Environmental scientist, marine ecologist and biologist, Jane Lubchenco was named administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in early 2009, the top political job in the country on ocean issues. She is using everything she has learned from her many days on the sea as a scientist and activist to try and shape a national ocean policy. Can politics really make a difference? Since the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, obviously her priorities may have shifted. An excerpt from a longer conversation, published in OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
Jon Bowermaster: Is it easy for you to name a highest priority?
Jane Lubchenco: There are multiple. One is definitely oceans, another is climate, and obviously they intersect with one another. Those are the focus of NOAA’s responsibilities and are just so incredibly timely right now because of the importance of oceans and the importance of addressing climate change, both on the mitigation side as well as the adaptation side.
JB: Which is easier mitigation or adaptation?
JL: Well it’s not an either/or, they are both incredibly important. I think that one way to think about them is: Mitigation is really about avoiding the unmanageable and adaptation is about managing the unavoidable.
JB: Are you having good success selling that theory?
JL: I think that there is still a lot of educating to be done. For far too long climate change has seemed like something that is so far down the road and so nebulous that it was difficult for people to understand why it mattered or how it might affect them, or what they could do about it.
JB: And really hard to illustrate to people.
JL: That’s correct. NOAA was the lead agency in a report from the federal government last June, which focused on the impact of global climate change on the United States by region and by sector. It’s an example of the kinds of things that are beginning to make a difference, where people can see that this is not something that is nebulous, something that affects only polar bears or islands of the Pacific and maybe somewhere far down the road, but that it’s actually happening right now and in our own backyards and affecting the things that people care about. Fifty percent of Americans live in coastal areas and the other half of the country goes there to play. Nearly everyone eats fish. So what happens to the ocean impacts half of the population directly and everybody at least indirectly.
JB: Is a National Ocean Policy a priority, something you feel strongly about accomplishing while you’re in this job?
JL: A very high priority, both for the administration as well as for NOAA. It is high time that the country declared clearly what it wants from and for oceans. The task force that President Obama set up, called the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, recognizes that we have a responsibility to protect our oceans and coasts and Great Lakes, both for current generations but also for future generations. The president made it very clear in the memorandum that set up the task force that one of its charges is to recommend a National Ocean Policy. In September we delivered an interim report to the president that sets recommendations for a National Ocean Policy and it sends a very clear signal that as far as the administration is concerned, healthy oceans matter and they matter because they are vital to our health, to our prosperity, to our security, and also to our ability to adapt to climate change. They matter because they affect the quality of our life. From that policy should flow a way in which we think differently about the variety of practices and policies on land and in the ocean that affect the health of the ocean. I think it’s a fortuitous opportunity for the government to take stock of what’s happening in the oceans, why it matters, and how we can begin to turn things around so that we can protect and restore them so that they can provide the wealth of benefits that we want and need from them.
JB: Do you think we’ll actually see legislation titled ‘National Ocean Policy’ during this administration, during your term?
JL: There has been interest on the Hill in doing just that, going back to the aftermath of the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy issued in 2003. Clearly Congress has a lot on its plate right now but I truly believe it’s a matter of when, not if.
The decision for the members of Congress now is more about strategy. Should it focus on one holistic law or start writing legislation piece by piece? There are currently different opinions about that, all quite legitimate.
JB: Is there a nation or a region in the world that has done a good job policing their ocean coastline?
JL: I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from a number of efforts including some by individual states. California, for example, has some very progressive legislation; a number of states, particularly Massachusetts and New Jersey, have been creating marine spatial planning philosophies that are beginning to think more holistically about the combination of activities that can co-exist in an area with the idea of minimizing conflict across different uses and minimizing impacts on the environment. Marine spatial planning is, in fact, one of the charges that the president gave to his ocean policy task force, to create a framework for doing coastal and marine spatial planning. Both across the federal agencies but in partnership with the states. That’s the part of it that we are working on right now.
JB: Do you see a future where the U.S. coastline is dotted with marine reserves, off limits to all fishing?
JL: The science of marine reserves is pretty clear that they are very powerful tools to protect biodiversity. In many cases they can also help recover depleted fisheries and provide a source of fish or other species to repopulate adjacent areas. They are definitely one of the tools in our toolbox, a very important one … but not the only one. They need to be considered as part of a more holistic strategy of what kinds of activities and what kinds of protection are needed in different areas of the ocean, different parts of the coastline.
JB: Historically around the world marine reserves – putting sections of the ocean off-limits to fishing – have often been established only after the fish are already gone. It’s a tough sell to try and get people to set the sea aside in advance of it being depleted.
