http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0605-04.htm
Published on Thursday,
June 5, 2003 by the Miami Herald
Ocean's Bounty is Gone
by Bill McKibben
When people accuse environmentalists
of exaggerating the damage
that humans have done to the planet, sometimes its because they
simply can't remember what the world once was like. None of us
really can; Human memories are short.
But every once
in a while some piece of news brings back that
former world. The journal Nature this spring published the most
comprehensive study ever conducted of the worlds fisheries.
Simply put, it concluded that the worlds oceans are wrecked.
In the past
50 years, the populations of every single species
of large wild fish have fallen by 90 percent or more. The sharks,
tuna, marlins, swordfish, halibut and grouper that have managed
to survive are, on average, one-fifth to one-half the size they
were 50 years ago.
In the deep oceans, where Japanese fleets use
fishing lines many kilometers long, they used to catch 10 fish
per 100 hooks; now they are lucky to catch one. Fifty years
is not very long. Eisenhower was president; we had television;
rocknroll was young; people who have not yet started to consider
themselves middle-aged were being born.
LONG-TERM DAMAGE
Even then the oceans
were somewhat impoverished. The schools of cod
that had greeted the first Europeans in the New World -- cod 5
and
6 feet long that you could catch by dipping a basket in the sea
-- were already reduced. But the damage had barely begun.
Pretty soon new technology
was at work: fish-finding sonar,
big factory ships that could wait offshore for months, helicopters
for chasing tuna. The equipment was so good that fishermen could
keep bringing in sizable catches right until the moment that the
populations crashed for good. Once Canadian cod fishermen were
able
to efficiently locate the nurseries where the fish spawned, for
instance, they were able to drag their trawls right through them.
On paper everything seemed fine until 1992 when, finally, the
nets
came up empty.
The Canadian government
imposed a moratorium on cod fishing that
year, a ban thats still mostly in effect. Hundreds of communities
were wiped out.
''Ten years ago we
had 118 guys in our bar baseball league,''
one Canadian fishermen told me a few years ago. ``Forty-eight
of
them don't play anymore. They've moved away.''
But it was a case of
bolting the dock door after the fish had fled.
Cod populations have been cut by 99 percent, and the ecology of
the ocean may have been changed so profoundly that they're never
coming back.
Overall, say the authors
of the Nature study, we would need to cut
total ocean fish catches by 50 percent to give stocks any chance
to recover. Instead, fishing pressure may actually be increasing.
As big species are wiped out, the fleets go for smaller fish.
Pilchard and anchovy catches are way up, in part so that they
can be ground into fishmeal and fed to those farmed salmon you
find in the supermarket.
FORGOTTEN BOUNTY
''We have forgotten
what we used to have,'' Jeremy Jackson of
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told reporters who asked
him about the Nature study. ``We had oceans full of heroic fish
-- literally sea monsters. People used to harpoon 10-foot-long
swordfish in rowboats. Hemingways 'Old Man and the Sea' was for
real.''
So were passenger pigeons
darkening the sky; so were buffalo herds
shaking the plains; so were ancient forests piercing the sky.
Now there are only echoes -- and even those we hardly care about.
Congress, for instance, still contemplates drilling for oil in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, breeding grounds of one of
the worlds last big caribou herds. Perhaps its a good thing our
memories are so short. Perhaps we couldn't live with ourselves
otherwise.
Bill McKibben is the
author of 'The End of Nature'.
Copyright 2003 Knight
Ridder
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