OCEAN
OF TROUBLE
to forget in economies of seeming abundance like ours. As it is, the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations estimated in 2012 that, worldwide, the full complement of commercial
angling, trawling and farming currently
yields an annual haul of 150 million
metric tons of fish, worth about $200
billion — of which roughly 130 million
metric tons ends up feeding someone.
For a little fewer than half the planet’s
nearly 7 billion inhabitants, fish comprise as much as 20 percent of the animal protein in their diets — and a significantly higher percentage in poor and
island regions where subsistence hinges
on just a few basic and readily accessible
staples like fish.
Inland fishing, to be sure, accounts for
a chunk of the angling activity. But the
lion’s share of the global seafood bounty
— about 80 percent — comes from comparatively small and patchy subsections
of ocean habitat where fish thrive.
Meanwhile, mankind’s proficiency at
exploiting those spots has taken a heavy
toll. Opinions on the precise numbers
vary widely, but by most accounts a staggering number of fish stocks have been
hunted to the po int of wholesale population collapse. Of the 600 varieties currently monitored globally by the United
Nations, for example, the organization estimates that roughly 90 percent are being
either “fully exploited,” meaning that any
HUFFINGTON
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uptick in fishing would be unsustainable,
or “overexploited,” which is just what it
sounds like: Humans are extracting fish
at a pace that exceeds the stock’s natural
ability to replenish its numbers.
It’s little wonder: Decades of technological improvements, including the rise
of GPS and fish-finding sonar and the
deployment of massive trawl nets and
more muscular boats to pull them, have
permitted commercial fishers to hunt
with an ever more brutal efficiency —
faster, deeper and over wider areas. And
these developments have come in tandem with other ocean stressors like the
increased demand for seafood, wanton
coastal development and proliferating
ocean pollution, all of which can spell
trouble for anglers and their quarry.
Object lessons abound, including the
collapse of Canada’s Atlantic cod fishery 20 years ago. A combination of lax
government oversight and the rise of
rapacious trawling technologies had, by
the mid-1990s, reduced cod stocks —
the cornerstone of coastal economies in
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia for the
better part of four centuries — by more
than 90 percent. Tens of thousands of
fishing and related industry jobs evaporated amid an emergency government
moratorium on cod fishing in the area.
While two decades of restrictions have
begun to yield small signs of recovery,
the amount of codfish in and around