Over the weekend, the Observer's Alex Renton gave it to us straight on how the world's oceans are running out of fish. Here's just a taste:
Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish?
Read some reasons why in the full article here.
Environment
Comments
"Don't Tell Me, Show Me."
Why is the ocean conservation movement STILL unable to implement these words when it comes to this issue of over-fishing? Why am I STILL able to go to every local supermarket in Los Angeles and SEE no evidence whatsoever of these problems that I am constantly being TOLD about? Yes, the prices are a little steep, but so is gasoline and everything else. Yet I still see Chilean Seabass and Orange Roughy and Swordfish and lots and lots of shrimp.
We started Shifting Baselines in 2002 amid dire warnings in the media of the end is near for seafood. That's six years. No change. What's going on? Who's in charge? Why isn't anyone conveying any frustration over this? Why is there such contentment with mediocrity in ocean conservation? Where are the signs at the seafood counter that say, "Sorry, the oceans have run out of this species."
I have a new movie coming out in July, "Sizzle: A global warming comedy." In it, one of the best and most profound sound bites comes from Dr. Fred Singer, a man who has fought for the tobacco lobby, the chloroflourocarbon lobby, and now is a global warming skeptic. I'm not a fan of his, but he does say this wonderfully cynical thing in my interview, regarding models.
He says that we can make lots of models to predict the future -- people love to. He was hired to make a model to predict the price of oil 50 years from now. His model never worked, but nobody cares -- he got paid, the people who commissioned him got their model and everyone was happy.
So much of ocean conservation is like this. Groups raise money, people feel good giving them money, they do some things, they feel good, their donors feel good, and everyone is happy.
And yet ... the seafood apparently continues to vanish.
Posted by: Randy Olson | May 14, 2008 6:02 AM
I don't have any answers but as to Randy's comment about shrimp: my understanding is that there are huge "farming" operations for shrimp these days.
Here in Dallas sea bass has stayed on restaurant menus and I'm the only person I know who has any concern about that.
Posted by: Texas Reader | May 14, 2008 12:21 PM
Decisions on quotas, etc. are political decisions which may have little relationship to reality. I see that the West Coast salmon fishery has crashed. Watched a very interesting program on the History Channel about a pollock fishery factory vessel. Remember when no one fished for pollock--they were trash fish? According to the program, your square fish at McDonalds is pollock. Actually they make pretty good cevichi. A lot of what you are seeing in the market is farmed and this will increase in the future. Farming has its own unresolved problems. I well remember when fish was cheap food for po' folks.
Posted by: Jim Thomerson | May 14, 2008 4:33 PM
Very occasionally, but lately more frequently, at the Austin, TX, grocery stores I frequent, the shelf that normally holds tuna will be empty, with a sign posted that says that the supplier is out of this product at this time. I always wonder if it's because of the issues cited in this article.
Posted by: deang | May 14, 2008 6:04 PM
I think that there are two reasons that we aren't seeing the crisis of fisheries management hit the shelves yet. The first is that only a few nations are taking the problem on, and while we can (arguably, in my opinion) regulate fisheries in our own EEZ, we are powerless and will-less outside of it so while we may consider spiny lobster overfished, Columbia continues to fish them down to unbelievably small sizes so that we can still eat them in fancy restaurants. In the words of my favorite fisheries activist "We're writing checks the ocean can't cash."
The second reason is the same reason that Americans until the mid 1970s thought that the oceans were inexhaustible. Fish stocks are hard to push to extinction. Recent data suggest that Atlantic coast red snapper have been severely overfished since 1960, fishing at 12 times the sustainable rate. And there are still red snapper out there! We can fish stocks at surprisingly low levels for quite some time.
Posted by: foragefish | May 15, 2008 8:58 AM
Okay Randy, I'll bite purely for the sake of argument.
I live in Utah. Why should I care if the ocean becomes devoid of fish? There are plenty of other animals I can eat. The only time I see the ocean is on vacation, on tv, or at the grocery store. None of the stuff I see around me is going to suffer much or at all if all the ocean fish die. Right?
Sure some fisherman will go the way blacksmiths, scribes, and buggy makers. Some towns will probably go under. It's all so very unfortunate but the economy will adjust and move on. Change hits every industry eventually.
The ocean is the ocean and the land is the land. I'm on land. Documentarians do a great job of reinforcing this otherworldliness. Every single documentary hypes the wonder and otherworldliness of the oceans. They also all show huge massive quantities of fish everywhere.
Here's a bit from one of Jennifer's articles over at the Tyee that sums it another point nicely:
"We did not co-evolve with fish they way we co-evolved with mammals," says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. "Therefore, we cannot wrap our minds around fish or our hearts around them either." Perhaps for this reason, our primary way of conserving fisheries over the last decade has been through our stomachs. http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/07/20/Toothfish/
Posted by: kevindwhite | May 15, 2008 10:04 AM