JL: True, that is often the case. There are a number of exceptions to that, but even areas that have been significantly degraded and have been set aside can often recover at least to some degree. But I think the real message from a lot of the scientific studies is that the healthier they are when you protect them, the more benefit there is. So that should be our goal.
The Pew Charitable Trust has long been a leader in promoting ocean conservation and education, twinning real scientific research with legislative lobbying. Its Pew Ocean Commission reports, published in 2003, helped set a national agenda for ocean issues. Chris Mann is the senior officer of the Pews Environmental Group, its emissary to both Congress and the Executive branch. He firmly believes the current administration will make the ocean a priority where others have not. An excerpt from OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin published a seminal paper in Science, entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”, in which he explains why any resource open to common use almost inevitably will become overexploited. In simple terms, overuse occurs because nearly all the benefit from using a resource (such as catching a fish or disposal of waste) inures to the individual, whereas the cost of degradation of the resource is spread among all the users.
There is no better example of the tragedy of the commons than our oceans. With no overarching framework for their management and no entity responsible for their wellbeing, the world’s oceans bear the cumulative effect of a growing list of ad hoc resource use decisions. Most of these decisions are rational from the standpoint of the individuals who make them, but the cost to society is cumulative and growing. Making matters worse, most ocean activities are managed under laws and programs narrowly designed to address specific management needs as they arose, such as ocean fisheries, offshore oil and gas development, and water pollution. According to the US Commission on Ocean Policy, in the US there are some 20 federal agencies that administer more than 140 laws affecting the oceans. Under these many laws, agencies often have overlapping or conflicting mandates. This is a recipe for chaos, confusion and—ultimately—degradation of our ocean resources.
Given the large and growing number of ocean uses and ocean users, single-sector management approaches are simply not up to the task of addressing the complex interactions and effects of multiple stressors on the oceans. After all, you can drill for oil, float wind turbines, or ship cargo, over a warm, dead ocean, but you can’t fish in it and you wouldn’t want to swim in it. To address these shortcomings, two different ocean commissions in the United States recommended that narrow, single-sector resource management give way to a more integrated, ecosystem-based approach implemented at the regional level and supported at the national level. The changes in ocean governance recommended by the Pew Oceans Commission and the congressionally chartered U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy would be a transformative and much-needed change in both the way society views the oceans and in the way we manage our ocean resources.
This does not suggest we will no longer need laws and policies governing individual activities, like fishing. Management of specific activities requires specific expertise and conservation measures. But unless and until we insist that our government take responsibility for the overall health of the oceans, they will continue to be degraded by the tyranny of small decisions.
Since the ocean commissions released their findings, progress has been mixed. A number of states have adopted a more comprehensive approach to ocean planning and management in their own waters, and are working with adjacent states on regional efforts. Yet these state-based efforts to improve ocean management are limited to the narrow band of coastal waters over which they have jurisdiction and are frustrated by the lack of coordination among federal activities.
Congress has enacted important reforms putting fisheries management on a more sustainable course. But marine ecosystems are about much more than fish. Although science-based fisheries management is a critical element of sound ocean management, fisheries management cannot by itself safeguard the health of marine ecosystems. And it is the overall health of marine ecosystems on which fisheries ultimately depend. Legislation to put in place the broader ocean governance reforms recommended by the ocean commissions has been introduced in Congress, but has never moved beyond the subcommittee level.
As we struggle to transform our energy economy, there is renewed interest in offshore oil and gas extraction, as well as emerging opportunities for ocean renewable energy development. At the same time, the environmental damage that our dependence on fossil fuels is causing to marine and terrestrial ecosystems alike has become more apparent. These new challenges are perhaps nowhere more evident than in the Arctic, where a poorly understood ecosystem already under stress from rapid environmental change is at the same time being exposed by reduction in ice cover to increased resource extraction and maritime traffic.
In 2009, Alexandra Cousteau’s Blue Legacy Expedition took her and a small team of documenters to five continents in one hundred days, in search of clean drinking water. Though occasionally far from the ocean, she found herself constantly seeing the link between the sea and mankind’s sustainability. This summer her team will travel the U.S. telling similar stories. An excerpt from our OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
The ancients told of water. Carved deeply in stone and crafted carefully in story and song, their superstitions and histories and wisdoms cascade across centuries and flow through our lives today: “From the heights of a mountain…” ”By the banks of a river…” “Upon the shores of a homeland…” and so the stories go. And so we tell them still. For history has always been written in water.
