opinion, are there any advantages or challenges with incorporating TEK in fisheries management? 49. Which stakeholders or interest groups are involved in salmon management? Probe: sports fishers, commercial fishers, any industries, ENGOs, community hatcheries a. Of those same groups, which are the biggest players? b. Of the groups you mentioned, which do you interact with most? c. Have their roles changed in recent years? If so, how? d. Do you expect this to change in the future? Why/why not? 50. How does your unit/organization address the concerns or interests of different groups? 51. Have you ever participated in stakeholder engagement? If yes: What was your experience like? 52. In your view, are there any challenges to engaging with interest or stakeholder groups? Conclusion That is all I have for you on my end - do you have any further comments or questions about the content of the interview or about the project overall? If I needed to clarify some comments you made, or if I had any follow up questions, is it possible for me to contact you at the e-mail through which we have been communicating? If not, how would you like me to get in touch with you? Great! Thank you so much for your participation. 194 Appendix C - Interview Guide, Nuu-chah-nulth Fisheries Introduction Thank you for taking time today to speak with me. As the e-mail invitation and the consent form indicate, this research project investigates the way that scientific knowledge is evaluated and implemented by people who are involved in salmon conservation, fishing, and management. You are invited to participate in a follow-up interview to talk about your experiences during a workshop on genomics held at a West Coast Vancouver Island Salmon Roundtable meeting. First, I will ask you a few questions about your background and your work. Then I’ll ask you about your experience during the workshop and your views on genomics and we’ll finish with some questions about salmon management and knowledge. The interview will take approximately 60 minutes. (Go over consent form with respondent) Section 1. Respondent’s Background and Outside Groups 1. How long have you been involved in the roundtables? 2. What group/organization do you represent at the roundtables? a. What is your job/position? b. What do you do in your job/position? 3. What is your educational background? Probe: specialization, other training 4. What are the goals of this group/organization? 5. What would success look like for you at the roundtables? 6. How would you describe the relationship between members of the roundtable? 7. What are the benefits or challenges to working with other groups, governments, or stakeholders? a. How do you deal with these challenges? Section 2. Genomics 8. How would you evaluate the workshop you attended? a. Which presentations/discussions did you find most relevant or beneficial for you? b. How well was the science communicated? Was it easy/hard to follow? c. Was there anything you thought was missing or is there anything you would have changed? 9. Do you ever come across anything related to genetics, genomics, or DNA in your work? If so, how? 10. In your opinion, are there benefits to using genomics or genetics in salmon management? 11. Are there any risks or ethical issues with using genomics or genetics in salmon management? 195 a. Do you trust scientists and fisheries managers to deal with those risks? 12. Did your views on genomics change at all after attending the workshop? If so, how? 13. Part of this project is studying the genetic diversity of coho salmon. Do you ever come across the term genetic diversity in your work? If so, how? 14. Do you see any benefits or challenges for managing salmon according to genetic diversity? 15. Had you heard of parentage-based or genetic tagging before the workshop? 16. Do you see benefits or drawbacks for the PBT or CWT methods? Section 3. Views on Nature and Salmon I’d now like to ask you some questions about your views on salmon and nature. 17. What is the value of Pacific salmon in your opinion? a. How important are coho compared to other species on the Coast? 18. How would you describe the condition of Pacific salmon stocks in your area? Probe: Other geographical areas, coho salmon and other species 19. Have there been any changes/trends in recent years? Probe: Overall trend? Last 10 years? 20. What do you think are some of the most important issues facing Pacific salmon? 21. Has climate change had any impact on Pacific salmon in your area? If yes: How? What do you think needs to be done to deal with the effects of climate change on Pacific salmon? 22. In British Columbia, we often hear the term “wild salmon.” In your opinion, what makes a salmon a ‘wild’? 23. Do you think that hatchery-produced salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 24. Do you think that aquaculture salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 25. Between hatchery and aquaculture salmon, is one more wild than the other? 