Yes, a major reduction in fishing subsidies (currently in the tens of billions a year), the establishment of property rights over the ocean commons, a massive reduction in overall catches, and, as this amazing article in National Geographic makes clear, we need an entirely new way of thinking about the ocean. That is, we need a paradigm shift with respect to how we view marine ecosystems. Read the article and let the journey begin ...
How to save the oceans?
Major reductions and a paradigm shift 12
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Posted 3:08 PM on 22 Mar 2007
by Jason D Scorse -
Posted in
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Jason Scorse, PhD
Associate Professor
Chair of the International Environmental Policy Program
Monterey Institute of International Studies
Institute Webpage: http://www.miis.edu/academics/faculty/node/936
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ekillian Posted 8:24 am
22 Mar 2007
http://tinyurl.com/yx3jl4
Page through it to see year by year the death of the oceans (it becomes a sort of animation if viewed at the right pace).
This is Japanese fishing fleet records about their catch post WWII. At first they were confined to the area right around Japan, but then they slowly expanded outward, killing the oceans as they went (note the red areas that turn blue representing a 10 times decline in fish).
I was shocked that the next day there were tuna sandwiches offered at lunch, and even more incredulous that anyone ate them after seeing the previous day's presentation.
The presentation was by Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University:
http://as01.ucis.dal.ca/ramweb/content.php?lang=en&i= ...
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Biodiversivist Posted 9:37 am
22 Mar 2007
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Delay And Deny Posted 4:48 pm
22 Mar 2007
I mean did you ever stop and wonder just why are the oceans so salty any way? It's not like the salt runs in from the rivers....they're fresh until the water gets in the ocean. My theory is that the oceans just don't have enough water in them.
The thing we need is more fresh water...it is still a very, very limited resource on Earth. More fresh water in greater supply.
Hey, I know a source....yep, melting ice. Melting ice from Global Warming...yet another benefit.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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caniscandida Posted 6:17 pm
22 Mar 2007
And we should realize that fishing is really just a form of hunting. The physical situation is distinctive, the techniques are distinctive, the capability of catching and killing multiple members of a species at once is distinctive. And so the old paradigm has us considering fishing to be a qualitatively different activity. But it is not. In principle, it is the same as hunting.
As such, we should note that while hunting on land, thanks to environmentalist influences or sympathies, is no longer a significant pressure on most land animals, at least in North America -- exceptions here are the traditionally mistrusted, hated and feared carnivores, especially the gray wolf and the grizzly bear -- , on the otherhand hunting in the oceans presents a terrific threat to many species, approaching catastrophe, as JS's National Geographic tells us regarding the Mediterranean bluefin tuna, and as the Dalhousie graphic timeline that EKillian sent us indicates more generally in another way.
We need a paradigm shift that recognizes all hunting, on land or sea, for what it is, the brutal, violent taking of the life of an animal. There are indeed circumstances peculiar to fishing which make fishing much more disgraceful and disgusting than hunting on land is; but we can pass over that for now.
We need a paradigm shift. Even our menu vocabulary is terrificly misleading. Meat (viandes, carnes, etc.) is carefully segregated from Fish (poissons, pescados, etc.). What is called "meat" generally comes from domesticated animals who are slaughtered (another story). What is called "fish" is no less meat, yes meat, only it has been taken from animals who had been living free in the wild, and were hunted, caught and killed.
We need a paradigm shift, so that professed vegetarians may see the craziness in saying such things as, "I never eat meat, but I do eat fish."
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Robert Delfs Posted 7:00 pm
22 Mar 2007
I couldn't agree with you more about the need to eliminate fishing subsidies, significantly reduce overall catches, and - as you say - change our way of thinking about the oceans. But I was confused when I clicked to the "amazing" NatGeo article, just as I had been when I first read this piece. Is something wrong with my browser? Am I only seeing the first part of a much longer article?
