I hate to say I tend to agree with this report. Not only are we fishing the living shit out of the ocean with very little concern over how badly we damage the fishery or non-food species in the area, we are polluting the rest. Most people don’t know we have one huge dead zone off of our shores, and wouldn’t believe we have two.
Research unveiled today is projecting that by the year 2050, all current fish and seafood species will collapse. The report is the work of 12 researchers worldwide and is published in this week’s edition of the journal Science.
“I was chilled,” says the report’s lead author, Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who adds, “I was really shocked because, I didn’t expect it to be so soon.”
Worm and the other researchers studied worldwide fishing records from the past 50 years, fishing records from 12 places that stretch back as long as 1,000 years, and records of small scale controlled studies. He says the studies all point in the same direction, “We see very clearly the end of the line…”
I can remember as a child people predicting that we wouldn’t be able to eat fish for the mercury, and lo and behold that’s becoming the case. Look at what almost happened (and may yet) to the swordfish, and think about what poorly farmed (I believe in fish farming, but it can’t be done as a max-profit enterprise) salmon and their parasites and diseases are doing to their local ecosystems.
We can fix this if we take action now, if we really wanted to. Nature is extremely resilient if you give her a chance to catch her breath.
When it comes to this, or any other scenario which pits the common interests of the human species against the unquenchable lust for more money, it behooves one to always remember that greed is not rational, and therefore not amenable to reason.
Sorry, didn’t they say were would have an Ice Age about right now in the 70s. Didn’t they say the Alaskan coast wouldn’t recover after the Valdez accident?
Just like they told us not have children to preserve the US environment and then let all the immigrants in to pollute it instead of our own children. Usually this stuff is politically motivated, cause an emergency and then fix with laws restricting us and our lives. In the end it’s about a increasing transfer of power from the populace to a fixed privileged few.
The sky is falling!Henny penny was right.We will deal with this also.
To quote one of my favorites:
Reduce the Surplus Population
-E. Scrooge
I’d like to know what parts of the article and the links I provided you feel are politically motivated.
Then again, as John Stewart said, “Facts have a distinct liberal bias”.
The purpose of these types of reports is to state that if things continue at their current pace, a definitive result will occur. What generally happens, however, is a market/economic reaction. As fish catches become more scarce, fewer fleets find that they can earn money fishing, resulting in a collapse in the fishing industry, resulting in higher fish costs, resulting in less fish consumption, resulting in less pressure on fish stocks, eventually leading to fisheries recovery.
Unfortunately, the way fishing is done now is more like clearcutting of forests, with large drift nets decimating everything in their path, making eventual recovery much further out. Inland fish farming is probably our best answer, but there is still large opposition from fishery dependant states (e.g. Alaska).
Over time, food consumption patterns will change to use alternative sources once the availability of the existing sources is diminished. This has happened many times with many different cultures. I for one say bring on the Soylent Green!
Blame the japanese and the mixture of their deep pockets and their insatiable hunger for seafood regardless of the species.
This shit will continue until Something Bad™ happens. Then a lot of people will die. It is hard to reason with apes.
How about letting people buy fishing rights to each part of the ocean? If things were as dire as people said, then why haven’t fish prices gone up yet? Is there no futures market?
I’m not going hunting for relevant sources, right now, to try to explain this to folks. I’m still sort of aghast at the couple of ignorant responses to the article posted.
Half my family have been fisherfolk for a thousand years or so — one side of the pond or the other. Fortunately, they’ve continued to work somewhat cooperatively with the Canadian government — admittedly dragging their feet a bit, since their income was directly affected — in the few reasoned and close-to-successful programs generated in the Western Hemisphere by any government.
Still, what stocks that have been revived continue to suffer from centuries of ongoing pollution by nations that think of the oceans as a convenient ready-built sewer. Since most governments treat the air as badly as they do water, I’m not surprised.
The wealthy and powerful — and short-sighted — seem barely interested in more than the next 2 quarters on Wall Street.
That’s okay, as we all know by 2050 the oceans will be so polluted that nothing will be able to live there, anyway. And due to global warming, Alaska will be the new Palm Beach. Hey Smartalix, I have a nice piece of property in Alaska–I’ll trade ya!
6 As fish catches become more scarce, fewer fleets find that they can earn money fishing, resulting in a collapse in the fishing industry, resulting in…
…resulting in fishing communities demanding compensation when their catches are restricted or eliminated – thus depriving them of their “traditional way of life”, and the way they pay the mortgage on their boats…
http://www.oregonocean.org/commercial-fishermen
This spring, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski declared a state of emergency for coastal communities in the wake of federal reductions in commercial and sport salmon fishing along the coast. Members of Congress have struggled to provide emergency disaster assistance for fishermen, processors, related businesses and affected communities
Very well stated … for a fish.
The whole matter paints a sad, seemingly very realistic and rather pessimistic picture. And the future looks even grimmer.
Self destruction seems to be homo sapiens strongest attribute.
I remember in my early years at school. The books had pictures of boats floating in an ocean of herring. Every small town on the coastline had their fish oil plants. And business was good.
20 – 30 years later and the business had somewhat changed. The herring was gone, and the cod was next on the list.
Fishermen was so effective that the cod is as good as gone also.
Then the pollution. Everything stacks up in the ocean. It disappears from the surface. At least for a while.
And here we are. Reading about a disturbing report. And we shuffle it away, thrusting healthy economics will heal all and put everything back on the right track again?
Wishful thinking.
I don’t think we’ve even seen the start yet. Whenever I head to the store and look for the “made in”, what do I see? China of course. They are the producers of pretty much everything in the store. I assume that’s how it is for most of the industrialized world. “Made in China”.
