Songstresses Björk and Rosalía have teamed up to launch a campaign against industrial fish farming and, while the cause is noble, the execution is certainly left-field.
Industrial salmon farming is a huge industry in Björk’s native Iceland and the pair have revealed a 75-second preview of an as-yet-unnamed song to be released later this month. The proceeds of the song will be donated to help with the legal fees from those fighting against the farming in Seyðisfjörður fjord.
In a statement, Björk said that she hoped their protests would be “an exemplary case for others”.
She added that Iceand was “the biggest untouched nature in Europe and still today it has its sheep roaming free in the mountains; in the summers its fish have swum free in our lakes, rivers and fjords. So when Icelandic and Norwegian businessmen started buying fish farms in the majority of our fjords, it was a big shock and rose up as the main topic this summer. We don’t understand how they had been able to do this for a decade with almost no regulations stopping them.”
Last year, a £118 million (roughly AU$225 million) merger between the two largest salmon fisheries in Iceland, with Ice Fish Farm acquiring Laxar Fiskeldi was completed. Ice Fish Farm controls the Seyðisfjörður fjord as well as three others in the east of the country, and aims to process 10 million salmon ever year.
According to Björk, this fish farming has had a “devastating effect on wildlife and the farmed fish are suffering in horrid health conditions. And since a lot of them have escaped, they have started changing the DNA in the Icelandic salmon for the worse, and could eventually lead to its extinction”.
Ahead of the merger, Ice Fish Farm chief executive Guðmundur Gíslason said that the company aims to deliver “high-quality premium salmon with high efficiency” but with “full respect to nature.”
Björk concluded: “Our group would like to dare these businessmen to retract their farms! We would also like to help invent and set strict regulations into Iceland’s legal system to guard nature.” She claimed: “The majority of the nation already agrees with us so this protest is about putting the will of the people into our rule systems.”
The song itself, meanwhile, features the refrain “Is that the right thing to do? I just don’t know, I just don’t know”.
Whether it becomes a smash-hit single remains to be seen.
Lead image credit: Bjork/ X.
