What options are open to a person with no money who sees a wrong and wants to right it? What if it involves an international corporation, largely owned by a wealth country? This is the case of Don Staniford vs Mainstream from Norway.
While many environmental groups have worked to protect wild salmon from the disease and pollution of net pen salmon feedlots, they worked within the constraints of their funders. Big money runs with big money and so big funding makes environmental groups docile. It is incremental, small slips until environmental groups can find themselves supporting the very thing they are fighting. This happened with salmon farming. Most of BC’s large environmental groups formed an alliance, funding came to work things out with the fish farmers and soon they were supporting the doubling in size of the salmon farms.
I don’t think big environmentalism works because they become dependent on exactly the mechanism that is crushing life out of this planet. Can anyone name the enviro groups with money to fight salmon farms in BC? Have they become invisible within corporate partnerships?
What does environmentalism without big funding look like? That is how I work and that is how Don Staniford operates.
Don Staniford picked up humor, satire and in your face graphics as his tool to pry salmon farms away from wild salmon. He posted graphics of cigarette packs with warnings printed them: “Salmon Farming kills,” “Salmon Farming Spreads Disease” “Salmon Farms are Cancer.” (
website)
He dared to compare the salmon farming industry’s advertising to big tobacco and salmon feedlots to cancer. Although Staniford never named Mainstream, they came after him. Mainstream, largely owned by Norway, which is mother to this dirty industry, threatened Staniford. Cease and desist, apologize, remove the statements in five days or else they would file a civil claim. With no salary, no money at all, Don wrote a 67-page report detailing how salmon feedlots are like cancer, attached a graphic cigarette package with the one finger salute and said, “Bring it on.”