And yet, for all the wonder and worship, throughout most of human history, the mysteries of this water planet were out of sight and beyond understanding. The oceans were vast unknowable surfaces across which ships sailed bravely in search of wealth or distant lands and adventure. Beneath this plane lay a mysterious void filled by the wild creatures of myth, an inexhaustible supply of fish, or some combination of both. Rivers cradled civilizations, nurturing the evolution of societies while carrying away the waste and transgressions of communities. And the rains came as they would for reasons most everyone could explain but seldom in the same way or for the same purpose. So man spoke of water as one who sees without knowing— hoping somehow to explain the wonders beyond and beneath the water planet he called home.
But as time passed, the siren call of exploration tempted the hearts of both pilgrims and wanderers to pierce the dark night of ignorance and see the planets spinning—to step beyond the binding traditions of mortality and think the thoughts of gods. And they too told of water. Some throwing sheets into the wind would rush to the edge of the world to drown echoes of scorn beneath a bending horizon. Some would chart water’s course through our veins and some would harness its steam to build a bigger and better life. So story follows story as man wielded reason and exploration to unravel the mysteries of his world.
But in spite of centuries of charting the expanses of her boundaries, no one had yet searched out the depths of her oceans and this frustrated my grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Tethered to shallow, short dives by the aching in his lungs he longed to see more, to know more and so, as centuries of explorers before him had done, he sat down with a friend to rewrite the boundaries. The invention they would call the “Aqua Lung” in 1943, allowed humans to explore the underwater world for the first time, opening new fields of study and changing how we understand much of our natural surroundings.
The thrill of what he saw—of what he discovered—was more than he could contain and soon, he was back at the drawing board to design gear for my grandmother Simone and eventually even for my father Philippe.
Just four years old when his father taught him to dive, my father was so exuberant about all he saw beneath the calm surface of the water – a darting school of fish here, a brightly colored coral there, a waving forest of life just beyond – that he repeatedly tried to call out to my grandfather. He was blissfully unaware that each exclamation caused the regulator to fall out of his mouth, which my grandfather deftly and repeatedly replaced to keep his small, excited son from drowning.
When they finally got back aboard the ship, my grandfather scolded my father for his reckless enthusiasm saying, “You must be quiet underwater because it is a silent world.” My grandfather’s description of the new world to which he had introduced my father that day later became the title of his best selling book and Oscar-winning documentary The Silent World. And so we Cousteau have joined the generations of those who tell the stories of water.
Twenty-six years, a host of inventions, discoveries and awards would pass from that day. President John F. Kennedy would bestow the National Geographic’s Gold Medal on my grandfather at a White House ceremony honoring his work. The award-winning series he developed with my father, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, would be welcomed into living rooms around the world. His storytelling would launch a new generation of environmentalists and forever change how we see the oceans. And then Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
I remember my grandfather telling me that the day he saw the headlines “Two Men Walk on the Moon” (knowing my grandfather, probably not without some healthy envy) was the day he knew our perception of the world would forever change. For the first time, we saw ourselves from outer space and realized unmistakably that our planet is in fact blue. Finally, people would see what he saw everyday from the deck of the Calypso: We live on a water planet.
For ten years the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has funded social action, education and short films on environmental issues. The actor and environmentalist has a particular fondness – and concern — for the ocean as well as the global need for clean drinking water. An excerpt from his essay, Water Planet, for OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide.
Consider this.
We live on a water planet.
Through the millennium the water cycle has supported all life.
Shaping weather, the seasons, and the climate, providing habitats for most of the world’s living things, and most of them including us are almost entirely made up of water.
Now consider this. Water is a finite source. A limited resource. Only a tiny fraction of the earth’s water is fresh.
It supports everything from agriculture and sanitation to aquatic ecosystems like rivers and streams. Water falls unevenly across the planet, while much of it is locked up in glaciers, permanent snow cover, ice and permafrost. Water is also stuck underground very deep in the earth and hard to reach.
To make matters worse, water is being threatened by pollution, overpopulation, climate change, mismanagement, and war.
Pollution is so severe that diseases are increasing in both humans and animals and habitats are being destroyed. Rain is turning into acid. So many chemicals flow into rivers and lakes that the actual composition of water in some places has been fundamentally changed.
Human encroachment is also drying out aquifers, diverting the natural flow of rivers and straining water supplies. Hidden in everyday consumption is the careless and unnecessary waste of water.
Dams displace millions of people and destroy whole ecosystems.
