DEN NYE FISKEN

Kjetil Østli and Simen Sætre THE NEW FISH

A global history of salmon farming

In the early 1970s, a group of scientists wanted to make more food for the world. They looked to the sea. They sampled genes from 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers, and designed a salmon that was fatter, more docile, and faster growing. This was the beginning of a new industry, salmon farming.

The industry spread from coastal Norway to all corners of the Globe. Jobs were created, business boomed, salmon farmers became filthy rich.

A new type of food, the salmon sushi, spread across the world. But as soon as the new fish was let loose in nature, unexpected things started to happen. Wild salmon stocks disappeared, diseases spread in the salmon farms, salmon louse swarmed, and the new industry became highly contested.

In a prize-winning, five-year investigation, the authors Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli take a closer look at the global salmon industry. For the first time, the whole story of salmon farming has been told. The result combines nature writing from Norwegian fjords with classical muckraking and character-driven literary non-fiction. The authors start out with a question: What happens when you place a new animal in the fjords? This book gives you the answer

Lies and torture – This book about salmon farming is exceptional investigative journalism.

DAGBLADET 

This is top-class journalism. They ask open questions without moralizing, with an underlying critical gaze.

VÅRT LAND

Kjetil Østli (b. 1975) is a journalist and author. He co-runs the online magazine Harvest, specializing in nature writing. He has received several prizes and awards for his reporting and his four books, and his debut Cops and robbers earned him the prestigious Brage Award.

Simen Sætre (b. 1974) is an investigative reporter who has been published in many languages. He has written six books, on themes including the international chocolate industry, oil states, and a spy in the Norwegian army. His thought-provoking books have been acclaimed and nominated for prizes.

Excerpt from the Prologue, The New Fish

We thrash about and are a danger to ourselves and to the rest of the life that surrounds us, wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson, who says that today’s world resembles a Star Wars-like civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. “Apart from the fact that we mostly behave like monkeys and have a limited life expectancy, we are godlike,” Wilson writes.

With this kind of mentality, our intelligence and creative urges can also be our enemy. This is thematized in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In these works, man uses his brain to create something new and innovative – but the results are terrifying.

Goethe describes the tragedy of development, where great ambitions for society upset nature’s balance. For Shelley, the new creature ultimately becomes a monster.

On the other side of this cautious attitude is the engineer-like optimist; our intelligence has taken us this far – so it can therefore also be our salvation.

Problems are solved with new research and innovation. If the air gets too hot, we’ll invent technology to slow down the heating. If the atmosphere is filled with CO2, we’ll capture and purify more CO2. If there are fewer wild animals to eat, we must produce more domestic animals or change our eating habits. And with fewer fish in the ocean, we have to create new fish to eat.

Yes, the fish – shouldn’t we also domesticate the fish?

205 mm / 320 pages

Torolf E. Kroglund THE HISTORY OF THE BOAT

From forest to ocean with the vessel that changed the world

While the Covid-19 pandemic led to closed borders and a break lasting well over two years, Torolf E. Kroglund built his own pram – without any experience. It was going to be a rowing boat – a pram. It gets built following a traditional clinkbuild method, just like the Vikings did and which is now declared a world heritage by UNESCO. At the same time both the author’s and the planet’s health worsens dramatically. Building a boat becomes a way to build a way out.

This book looks at the history of the boat, from African migrants who at the dawn of time left the continent by boat, to the present boat migrants, and the complicated culture of the coast. With a personal approach the book digs into the core of what the boat has meant, both internationally and for Norway as a nation. The boat as a specific vessel between land and continent, moving towards freedom and free time – but also in the less literal meaning; the method of communication which carries humanhood. We’re all in the same boat.

'Contagious storytelling from someone who isn't born with skis on his feet, but oars in his hands.'

ADRESSEAVISEN 