Nowhere is the decline of fisheries more obvious than in Downeast Maine and the maritime provinces of Canada. Abandoned canneries are a reminder of better days gone by. Commercial harvests of cod, herring, and sardines are a distant memory, and fishermen resort to dragging the ocean bottom for scallops, and harvesting shoreline seaweeds.
Overharvesting of the seas is easy to understand. The waters belong to no one, but anyone can exploit them. And, while environmental degradation is obvious on land, it’s harder to see what is going on below the surface of the sea.
Data from commercial fisheries are not reassuring. Efforts have increased 10-fold since 1950, but the global catch has leveled off, and the catch per unit effort has declined by half.
Efforts now focus on the small fish that used to provide forage for predatory fish. And much of this catch is used for fertilizer or to create the food used on fish farms.
Decades ago, we learned that food derived from the harvesting wildlife from natural ecosystems was unsustainable. Bison were hunted to near extinction. Market hunting for ducks led to a decline of many species until it was outlawed in the 1930s.
While they are not pretty, large-scale animal feeding operations now produce ducks, chickens, cattle, and pigs for the American diet. Wild populations are spared.
We need to continue innovating sustainable farm-based methods of rearing seafood. This means exploring inland fish farms and alternatives to fish-meal. It’s the only way to protect the dwindling health of our oceans from society’s growing seafood appetite.
Photo, taken on May 26, 2009, courtesy of Alex and Stacy via Flickr.