Empty oceans

by frog

Our poor little disappearing whitebait are not alone.  Or to be more accurate, once they reach the ocean, they are alone. The US Good magazine has an important story, Fin: The Last Days of Fish that notes:

Our oceans carry less than a tenth the number of fish they once held, yet few of us have any sense that something is wrong.

Good examines the massive collapse of fish stocks and the fishing industry in New England and Cape Cod, noting that industrial fishing has plundered 9 tenths of large predatory fish (like tuna, swordfish, cod, halibut) in the last fifty years. And worse, we may have only 40 years left before our worldwide supplies completely collapse.

The demise of commercial fishing is beyond the limits of even our darkest environmental imaginations. And yet the evidence of the ocean’s diminishment is everywhere. Leaving aside the legitimate concerns of conservationists, the possibility of a broad fish collapse is harrowing for other reasons. At a time when we are mired in a global food crisis, nearly 1.5 billion people depend upon the sea as a source of food or income. The destabilizing effect of such a collapse would be tremendous, bringing communities and countries into conflict over a resource we once considered boundless. It is fair to say that the endgame has begun.

And:

We have imperiled what is perhaps the last wilderness on earth, for the simplest reason: We believed it was so vast it couldn’t be harmed. The signs of our folly are now too numerous to ignore. Massive, swirling gyres of plastic have formed in the North Pacific, as have toxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and dozens more places. Coastal pollution and construction is destroying critical wetland habitats worldwide. And the ocean itself is warming, a development that will have consequences we can hardly imagine. Amid these challenges, overfishing represents the most immediate threat and possibly the easiest problem to remedy.

That’s a gloomy scenario. Yet, the solution is a relatively simple, quick and effective one: we need to safeguard large segments of our oceans to allow them to recover:  Good suggests up to 20% of all the world’s oceans.

In places where fishing has been halted, recovery can be measured over a relatively short period of time. The ocean’s floor begins to return to a natural state, fish populations start to rebound, and fishermen experience a surge in catch as fish migrate beyond protected waters.

* Good’s article cites New Zealand as a sustainable fishing success story.  Sadly Greenpeace’s Red Fish guide suggests this is not the case.