26. Do you think salmon conservation is an important goal? Why/why not? 27. Do you think it is important to take steps to revive (or protect existing) salmon stocks that are struggling? Why/why not? Section 4. Salmon Science and Knowledge 28. What do you think is the purpose of hatcheries? a. How well do you think hatcheries meet these goals? 2. Do you think we still need hatcheries in the future? 29. In your opinion, should hatcheries selectively breed salmon for specific characteristics? Why/Why not? a. For what characteristics? 30. How well does DFO balance the demands of human development and the ecological needs of salmon? a. Is there anything you think they should be doing differently? 31. How well are salmon monitored in BC? b. Are there things we should track/monitor but don’t? 196 32. What sources of information do you use to find out how salmon stocks are doing? 33. What do you think is the role of science in salmon management? 34. Do you ever find situations where what you see contradicts what you have heard from scientists? 35. There are many ways that people have knowledge of salmon, including their observations at the local level. In your opinion, how important are local observations and local knowledge? 36. Do you think that local observations and local knowledge holders are given enough consideration in how salmon are managed? 37. Are there any challenges with incorporating local knowledge in salmon management? 38. Are you familiar with the concept of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)? 39. In your opinion, how important is TEK in salmon management? 40. Do you think that TEK and Indigenous Knowledge Holders are given enough consideration in how salmon are managed? 41. Are there any advantages or challenges with incorporating TEK in salmon management? If so, what? Conclusion That is all I have for you on my end - do you have any further comments or questions about the content of the interview or about the project overall? If I needed to clarify some comments you made, or if I had any follow up questions, is it possible for me to contact you at the e-mail through which we have been communicating? If not, how would you like me to get in touch with you? Great! Thank you so much for your participation. 197 Appendix D - Interview Guide, Fishing Industry Introduction Thank you for taking time today to speak with me about the EPIC4 Genomics Project. As the e-mail invitation and the consent form indicate, this research project investigates the way that scientific knowledge is evaluated and implemented by different groups, including people who are currently employed by or volunteer for an organization or industry related to salmon fishing, or people who are involved in the commercial or salmon fishing industries. You are invited to participate in this research because of your involvement with salmon fisheries or habitats. First, I will ask you a few questions about your background and your work. Then I’ll ask you about salmon and fisheries management and we’ll finish with some questions about how your department communicates with other groups or organizations. The interview will take between 60-90 minutes. (Go over consent form with respondent) Section 1. Respondent’s Background 1. How long have you been involved in fishing? 2. What types of fishing do you do? a. What do you usually fish for? b. Where/How often? 3. Are you currently employed or part of any fishing organizations? If yes: What is your current occupation? 4. How long have you been in your current role? 5. What do you do in your job/position? 6. What are the goals of this/these organization(s)? 7. What would success look like for you? 8. What is your educational background? Probe: science/technical background, formal or informal training 9. How would you describe what it’s like to be in fishing these days? Section 2. Views on Nature and Salmon 10. How would you describe the condition of Pacific salmon stocks today? Probe: Other geographical areas, coho salmon and other species 11. Have there been any noticeable changes in recent years? How/why? Probe: Overall trend? Last 10 years? 12. What do you think are some of the most important issues facing Pacific salmon? a. Are these issues also a priority for other (sports/commercial) fishers? 13. What sources of information do you use to find out how salmon stocks are doing? 14. What is the value of salmon in your opinion? a. How important are coho salmon compared to other species? 198 15. What are the characteristics of a successful or healthy salmon return? Probe: Abundance, size, “fight” health 16. Has climate change had any impact on Pacific salmon? If yes: How? Have you been affected by these impacts? What do you think needs to be done to deal with the effects of climate change on Pacific salmon fisheries? 17. In British Columbia, we often hear the term “wild salmon.” In your opinion, what makes a salmon a ‘wild’? 18. Do you think that hatchery-produced salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 19. Are there genetic or behavioural differences between hatchery salmon and naturally born salmon? 