Fishing and restraint
Research being done off Lundy Island, in the United Kingdom, shows how quickly some marine ecosystems can begin to recover when fishing is discontinued. A five year old marine protected zone has resulted in the lobster population increasing sevenfold, as well as benefits to other species. This is consistent with the kind of larger scale recoveries that took place during the world wars, when the need for merchant ships and the dangers of war prevented most fishing fleets from operating.
It makes a person wonder what would be involved in producing a genuinely sustainable national fishery (trying to do the same in the open ocean is probably impossible for the foreseeable future, given the sheer number of unapologetically rapacious national fleets). One idea that comes to mind is this:
- Ban all imports. This will ensure that all fish being sold were caught under the sustainable approach.
- Restrict all fishing equipment (except safety equipment) to that which was available at the height of the age of sail. That means no diesel engines, no fish aggregating buoys, no satellite navigation, etc.
- Set catch quotas at a level where marine ecosystems as a whole remains vibrant and robust.
This would make fish dramatically more expensive, probably reducing consumption considerably. Arguably, it would actually increase employment in the industry. It would also make the industry rather more interesting to those both within and without it. Fishing from wooden tall ships has a lot more aesthetic appeal and romance than smashing the ocean floor and stripping the sea with freezer trawlers.
Of course, the above is supremely unlikely to ever happen. The question, then, is whether we will ever be able to come up with a mechanism that provides society with fish in an ethical and sustainable way, or whether we will keep plundering the resource, earning poorer and poorer catches, until we must be satisfied with whatever worms and jellyfish remain.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:54 am
previous posts on fisheries
July 16th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Overfishing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
July 16th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
That picture is pretty psychadelic.
July 16th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
With #3 in place, why do you need #2?
July 16th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
2 sounds like a recipe for disaster involving high risks for those working on the fishing boats and maybe for others at sea if they get lost & ram into them.
1 & 3 make more sense, but I’m doubtful about how well banning things works, particularly when those things traditionally arrive on boats (ie. fish are easy to smuggle).
July 16th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
2 sounds like a recipe for disaster involving high risks for those working on the fishing boats and maybe for others at sea if they get lost & ram into them.
I have my doubts about this. Were sailing ships frequently ramming one another? It is also worth remembering that this fishing would mostly be happening close to shore - no refrigeration, etc.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I bet the new ships would also employ a lot more people, in more pleasant jobs. The same would be true of the shipyards that would need to build the vessels.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:45 am
Overfishing, Rising Fuel Costs, and Subsidies
Category: New Research
Posted on: July 16, 2008 7:56 AM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet
July 17th, 2008 at 4:50 am
In-shore fishing makes collisions more likely, because you have a greater density of boats in a smaller area. More than that, in-shore fishing with sail boats is not particularly safe: on one stormy night sometime in the late eighteenth century, the village along the coast from the Scots fishing port my mum grew up in lost about a third of its adult male population. Also, sailing doesn’t restrict you to in-shore fishing: fisherman out of Bristol were supposedly fishing the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the fifteenth century, and presumably pickling their catch. What would do it would be the size of boats presumably.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Modern safety equipment could make things a lot safer. This could include weather reports, ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore radios, transponders for the mutual location of ships, search and rescue teams, etc.
Crossing the Atlantic for cod may have been worthwhile at some point, but Atlantic fisheries are now badly depleted. Would people sail from Canada to the west coast of Africa / Antarctica, etc?
July 17th, 2008 at 11:35 am
With #3 in place, why do you need #2?
Restricting gear is necessary, since the main problem of fishing is technological. Once you cross the threshold where you are taking more than the ecosystem can provide, more capital and more technology just mean faster ecological destruction and more immediate unprofitability.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I’m doubtful about how well banning things works, particularly when those things traditionally arrive on boats (ie. fish are easy to smuggle).
Make it a crime to sell any species of fish that cannot be caught in Canadian waters. That would do a lot to deter smuggling.
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:31 pm
After describing the town and its denizens, the author explains how Gloucester ran out of fish, especially Atlantic cod. The decline of this once-abundant species was partly caused by the success of the schooner-based fishery, which, even though it relied on wind power, harvested enough to reduce the stock. Bottom trawlers dealt the coup de grâce.