Sustainable Seafood
We have all grown up knowing that seafood is a healthy part of our diet, but is it healthy for our planet? Bluefin tuna has been fished to the brink of extinction, wild salmon spawning runs get sparser each year, the north Atlantic cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, and wild shrimp is harvested in one of the most environmentally destructive ways ever invented. This may make a trip to the grocery store to pick up a piece of “sustainable” seafood for dinner seem like a daunting task but it all comes down to being a conscious consumer. We must all aware of the choices we have and which ones are good for both our bodies and our environment. Fishery management practices that accurately reflect the needs of fish populations instead of the relentlessly increasing human demand, and laws that reward sustainable fishing methods and punish the opposite are also necessary if we are to continue harvesting our ocean beyond the middle of this century. Understanding what sustainable seafood truly means and using our collective buying power to shift global demand towards more environmentally friendly options are the waves of the future. It is no longer a case of “plenty of fish in the ocean”. In order to get a clearer picture of exactly what “plenty” once was (so that we have a goal in mind when discussing the rebuilding of fisheries), we will need to begin by travelling back into the pre-industrial world.
The Industrial Revolution was a period of incredible advancement, growth, and invention associated with hallmarks of progress such as the steam engine, telegraph, reliable light bulbs, canned food, large-scale assembly lines, and incredible expansion of our world’s canals, roads, and railways. The foundations of daily life changed drastically as massive improvements in mining, manufacturing, technology, agriculture, and transportation altered the socioeconomic and cultural landscape of our existence. Nobel Prize winner and economist, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., once said, “For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth”. However, our growth has been far from sustainable. The Industrial Revolution forever changed the way we fish, and signalled the beginning of the age of unsustainable and environmentally destructive fishing practices in which we currently find ourselves.
With the advent of steam-powered ships, humans were now able to regularly employ quite possibly the most efficient, yet destructive method of fishing ever conceived: the beam trawl. This piece of equipment is nothing more than a large net held open by a wood or metal beam that is then dragged through the ocean, but until steam was used to power fishing vessels, sailing ships driven by wind alone were not strong enough to haul these huge nets. The pestilential power of trawls was recognized and regularly debated long before their widespread use. The English actually convened commissions starting in the late 1870s with the goal of reducing the carnage brought on by trawlers, catalysed by an already apparent decline in fish catches in the North Sea. These efforts did nothing to curb the steady growth of a fleet of trawlers increasing in size, destructive capacity, and numbers.
Trawlers indiscriminately capture all living things in their path and leave in their wake, a complete destruction of the seafloor. This was evident at the turn of the century when fishermen tried to demand that their governments outlaw the use of these detrimental fishing practices. A New England newspaper article in 1911 stated that, “the continued operation of these trawlers scraping over the fishing grounds and destroying countless numbers of young and immature fish, is the greatest menace to the future of fisheries, and the greatest danger the fisheries have ever faced along this coast”. Sadly, not only did these factual proclamations not reduce trawler use, this fishing method has grown ever more efficient. Nets are now equipped with chains to stir up all remaining wildlife, rock hoppers and giant tires allow the nets to be dragged over uneven terrain, decimating these habitats to nothing but rubble as they are pulled along the ocean bed. According to the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, 82% of everything caught by bottom trawling in North Pacific fisheries is unwanted bycatch, which is discarded dead and dying back into the ocean. Factors like this one make it almost impossible to accurately estimate the damage done by trawling, but one does not need to be a fisheries biologist to comprehend the magnitude of biomass loss brought about by trawlers and other types of environmentally destructive fishing methods such as long lining and dynamite fishing.
One-and-a-half centuries of rampant pillaging of our world’s waters by unsustainable fishing practices, has reduced the bounty of our seas to a mere glimmer of what it once was. It is has been determined that all the major stocks of large fish in the world such as cod, tuna, swordfish, halibut, and many others have been reduced to approximately 10% of what their populations were in the 1950s. Ironically, this is the number associated with the total “collapse” of a fishery, a term defined as “a state where 90 percent or more of the historical population is gone.” It has also been shown that it only takes 10 to 15 years of modern industrial fishing pressure to reduce any healthy fish community to this 10% mark. Yet the world’s wild catch remains at an astronomical 170 billion pounds annually; this amount is equal in weight to the entire human population of China! As fish populations shrunk, our fishing methods were made even more efficient in order to extract the same amount of seafood. Even as I write, our last giant bluefin tunas are being hunted down by sophisticated sonar in the largely unmanageable international waters of the open ocean, and slaughtered to feed our bottomless appetite for sashimi. There are too many exploited populations of fish to cover in anything less than a book, but in an effort to succinctly analyse the nature and condition of our world’s fisheries, I will focus on four representative marine animals and the issues associated with each of them: cod, salmon, tuna, and shrimp.
All the way up until the 1970s when some of the first documented local fishery collapses began to occur, the validity of the idea that our ocean could be overfished was dismissed as impossible. Even into the early 1980s, the U.S was still heavily subsidizing the expansion of the American fishing fleet to the tune of about $800 million in order to make up for declining catch numbers. This huge increase in fishing pressure along with the use of the ubiquitous ocean destroyer, the trawler, brought about something unimaginable: the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery. In 1992, the Canadian government closed the Grand Banks to cod fishing and in 1994, the Georges Banks, known as the most prolific cod fishing grounds in the United States and the area whose abundance gave Cape Cod its name, were officially closed to commercial cod fishing. This “industrial fish” that had been the very image of plenty and the definition of commonness, was nearly wiped out and only about 5% of the historic population of cod remained. Great care has been taken since the closing of these once-fecund fishing grounds, and the Sustainable Fisheries Act was passed in 1996, to ensure that these populations are rebuilt in a reasonable timeframe. Policy makers are always under extreme pressure from fishing interests to raise allowable catch limits to satisfy our growing demand for whitefish flesh, a requirement on the order of 40 billion pounds annually (that is the equivalent of 41,000 fully loaded Boeing 747s),
by Alex Rose ( see OG Issue 29)