20. Do you think that aquaculture salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 21. Between hatchery and aquaculture salmon, is one more wild than the other? Why/why not? Section 3. Salmon and Fisheries Management 22. What do you think is the purpose of hatcheries? a. How well do you think hatcheries meet these goals? 2. Do you think we still need hatcheries in the future? 23. In your opinion, should hatcheries selectively breed salmon for specific characteristics? Why/Why not? a. For what characteristics? 24. Do you think salmon conservation is an important goal? Why/why not? a. Is conservation something that a lot of people in the fishing industry are concerned about? Why/why not? 25. Do you think it is important to take steps to revive (or protect existing) salmon stocks that are struggling? Why/why not? 26. The Wild Salmon policy is a federal policy aimed at protecting and conserving wild salmon and their habitats. Are you familiar with the Wild Salmon Policy? If yes: What are your thoughts on the policy? Does the WSP relate to your fishing activities in any way? 27. Part of this project is studying the genetic diversity of coho salmon. Do you ever come across the term genetic diversity in your work/fishing? If yes: What does genetic diversity mean to you? 28. Are you familiar with Conservation Units? Are CUs relevant for your own fishing activities or people in your part of the industry? a. Do you see any benefits or challenges for managing salmon according to genetic diversity/CUs? 29. One of the main activities in managing salmon is monitoring the health and activity of different populations. How well are salmon monitored in BC? a. Are there things we should track/monitor but don’t? b. As a fisher, have you ever come across the coded wire tags that hatcheries use to keep track of salmon? If so, how? c. Have you ever heard of parentage-based or genetic tagging? If yes: Do you see benefits or drawbacks for either type of tagging? 199 Section 4. Salmon Science and Knowledge 30. What do you think is the role of science in fishing? a. Are there any benefits/challenges of using science in fishing/your work? 31. Do you ever find situations where what you see contradicts what you have heard from scientists? 32. Have you ever participated in any “citizen science” or research projects around fish (e.g. samples, monitoring)? If yes, how & why? How would you describe your experience? 33. Do you ever come across anything related to genetics, genomics, or DNA in your work? If so, how? 34. In your opinion, are there benefits to using genomics or genetics in fisheries management? 35. Are there any risks or ethical issues with using genomics or genetics in fisheries management? a. Do you trust scientists and fisheries managers to deal with those risks? 36. There are many ways that people have knowledge of salmon, including their observations at the local level. 37. In your opinion, how important are local observations and local knowledge? 38. Do you think that local observations and local knowledge are given enough consideration in how salmon are managed? 39. Are there any advantages or challenges with incorporating local knowledge in salmon management? 40. Another way of knowing about salmon is Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge. 41. Are you familiar with the concept of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)? If so, what are your experiences, impressions? 42. Are there any advantages or challenges with incorporating TEK in fisheries management? If so, what? Section 5. Communication and Outside Groups 43. Do you ever interact with any personnel or departments from DFO? 44. If yes, who/which ones and about what? How often? 45. Does this ever involve coho or other species of salmon? If so, how? 46. What do you see as DFO’s mandate or central purpose? 47. How well does DFO balance the demands of human development and the ecological needs of salmon? 48. Is there anything you think they should be doing differently? 49. How would you describe the relationship between DFO and sport fishers? 50. Are there any challenges with interacting with DFO? 51. Do you identify as Indigenous or First Nations? If yes, from what nation/band/community? 52. Do you ever work with or interact with [other] First Nations during your fishing activities? If yes, how would you describe your experiences? 200 53. How would you describe the relationship between First Nations and (sport/commercial) fishers in this area? 54. What other groups are involved in salmon fisheries and management? Probe: sports fishers, commercial fishers, any industries, ENGOs, community hatcheries a. How would you describe the relationship between sport fishers and these groups? Probe for any partnerships, joint interests b. What are the challenges to working with other groups or stakeholders? How do you/your organization deal with these challenges? c. Of those groups, who has the biggest impact on how decisions are made? 55. Have you ever participated in a community forum or consultation meeting that dealt with fisheries management or policies? If yes, where/why? What was your experience like? Conclusion That is all I have for you on my end - do you have any further comments or questions about the content of the interview or about the project overall? If I needed to clarify some comments you made, or if I had any follow up questions, is it possible for me to contact you at the e-mail through which we have been communicating? If not, how would you like me to get in touch with you? Great! Thank you so much for your participation. 