This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under the Creative Commons BY NC ND license. Cover image: Sea lions rest on rocks in the Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Argentina in Patagonia (Image: JHVEPhoto / Alamy)

Eight in favor, seven against.

On 15 December, the legislature of Tierra del Fuego passed a law permitting the industrial production of salmon by the slimmest of margins.

The Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego sits at the southern tip of South America. Its Beagle Channel and rugged coasts mark one of the planet’s remotest landscapes, and the capital, Ushuaia, serves as the gateway to Antarctica. It is often dubbed “the end of the world.”

Tierra del Fuego has long been known for something else, too: its largely intact ecosystems. Here, in a subantarctic realm of wind-swept forests, peat bogs, and cold, nutrient-rich seas, wildlife thrives. Sea lions and dolphins ply the channels, southern right whales migrate through offshore waters, and seabirds – from albatrosses to cormorants to penguins – depend on the waters for feeding and breeding.

For many in the province, the new law means this can no longer be taken for granted.

Changing political tides

After the vote, the chamber fell silent.

“There was a strange feeling, as if [the legislators] were between a rock and a hard place,” says Nancy Fernández. She is president of the Mane’kenk Association (AM), an NGO dedicated to education and environmental conservation, and a researcher at the National University of Tierra del Fuego (UNTDF). 

“It was just a second, but they looked at us as if to say, ‘We had no other choice,'” she told Dialogue Earth.

In 2021, a law was passed to the opposite effect: banning salmon farming in the lakes and seas around Tierra del Fuego. The then-legislator, Mónica Urquiza of the Fuegian People’s Movement (Mopof), welcomed everyone in to the legislature to celebrate. 

But at the December vote that has now overturned that ban, Fernández claims Urquiza – who has since become the legislature’s president – permitted just three civil society representatives to enter and observe.

“Today, as deputy governor and president of the legislative chamber, she prevented people from entering. And legislators who until last Friday said they would not support the bill voted........

© Buenos Aires Herald