May
2004
Vegetarian
Advocate: Deep Trouble: The Ecological Cost of Overfishing
By Jack Rosenberger
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Originally entitled “Vegetarian Alert,”
Jack Rosenberger’s monthly column first appeared in the September
1998 issue of Satya. For the past six years, readers have enjoyed (and
been annoyed, even offended by) Satya’s eagle-eyed Vegetarian
Advocate, who consistently stands up for vegetarians and rips on all
things carnivorous, like veg-washing and advertising that bashes vegetarians;
confronting meat-eaters with the health problems of a flesh-based diet;
and factory farming, overfishing, foie gras, and other industries. The
following originally appeared in the June/July 2002 double issue of
Satya.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about The Rainbow Fish (North
South Books, 1992), a popular children’s book. The Rainbow Fish
is a story about “the most beautiful fish in the entire ocean,”
whose scales are “every shade of blue and green and purple, with
sparkling silver scales among them.” One day a little blue fish
asks the Rainbow Fish for one of his shiny scales. The Rainbow Fish,
who is very proud of his handsome appearance, refuses to share a single
shiny scale.
The other fish, once they learn of the Rainbow Fish’s inability
to share, avoid him. The Rainbow Fish quickly becomes “the loneliest
fish in the entire ocean,” and can’t understand why the
other fish don’t like him. Finally, he visits the wise octopus,
who advises him to give “a glittering scale to each of the other
fish. You will no longer be the most beautiful fish in the sea, but
you will discover how to be happy.”
After some hesitation, the Rainbow Fish shares all but one of his shiny
scales with the other fish. He discovers that he “at last felt
at home among the other fish,” and the other fish decide to be
friends with the Rainbow Fish. The end.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the worldwide ecological crisis
of overfishing—how the earth’s oceans are being stripped
bare of sea animals—and I imagine that if Marcus Pfister, author
of The Rainbow Fish, writes another sequel, the Rainbow Fish should
be portrayed as a solitary being, swimming sadly through the empty ocean,
never encountering another fish.
Deep-Sea Decimation
The extinction of sea animals is nothing new, but the last several decades
have seen the world’s oceans being emptied of sea animals at an
alarming rate. In the 1960s, fisheries had decimated many of the shallow-water
fish species, so they turned toward deep-sea trawling. Now, four decades
later, deep-sea species are similarly threatened. Twenty minutes of
deep-sea trawling off-shore of New Zealand and southern Australia, for
instance, captured about 60 tons of bottom-dwelling orange roughy in
the 1980s; today, stocks have been reduced to less than 20 percent of
their former abundance. Likewise, deep-sea catches of pelagic armorhead
have shrunk from 30,000 tons in 1976 to an average trawl of 3,500 tons
today.
The United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization’s
recent “State of the World’s Fishery Resources” report
concludes that 60 percent of the planet’s major fish populations
are in decline. In the Northeast Atlantic, for example, two-thirds of
the 60 main commercial fish species are being depleted faster than they
can replenish themselves, and all nine of the commercial fish species
caught in the North Sea are being fished unsustainably.
Deep-sea fishing has changed dramatically during the last ten years.
Since the end of the cold war, fishing ships have been able to equip
themselves with spy gear, like multi-beam sonars and positioning systems,
that allow them to precisely map the sea floor. Now, deep-sea trawlers
can pinpoint populations of sea animals and, using bottom-trawling nets
up to 400 feet in width, wipe out entire communities of fish. In essence,
what we are seeing today is the strip-mining of the deep seas. Everything
in the path of these enormous, weighted trawling nets is often captured
or crushed.
What is particularly troubling is the recent discovery that many sea
animals are restricted to narrow areas. It is believed that more than
50 percent of all lobster species on coral reefs are confined to small
geographic regions, as are nearly one-third of snail populations and
more than one-fourth of fish populations. The danger is that the sea
animals’ limited geographic range increases their risk of extinction
as localized fishing and pollution can decimate entire species.
Wanted: Advocates for Sea Animals
At times like this I wish reincarnation were a fact, as opposed to a
reassuring belief system, and that Henry Spira would magically appear
so he could champion the cause of sea animals. In the ‘80s and
early ‘90s, Spira was the lone prominent advocate for farmed animals,
who comprise the largest percentage of animal suffering. While many
activists were focused on pets, fur-bearing and wild animals, Spira
was speaking up for the most miserable and forgotten. He was also, unlike
some of his peers, pragmatic, combative, and effective. (Those who are
unfamiliar with Spira should read Peter Singer’s biography of
him: Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement
[Rowman & Littlefield, 1998].) What sea animals desperately need
is someone who can direct public attention to their rapidly worsening
situation.
Unfortunately, ethical vegetarians (myself included) have focused most
of their efforts on bettering the treatment of land-based animals. Animal
advocates have paid too little attention to exposing the exploitation
of sea animals, which traditionally has been largely the concern of
often-timid conservation groups. What the sea animals need is a Henry
Spira-type, in-your-face leader and lots of grassroots animal advocates
who are willing to rally around their cause, and to make the exploitation
of sea animals a distasteful endeavor.
Blaming All Carnivores
In researching this column, I’ve read more than a dozen newspaper
and magazine articles about overfishing. While all of them agreed that
overfishing is a serious problem that is only getting worse, none of
them dared to mention one simple and inescapable fact: namely, carnivores
are responsible for the problem of overfishing. If human carnivores
didn’t eat sea animals, we wouldn’t be confronted with the
current ecological nightmare.
I believe people are responsible for their actions. No one, with the
exception of children and the mentally challenged, is forced to eat
the flesh of sea animals. It is the personal decision of carnivores
to eat sea animals that has caused the overfishing crisis.
As vegetarians, we need to speak up for sea animals. We need to challenge
the notion that eating fish is somehow less cruel than eating land-based
animals. And we need to make the public aware that the world’s
deep-sea regions are being hopelessly strip-mined. Educate yourself—and
agitate!
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