201 Appendix E - Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations Introduction Thank you for taking time today to speak with me about the EPIC4 Genomics Project. As the e-mail invitation and the consent form indicate, this research project investigates the way that scientific knowledge is evaluated and implemented by different groups, including people who are currently employed by or volunteer for an organization or industry related to salmon fishing or their habitats. You are invited to participate in this research because of your involvement with salmon fisheries or habitats. First, I will ask you a few questions about your background and your work. Then I’ll ask you about salmon and fisheries management and we’ll finish with some questions about how your department communicates with other groups or organizations. The interview will take between 60-90 minutes. (Go over consent form with respondent) Section 1. Respondent’s Background 1. How long have you been involved with (organization name)? 2. What is your position or role? 3. What you do in your role/position? 4. What is the goal of your organization? a. How do you go about trying to achieve these goals? 5. What would success look like? 6. Does any of the work/activity at your organization deal with salmon or their habitats? If yes, how? 7. How would you describe what it’s like to work for/volunteer at your organization? 8. Are you involved with or working with any other organizations that deal with salmon or fish habitat? If yes: which ones? What do you do there? 9. What is your educational background? Probe: science/technical background, formal or informal training Section 2. Views on Nature and Salmon I’d now like to ask you some questions about your views on salmon and nature. 10. How would you describe the condition of salmon stocks today? Probe: Other geographical areas, coho salmon and other species b. Why are stocks doing poor/well? 11. Have there been any noticeable changes in recent years? Probe: Overall trend? Last 10 years? 12. What sources of information do you use to find out how salmon stocks are doing? 202 13. What do you think are some of the most important issues facing Pacific salmon? c. How did you learn about these issues? d. What would be the best way for a person to learn more about these issues? e. Does your organization do anything related to these issues to raise awareness or bring about change? If so, how? 14. What is the value of salmon in your opinion? a. How important are coho salmon compared to other species? 15. What are the characteristics of a successful salmon run? (If they only give a number, ask: “are there any other characteristics that you look for?”) 16. Has climate change had any impact on Pacific salmon? If yes: How? Have you been affected by these impacts? What do you think needs to be done to deal with the effects of climate change on salmon fisheries? 17. In British Columbia, we often hear the term “wild salmon.” In your opinion, what makes a salmon a ‘wild’? 18. Do you think that hatchery-produced salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 19. Are there genetic or behavioural differences between hatchery salmon and naturally born salmon? 20. Do you think that aquaculture salmon can be thought of as wild? Why/why not? 21. Between hatchery and aquaculture salmon, is one more wild than the other? Why/why not? Section 3. Salmon and Fisheries Management 22. What do you think is the purpose of hatcheries? a. How well do you think hatcheries meet these goals? 23. Do you think we still need hatcheries in the future? Why, why not? 24. In your opinion, should hatcheries selectively breed salmon for specific characteristics? Why/Why not? a. For what characteristics? 25. Do you think salmon conservation is an important goal? Why/why not? a. Is salmon conservation something that a lot of people in your industry are concerned about? Why/why not? 26. Do you think it is important to take steps to revive (or protect existing) salmon stocks that are struggling? Why/why not? 27. The Wild Salmon policy is a federal policy aimed at protecting and conserving wild salmon and their habitats. Are you familiar with the Wild Salmon Policy? If yes: What are your thoughts on the policy? a. Does the WSP relate to your work in any way? 28. Part of this project is studying the genetic diversity of coho salmon. Do you ever come across the term genetic diversity in your work? If yes: What does genetic diversity mean to you? 29. Are you familiar with Conservation Units? Are CUs relevant for your own work or people in your part of the industry? 