The Reversal

Some years ago a salmon-farm licence in the southwest was cancelled because the operation had put more fish in the water than the licence allowed. This is about as clear a case as the whole tangled business ever produces. There was a number written on the permission: a ceiling, a limit, the tonnage the site was judged able to bear. The number was exceeded. The permission was withdrawn. For once the system did the plain thing, and a person could be forgiven for feeling that somewhere in the apparatus a rule still meant what it said.

This year an appeals board handed the licence back.

I want to be careful and fair here, because the appeals process exists for good reasons and I am not a lawyer and the reasoning will have run to many pages I have not read. Operators are entitled to appeal; boards are entitled to weigh the evidence and reach their own view; a cancellation is not supposed to be the end of the argument. All true. But stand back from the machinery for a moment and look at the shape of the thing, because the shape is the story, and the shape is this: a limit was breached, a licence was pulled, and then, in the fullness of time and after the wild fish had gone on declining all the while, the pulling was undone. The ceiling turns out to have been a suggestion. The consequence turns out to have been provisional. The company is farming again.

This is of a piece with everything I have watched these last years, and it is why I keep coming back to the same word: not corruption, which would at least imply a hand on a lever, but drift. The state’s own fisheries service goes to the High Court against the state’s own department over how a farm was licensed. A department issues permissions that other arms of the same government spend money and lawyers contesting. An appeals board reinstates what a regulator revoked. At every turn the institution meant to hold the line and the institution meant to grant the favour turn out to be the same institution, arguing with itself in a language a judge once called Byzantine, while outside the courtroom the smolts run the gauntlet of the cages and fewer of them come home each spring.

The wild fish keeps no minutes and files no appeals. That is the asymmetry at the centre of all of this, and it never changes. A licence, once granted, has patience; it can wait out an objection, absorb a review, come back on appeal a year or three later none the worse. The salmon has no such patience, because the salmon has a life measured in a few sea-winters and a run that comes once a year whether the paperwork is settled or not. Every season the argument stays open is a season the fish spends losing. Delay is not neutral. For the thing that cannot wait, delay is defeat, dressed as due process.

I keep a tally, privately, of the last five years, and set down like this it reads almost as satire. A licence granted in a bay against strong local objection. The fisheries service suing over it. A hundred thousand farmed fish dead in that same region in a single algal bloom. A national count so bad the state used the word catastrophic in its own report. A hundred and ten million euro committed to opening rivers to a fish we are declining to protect at the river mouth. And now, to round the half-decade off, a licence pulled for breaking its limits, quietly reinstated. If you proposed this as the plot of a state’s relationship to its most storied wild animal, an editor would send it back for being too on-the-nose.

And still, I have to say this, because it is true and because the anger is useless without it: none of the individual people in this are villains. The board members applied the rules as they found them. The department issued what the framework allowed. The company availed of a right the law gives it. Everyone acted within their part, and the sum of everyone acting within their part is a wild population sliding toward the point of no return with nobody’s fingerprints on the knife. That is the particular horror of a system as opposed to a crime. There is no one to forgive, and no one to stop.

What breaks the drift is not a better appeal or a cleverer objection. It is a decision, taken above the machinery, that the wild fish is worth more than the convenience of continuing: the kind of decision Washington and Denmark and Argentina and, in its blunt way, even Norway have each managed to take. A line drawn not by a regulator to be reversed by a board, but by a government that has decided, and means it. We have not taken that decision. This year we took, once more, the other kind: the small, procedural, eminently defensible kind, the kind that reinstates a licence and lets the machine grind on.

The season is closing as I write. The last of the run is in, such as it was. Somewhere in the southwest the cages are stocked again, lawfully, and the smolts of next spring are already in the rivers above them, growing toward a journey to the sea that will take them, one bright morning, straight past the nets. They do not know about the appeal. They only know the water, and the pull of the salt, and the old road down. We are the ones who are supposed to know the rest.