The article I read was a well-written feature story about the plight of the Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna. That is certainly a tragedy, but hardly an unknown one. There doesn't seem to be much about the global fishing crisis that the NatGeo article is supposedly about, nor what to do about it - how to save the oceans. The separate map contains the only information ostensibly relating to the larger picture, but confusingly presented and seemingly inconsistent with the data in the graphic by Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University (Thanks, ekillian!)
There is quite a bit of solid information about the larger dimensions of the truly global fishing crisis out there, though it doesn't lend itself to NatGeo's recent approach to printed CNN-style video reports feature stories. The most recent (and widely reported) major study is probably the one by Brian Worm (also of Dalhousie University) and 13 other marine scientists, projected that populations of commercial fish and seafood species are likely to crash by 2048. (See Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services in Science 3 Nov 2006, or the excellent summary of that study by Cornelia Dean in the New York Times (2 Nov 2006).
Caniscandida, you are certainly correct in saying that wild capture fishing is hunting, and it seems likely that most if not all wild capture fisheries will disappear within many of our lifetimes. In the happy event that doesn't happen, I very much doubt that the cause will be mass voluntary cessation of fish eating by humans. As the Worm et al. study stated, the collapse of fish populations and other oceanic ecological services were still "largely reversible". For that to happen would take a worldwide revolution in fisheries management, changes that may be unlikely, but wouldn't require the all world's population to convert to full-out vegetarianism, though I appreciate that there are people here deeply committed to that objective for other, non-conservation related motives.
Another interesting piece that apparently wasn't reported here at Grist when it first appeared, and which does address some interesting larger issues relating to the global fishing crisis is Natasha Loder's article "Point of no return" in Conservation (formerly Conservation in Practice) Vol 6 No 3 (July-Sept 2005).
Loder, a correspondent for The Economist, highlights recent studies about the way fishing, even when it does not lead to local extinction, has become a mechanism for inducing human-caused evolutionary changes in fish species, and the implications for fisheries management.
Robert Delfs
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caniscandida Posted 7:28 pm
22 Mar 2007
EKillian's graphic timeline from the biologists at Dalhousie, based on Japanese fishing data from 1950 to 2000, sheds light on this phenomenon in a different way. It is interesting that as Japanese fishers moved out of their regional waters in the northwest Pacific, they were satisfied for a while with the tropical and southern Pacific and Indian Oceans, then hit the tropical Atlantic in a big way, between South America and West Africa; but it is only in the 1990s that they moved into the north Atlantic, the historic turf of Europeans (the Basques, Portuguese and Norwegians) and North Americans (from the Maritimes and New England), and finally into the Mediterranean.
A paradigm shift of a different sort is required in East Asia. To some extent, the first paradigm shift, directed at North Americans and Europeans, may apply, regarding respecting aquatic animals as we do land animals. But the East Asian cultural context is distinct, and we should recognize it as such.
What we observe of the old East Asian paradigm is that the charisma of an animal matters little or nothing, whether it lives on the land or in the water. All that matters, really, is the animal's economic value, as marketable object.
The Japanese (i.e., Japanese whalers, marketers and consumers of cetacean meat, and supporting agents of the government) are notorious for historically involving themselves in the large-scale slaughter of extremely charismatic marine animals, dolphins and whales. They show no signs of remorse, and no signs of relenting. Quite the reverse, they are putting great effort into having international restrictions on these activities lifted.
Moving onto dry land, we find that some of our best beloved animals, endangered too, are falling victim to poachers, thanks to the insatiable and unregulated market for the animals' body parts in a few East Asian countries: elephants, tigers, and rhinoceroses, for starters. There is an international ban on dealing in ivory, and yet the market for ivory in China and Japan seems as strong as ever. Then, there is a market for body parts to be used in traditional medicines, and there is a market for furs and hides.
