The Humboldt Fishermen’s Marketing Association, the Redwood Region Audubon Society and 350 Humboldt have appealed the Humboldt County Planning Commission’s recent approval of an environmental review of a large fish farm on the Samoa Peninsula to the Board of Supervisors.
In an Aug. 17 letter , the three agencies listed numerous issues with the review of Nordic Aquafarms’ development proposal that they believe violate the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The alleged issues raised include:
— Under-calculating greenhouse gas emissions. There are numerous sources of such emissions in the project, including the manufacture of fish food, refrigerants used to cool the facility, the truck travel generated by the project and the amount of fossil-fuel powered electricity that will be used.
— The effects of the project on local salmonid fisheries, including potential exposure of fish populations to disease and the likelihood of increasing domoic acid in Humboldt Bay.
— That required scientific studies were not completed before the report was done.
— The allegation that the project was improperly piece-mealed: that is broken into three separate projects instead of being considered as a whole.
The letter-writers state that the EIR should have considered other alternatives, including a smaller project, or creating the project one module at a time, so that any problems could be worked out before going onward.
In a statement issued after the appeal was filed, Nordic said the appeal “provides an avenue to continue dialogue.”
“We believe the certified Environmental Impact Report to be a comprehensive and robust document,” the company said, adding that the project would clean up the contaminated old pulp mill site and, once operational, provide farmed Atlantic salmon to domestic markets — replacing fish that is currently farmed overseas and imported.
If the supervisors certify the FEIR, the challenging organizations have about 30 days to challenge the decision in court. No date has yet been set for the board to hear the appeal.
See past coverage of the proposed project and its environmental review here and find a press release announcing the appeal below.
This article appears in Obon Humboldt Style.
I am up in the air about this project. I am as a rule against farming salmon, but my knowledge is derived from fish raised in pens in the oceans and their record is poor. I want to think that fish raised in a sealed environment won’t harm nearby natural fish habitats. I assume that a giant earthquake or especially one with a tidal wave that that may go out the window, but we will have far bigger problems and it may be handy to have a source of protein near at hand in the aftermath. I also think that Humboldt cannot get by on only building for the future by painting murals on everything. And also I read online on local sites all the time folks complaining they cannot afford a house here and that is worrisome because we are here because it is the cheapest nice place we found where we could afford a house. If we reject every business that tries to use the bay to bring prosperity here the number if people who own homes will get smaller as the folks who already do own their own homes often are prosperous enough to buy rental properties. Plus Nordic must know it is a sort of short term plan anyway as I personally bet that by the end of this century the harbor entrance we now use will not be the only entrance to the bay due to global warming. It is a conundrum for a place that has had so many booms and busts. I remember coming through here in 1969 when my girlfriend and I ran away from home for month and you could smell the prosperity of Humboldt’s lumber mills over the course of 29 miles and see from 101 that not many square inches of shore were not providing good high paying jobs here. Before that that in the era of wooden ship building this place built more ships than anywhere on the West Coast. And I had friends who grew in Piercy in the 1970’s and 80’s who came up here with trunk loads of cash and lavished their ill gotten gains on the community thinking they were like old time outlaws above the law. I don’t see any boom times in the future here. Possibly if enough hikers come up the trail they are building but they are essentially just clean healthy homeless people. I hope murals lure them here. As an aside I like the murals. Good luck to us all.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish?language=en
Imagine a new way.