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![]() ![]() Large wild herbivores are crucial to ecosystems and human societies. This article contributes to the emerging field of scholarship on ecological infrastructures by critically assessing the landing of salmon in response to the socio-ecological crisis in conventional salmon aquaculture. In turn, we are able to illuminate the political, social and ecological implications of the industrial containment and feeding of animals. ![]() We argue that analysing industrial aquaculture, and more broadly industrial animal agriculture, through the lens of environmental or ecological infrastructures, helps to bring into focus the massive and global infrastructuring of nature and nonhumans. We explore this development in the context of recent debates on infrastructures as they relate to environments, ecologies and the nonhuman. We show how productive and speculative capital underpin these new projects, but also how these projects meet varied frictions which raises questions about whether ‘landing’ infrastructures represents a sustainable alternative to conventional salmon aquaculture. But the firmness of land is no predictor of a given or stable form of capital accumulation, nor does it represent a straightforward ‘sustainable solution’ to the ecological challenges in conventional salmon farming. Proponents of this ‘landing’ of salmon aquaculture’s infrastructure promise sustainable solutions to the environmental challenges of farming in and from the sea. In this paper, we critically assess two key shifts in the global salmon aquaculture sector: first, the development of large land-based salmon production facilities and, second, the increased reliance on land-based commodity crops in salmon feed. This framework seeks to simultaneously pose challenges for historical analysis and provide insights that help to understand the trajectory of animal life today. The second way started from the introduction of domesticated animals, with the muscle power and bodily commodities derived from proliferating populations valued not only in the expansion of agricultural landscapes but also in the formation and functioning of other resource frontiers, and ultimately bound up in waves of enclosures and expulsions. One path was set by burgeoning demand essentially turning some wild animal species into increasingly valuable commodities and driving the rising scale and systematization of extraction and trade, which tended to quickly undermine conditions of abundance and make these animal frontiers very mobile. This paper attempts to locate changing interspecies relations in the dynamism and violence of capitalist expansion on a world scale, setting out two primary ways that the rising exploitation of non-human animals contributed to the development of settler-colonial economies, destabilization of indigenous societies, and transformation of ecosystems. ![]()
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