It's official: With a stroke of California Governor Jerry Brown's pen, the entire U.S. West Coast has now banned the trade of shark fins.
We've been working to support the bill since its introduction; we called our legislators and Governor Brown and urged them to protect sharks, and I know many others did, too. Thankfully, our lawmakers listened.
Each year, tens of millions of sharks are killed for their fins, mostly to make shark fin soup, an Asian delicacy. In case you're unfamiliar, shark finning is a shocking practice in which a shark's fins are sliced off at sea and the shark is thrown back in the water to bleed to death. Shark finning is illegal in U.S. waters, but the shark fin trade persists.
According to government data, approximately 85 percent of dried shark fin imports to the United States came through California last year, making California the hub of the US shark fin market. But thanks to Governor Brown, this will no longer be the case.
California has joined the ranks of a growing number of governments rallying to protect the top predators in the oceans. Washington State, Oregon and Hawaii have all passed similar bans. And the movement here in the U.S. reflects a global trend. The Pacific nation of Palau created a shark sanctuary two years ago, and other countries have followed suit in shark conservation efforts. As a result of Oceana's efforts, this summer Chile passed a national ban on shark finning. And most recently, Mexico and the Marshall Islands have announced plans for new shark protections.
It's encouraging to see that the momentum to protect sharks is growing around the world. Sharks are magnificent predators that have been on the planet for more than 400 million years. Shark populations around the world are crashing, which has cascading consequences on the marine food web. They play a vital role in maintaining the health of ocean ecosystems, but due to their slow growth rate and low level of reproduction, sharks are especially vulnerable to fishing pressure.
We're glad Governor Brown continued California's leadership in ocean conservation. Thanks to everyone who spoke up to help score this monumental victory for sharks.
Actress January Jones ("Mad Men") is the spokesperson for Oceana's shark campaign. Watch video, see photos, and learn more about why January is scared for sharks.
of Asian Americans.
You can still catch and eat a shark you just just can't mass net them, or long line them, cut off their fins and throw them back to die a slow death , now if you have a problem with THAT or think THAT is a TRADITION then that is you and you ALONE.
That is all
It's a Fin/Win.
(And congrats on the baby JJ)
If you want to save sharks the best thing to do is to figure out a way to make them a commodity by establishing property rights over them. This is not necessarily easy but with some kind of tagging one could imagine how sharks might be kept exclusive. It probably depends on the type of shark.
The ocean is a true tragedy of the commons. Bans will never solve the problems there.
Whaling bans, though not yet universally embraced, have seen substantive reversals in depletions of not only various species, but within heavy consumption "centers". As well, there are various governments who have experienced political fallout for not acting quick enough to suit many of their much more proactive and aware citizens/constituencies.
That trend won't reverse itself.
The concept that the oceans somehow belong to everyone (the commons) denies a collective irresponsibility that has seen vast reductions in food source supplies AND the diminished health of the ocean's necessary "food chain" models. We are past the "economic's first" considerations too many people use as benchmarks to "acceptability"
The oceans belong to future generations.
7 billion consumers have never united in universal awareness, when all the singular consumer recognizes. . . is what they have sitting on the plate in front of them . . . or how many bags of trash that one person discards per week.
Further, intellectually, few individuals grasp the waste and pollutants created by not only their consumption patterns, but the waste created by global industries that service those 7 billion, who promote excessive consumerism unnecessarily, merely to assuage their concept of "consumer convenience", thereby placing profits over bigger-picture responsibilities.
In a perfect world, held to zero population growth, bans might not be necessary.
But we now cannot replace what we inherently over-consume. We are way past that point.
The bans create precisely the kind of incentive structure that you don't want to exist if you care about sustaining anything. You can't possibly ban things to the extent necessary to make a sustainable situation. And it's not as though these bans are magically instituted by people who can know everything about the appropriate population of any given species.
Most of the problems you think exist due to promotion of "excessive consumerism" are in fact related back to the same incentive structure that the state has created through it's various other regulations rather than protecting property rights. Businesses fight regulations they perceive as hindering them, but influence those that harm the competition, but without property rights enforcement the regulations primarily create moral hazard.
Obviously the example of moral hazard can easily be found with the BP oil spill. MMS was there to protect people, and it failed miserably due to being captured by the industry. The method of managing rights by leasing them from government doesn't work.
People imagine that the government is doing all this to protect them and it either won't or can't. It in many cases won't because the regulators have no incentive to do the right things, or lack the intellect. It's not as though regulators are generally the best and brightest. The best and brightest would generally be able to get into the industry and figure out how to profit, not be on the sidelines in some bureaucracy.
So these generally weak people are of course going to be influenced by the industry that they are supposed to be regulating.
The costs of regulations both for the regulated and the government are tremendous. The bans are no different in this regard, as because they provide incentive to hide goods/etc. they are actually even more difficult to enforce.
And it's not as though you can make people not want to eat shark. The most you can do is try to apply force to make them stop, but unless you can explain how shark is different than other things we eat it's rather arbitrary. Obviously the "endangered species" nature is something many people think matters, but establishing property rights in sharks is more likely to result in benefits to the shark population than making it illegal to hunt them.