In that connexion, it is not irrelevant to bring up the established trade, in China, in the fur of dogs, cats and raccoon dogs (a wild canid), supremely charismatic land animals. "Harvesting" the fur is done by skinning the animals alive, or else by plunging them first, a whole bunch encaged at once, into a vat of boiling water. The market for that fur has been in the West (wholly?; partly?). Fortunately, but very slowly, international repugnance and opposition are growing.
The nature of the East Asian paradigm shift that I am hoping for should by now be plain: economic gain does not justify exploiting animals, causing them to suffer, or killing off the last of their kind.
It is necessary to emphasize that there is nothing ethnocentric or racist about this hope. Europeans and their descendants have by no means any better record, in general, regarding how well we treat animals, than do East Asians. Our systemicly established diet involves the unimaginably cruel treatment, through life and death, of billions of animals. And to that horror, we insist on remaining blind. So no, my pointing out the grave moral deficiencies of many East Asians does not at all mean that I think North Americans and Europeans are better.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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amazingdrx Posted 11:03 pm
22 Mar 2007
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Robert Delfs Posted 2:33 am
23 Mar 2007
To be serious for a moment, organizations are working with local communities to strengthen legal rights and responsibilities towards coastal oceanic resources. The most promising results are coming in localities where there is an established basis for treating coastal resources (such as a coral reef) as community property under traditional practice and law, such as in Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, or traditional systems for regulating local oceanic resource use (like sasi in parts of the Maluku Islands of Indonesia.
But I'm not aware that anything like this has even been thought through with respect to deep water oceanic and pelagic fish resources, however, the real global oceainic commons. The LOS (Law of the Sea) convention (UNCLOS III) extends national rights of control over oceanic resources on continental shelves, within archipelagic waters and the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zones of coastal states, but does not address issues of deep sea resources outside of the controversial Part XI treatment of seabed mineral deposits.
Some of this has helped (or would - the US has still not ratified UNCLOS III, though it honors most of it. Given credible predictions that the world's fisheries may collapse by the mid century, the likelihood that effective systems to "privatize the oceanic commons" (as JS put it) could be put in place in time to make much of a difference - even if such systems were actually feasible - appear exceedingly slim.
Robert Delfs
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Jason D Scorse Posted 2:38 am
23 Mar 2007
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0704/sights_n_soun ...
I teach environmental economics and blog at http://www.voicesofreason.info. I am a proud liberal, who stands on the shoulders of giants.
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caniscandida Posted 2:57 am
23 Mar 2007
Sure, the regulations are great; and sure, they can be improved. But what good are they, if no one enforces them, and everyone ignores them?
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Robert Delfs Posted 4:27 am
23 Mar 2007
I don't have the bandwidth here in Bali to handle internet video, so I never saw the linked documentary, just the article that was titled "Still Waters - the Global Fish Crisis" but was mostly about Mediterranean tuna. I'd been pointed to the piece last week by a friend posting on the conservation forum at wetpixel.com, a diving-underwater-photography related site I participate in, but just reading the article, I couldn't figure out what all the excitement was about.
Although I'm a fan of NatGeo from way back too, nowadays I often find myself disappointed by the lack of substance in the printed articles, though the photos are better than ever. I know there have been changes in editorial personnel and policy at NatGeo, like a lot of other publications. Everything changes, I guess.
Robert Delfs
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caniscandida Posted 5:48 am
25 Mar 2007
http://www.hsus.org/marine_mammals/marine_mammals_news/cl ...
It seems that not only must the newborn harp seals of the Gulf of St. Lawrence deal with the annual slaughter, but global warming is adding another significant pressure. The ice which the pups need for support -- they cannot swim when they are very young -- is increasingly thin and fragile. Either the pregnant females abort their unborn pups, because they cannot find an adequate piece of ice on which to give birth; or the newborn pups fall into the water and drown.
The seal slaughter is the world's largest slaughter of marine mammals. As with the fisheries of tuna and other ocean fish, and with the slaughter of cetaceans, we see how very difficult it is to get governments and international agencies even to pay attention, let alone to enforce effective regulations.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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