Submitted by Wild Fish Conservancy.

In a ground-breaking and historic announcement, the Washington Department of Natural Resources announced they have officially denied applications from global seafood corporation Cooke Aquaculture for new leases to continue operating commercial net pens in Puget Sound. Earlier this month, all of Cooke’s existing net pen lease terms expired after over a decade and the company was required to secure new leases to continue operating in Washington.

DNR is giving Cooke until Dec. 14 to harvest any remaining fish and completely remove all of their facilities and debris from Puget Sound. As the sole commercial net pen operator in Washington, this monumental decision will effectively remove this industry from Puget Sound by the end of the year. This action will immediately cease the chronic untreated pollution discharged daily by this industry for over three decades, finally allowing these degraded sites to begin the process of natural restoration as part of the largest passive restoration project in Washington’s history. The decision will also eliminate many major risk factors that harm the recovery of wild salmon and steelhead, including ending the risk of exposure to viruses, parasites, and diseases that are amplified and spread at unnatural levels by massive densities of farmed fish and the risk of future catastrophic escape events in which farmed fish could compete with, attempt to interbreed, or spread pathogens to threatened and endangered wild fish.

DNR’s decision will also restore the public and Tribal access to over 130 acres of Puget Sound that have been restricted by this industry for over thirty years. More broadly, Washington’s decision will unite the entire U.S. Pacific Coast in excluding this industry from marine waters. Combined with Canada’s recent commitment to transition open water net pens out of British Columbia waters, this decision also has the potential to eliminate a major limiting factor to wild Pacific salmon recovery at a coastwide, international scale.

On Nov. 18, Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz issued an executive order banning fish-farming with net pens in state waters, citing danger to struggling native salmon.

California, Oregon and Alaska have already outlawed net-pen aquaculture, and Canada is working on a plan to phase it out of British Columbia’s coastal waters by 2025.

Cooke is the same company found at fault for the catastrophic 2017 Cypress Island net pen collapse that released over 260,000 nonnative and viral-infected Atlantic salmon into Puget Sound. Cooke purchased all of Washington’s net pen facilities in 2016 with plans to expand exponentially in Washington waters.

In response to this expansion plan, Wild Fish Conservancy launched the Our Sound, Our Salmon campaign in April 2017 to raise public awareness about the environmental impacts of commercial net pen aquaculture. In 2018, a coalition of over 10,000 individuals and hundreds of businesses and organizations under the banner of OSOS, worked in concert with Tribal efforts, to advocate for Washington’s landmark law banning nonnative Atlantic salmon aquaculture.

In July 2020, in response to Cooke avoiding the ban by transitioning to native species, the OSOS campaign launched a new initiative, Taking Back Our Sound, with the goal of preventing Cooke from receiving new leases. Through this effort, 9,000 individuals and 127 business and organizations called on DNR’s Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz through a petition and direct actions, which included a Bainbridge Island city resolution, to deny new leases to Cooke and to restore Puget Sound for the benefit and use of all. In making her decision over Cooke’s lease request, DNR was required by statute to issue a decision in the best interest of the public.