The Greenpeace Foundation
But our fishing activities have run amok…
These days, if you teach a man to fish, you wind up with “the tragedy of the commons”, as too many fishermen with too many boats chase dwindling numbers of fish. Every technical advance makes it possible to deplete the resource more completely, and take it closer to nonexistence.
Fishermen blame other nations, and blame the natural ocean predators, but seldom blame their own quest to get the most fish first, racing against one another to catch the last fish.
In blaming the natural predators, they have poisoned, bombed, and massacred seals and dolphins. This didn’t increase the fish catches, but it was something to do while not catching fish. (Netting dolphins even became the preferred way of catching yellowfin tuna in the Eastern pacific.) In Japan and elsewhere they drive the dolphins into bays and gut them. In Canada and elsewhere, unemployed fishermen bash seal pups on the head in massive kills. (At least they won’t be eatin’ fish now, eh?)
The size of fish has plummeted over two generations. Most world fisheries are utterly depleted or heavily overfished. Trawl nets destroy everything on the ocean bottoms; fragile reef systems destroyed. Gillnets and driftnets capture everything which can’t swim through a tiny hold in an invisible nylon net, hanging like a wall in the water. And the sheer number of longline hooks and other fisheries means that naturally-evolved feeding behaviors take most fish from the seas. Bycatch takes many more species, which are discarded for having no market value.
And as they get rarer the price goes up. In Japan, a record $1.76 million was recently paid for a single endangered bluefin tuna to be used in sushi. Can fisheries long survive so remorseless a havoc?
And some methods are inherently destructive
Some fishing methods are so destructive that they should be banned. Dynamite fishing, bleach fishing, poison fishing… humans can be very resourceful.
But on the largest scales, the most destructive have been driftnets and gillnets. They clear an area entirely of life. Set in the path of large migrations, they capture seabirds, squid, salmon, tuna, swordfish, sea turtles, dolphins…anything that can’t swim through a 2″ hole. Most of what is captured is discarded to the sea bottom, since it isn’t worth hold space in the fishing boat to keep it.
Shark finning is going on at a huge rate, and is clearing the seas of these important apex predators. The rest of the shark isn’t used… the fin is cut off and they’re discarded, for a high-priced soup reputed to be healthy. Statistically, humans have little to fear from sharks; while sharks are being eradicated by humans.
Bottom trawlers leave the bottom sea-life communities looking like the surface of the moon, willing to destroy very much for very little.
And these reduced marine populations must somehow cope, in their diminished state, with oceans we are polluting, heating, fouling, and acidifying.
We’ve reached the point at which something has to change, or the seas will no longer support the sea life we evolved alongside.
It’s time for a sea change in fishing
We’ve been on the cutting edge of this fight since 1976, campaigning against bycatch by Pacific purse seine vessels. We created and funded the first high-profile sea-borne campaign against deep-sea driftnets in 1983, funded by Ted Turner and using the GP International ship Rainbow Warrior in a joint campaign. Our current directors went on to lead the world, in 1991, to a United Nations deep-sea driftnet moratorium coordinating the campaign of the group EarthTrust.
But the seas are still full of nets and net debris. There are just too many. The number of fish in the sea has turned out not to be inexhaustible when attacked in an inherently destructive way.
Illegal use of destructive methods continues opportunistically. As the net energy to human society diminishes in coming decades, food becomes scarcer, and funds for monitoring international waters become scarce, pelagic driftnets will return. They are cheap and effective, and they destroy everything that touches them.
There has to be a point at which we stop destroying the seas, if the ecosystems are to survive, and if the future is to have fish in it. We think that time must be now.
Join us.
The USA’s oldest and original Greenpeace, proudly unaffiliated with Greenpeace USA