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Is This The Last Century For Fish?

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Is This The Last Century For Fish?
February 1, 2007

I visited the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo a few years back and was amazed at how many fish it processed in a single day. I asked myself, "How many fish can there be in the ocean?" I decided to check.

Not enough, it turns out. With the people population growing every year and the fish population declining every year and our ways of catching fish improving all the time, it was obvious that the fish couldn't last forever. In fact, that's true.

I discovered that a number of excellent books have been written on the subject of overfishing. Studies have been commissioned. Speeches have been spoken. Laws have been passed. Yet, the fish population keeps declining.

Existing material isn't working. As long as there's a market for fish, the fish will be caught. The only way to stop the depletion is to slow the buying of fish. My target became not the supply side of the problem, but the demand side. If people slow their buying, the industry will slow its catching. Put more memorably:

Fewer fish caught means fewer fish bought.

Next, I had to come up with a solution. Just telling people to stop eating fish entirely wasn't reasonable. Fish are too much a part of human culture. I decided that eating fewer fish was the answer.

If we refrain from eating fish for five days a week, that'll be enough to let the populations catch up to healthy levels again. At the very least, they'll stop swimming toward decimation.

Finally, how to get that message to a world unaware of the problem? A simple book that rhymes, I decided. Another in-depth book wouldn't work. They hadn't before, why would mine be any different? I needed an entertaining book, with cute illustrations, and a story simple enough that a child could understand it. It would need to be short to get the message across quickly. Also, it should not target any specific country or culture. It should be universal.

That's the book I wrote and illustrated, and made available to you on this site. The characters have no names. They are not Chinese, American, or Japanese. They are all of us, because all of us together are causing the problem. My hope is that you: