It’s a scene that should have been a spoof on Saturday Night Live: Mike Dunleavy, governor of Alaska, filling his grocery cart with imported, farm-raised fish products instead of wild-caught Alaska fish. No wild Alaska salmon, halibut, or lingcod for him. Instead it was tilapia. Catfish. Farm-raised salmon and farm-raised steelhead.

Sadly, the video wasn’t a spoof. Instead the governor was promoting a bill he put before the Alaska legislature this session, HB 111: Finfish Farms and Products, which could open up Alaska to something that is currently illegal here—finfish farming. He provided basically no notice to Alaskans before dropping the bill, arguing that Alaska imports these products to sell in our grocery stores, so why shouldn’t we grow them here? Fortunately, Alaskans came out in droves to oppose fish farming, with more than 450 people commenting in opposition. In one of the hearings Rep. Louise Stutes, head of the House Fisheries Committee, said she had never seen so much public opposition to a bill.

Farming fish is dirty: crowded industrial seafood farms create vast amounts of waste, contaminating water, sickening fish, and leading to the need to introduce pesticides.

Fish farming is bad for wild fish: pesticides, nutrient waste, and fish excrement can kill wild fish. Escaped fish can spread disease, compete with wild stocks for food, and contaminate the gene pool of wild fish.

Farmed fish is also inefficient: Stanford University researcher Rosamond L. Naylor estimates that it takes about two pounds of wild fish to raise one pound of carnivorous fish using processed fish meal.

It’s illegal to farm fish here in Alaska because we recognize the threats it poses to our real treasure: our wild fish. Alaskans go out fishing on the ocean or in our river systems, know people who do, buy it from local fishermen, or all three. We are a state of fishermen, of fishing communities, and we take pride and pleasure in our ability to feed the best food on the planet to ourselves, our families, our friends, and the rest of the world. Introducing farmed fish at any level endangers all of this.

There are real, meaningful risks to our wild salmon, like trawlers, which bycatch, and mostly dump overboard, 141 million pounds of dead marine life each year. Industrial development—which the governor champions and is using Alaska state money to subsidize— threatens to contaminate and degrade the cold, clean waters our wild salmon need to thrive and survive. Proposed increased clearcut logging of wild ecosystems like Southeast Alaska would degrade what the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust calls the “Seabank”: a natural ecosystem bank that provides enormous benefits, economic and otherwise. The proposed sale of public lands would take away Alaskans’ ability to hunt, fish, and recreate in these places—one of the best things about living here.

These real threats have real solutions: protection of the clean, cold, clear waters wild salmon need to thrive and precautionary, ecosystembased management of our fisheries.

Instead of introducing false, dirty, dangerous solutions, we should focus on defending the treasure we already have.