Cooke Aquaculture, the company responsible for releasing over 250,000 nonnative and viral-infected Atlantic salmon into our public waters, will face another challenge in their attempt to begin raising domesticated steelhead in their Puget Sound net pens.
Today, Wild Fish Conservancy and our partners filed an appeal taking our legal challenge over the approval of Cooke's new net pen proposal straight to the WA Supreme Court.
This decision comes in response to an unfortunate but not unexpected ruling by a lower court to uphold a permit granted to Cooke by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) and to defer to the agency's misguided decision to greenlight Cooke’s project without conducting a comprehensive scientific review of the potential environmental impacts to Puget Sound's ecosystem.
“We are disappointed that the lower court has upheld WDFW’s inadequate environmental review of Cooke’s destructive net pens," said Hallie Templeton, senior oceans campaigner and deputy legal director at Friends of the Earth. "We will appeal the flawed decision that allows Cooke’s floating factory farms to persist in Puget Sound, further destroying water quality and our endangered salmon and orcas.”
“Net-pen farming in Puget Sound promotes private profit over public resource preservation,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney at Center for Food Safety. “We will continue fighting this harmful practice to help to protect our endangered salmon and orca for future generations.”
Last February, Wild Fish Conservancy and partners at the Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, and Friends of the Earth, filed a lawsuit against WDFW for violating state law by permitting Cooke's new proposal without requiring a comprehensive environmental impact statement (EIS). This type of review would have fully analyzed the risks posed to wild fish, water quality, and the overall health of Puget Sound.
2017 Cypress Island collapse. Photo: WA Department of Fish and Wildlife
As it stands, WDFW's current deficient environmental review that largely relied on a woefully outdated EIS from 1990 sets a low bar for what level of risk and uncertainty should be acceptable when it comes to making decisions with the potential to endanger the health of Puget Sound.
“Fish factory farming has no place in Puget Sound,” said Sophia Ressler, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Doing the work to fully understand how this project could harm our waters and endangered wildlife is absolutely vital to protecting our state waters, and the failure to require this will be destructive.”
In early November, the lower Court ruled they did not have the scientific expertise necessary to overrule WDFW's opinion. As a result, the Judge was unable to consider the merits of the lawsuit, deferring to WDFW on the very decision and underlying scientific review being challenged. The WA Supreme Court, with its increased capabilities and resources, is likely to be far more capable and prepared to address the technical merits of this case moving forward.
“The question at the heart of this lawsuit is whether or not the agency’s environmental review of the science sufficiently considered the risks posed by Cooke’s new project,” says Kurt Beardslee, Executive Director of the Wild Fish Conservancy. “The Court’s decision to rely on the expertise of the very agency being challenged means the scientific merits of this case have not been considered. The health of our Sound is far too important, we will appeal this case directly to the Supreme Court.”
Today’s appeal, echoes the calls of thousands of members of the public, including six Tribal Nations, salmon and killer whale experts, and commercial and recreational fishing groups, who all urged WDFW in public comment to do their due diligence and conduct an EIS that fully analyzes the potential environmental impacts before making a decision on whether or not to permit this new project. Even the Department of Natural Resources, a jurisdictional agency to the review process, submitted comments expressing concerns that were never addressed by WDFW’s environmental review process.
The risks posed by commercial net pen aquaculture are not only well-documented in the scientific record, but are all too familiar here in Puget Sound— daily untreated pollution, viral outbreaks, and catastrophic collapse events to name a few. This spring, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made a new Endangered Species Act (ESA) determination finding that Puget Sound net pens “are likely to adversely affect” ESA-listed salmon, steelhead, and rockfish in Puget Sound. As a result, the National Marine Fisheries Service is currently preparing a biological opinion to further analyze this initial finding.
The federal agency’s recognition of the potential risks to our most fragile wild fish populations and the decision to conduct a current and more informed analysis of those potential risks stands in stark contrast to WDFW’s reliance on the 1990 EIS and their arguments in trial that there was no agency record of environmental harm in Puget Sound.
“Wild Fish Conservancy, our attorneys, and our legal partners all remain more confident than ever that when the science and the merits of this case are considered, we will prevail.” says Beardslee. “We refuse to let the science be ignored.”
Learn more:
Wild Fish Conservancy is a nonprofit conservation ecology organization dedicated to preserving, protecting, and restoring the northwest’s wild fish and the ecosystems they depend on, through science, education, and advocacy.
wildfishconservancy.org
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
biologicaldiversity.org
Center for Food Safety's mission is to empower people, support farmers, and protect the earth from the harmful impacts of industrial agriculture, including aquaculture. Through groundbreaking legal, scientific, and grassroots action, we protect and promote your right to safe food and a healthy resilient environment.
centerforfoodsafety.org
Friends of the Earth fights to create a more healthy and just world. Our current campaigns focus on promoting clean energy and solutions to climate change, ensuring the food we eat and products we use are safe and sustainable, and protecting marine ecosystems and the people who live and work near them.
foe.org
The conservation and environmental groups bringing this challenge are represented by Kampmeier & Knutsen, PLLC and by attorneys at the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Biological Diversity.