Overfishing News
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Overfishing is a catastrophic problem that few people know about. It's hard to find a villain to blame. Fishermen have fished for thousands of years. They're doing what their fathers and grandfathers did. A mom going to the grocery store to buy a can of tuna to make sandwiches for her children is not out to destroy tuna. Yet, millions of fishermen and billions of moms are permanently eliminating our ocean's fish. It's happening right now. On March 5, the AFP reported that the Food and Agriculture Organization voiced "serious concern" over a number of species of fish caught on the high seas and called for better monitoring and management of the stocks: Even though stocks have been fairly stable for the past 15 years, "more than half of stocks of highly migratory sharks and 66 percent of high-seas and straddling fish stocks rank as either overexploited or depleted," it said, citing hakes, Atlantic cod and halibut, orange roughy, basking shark and bluefin tuna.The BBC ran an excellent story last November in which it looked at a report from Dalhousie University in Canada concluding that there will be "virtually nothing left to fish from the seas by the middle of the century if current trends continue." Pause, and imagine what that would be like. Steve Palumbi of Stanford University said, "This century is the last century of wild seafood." Read the whole sad story, and then read CNN's summary by numbers of the report. Yes, the report from Dalhousie sure was a doozy. So much so that Dr. Simon Cripps, Director of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Marine Program said, "For centuries people have regarded the ocean as an inexhaustible supply of food, but in recent years human actions have finally pushed oceans to their limit. This study confirms the scale of the oceans crisis. Governments and industry must act or we'll reach the point of no return for fisheries and the marine environment." Read the WWF's urgent update. I'm afraid that Dr. Cripps and the rest of us are doomed to disappointment in governments and industry. One reason I wrote No Fish In My Dish is that I lost faith in the world's policy makers to act in time. They will continue doing the wrong thing until it's too late. That's why we need to focus on the consumer side of the problem. Eat fewer fish! That's the answer. The latest evidence of policy makers letting fish down comes from Brussels, where the EU Fisheries Ministers just set 2007 quotas that are "worse than ever," in the words of Oceana. Ricardo Aguilar, the Research Director of Oceana Europe said, "It's incredible and incomprehensible how Ministers continue to play politics when our fish stocks are in serious trouble." Folks, it's no joke. The ocean's fish are disappearing. Mr. Aguilar referred to the Dalhousie report when he said, "Only last month an important scientific study outlined how fish stocks risk global collapse if fisheries continue to be managed as they are now. How can Ministers continue to ignore this -- do they really want to be responsible for future generations living in a world of empty oceans?" Read Oceana's brief on this disaster. If you're still up for it, there's a lot more. Fill your mind and raise your consciousness by reading:
Like to eat fish? Don't we all. Luckily, with my solution, you still can. No Fish In My Dish urges you to refrain from eating fish for just five days per week. That leaves two guilt-free fish-eating days on the calendar. On those other two days, though, you should still be careful about what goes down the hatch. To help you make gracious decisions, here's Seafood WATCH from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Do your part. Read the book. For five days a week, don't eat fish. Tell others about this site. Join the no fish list. And, if there's any information I've missed, please send me a note.
Yours very truly, |
