Becoming Salmon

Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. In this careful and nuanced study, Marianne Elisabeth Lien explores how the growth of marine domestication has blurred traditional distinctions between fish and animals, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal-welfare legislation. Drawing on fieldwork on and off salmon farms, Lien follows farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial husbandry, exposing how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and "alien" in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to both the economic context of industrial food production and the materiality of human-animal relations, this book highlights the fragile and contingent relational practices that constitute salmon aquaculture and the multiple ways of "becoming salmon" that emerge as a result.

"Becoming Salmon is the first ethnographic account of salmon aquaculture, the most recent turn in the human history of animal domestication. As fish are enrolled in new regimes of marine domestication, traditional distinctions between fish and animals are reconfigured, recasting farmed fish as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and subject to animal welfare legislation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Australia, the author traces farmed Atlantic salmon through contemporary industrial practices, and shows how salmon are bred to be hungry, globally mobile, and alien in their watersheds of origin. Attentive to the economic context of industrial food production as well as the mundane practices of caring for fish, it offers novel perspectives on domestication, human-animal relations, and food production"--Provided by publisher.

"Examines Western culture's ... alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon--weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest"--Amazon.com.

Nautilus Award Silver Medal Winner, Ecology & Environment In search of a new story for our place on earth Being Salmon, Being Human examines Western culture’s tragic alienation from nature by focusing on the relationship between people and salmon—weaving together key narratives about the Norwegian salmon industry as well as wild salmon in indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Mueller uses this lens to articulate a comprehensive critique of human exceptionalism, directly challenging the four-hundred-year-old notion that other animals are nothing but complicated machines without rich inner lives and that Earth is a passive backdrop to human experience. Being fully human, he argues, means experiencing the intersection of our horizon of understanding with that of other animals. Salmon are the test case for this. Mueller experiments, in evocative narrative passages, with imagining the world as a salmon might see it, and considering how this enriches our understanding of humanity in the process. Being Salmon, Being Human is both a philosophical and a narrative work, rewarding readers with insightful interpretations of major philosophers—Descartes, Heidegger, Abram, and many more—and reflections on the human–Earth relationship. It stands alongside Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, as well as Andreas Weber’s The Biology of Wonder and Matter and Desire—heralding a new “Copernican revolution” in the fields of biology, ecology, and philosophy.

The solution to every problem, the means to every dream, and all that anyone every needed, wanted or hoped for resides in the sea of energy, vitality, enlightenment, wisdom, and power that dwells within you and within the world around you. This book will help you to discover and access this energy, vitality, and wisdom that will help you to thrive through challenges and adversity. You will be guided through experiences to help you learn how to access your own innate resilient energy. To thrive through life challenges you will rediscover and utilize your childlike resilient energy emerging from your sense of adventure, play, spontaneity, and fun. Noble resilience guidance will help you to feel a greater increase in self-worth and esteem through personal goal achievement and the mechanism of altruism. This book will guide you through character resilience which is the experience of conserving energy and feeling freedom from guilt through the mechanism of living within a chosen character framework. Ecological resilience is the experience of feeling an infusion of peace and energy from varied enriching environments including colors, natural settings, music, smells, pets and home environments among others. Universal resilience is the amazing experience of connecting to a source of wisdom, energy, and strength beyond normal consciousness. The book continues to explore ways to enrich one's intellectual resilience as well as his or her essential resilience (physical enrichment). The book then takes you on the journey of accessing strengths through the stages of recurring resiliency process. Progression to thrive through life challenges begins with homeostasis, venturing, disruptions, using integrated health skills, experiencing answers to life challenges through resonation and quickening, and self-mastery. This resiliency process is the journey everyone must take to thrive through stressors and life challenges.

All followers of Jesus Christ are called to become people transformed by the Holy Spirit so we can live out Gods heart for the world in terms of Christs great commission. To do that often requires Christians to move against cultural sameness, familial expectations, secular norms, religious boundaries, and even personal emotional issues. Obedience to God in todays world requires the lifestyle of a Salmon Swimmera Christian equipped to overcome whatever obstacles keep them from fulfilling Gods global agenda. Such commitment has intriguing parallels to the journey of Atlantic salmon in their effort to swim upstream to spawn the next generation of salmon.