A Song to Save the Seas

"Hyperballad" is a thrumming dreamscape of a song; Björk sings, icy and delicate against the synths, about climbing to the top of the mountain she and her lover live on and throwing rubbish off the clifftop, "like car parts, bottles, and cutlery / or whatever I find lying around." The chorus cascades into a romantic declaration: "I do all of this before you wake up / So I can feel happier to be safe up here with you." Against that driving beat, my heart always stutters in recognition—the strange, tender feeling of wandering near the edge, aware of the potential of your own destruction and then the relief of stepping back into your loved one's arms.

But what about that litter! In the context of Björk's abiding love for the natural world—conjured up in the mountain of "Hyperballad" itself, as well her ongoing environmental activism over the decades—the discard car batteries and company stand out even more. But the trash is fictional even within the song's internal universe: "['Hyperballad'] is about when you're in a relationship... and you're really happy and maybe you have given up parts of yourself," Björk explains. And while Hyperballad was released in 1995, Björk's connection to the natural world has reared its head again, as she faces off against a new, all-too-literal form of "littering": the corruption of the Atlantic Wild Salmon's ecosystem.

The release of Björk's new single, which also features Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía, is a much more explicit environmental move.  Björk and Rosalía are donating the profits of "Oral," a sweeping pop song from Björk's archive, to help a legal battle against fish farming in Iceland.

Fighting Iceland’s fish farms

"Iceland has the biggest untouched nature in Europe," Björk said in a statement when she released "Oral." "So when Icelandic and Norwegian business men 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."

"People at the fjord Seyðisfjörður have stood up and protested against fish farming starting there," she explained. "We would like to donate sales of the song to help with their legal fees and hopefully it can be an exemplary case for others."

Factory fish farming is a cruel and destructive practice—not least for the fishes themselves. Fish are confined to crowded, filthy environments and overdosed with antibiotics in an (often fruitless) attempt to slow the inevitable spread of disease. Given that, contrary to popular belief, fish experience both physical and psychological pain, it's no wonder that animal activists have been fighting factory fish farming globally for years.

But Björk and her fellow campaigners against fish farms in Iceland are concentrating particularly on the devastation that farming fish wreaks on the ecosystems surrounding the farms—and the wild salmon who have made that ecosystem their home.

The threat to an ecosystem

As Björk tells it, the trigger for her decision to join the legal battle against Iceland's fish farms was the latest escape of thousands of fish from their enclosures into rivers upstream, where they are particularly endangering the wild salmon population. When they escape to the wild, the farm fish spread parasites like sea lice and breed with the wild population, who then struggle to reproduce naturally.

The escape caused an uproar in Iceland. Iceland police have opened an investigation into whether Arctic Fish (one of Iceland's largest salmon-farming companies, who owned the pen from which fish escaped) breached fish farming laws, while specialist divers are hunting down escapee fish. The firm's CEO, Stein Ove Tveiten, apologized publicly: "This is a matter of great concern to us." In the meantime, protestors in Reykjavík poured insecticide over dead fish, to symbolize the poison which has been repeatedly released into Iceland's fjords.

Public concern over Iceland's wild salmon is well-placed. The numbers of wild Atlantic salmon have dropped globally from 8-10 million in the 1970s to 3-4 million today. Fish farming has a direct impact on the wild salmon: in Norway, which supplies more than half of the world's farmed salmon (that's a massive 1.5 million tonnes in 2022), an estimated 200,000 salmon escape from Norway's farms every year. Studies suggest that 71% of the country's rivers are "genetically polluted" by these farmed escapees. The result? Only 500,000 wild salmon are left in Norway—half the number of 20 years ago. Similarly, Scotland (which produces 205,000 tonnes of farmed salmon every year) has seen a 40% decline in salmon returning to rivers over four decades.

Open-pen fish farms also cause massive environmental damage, with pollution from organic waste and pesticides used to treat sea lice. The Norwegian Pollution Control Authority reported that a medium-sized fish farm of about 3,000 tonnes produces as much effluent as a city of 50,000 people.

