Could We Be the Generation that Runs out of Fish?
In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news -- where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek -- the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story is stark. In my parents' lifetime, we have killed 90 percent of the world's fish. In my lifetime, we will finish off the rest -- unless we change our ways, fast. We are on course to be the people who wiped fish from the earth.
The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.
It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But fifteen years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.
A growing number of scientists are warning that we could all be living in Newfoundland soon. Professor Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a detailed study in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature saying that at the current rate, all global fish populations will have collapsed by 2048. He says: "This isn't some horror scenario, it's a real possibility. It's not rocket science if we're depleting species after species. It's a finite resource. We'll reach a point where we run out."
The species in the frontline is bluefin tuna, the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain for fish. This little creature can swim at 50 mph, and accelerate faster than the swishest sports car. It has even developed warm blood. Yet every year, a third of the remaining population is ripped from the seas and slapped onto our plates. Soon, it will be gone.
All over the world, from the Bay of Bengal to Lake Victoria to the shores of South America, I have heard fishermen say their catches are shrinking, in size and in number. Industrial-scale fishing only began in the 1950s. By the standards of the news cycle, this is slow -- but by the standards of the planet or of settled fishing communities, this is a click of the fingers. The effects of the new industrial fishing are uniform. Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just fifteen years to reduce the fish population to a 10 percent shadow of its former self.
This process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction, ripping up everything in its path. Charles Clover, who wrote the book on which the documentary is based, has a good analogy for it. Imagine a band of hunters stringing a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. Imagine it scooping up everything in its way: lions and cheetahs and hippos and wild dogs. The net has a massive metal roller attached to its leading edge, smashing down every tree that gets in its way. And in the end, when the hunters open up the net, they pick out the choicest creatures and dump the squashed remains in the sun as carrion for the vultures.
But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14 billion of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?
A small number of people are making a lot of short-term profit out of this destruction -- and they are using this cash to ensure they can carry on hunting, down to the last fish. In 1992, an attempt to get the bluefin tuna listed as an endangered species was scuppered by the US and Japanese governments at the urging of the tuna lobby -- who happen to give large campaign donations to all parties. A similar corruption has eaten into European politics.
Add to this the fact that fishermen are a determined and demanding constituency with an equally short-term agenda. They demand the maximum quotas today -- even if that means no quotas tomorrow.
Our societies are structured to put these short-term cries for money for a few ahead of the long terms needs of us all. A small determined group with hard cash almost always beats a diffuse group with good intentions -- until they get angry and fight back.
Yet today, ordinary people in rich countries are being insulated from the fish crisis. As we exhaust our own fish stocks, our corporations are sailing out across the world to steal them from the poor. Today, there are armadas of industrial European and American fishing boats across the coast of West Africa, leaving the small fishermen who live on its coasts to starve. (A lot of the "piracy" we are fighting is in fact a desperate attempt to fight back against this.) Professor Daniel Pauly says: "It is like a hole burning through paper. As the hole expands, the edge is where the fisheries concentrate, until there is nowhere left to go."
We are not only stealing fish from Africans; we are stealing them from future generations. In the age of limits, we are hitting up against the capacity of the planet to provide for us -- yet we are reacting with blank denial. This story is unfolding, in one from or another, in the rainforests, the air, and in the planet's climate itself.
It has left us at a strange crossroads. We will either be a despised generation who left behind a depleted husk-planet -- or a heroic generation who, at five minutes to ecological midnight, turned back to the light.
With fish, the solution is even simpler and more straightforward than with the other ecological crises ensnaring us. The scientific experts say we need to follow two steps. First, expand the 0.6 percent of the area of the world's oceans in which fishing is banned to 30 percent. In these protected areas, fish can slowly recover. Second, in the remaining 70 percent, impose strict quotas on fishermen and police it properly, as they do in Alaska, New Zealand and Iceland.
The cost of this programme? $14 billion a year -- precisely the sum we currently spend on subsidising fishermen. At no extra cost, we could turn them from the rapists of the oceans into their guardians.
