Also in the Maritimes, we see that fishermen are protesting against offshore seismic testing being done by a contractor for junior hydrocarbon explorer Corridor Resources.
Corridor holds an offshore exploration licence in Northumberland Strait and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, lying off Cape Breton Island. It plans a 500-line-km seismic survey using towed compressed-air guns as seismic sources, sledgehammers, and Vibroseis trucks having an infuriating tendency to sink and become lost.
The fishermen — whose representatives were called in to review the seismic plans earlier this year — fear for the impact on fish stocks, particularly the herring fishery.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (an organization that, at other times, is the fishing industry’s whipping-boy for the way it manages fish stocks) says compressed-air seismic sources can kill herring in the larval stage for about 2 metres around the air blast. Mainstream media and the fishing industry have seized on this to argue the dangers of seismic testing on the herring fishery. One Nova Scotia fisherman blithely said, “I don’t think the Department of Fisheries should be allowing any kind of mortality.”
Larval recruitment — the progression of herring from fry to brit (fingerlings) — is affected by so many factors that isolating seismic testing as a cause of population-scale mortality is a fool’s errand. The fisherman might as well have asked the Department to net up all the predator species and, while they were at it, divert the St. Lawrence Gulf currents to keep the herring young in ease and safety.
In a 500-line-km seismic survey, the affected surface area would be about a square kilometre in an offshore exploration licence of 2,488 sq. km. — about 0.04% of the area. What are the chances of a significant impact on marine life? Yet there are still calls for a “full environmental impact assessment.”
Our own view is that it may be time for a full-scale environmental impact assessment on the good, or harm, done by pressure groups. There’s so little we know about the effects they have on the ecosystem, and surely the precautionary principle demands that we halt their activities until a proper study can be undertaken.
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