Pathogenic proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism

Abstract

In this article, I ask how a virus associated with Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia (BC) can reveal geographies of aquaculture, ecological encounters, and colonial entanglements within the bodies and blood cells of fish. Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV) travels through supply chains, ocean currents, and ecological interactions, and causes salmon to become at risk of ruptured blood cells and organ damage. This article proposes that PRV can be interpreted as a form of industrial waste that reinforces geographies of toxicity across multiple scales. I first situate the emergence of aquaculture in BC within colonial histories that continue to transform the coastal straits into contested sites of state-making. I then outline how multiple forms of life, ecological encounters, and unique hydrological conditions become entangled with industrial practices, giving rise to novel pathogenic proliferations. I end by describing how the appearance of yellow salmon hints at the potentially far-reaching presence of PRV, and I look to the bodies of salmon to consider how the expanding PRV footprint transforms regional ecologies and contributes to emergent toxic geographies of settler-colonialism. In forging connections between settler-colonialism, industrial landscape-making, and pathogenicity, I highlight how microbes can reflect and reinforce settler-colonial structures of dispossession. Moreover, in proposing that pathogens can be understood as components of industrial toxicity, I contribute to a reimagining of what industrial toxicants are and the forms they might take.

Introduction to special issue: “Scaled ethnographies of toxic flows”

“…In "Pathogenic Proliferations: Salmon aquaculture, industrial viruses, and toxic geographies of settler-colonialism", Darcey Evans (2022) investigates how ancestral waterways in what was once the largest salmon migration route in North America are increasingly seen as being poisoned by the virus, Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV). The article brings attention to viruses as toxicants and suggests that microbial pathogens are sometimes overlooked forms of toxic industrial waste.…”

“…Such discussions of different bodily politics and representations of toxic harm helps to uncover the power dynamics that actively produce some places (and some bodies) as more toxic/'naturally exposed' than others (Perczel, 2023) and underscore how and at what scale toxic matter flows and seeps even in efforts to contain (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023). Such slow violence is both visible and bodily experienced for those human and other-than-human populations who face toxic exposure daily (Evans, 2022;Garb and Leblond, 2023).…”

“…An attention to the scaled materiality of toxic substancesfrom how they are bodily experienced to local, national, and global regulatory efforts to contain toxic seepages (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023;Evans, 2022;Ippolito, 2022;Perczel, 2023) reveal the unequal distribution and failures to contain toxic flows where some groups are more exposed to harmful effects than others. In an industrial Italian town, experiences of asbestos regulations in the past shape engagements with dioxins in the present, highlighting the temporalities of toxic matter as health effects are delayed over time (Ippolito, 2022).…”

“…To conclude, ethnographic attention to the spatial politics of toxic flows constitutes a critical intervention in geography and anthropology by underlining the inherent inequality of poisonous exposure that reduces life expectancy and devalues human (Dewan and Sibilia, 2023;Garb and Leblond, 2023;Ippolito, 2022) and other-than-human (Evans, 2022) life. Scaled ethnographies tracing toxic flows help us visualize spatial geographies of structural inequality and the ways in which toxicity reshapes sociopolitical life (Fisher et al, 2021).…”

“…Furthermore, both geographers and anthropologists have thus far focused on chemicals - resulting in sub-fields such as ‘chemo-ethnographies’ (Jain, 2013; Kirksey, 2020; Shapiro, 2015; Shapiro and Kirksey, 2017) and chemical geographies (Balayannis, 2020; Romero et al, 2017). However, toxic matter is not limited to ‘industrial toxicants’, radioactivity or chemicals as Evans (2022) demonstrates with a virus emerging as a poisonous health-harming pathogen for salmon, the conjunctural outcome related to large-scale commercial aquaculture. This issue uses toxic flows to broaden the debate away from chemicals to include all substances that produce harm on living bodies, a timely intervention considering how zoonotic viruses like Sars-Cov-2 acts as a poison on organs and tissues.…”