Yet The End of the Line has one flaw -- and it is one that riddles current environmental thought. It presents us with a great earth-altering crisis, and then says our primary response should be to change our own personal consumption habits. It urges people not to buy from Nobu, which shamefully still sells bluefin tuna, and to ask if the fish we buy is sustainably produced. It's like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, where the primary response Al Gore presses on us is to shop green and change our lightblubs.
Of course this is valuable -- but it is only an anemic and minor first step. It is rather like, in 1937, reacting to the rise of Nazism by urging people to make sure that they personally weren't killing any Jews or gays or Jehovah's Witnesses, or buying from any Nazi-owned companies. We needed collective action that would stop other people from killing these minorities -- just as today we need collective action that prevents anyone from irreparably trashing the means of life.
At the moment, many good people get anxious about environmental issues, and hear the message that The Response is to scrub their own lifestyle clean. Yet individual voluntary action by a minority of nice people will not save the bluefin tuna, never mind the ecosystem. But if all these honorable people act together -- by volunteering for, and donating to, organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Plane Stupid -- they can change the law, so everybody will be required to change their behavior, not just a benevolent ten percent. It was just such determined minorities armed with the facts that spurred the fights against slavery, colonialism and fascism. When you respond as a consumer, you are weak; when you respond as a citizen, you are strong.
The voice of millions of people can drown out the concentrated power of the fishing industry -- and all the other industries with a vested interest in trashing our planet -- but not with the swipe of a credit card.
The alternative to collective action today is catastrophe tomorrow. As Charles Clover explains: "When the human population comes under pressure on land because of global warming, when we are running out of ways to feed ourselves, we [will] have just squandered one of the greatest resources on the planet -- wild fish." The epitaph for the human species would turn out to have been scripted by Douglas Adams: so long, and thanks for all the fish.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.
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Setting up marine protected areas and fishing quotas are necessary, but will yield less fish in an already underserved market. In light of this, how can aquaculture not be part of the solution?
The End of the Line misses this point because its makers cling to decades old data about wild fish in:farmed fish out ratios, saying they are 5:1. For much of the industry, this ratio is closer to 1:1 because 'carnivorous' fish can become 50% or more vegetarian. Furthermore, farming is a much more efficient use of marine resources than wild caught predatory fish, even at 5:1ratios. This is because the fish which go into farmed fish are at the bottom of the trophic pyramid, have little market for direct human consumption, are generally more robust stocks than predatory fish, and yield less by-catch. It is also because farming can optimize food conversion, while wild predatory fish expend tremendous energy surviving.
The Company for which I proudly work, Kona Blue, is an offshore mariculture company. We have pioneered the argument that sustainably farmed predatory fish represents 60 times more efficient use of marine resources than their wild-caught counterparts. This is NOT a slight improvement, but a monumental improvement over the plunder and pillage covered in The End of the Line. You can read this argument and review our environmental monitoring data at www.kona-b
Every few months an article or report on the decline of fisheries hits the news and withers away. But this also occurs in global warming, peak oil and ...name it. Lots of apparent concern, but no viable solutions. Even I'm beginning to cave in, as my blog today, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, actually picked the year when we began to fall apart as a civilization:
http://pla
A couple of years ago I wrote a chapter in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth
http://sim
on the Blue Revolution. This information formed a series of HuffPos, one entitled, The Ultimate Ocean Ranch:
http://www
It's easy to complain and express indignation. So I presented solutions. Well, sad to say, nothing much is happening.
You are, though, absolutely correct on all fronts. Now, let us catalyze a progressive response to help make a difference. These virtual portals I thought could be the answer to those oh so last generation protest marches, as interaction is instantaneous and widespread. Somehow, though, as I noted in my latest HuffPo:
http://www
unless your immediate mortality is threatened, people just don't care enough. Maybe someone out there can suggest a more effective strategy.
Wow, 4 days and only 16 comments. I guess we CAN write off the fish. Too bad.
Why do so few care?
