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Genetics as a New Frontier for Environmental Climate Change Responses

Sat, September 2, 2:00 to 3:30pm, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Fairfax B

Abstract

The impact of a changing climate on marine life is turning oceans into one of the most important frontiers in the socio-political battle over the environment. Increasingly harsh ocean conditions have led to rapid declines in several salmon species along the Pacific Coast, threatening both vulnerable salmon runs and the food sovereignty, security, and cultural survival of coastal indigenous and settler communities. In response to declining fisheries, hatcheries continue to produce juvenile salmon that are biologically and behaviorally distinct from “wild” salmon, fostering concerns that hatchery salmon are replacing the vanishing “wild” salmon stocks. In this paper, we examine hatcheries as sites of contested knowledge and biopower and we raise questions about the complex relationships between culture, risk, and the bodies of humans and non-humans. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Canadian genomic scientists and an analysis of news articles from 2005 to 2015, we examine discourse surrounding Pacific salmon hatcheries and the human and non-human risks associated with these operations. Our findings reveal that advances in genetic technologies inform both support for and resistance to human interventions in oceans management through hatcheries. We demonstrate how biotechnologies such as hatcheries represent a problematic but persistent feature of climate change adaptation and explore the impacts of knowledge-based resource management on salmon bodies and the humans that depend on them.

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