Good for China. In a way. Big success in “no time”. But I fear the cost is pollution as we’ve never seen it. And it all ends up in the ocean. Pretty much anyway.
So, if we have a couple of dead zones now, it’s not going to be any better. And a rising DOW won’t help this problem.
Crap. Depressing. Isn’t it?
Humanity has become a blight on the earth.
As Chicken Little said it best, “The sky is falling…the sky is falling.”
This is politically motivated and timed.
It is also a crock.
This sounds right to me. Cod are now an endangered species.. COD?!
@ 15
Stories like this always remind me of the line from the movie Planet of the Apes…”beware the beast man, he will make a desert of his home…and yours.”
I’m glad I won’t be around in 50 or 100 years to see what a mess we have made of our once beautiful planet.
I’d like to find out what you think is a crock about the story and the links provided. Is it a crock that there are two huge dead zones in the ocean off of our coasts? Is overfishing a crock?
Please enlighten us with your insight. Any fool can dismiss facts.
The sky is falling!Henny penny was right.We will deal with this also.
Yeah. You and most of the rest of us will deal with it by dying before it becomes a problem for us, personally. That’s basically the subtext of your statement, anyway: “And this is a problem for me how???”.
Inland fish farming is probably our best answer, but there is still large opposition from fishery dependant states
Inland fish farming isn’t an answer AT ALL, because fish food is made from…. (wait for it…) FISH. For every pound of farmed fish we raise, it takes several pounds of wild-caught fish to feed them.
At least cattle eat grass and other slightly-more-easily renewable resources.
#18, Only my kids will still be here. My instinct to provide for them today includes what they will have in those 50 to 100 years.
Any body think it might be a tactic by the beef industry to scare people away from eating fish? Who funded the research? Many people make a living off of studying things that can go wrong for some industry or another to make a buck. I remember in the 70″s that it was Global Cooling and the next ICE AGe. Now it the Opposite. Read State of Fear by Michael Crichton. I’m so scared. Boo! Happy Halloween.
I’m a little sceptical about the severity of the situation. Granted, we humans don’t seem to mind drinking toilet water and eating the fish that swim in it as long as the flushing and fishing is out of sight and somewhere else. But the Discover article says that “not all marine biologists agree that the situation is so desperate.”
We (and the fish) may just end up becoming the garbage we eat, adapting and surviving but at a lower quality of life
22,
Non sequitur. The beef industry isn’t involved with this.
Will any of the naysayers address the facts, or are they all just going to blow rasberries?
Here follows a copy of a post I made to the NY Time on the same subject. BTW: the image of a dead fish you posted with this article is that of a Pacific salmon, likely a Sockeye, which normally dies after spawning. As such, it’s not the best image possible for this subject.
“I worked the sea for 24 years. Of that, near twenty were as a commercial fisherman, a hook-and-line longliner. There can be no doubt that the single most destructive method of harvesting food from the sea is hard-on-bottom dragging (trawling). This method drags tremendous nets, some exceeding a quarter mile across, right over the bottom, stripping it of all life. All life. I can assure you that, having returned to once productive areas after they had been drug, there was no life remaining. Not even a snail or sea star. No coral. Nothing.
For the uninitiated, do not confuse this with trolling, which is an extremely low impact hook and line method of catching salmon.
It is my hope that commercial fishing for seafood, and the opportunities there for brave men – and the rare fisherwoman – last forever, as they surely can. But, destructive practices must end, and of those, the worst by far is hard-on-bottom dragging.
The only solution is a world wide ban on bottom dragging, as was done with those monstrous deep sea drift nets.
The sea, murderous though it is, can be good to us, so long as we don’t trust or abuse it. It must be respected and treated decently and with caution. And bottom dragging must go. Unfortunately, corrupt politicians, our own Alaskan politicians among them, have been bought out by large monied interests . They will not listen, but must be replaced, and this practice banned.”
Copy ends.
While there are many other possible solutions, it is my opinion that simple banning of this most destructive practice would go a long way indeed toward rehabilitation of fish stocks. Really, just give them a fighting chance, and they usually do come back.
Kenneth Johnson
Sand Point Alaska
This is an example of the ruins of the commons. We can see it coming – yes, there are always a few who will bury their heads and deny the problem – but we continue so we get our share even though it depletes the common share. So everyone loses.
Read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Very revealing, and well written and researched book.
25,
“Really, just give them a fighting chance, and they usually do come back.”
I said the same thing myself. As for the dead fish pic, anybody who doesn’t know about this situation isn’t likely to know what kind it is.
Amen to #25!
Now the crab is Russian and the shrimp are from SE Asia and who knows how they are scooped up from the unsupervised oceans there. Greed and big business have driven the ‘little’ fisherman, and the fish too, out of once productive inshore and nearshore fishing grounds, now approaching barren. Processors need the dragged bottom fish to make the value-added fake crab/shrimp end product now passing as crab.
But that is business. ‘Fresh wild-caught fish In Season’ is no longer a concept in dining. The product has to be furnished all year to the markets. Frozen at sea required bigger boats, which cost more money. The measured depeletion of the stock as done by the trollers and which was sustainable in the oceans of the world have been surpassed by the fishing machines, who clearcut the ocean.
If you drive the fish/shellfish below sustainability by overfishing or destroying their habitat they will not recover. We are on that path worldwide. It’s the same with the animals like the tigers and pandas etc.
It will be an interesting next 50 years.
…We can fix this if we take action now, if we really wanted to. Nature is extremely resilient if you give her a chance to catch her breath.
It truly does. Lake Erie is an example.
# 19
Here’s a link for ya…and from Seattle noless.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003340489_seafood03m.html