The Crash Course, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 24All Fished Out

As a child, I loved fishing with my grandfather. I can't recall us ever talking about anything, but there was no need for words; he was a man of few words, he loved me unconditionally, and we were fishing. He took me to the Branford public pier on Long Island Sound, and there we routinely caught many different types of fish. As I remember, the waters were teeming with life—an abundance, sadly, that is gone.

Once again, this chapter isn't designed to be a long recitation of the many challenges that our oceans are facing—there are too many to list—but I'll continue to make the simple point that we're already up against hard limits with respect to what the oceans can provide. More growth? Another 10, 20, or 30 years of increasing exploitation of the ocean's riches? It's not going to happen. They're already fished out.

Ninety Percent Gone

A recent study published in the esteemed journal Nature concluded that the combined weight of all oceanic large fish species has declined by 90%.¹ If something supposedly renewable is being harvested at a rate that causes its mass to shrink alarmingly, then it's a poster child for the concept of “unsustainability.”

As Lester Brown put it in Plan B 3.0:

After World War II, accelerating population growth and steadily rising incomes drove the demand for seafood upward at a record pace. At the same time, advances in fishing technologies, including huge, refrigerated processing ships that enabled trawlers to exploit distant ...