The Cult of St. Alex
Special to Positive Aquaculture Awareness, Jan. 11, 2011
They say if you give someone enough rope they’ll hang themselves.
Listening to Alexandra Morton prattle on for a full hour monologue on CBC radio’s Ideas certainly brought the adage to mind Monday January 10th, 2011.
At first, the self-styled champion of the wild salmon people came across as an earth mother intent with saving the whales of Echo Bay, her coastal home. When her whales seemed to run short of salmon, she explained, she turned her attentions to that challenge.
It was all so altruistic. Salmon farms, she said, seemed like a good idea at the time and there’s no doubting her determination, passion and tenacity on the issue. She is a true believer.
What she believes in, however, is where it gets whacky.
A full hour of diatribe which railed against all levels of government, evil corporate empires and hidden agendas gave us a fuller picture of a woman whose grip on reality is sometimes tenuous.
At first it seemed the Mother Corp was slavishly worshipping at the altar of “St. Alex,” as if the producers had been lured into her cult. On reflection, however, by exposing the flakier side of Morton CBC has done her more harm than good.
Here is someone who wants to suck and blow at the same time. Not only is her science flawed and suppositional, her logic borders on paranoia and delusion.
In Morton’s world, only she holds the truth and by extension the answers. She is, in her own grandiose self-description, “the keeper of the knowledge.”
The truth is she has parlayed being a field technician on a couple of studies into inferring she has published 20 scientific papers on BC wild salmon, and the fact that her doctorate is an honorary one is glossed over.
But then, Morton, routinely glosses over or ignores such “inconvenient truths.”
She talks about how she raises funds for her work but not about her connections with large US interests who are intent on protecting their own west coast fisheries at the expense of BC aquaculture.
The real conspiracy, she says, ignoring her own soiled hand is at the government, DFO and corporate levels.
She complains meeting with politicians and officials at DFO is pointless.
“Politicians wring their hands and furrow their brows,” she complains. “But do nothing.”
She goes on to suggest they and the DFO are part of a larger conspiracy, working in cahoots with government at all levels and global conglomerates with a master plan to rid rivers like the Fraser of wild salmon to better clear the way to dam it for hydro-electric power.
That’s one gianormous conspiracy theory. Count up the people who would have to be involved and the cash to keep it going boggles the mind.
The farms, of course, are the spawn of corporations which are like “big mosquitoes” pushing their proboscis into the environmental infrastructure that binds us all and destroying it.
The pattern is well established, claims Morton. The DFO did nothing to stop the decimation of the Atlantic cod fishery because there was a bigger agenda at play.
“Once the cod declined, Hibernia went on to the Grand Banks,” she said with a smugness of the cat who ate the canary.
Of course, everyone who disagrees with her or doesn’t directly support her is complicit in their grand conspiracy.
Such is the threat of the dark forces that honest, hard working people are afraid to speak up.
“There’s all kinds of secrecy, I hear a lot but people are afraid to speak,” she said. “I feel bad for them.”
And then comes the curious part.
“It’s very easy to confuse people about science,” she says, presumably referring to the science which doesn’t mesh with her own theories. “Really this (the link to salmon farms and decline of wild salmon) is impossible to prove.”
But she has the proof, right?
“What I have is the weight of the evidence,” she says. “Before the farms were there was no lice. When there were farms we have baby lice. It’s the weight of the evidence.”
So, it’s circumstantial evidence?
“I have no direct proof.”
Right.
“What I see is an enormous effort by government to confuse us,” she claims, suggesting having gotten into the mess they’re in, the authorities are stuck on a runaway disaster train with no way of stopping it so they are content to cover it up.
They are, of course, aided and abetted by “international economics and corporate forces which are bigger than some countries.”
But exaggeration is nothing new to Morton.
She tells of a rally in Victoria following a “down with salmon farms” march where 7,000 people stood with her, through reports from the legislature that day fix the crowd at 1,000 to 2,000 and the most generous estimates from the sympathetic Tyee suggested up to 4,000.
This is propaganda at its finest, folks. Retell the lie often enough and it becomes fact.
But let’s get back to the science: “To save the salmon,” she says, I have to teach people the facts of life.”
And it’s here, about two-thirds the way through the hour, where she starts to conflict herself.
In one moment she claims the salmon are capable of “rapid evolution” and then notes they face a variety of challenges. Then she’s back saying they can’t deal with the “dangers” posed by fish farms.
It’s not real science, it’s a home-grown theory and philosophy which becomes abundantly clear as she prattles on: “Salmon are an extension of our bodies.”
“A southeast breeze means we’re breathing salmon created oxygen.”
Or salmon farts?
At this point in the show she starts sounding exactly like what she is, someone who is imposing their own set of values and faith on everyone else with religious fervor.
And that’s a cult.
On the one hand, she says, salmon can survive anything. On the other, she says, they can’t survive fish farms. Well? Which is it?
It is clear salmon farms are to blame because they are all along the northern migration routes while there are no issues with the south routes where there are no farms, she says.
Obviously, she posits, with a haughty laugh, the sea lice are the issue.
Right. So why then don’t 9 out of 10 real biologists and Phds agree?
Because it’s flakey science just like her claim that fish are developing a resistance to antibiotics which will clearly lead to more disease which will eventually spread to humans who consume the fish.
Mad fish disease? Where did that come from?
Her vitriol against the farms is clearly personal and she blames it for the decline of her hometown Echo Bay.
She blamed “27 Norwegian fish farms” for the town’s economic declines, claiming they wouldn’t hire locals and in any event more locals wouldn’t work for such an ecologically destructive entity.
Again, which is it? Strangely enough, almost all the 6,000 people who work in the industry today are local coastal people because that’s where the farms are located. Many are First Nation peoples.
The root of all this evil, however, is also clear to her: Corporations in their black towers.
“The corporate creature needs to be brought under control,” she says before going on to say how “embarrassed and out of place” she was when she went to a shareholders meeting in Europe and spotted someone “wearing blue suede cowboy boots which probably cost thousands and thousands of dollars.”
Classic propaganda: Demonize the opposition by painting them as faceless, rich and uncaring.
Instead of shareholders for whom their investment in BC salmon farms is just “pocket change” authority over farm leases should be given over the local communities, she says.
Of course, that would mean the end of the leases but most of the current farms are out of lease anyway and operating illegally, she claims.
Still, between the engineers and the biologists something could be worked out, she insists.
Really? The same engineers and biologists working on the problem now? Or a new group who are indoctrinated in the Cult of St. Alex, who pretty soon we can assume will have a PhD in engineering?
“We need to live in ecological compliance,” she claims. “And we must forget about growth. Growth is cancer. We can’t grow limitlessly.”
Sure, Alex, we’ll just hand out free condoms and stop the population explosion and immigration to Canada. That’ll work.
The take away here is that Morton is at the epicenter of a cult fabricated in her own image which draws in others to drink the Kool-Aid.
It may be just the ticket to keep giving her more rope.