30. Do you see any benefits or challenges for managing salmon according to genetic diversity/CUs? 203 31. A key reason for identifying Conservation Units, is to help protect the genetic diversity within different species of salmon. How important do you think it is to protect diversity in salmon? Why so? 32. One of the main activities in managing salmon is monitoring the health and activity of different populations. 33. How well are salmon monitored in BC? a. Are there things we should track/monitor but don’t? b. Are you familiar with the use of coded wire tags to keep track of salmon? If so, what are your thoughts on this method? c. Have you ever heard of parentage-based or genetic tagging? If yes, do you see benefits or drawbacks for either type of tagging? d. How important do you think it is to be able to gather this kind of information on salmon? Section 4. Salmon Science and Knowledge 34. What do you think is the role of science in fish and habitat management? 35. Are there any advantages or challenges of using science in your work? a. Do you ever find situations where what you see contradicts what you have heard from scientists? 36. Have you ever participated in any “citizen science” or research projects around fish (e.g. samples, monitoring)? If yes, how & why? How would you describe your experience? 37. Do you think science is able to help solve the problems you mentioned earlier regarding salmon? Why/why not? 38. Do you ever come across anything related to genetics, genomics, or DNA in your work? If so, how? 39. In your opinion, are there benefits to using genomics or genetics in fisheries management? 40. Do you think genomic tools have anything to offer in dealing with any of the issues you mentioned earlier? 41. Are there any risks or ethical issues with using genomics or genetics in fisheries management? a. Do you trust scientists and fisheries managers to deal with those risks? 42. There are many ways that people have knowledge of salmon, including their observations at the local level. In your opinion, how important are local observations and local knowledge? 43. Do you think that local observations and local knowledge are given enough consideration and a big enough role in fisheries management? 44. Are there any advantages or challenges with incorporating local knowledge in fisheries management? If so, what? 45. Another way of knowing about salmon is Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Are you familiar with the concept of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)? If so, what are your experiences, impressions? 46. Are there any advantages or challenges with incorporating TEK in fisheries management? If so, what? 204 Section 5. Communication and Outside Groups 47. Do you ever interact with any personnel or departments from DFO? If yes: Who/which ones? About what? How often? 48. Does this ever involve coho or other species of salmon? If so, how? 49. Have you ever participated in a community forum or consultation meeting that dealt with fisheries management or policies? If yes: Where/why? What was your experience like? 50. What do you see as DFO’s mandate or central purpose? 51. How well does DFO balance the demands of human development and the ecological needs of salmon? 52. Is there anything you think they should be doing differently? 53. How would you describe the relationship between DFO and ENGOs? 54. Are there any challenges with interacting with DFO? 55. Do you identify as Indigenous or First Nations? If no: Do you ever work with or interact with First Nations during your work? If so, how/why? How would you describe your experiences? 56. How would you describe the relationship between First Nations and ENGOs in this area? 57. In your experience, what role do First Nations play in fisheries management? 58. What other groups are involved in salmon fisheries in BC? Probe: sports fishers, commercial fishers, any industries, community hatcheries a. How would you describe the relationship between environmental organizations and these groups? b. Of those groups, who has the biggest impact on how decisions are made? c. Which do you interact with the most? How/why? d. What are the challenges to working with other interest groups or stakeholders? If so, how do you/your organization deal with these challenges? Conclusion That is all I have for you on my end - do you have any further comments or questions about the content of the interview or about the project overall? If I needed to clarify some comments you made, or if I had any follow up questions, is it possible for me to contact you at the e-mail through which we have been communicating? If not, how would you like me to get in touch with you? Great! Thank you so much for your participation.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Sociology
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Matthews, Ralph, 1943-
In pursuit of wildness : genomic science, risk, and the production of wild salmon
Text