Seafood
jjacquet | May 28, 2007This week I am part of a sustainable seafood panel at Cultivating Appetites for Knowledge, the International Food Conference at the University of Victoria. Mark Powell wrote about the very topic of sustainable seafood last week over at blogfish. Daniel Pauly, a genius (as in: any fool can make things complicated, it takes a genius to make them simple), says that sustainability relies on only one premise: things stay the same.
Therefore, bottom trawling is inherently unsustainable because it erodes the very habitat upon which fish extracted from it depend. Shrimp trawling is also…
jjacquet | May 16, 2007 In the 1960s, Godfrey Merlen, a longtime resident of Galapagos, remembers hoards of spiny lobster antennae that resembled "bouquets of underwater flowers". Today, lobsters are a rare sight to divers. There are still a few refuges because the conditions are so rough that fishermen cannot frequent the sites. But, on calm days, these lobster homes are hit hard and the populations continues to the decline. According to Fernando Ortiz at Conservation International, the catch-per-unit-effort for lobsters in Galapagos has hit a record low. Almost all spiny lobsters caught in Galapagos are…
jjacquet | May 10, 2007One of our longtime heros of Shifting Baselines is Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Mark Dowie. In this recent essay he takes the Bush administration to task over their plans for large scale (too large?) aquaculture. What he notes is that, "while the U.S. Congress recently passed amendments to federal fisheries law that actually improved, built on, and strengthened the Fisheries Conservation Act of 1996, other branches of the U.S. government (NOAA and the White House) were doing this."
Blue Pastures in a Public Trust
The Bush administration has made bringing industrial aquaculture to the…
jjacquet | April 23, 2007
Two seafood companies in Britain were listed yesterday among the top 100 private firms with the fastest growing profits. Increase in seafood demand may lead to decline for wild fisheries stocks but not necessarily for revenue, which is what happened on the East Coast when overfishing of cod and other higher trophic level fishes led to an increase in high value shellfish. Hard to muster much fuss over shifting baselines when the profits continue to rise.
jjacquet | April 17, 2007
An article I wrote about fishmeal and the prospects for turning the industry around is published in the Tyee today. About 30 milliion tonnes--more than one third of all marine fish caught--is ground into fishmeal annually. About two million tons were ground into meal in 1950. Fishmeal is fed to an ever-increasing number of farmed fish, pigs, and chickens. It helps pigs and chicken (AND herbivorous fish) grow faster than their historical grain-based diets.
But the fishmeal industry also turns into powder fish perfectly edible by humans. The article explores a new initiative in Peru,…
jjacquet | April 11, 2007
Having established the link between overeating and overfishing, it is also worth noting the trend of Fishing Down Marine Food Webs, another phenomenon uncovered by Daniel Pauly and team in 1998. 'Fishing down marine food webs' describes the fishing industry's elimination of top predators in the marine system over the last fifty years. Since these top predators are unable to reproduce quickly, the fishing industry targets the next biggest fish, and so on and so on, down the marine food web.
A recent article sent to us by Mike Hirshfield of Oceana fits neatly into 'fishing down marine food…
jjacquet | April 9, 2007The discussion generated around these two extreme positions has been very provocative and we plan to let the comments keep coming a couple days more. Both Randy and I agree that it is heartening to see so much support for the ocean and its inhabitants. We will wrap up the seafood discussion later this week, with excerpts from our favorite posts, so please continue to weigh in on: To Eat or Not To Eat.
jjacquet | April 8, 2007YES, SAYS RANDY OLSON: Until There Is Effective Leadership, There Is Little Point in Making Sacrifices
I say we should not be expected to stop eating seafood until there is a clear strategy that will make use of individual efforts -- namely boycotts. Asking people to make sacrifices in the absence of organized efforts is asking them to make gestures that are more symbolic than real. That, in my opinion, is essentially religious behavior.
Let me describe a similar situation. I support in general the idea of a reasonably high tax burden in our society with the intention of funding an…