Retired Scripps Professor: Atlantic Fish Stocks Now 1/1000th To 1/10,000th Of 150 Years Ago

[hatrack]

“It’s not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. We use nets that are 20 miles long. We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish.

Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish.

It is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. We’ve managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years.”

[hunter]

1. If I was Emperor of Earth I'd ban all commercial fishing.

Buy their boats and offer them better paying jobs at inland tilapia farms, ponds downstream highest state of the art technology sewage treatment plants.

Fish is fish.

[BigmanPigman]

2. I wish you were Emperor.

[mountain grammy]

3. K & R