We are arguably in the sixth greatest extinction period recorded by the fossil record, and we are the cause. Why the guilt ? Did the Sun feel guilty when it dried nearly all the fresh surface water from the planet 250 million years ago ?
We feel guilty because we have the hubris to think that we are clever enough or care enough to do something about it and that we, in fact, are the cancer. The old self-esteem takes a hit on that one. Lovelock states that there will be 1 billion people on the planet by 2100. Alas the cancer will have abated.
You do realize that the sun has no feelings? And that a lot of suffering is being caused by overpopulation? If you don't care about your relatives or humanity, I guess your words are OK. But maybe we can live in a sustainable world without feeling quote unquote "guilty"? Maybe just a little common sense can make things better, for us and the environment?
1. You cannot guilt-trip people to conserve scarce resources. You are correct to say that we need regulation. The guilt-trip version of eco action is pretty much a substitute for real action. A few people feel better but nothing really changes.
Real action takes laws. Lots of fish species that should be banned from commerce are currently sold in supermarkets and natural food stores.
2. There are a few locations where fishing is prohibited for national security reasons. Things are very different in those areas. One example is the area around the Cape Canaveral missile launch facility.
The fact that only a few people posted here shows humans could care less. That is the problem.
I do not eat seafood and live along the ocean and Ches. Bay. Commercial fisherman say that the fish come and go in cycles, yeah right.
As long as you can make a dime from over fishing it will be done until the last minnow is caught, that is human nature, look at Easter Island.
A prime example of the tragedy of the commons http://en.
good link
What kind of a world are we leaving for our children?
I couldn't agree more--thanks for publishing this information. Another example of an anemic 'personal' solution to a global crisis was in the ABC show the other night '2100', a 'fake' documentary about the climate changes to come. Although they presented the 'worst case scenario', their solution was for everyone to personally change their lightbulbs and buy local. Sure, it helps. But most won't. We need to use our governments to stop this insanity. The earth is melting, and there is no Jor-el to ship us all off to some other planet to save us. Some say that 2/3 of the ocean's species will be gone by 2050. The plankton will go with only 2 degrees of warming. We have to stop emissions now, not in 2030. And we have to find a way to clean the air faster--algae farms, whatever.
The ECO- community needs to get serious and stop being so darn nice and mealy-mouthed. This is code RED. EMERGENCY!
Overpopulation is the issue no one wants to discuss. Around the world, the answer is birth control. In this country, it's slowing the immigration that is fueling our population increase.
It's going to be hard to get people in the Pacific Northwest to stop eating fish.
About 6 years ago I saw this. I said to myself that if the Salmon population in the Northwest US did not survive the onslaught of humans, none of it would. I wish I had the Huffington Post to say it to back then. Thank you for saying what you are saying today here Johann.
If we lose the fish, survival will be a whole lot less pleasant.
We are about to lose the fish.
I make sure to enjoy things like ahi tuna sushi occasionally, because they will be extinct in my lifetime.
As TXfemmom observed, the fisheries are the same problem as so many others in our environment. We approach global problems with the same nationalistic mentality we've been using for centuries. Individual countries will continue to resist limits on their own consumption of a given resource until the resource is gone.
If you want to see this trend projected to its depressing conclusion, watch NBC's "Earth 2100"
We need to restore the DEAD SPOTS in our oceans like The Gulf of Mexico and Chesepeak Bay.
Growing corn contributes to this problem. Legalize hemp outlaw feeding of corn to cows.(let them grassfeed)
Hemp makes the best chicken nd turkey feed.(they grow twice as fast)
Hemp rquires much less fertilizer.
We also need strict laws outlawing animal waste runoff.
You are exactly correct. The growing/fa
If American and Europeans countries strongly curtained fishing, the fishing fleets of Japan, China, and other Asian nations would still finish off the fish. The only hope to be able to keep some of these fish in existence may be commercial growing of the fish by governments which will not release them until there are huge numbers of them, or when the areas where they will go to reproduce are off limits for ten years or more and it is ENFORCED through force, if necessary.
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