As salmon farming booms, Icelanders size up an existential threat

I’m greeted in Reykjavik airport, Iceland by Ramon Navarro. He’s holding what looks like a double espresso and eyeing, with regret, a few crumbs on the moulded plastic table. Evidence, I figured, of a snack that hadn’t quite hit the mark. He arrived 15 minutes earlier after a 36-hour trip from Chile, and wears the hollowed look of a man whose soul is still making its way across the North Atlantic.

It’s the first time I’ve met him, yet after just a couple of minutes of small talk he flicked up his eyes from the pastry flakes and exclaimed with a sudden sharpness ​“So, what about the salmon?”

Ramon is a water man, born to a family who for generations have lived by the sea. He understands big bodies of water, how they move, what wind and tides do to the ocean, and how storms that rage hundreds of miles offshore impact the small Chilean fishing town of Punta de Lobos where he grew up. As a boy he would help his father on their boat and go spear fishing, reading the subaquatic world as we would road signs. Riding waves came naturally, and today he is held in high regard as one of the best in the global big wave surfing community. 

He cares about the ocean, and he’s pissed. He’s seen what industrial scale salmon farming has done, not just to the delicate marine ecosystems of Patagonia coastline, but to the traditional fishing lifeways of the indigenous Kawésqar people of the region. He has dedicated much of his life campaigning for the protection of the ocean from what he sees as the exploitation of the seas for financial gain, camouflaged as sustainability, a threat that now looms as heavy over the pristine Icelandic fjords as the clouds do over the international arrivals hall.

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Iceland is hostile, barren, it looks prehistoric. The trees were felled centuries ago to expose vast swathes of shrubland that are barely holding on. Glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes and cracks in the ground seep steam like ghosts of the past, tectonic. It’s inhabited by the descendants of Vikings who first settled over 1,000 years ago. They occupy a thin ribbon around the perimeter of this most volatile and beautiful island landscapes. They too are from fishermen stock; they came here on boats in the 9^th century and never left. But life is tough here, isolation is real, months of darkness and temperatures that rarely get into double figures does something to the human psyche, but that too is a thing of unusual beauty which manifests itself as proud, quiet, stoicism.

The sea is a type of cold that is rarely encountered, it doesn’t bite so much as swallow whole, giving us ill-equipped mammals perhaps 30 or so minutes before it’s all over. Ramone however seems oddly at home in the frigid waters, either in the surf or plunging for a swim in the glacial waters of Seyðisfjörður, a small and ancient port on the east coast of the island. It is here, in a valley eroded by time, that together we see what’s at stake.

Over the last decade, open-net salmon farms, floating steel cages crammed with selectively bred fish, have crept into Iceland’s coastal inlets. Sold to the people as an economic win and a sustainable protein source, these set-ups now teem with a biomass that can be 20 times greater than the entire Icelandic wild salmon run. Where once 50,000 to 80,000 wild fish surged back from the sea each season, millions of captive fish – often blighted by parasitic sea lice – now swirl captive in the same waters, sometimes escaping, breeding with native species occasionally, and continuing to tip the ecological scale toward collapse.

In Iceland, fishing isn’t just work, it’s a way of being, a quiet pact with the sea etched deep like ancient runes. You see it in the stories that locals tell, in the wooden boats that still dot the fjords, and in the reverence for a landscape shaped as much by myth as it is by the weather. Atlantic salmon are beautiful, tough, predators, unpredictable, generally solitary with the ability to live in both fresh and sea water. They have seemingly always been at the centre of the relationship Icelanders have with the sea. The community of Seyðisfjörður and their long-entrenched ways of life is under threat, as foreign interests with the money to outpace regulatory oversight or to tempt local residents are making strategic moves to bring this intensive farming to their tranquil inlet.

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This isn’t just an environmental risk. As in the southern waters of Ramon’s homeland of Chile, this is about culture, about what washes away when fishing becomes farming. The old ways of working the riverbanks and heading out to sea at dawn, community rituals stitched around the salmon’s return, stories passed on like heirlooms, all of that becomes quieter, more fragile, when the fish themselves stop behaving like fish.

There is however, pushback. The locals are mobilised. Groups like the North Atlantic Salmon Fund and the Icelandic Wildlife Fund (IWF) are tireless in their efforts in spreading vital information. Jón Kaldal, operations officer at the IWF tells me: ​“For years, the mortality rate in Icelandic open-net pens has hovered around 23%. Since the farming cycle at sea lasts nearly two years, this means that approximately 40% of the salmon factory farmers put into the pens die before they can be harvested. This cruelty is literally written into the business model, it’s a feature, not a bug. This has to stop. Thankfully, the world is beginning to realise that open-net salmon farming is fundamentally flawed.”

When volunteers went door-to-door collecting signatures in Seyðisfjörður, one of the campaign’s organisers, Benedikta Guðrún Svavarsdóttir from activist group VÁ! put it plainly: ​“The vast majority of people said, ​‘thank you for coming’ and signed. They had informed themselves on the matter and were adamant that this was not the future of Seyðisfjörður. Not of benefit to Seyðisfjörður.”

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Meanwhile, governmental agricultural policies tend to favour large-scale operations over traditional practices, reflecting a trend of prioritising economic interests over environmental and cultural preservation.

64% of Icelanders now live in Reykjavík, where daily life tends to revolve more around tech and tourism than it does tides times and net repair. The distance between the people and the old fishing rhythms has widened, lytja á mölinare they call it, the ​‘move to the gravel’ where international routines and coffee shop culture are more present than the mountains of past generations. Meanwhile, Norwegian owned companies have moved in to set up farms, reaping profits that seldom get invested locally, and making decisions that are increasingly opaque to impacted communities.

What’s at stake here feels more than just fish. It’s about the Icelanders’ sovereignty over their culture, their nature, over the stories they tell itself. And yet, Iceland’s systems, long tuned toward resilience and economic pragmatism, haven’t shifted fast enough to defend against this Atlantic drift. Aquaculture, like agriculture before it, is treated as a stable industry, even as its environmental consequences pile up like the farm slurry on the ocean floor.

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So, the farms expand. The fish escape. The rivers wait. And somewhere between passive trust and quiet resignation, Iceland’s relationship with its waters is being rewritten by global capital, bureaucracy, and the slow unravelling of an identity built on ice and fire.

Ramon has seen this before. In Chile and Norway, Scotland and Canada, the salmon farms multiplied and the ocean grew sick, communities that once lived in harmony with the sea were marginalised. What began with promises of jobs and development led to collapsed ecosystems, dead zones beneath the cages, disease outbreaks, and mass die-offs. The Kawésqar people’s ancestral waters now host 67 salmon farms and have seen their cultural identity threatened and their traditional fishing practices eroded. The industry’s expansion, often proceeding without the necessary consultation, has transformed pristine fjords into zones of ecological sacrifice.

In Iceland, the path is not yet forged. The wild salmon still return each year, the rivers still run into clear waters, and the cultural ties to the sea remain strong. But the warnings from Chile are clear: without proactive measures from communities such as those in Seyðisfjörður, the same patterns of environmental degradation and cultural loss could take hold. Iceland stands at a critical point, with the opportunity to choose a different future, one that honours its heritage, protects its ecosystems, and resists the silent creep of industrial exploitation.

Phil Young is the founder of the Outsiders Project. Follow him on Instagram.

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