The Framing of Farmed Fish: Product, Efficiency, and Technology.

This paper examines the ways in which both fish farmers and environmentalists use frames to socially construct the salmon farming industry in British Columbia. Advertisements and other promotional materials contain movement actors' justifications for promoting or opposing the industry; these rationalizations are good reasons for understanding fish farming in a particular way. Because salmon environmentalists must both rely on what people already know, they create frames that direct the viewers's gaze of salmon aquaculture in surprisingly similar ways. It was found that frames created by both proponents and opponents of the industry are structured around the inter-related concepts of production, efficiency, and technology. As a result, farmed fish become natural-social hybrids. Farmed salmons are framed in both common-sensical and hyper-real ways as naturally efficient bits of living technology. This paper suggests that an awareness of the performance aspects of environmental farming allow people to live more astutely in a world of burgeoning controversy over natural resource issues.