Shifting Baselines : Gore: A Victim of Toothfish Confusion

The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

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July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

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July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

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Gore: A Victim of Toothfish Confusion

Category: Communicating
Posted on: July 20, 2007 12:14 AM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

In 2003, after Randy Olson would give a lecture on ocean conservation, audiences would ask the inevitable: What is one thing I can do to help the oceans? Olson would respond: Boycott Chilean sea bass. Today, though the evidence for declines in Chilean sea bass is even clearer, the message is no longer so simple. For those of you still interested in Al Gore's eating or not eating of an overfished or, on second glance, sustainably caught fish, you can read this article I wrote on The Toothfish That Bit Al Gore and the confusion around sustainable seafood (indeed, the seafood market as a whole) published today at the Tyee.

Comments

I guess I have to place myself in the camp of being more pleased that unsustainable seafood and Patagonian toothfish got some attention, rather than upset that HSI served up additional fodder for the attack dogs of the right to go after Gore. Since the climate deniers can no longer attack the message, they readily attack the messenger, and Gore will constantly be scrutinized for any sign of real or imagined hypocrisy. If not toothfish, it would be energy use or travel, so it might as well be on an issue that most people outside of the ocean world know little to nothing about. And if it gets a few to think and care about overfishing, all the better. I think Gore's spokesperson's response to it that "the really important thing is that people become more aware of this issue" was excellent.

The bigger problem is the conclusion that the brouhaha was all a "mistake" in the end because the toothfish at the wedding was MSC-certified South Georgia Island fish. Even if one can believe that MSC-certified fisheries are truly sustainable (only possible if you ignore the crashing Rockhopper and Macaroni penguin populations on South Georgia, or the 5000 Black-browed albatross killed each year by the MSC-certified South African hake fishery, or the Steller sea lions and Northern fur seals declining in the face of the certified Bering Sea pollock fishery, and otherwise accept a very shifted baseline), the incident really highlights how confused the messaging has become on "sustainable" seafood.

Posted by: Brendan | July 19, 2007 11:21 PM

Someone needs to develop a simple DNA sequencing kit for sustainable diners where you ask the waiter to bring you a sample of the fish to quickly assess which population it's from and make sure you're making the right choice.

Seriously, folks. Certifying individual populations may make great sense to scientists, but its just absurd when it comes to the general public. And leads to the sort of chaos swirling around this Al Gore story.

Posted by: Randy Olson, Head Dodo | July 20, 2007 5:45 AM

You forgot to mention that, since this was the rehearsal dinner, Al Gore likely had no control nor voice in what was served.

Posted by: DaleP | July 20, 2007 6:25 AM

I've actually been wondering this since the first time an overly smug Whole Foods fish monger told me they were now carrying the toothfish again. He gave me a whole song and dance about the certification organization, but, the introduction of illegally obtained fish being slipped in aside, it was my understanding that the Chilean Sea Bass was the poster child for those biological life history characteristics that make it awful for being a fished species at all - long slow development, many years until age of first reproduction, etc. Is this wrong? If not, can any population ever be sustainable? Just who is this certification organization, and what kind of science are they using?

Posted by: jebyrnes | July 20, 2007 7:53 AM

It's a bankrupt idea to "just say no" to certain fish species because of presumed problems. It's the proverbial throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

What if all of Europe decided to "just say no" to every American because of the number of ugly American tourists?

Would you like it if your dentist pulled out all of your teeth just because one went rotten?

How about if you and your whole family were killed because your 110-year old great grandfather needed to have the plug pulled because he was in a permanent coma?

Problems with fish and fishing do not happen uniformly across the entire range of a species. Chinook salmon are extinct in some places, troubled elsewhere, and thriving beautifully in some regions. How should that be handled with the boycott mentality?

There is a messaging problem, but it's caused by a bankrupt model of how to conserve fish. "Just say no" didn't work for drugs and it won't work for fish. It's hard to message because it's not a good strategy.

Instead, we need to find ways to support conservation where it's happening and expand the successful models.

Posted by: Mark Powell | July 20, 2007 9:53 AM

Hey Mark (for those of you who don't know, Mark works with the Ocean Conservancy, occasionally with the very topic of sustainable seafood), It's great you persistently enter the conversations about sustainable seafood as it adds to the dialogue and, furthermore, you're in the biz. I don't know the answer to mixed messaging, but perhaps it is partially to bypass consumers and work with large distributors (or even governments), like you're doing with Wal-Mart (though I have my own cynicism about that, too, but that's the great thing about fisheries: it's the perfect field for a pessimist!). Has Ocean Conservancy strategized on the mixed messaging issue? What are your opinions of the cost/benefit ratio for sustainable seafood messaging?

Posted by: Jennifer Jacquet | July 20, 2007 10:58 AM

It's seems clear that, for consumers who care, an easy, handy helpful guide would be a wonderful thing.

Is there one? Let me know, or perhaps do a piece on that at our site? Thanks

Rick at http://www.organiccanadian.com

Posted by: Rick | July 20, 2007 12:55 PM

Rick,

Find your handy-dandy guidlines here: http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp

Posted by: MK | July 20, 2007 1:06 PM

Monterey Bay Aquarium does have very comprehensive, up-to-date sustainable seafood cards, but they are not the only group doing assessments. In fact, this is part of the mixed messaging issue: there are many groups producing many different sustainable seafood guides. In one case, McCormick spice company (the largest producer of species used for fish) offered to sponsor one for an East coast aquarium.

My personal favorite seafood card is one produced by a New Zealand NGO: no fish or shellfish are listed in the the green ('Best Choices') column because no fishery met their standards.

Posted by: Jennifer Jacquet | July 20, 2007 3:01 PM

#10

Jennifer, We're working with the Walton Family Foundation, not Walmart (hate to split hairs). WFF is supporting conservation work by OC and others.

Now, of course, my blogthoughts are mine alone. Even though I'm brilliant and have an exalted position, OC doesn't do everything I say. Go figure.

With those thoughts out of the way...messaging sustainable seafood (or anything else) is easy if you have agreement on what is sustainable seafood. Mixed messages prevail in sustainable seafood because there are many different definitions out there. It's easy to message the Marine Stewardship Council certification of chilean seabass from South Georgia. Buy fish with the blue MSC logo, and don't by anything without the MSC logo. That's duh easy. But if you don't like MSC, that won't work for you.

It's going to get worse as the US govt. gets into the act in August with their FishWatch program (buy anything caught by US fisheries). Also, WASI and others are promoting their wares. Yukon salmon competes with Copper River.

Flavor of the month, don't expect clear messaging now that sustainable seafood has value. Even if ENGOs could agree, there are other sectors with their own goals.

Really, Jennifer, you like a rating system with no winners? Here's a hair shirt I'll sell you, it's scratchy, costs $250, and looks terrible. But you'll feel great wearing it cuz it purifies your soul.

Posted by: Mark Powell | July 20, 2007 9:45 PM

#11

That is a very interesting article. All the confusion about what kind of consumption is ethical and what kind is not seems to be one of the most compelling arguments for strict vegetarianism (if not veganism) today.

Posted by: Milan | July 24, 2007 11:30 AM