Fisheries run out of room to expand

According to a new study by University of British Columbia scientists, humans have run out of room to expand our fisheries. Severe overfishing has occurred in the waters around Europe and North America, so every year since 1950 people have expanded fisheries to cover other parts of the ocean. Catches have been increasing, but this is at an unsustainable level. There has been a high ecological footprint. In the 1980s and 1990s, fisheries were expanding at the fastest rate, and in the late 1990s they began to stagnate. Today, there does not appear to be any more room for expansion. The open ocean and the continental shelves have been overfished to the point that many fish stocks are declining. The world’s overall catch of fish today is five times greater than it was in 1950, but it is unsustainable.

Overfishing at such a high level demonstrates one of the principles we learned about in class, Gifford Pinchot’s concept of nature as a resource. (In contrast to John Muir’s concept of nature as a place that should ideally stay wilderness.) However, Pinchot said that the resource should be managed so as to sustain production at a reasonable level. He would not agree with resources being depleted unsustainably. The latter is what is going on with the world’s fisheries.

I think that there are only a few solutions to overfishing. The most obvious one is to let fish stocks recover by drastically reducing our catch of the most overfished species. Another is to rely more on farmed fish. Or we could start eating more of certain species that people have not fished very much before. But any permanent fix probably will have to include the first idea of reducing catch. With a growing population, especially one being advised by health associations to eat more fish, this will be difficult.

People protesting overfishing in Kenya

Source: Swartz W, Sala E, Tracey S, Watson R, Pauly D (2010) The spatial expansion and ecological footprint of fisheries (1950 to present). PLoS ONE 5(12)

Posted by: Anne Accettullo