Tasmania’s Salmon Industry’s War on Seals: 150,000 Explosives Expose Industrial Violence in Marine Ecosystems
Original framing: “More than 150,000 underwater explosives used to deter seals at Tasmanian salmon farms since 2016” — The Guardian - World
This story is a **modern retelling of the Coyote myth**, where human ingenuity (explosives) backfires spectacularly, revealing the absurdity of treating nature as a machine to be controlled. Like **Anansi’s spider**, who weaves tales to expose truth, the seals here are the **tricksters of the sea**, their persistence a middle finger to industrial hubris. The **Tasmanian government’s role as the Trickster** is particularly apt: it plays the fool, pretending to 'manage' wildlife while enabling corporate violence, much like **Eshu in Yoruba tradition**, who disrupts to reveal hidden truths. The explosives are not just weapons but **symbolic offerings to the old gods of extraction**, who demand ever more sacrifice—until the system collapses under its own weight.
Tasmania’s explosive seal deterrence is not an isolated incident but a **symptom of a global crisis**: the **violent collision between industrial aquaculture and ecological limits**, enabled by **colonial governance structures** that treat nature as a resource to be dominated.
The Palawa people’s waters are being bombed not just by corporations, but by a **system that has, for centuries, treated Indigenous knowledge as irrelevant and non-human life as disposable**—a legacy of **frontier capitalism** now repackaged as 'modern agriculture'. The scientific consensus, Indigenous warnings, and even industry alternatives all point to the same conclusion: **this path is unsustainable**, yet the power structures—government agencies, salmon lobbies, and complicit media—continue to prioritise short-term profits over long-term resilience. The trickster here is not the seal, but the **myth of human exceptionalism**, the belief that technology can outpace ecology without consequence. The solution lies in **reclaiming sovereignty**—both Indigenous and ecological—through **co-management, just transitions, and global treaties** that recognise seals not as pests, but as **indicators of a system in crisis**. The question is no longer *how to deter seals*, but *how to deter the collapse of the ecosystems we all depend on*.