The results are devastating not just for the wild Atlantic salmon, but for thousands of other species who form part of our world's delicate ecosystems. Salmon are a key prey source for animals including other species of fish, sharks, bears, otters, birds, and more. They form part of the natural world's fragile food chain, and of course they have their own complex histories, moving from fresh- to saltwater and migrating massive distances over the course of their lives. Losing wild Atlantic salmon will have a wide-ranging and cruel impact in the lives of millions of creatures, and for our rivers and oceans themselves.

Public disapproval, private profit

Most of Iceland's citizens agree with Björk: two-thirds of Icelanders are against open-pen salmon farming.

The reason salmon farming persists—and, indeed, is growing as an industry—in Iceland is for a simple reason. Companies are looking to make money. Iceland's fish farming grew more than tenfold between 2014 and 2021, with yearly production rising from 4,000 tonnes to nearly 45,000 tonnes. 76% of Iceland's export value of agricultural products in 2021 came from farmed salmon.

This has been concerning activists for years. As early as 2019, Jon Kaldal of the Icelandic Wildlife Fund predicted, "If industrial-scale open net salmon farming is allowed to take over, it will cause massive pollution and a dramatic increase in the risk of farmed fish escaping. Iceland is the final frontier for north Atlantic salmon." And despite economic growth, most Icelanders are not seeing the results in a personally impactful way. In the remote Eastfjords and Westfjords, where the fish farming industry is based, it has provided only about 5.5% of jobs in the region. And the largest fish farming companies in Iceland are Norwegian-owned.

Part of what is angering Björk and her fellow campaigners is how little oversight Iceland's government has implemented over these fish farms. A report commissioned by Iceland's Ministry of Food, Fisheries and Agriculture painted a "dark picture of the administration and supervision of the fish farming industry." Even when fish farming legislation was changed to develop the industry, there was no increase in administration or supervision to ensure legislation was properly implemented. The result has been serious, regular breaches in regulation. But for the fish farming industry, profit is king.

This profit-minded destruction is visible even in the method by which fish farms are destroying the wild Atlantic salmon's population. The main reason that interbreeding between farmed and wild fish leads to a decline in wild populations is that farmed fish produce offspring that mature faster and younger. Scientists discovered that females descended from farmed salmon reached maturity 0.29 years younger and males 0.43 years younger than genetically wild salmon. This early maturation is linked to traits like increased boldness and aggression, which make salmon less well-adapted to their environment and more susceptible to predators. Studies found that the offspring of farmed salmon are less likely to survive as juveniles in the wild. This early maturation is obviously good for fish farms, who want to spend as little time as possible feeding and looking after their fish before killing them for our consumption. But the very quality that makes farmed salmon more suitable for humans to eat them also makes them worse off in the wild. These fish are part of a natural ecosystem with predators and prey in sustainable conditions; they are not destined for our dinners.

“A punk rave song that is a protest song”

For all her ethereal music and surreal artistic visions, part of the reason I love Björk is for her ruthless practicality. She is not a patron saint of lost causes; she works tirelessly for real change, with a self-declared "think globally, act locally" motto. The result is a track record that speaks for itself; Björk has used her music to protect the Icelandic environment, been part of a successful campaign to create a national park in the Icelandic Highlands, and fought aluminum factories. Now, with "Oral," she is once more setting music to a movement.

In her statement, Björk said, "There is still a chance to [save] the last wild salmon of the north. Our group would like to dare these business men to retract their farms. We would also like to help invent and set strict regulations into Iceland's legal system to guard nature. The majority of the nation already agrees with us, so this protest is about putting the will of the people into our rule-systems."

Talking to Pitchfork, she called it "a punk rave song that is a protest song." "I like the fact that it's happy," she said. "We are focusing on the solutions, to give people a voice... We also understand that this is not a sprint, this is like a marathon. This might take five years, so who knows? One of the reasons why I picked this case is because it is still possible to stop the mutant Norwegian salmon. It is still possible to get our fjords back."

"Oral" is a love song. Like my beloved "Hyperballad," it teeters on an edge—this time, the moment before kissing someone for the first time. But between its triumphant howl and sharp-edged string is that vision for a better future that extends to every species on our planet: "Just because the mind can make up whatever it wants," Rosalía sings, "does it mean that it'll never come true?"

In the second verse, as though answering Rosalía's question, Björk sings, "Let me introduce one to the other: The dream and the real, get them acquainted."