Global warming is altering the water cycle causing more severe and unpredictable flooding and droughts, ultimately shifting where water flows. Unregulated corporate privatization threatens access to water for the poor. Some governments fail to deliver water where it is needed most. These stresses have created military and political conflicts that will only get worse.
Ultimately, humanity is poisoning, squandering and overburdening water resources. The result is, that billions of people lack access to clean water. Millions of children die every year from preventable water-born diseases. Lack of clean water and basic sanitation cracks people in poverty. People are fighting and dying for it.
We are at a crisis point. We still have time to turn this around. We can conserve water and not waste it. Invest in smart water infrastructure and technologies. Increase environmental regulations from polluting industries. Tell government leaders to fulfill financial pledges for clean water Insure that water is not treated like a commodity.
But most important, we must recognize that access to clean water is a basic human right and the United Nations should adopt a global treaty for the right to water.
Water equals life, there is no separation. By protecting water, we can protect ourselves and this blue planet for future generations.
A long-distance ocean swimmer and elegiac writer, Lynne Cox has an obviously unique take on the ocean, having spent hundreds of hours stroking through it – across the Bering Strait, the English Channel, along the Antarctic Peninsula. Her concern here takes her north, to the Arctic Ocean, in an excerpt from OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide.
Whenever I gaze across vast blue oceans, my mind wanders without limitations, and I envision the possibilities of life. I see the oceans as the dynamic connection between the countries of the world. The water circulates from one continent to the other carrying the influences of the earth, from one land to another, affecting depths of the sea, and the atmosphere above. As I walk the beach and watch the tide ebb flood, I see the gravitational pull of the moon made visible, and the ocean’s connection to the sea of heavens and the universe.
As a young child I swam off Rye Beach, New Hampshire, and off Old Orchard Beach, Maine. By the time I was twelve, my family moved to California so I could train with the U.S. Olympic coach. At age fifteen I swam across the English Channel and broke the men and women’s world records. My time was broken, so I returned the following year and broke the men’s record a second time. I realized that I could spend my entire life swimming the English Channel, but there were parts of the world I had never explored, and my way to get there was to swim. I became the first person to swim around the Strait of Magellan, and the Cape of Good Hope, and the first women to swim across the Cook Strait in New Zealand. It was exciting to break world records, and to become the first person to swim across great waterways, and enter the unknown, and learn, but I wanted to do something more significant. My father suggested that I swim across the Bering Strait from the United States to the Soviet Union as a way to demonstrate that the U.S. and Soviet Union were neighbors, only 2.7 miles apart.
I grew up during the Cold War, at a time when the relations between the two superpowers, the U.S. and Soviet Union, were very poor. I was afraid that we might engage in a nuclear war, and that would affect all life within the oceans, as well as on land, but I was also hopeful that the two nations could figure out how to become friends. For eleven years I wrote to U.S. presidents and Soviet leaders to obtain permission and support for the swim. Ultimately Secretary of State George Schultz and Soviet Premier Gorbachev endorsed the project and in 1987 I swam across the Bering Strait, and the U.S.-Soviet border was open for the first time in forty-eight years. When Gorbachev and Reagan signed the INF missile treaty they toasted the swim and Gorbachev said that it showed how close to each other we live, and how the relations between the countries were improving.
I went on to do other swims that were about bridging distances between countries: the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Beagle Channel, and in 2002 I swam in a bathing suit, swim cap, and goggles in thirty-two degree F water from the ship the Orlova 1.22 miles to the shores of Antarctica, to research the ability of the human body to acclimate to the cold. In 2007, while writing South with the Sun, a book about polar explorers past and present, I followed in the wake of Roald Amundsen through the Northwest Passage, swam in colder waters, and gained a greater understanding of the issues currently impacting the polar oceans.
As I walked on the Malibu beach a small wave rose above the Pacific Ocean and broke like the slow exhalation of a breath, sliding across the even shores of the sand, filling the air with a rush of coolness and the salty essence of the sea. Cold water rose around up along our warm legs, and Cody, my Labrador retriever, wagged his long white tail. He was excited; this would be his first swim in the Pacific Ocean. I loved this moment. For years I had watched earth bound people of all ages, from different countries around the world enter the ocean for the first time. There was always a moment when their eyes grew wide and their smiles wider as the ocean lifted them into a new world. They were suddenly buoyant, swimming, flying across the ocean, unharnessed by gravity. They were free, and now my pal was too.
As the wave lifted Cody off his paws he turned his big white head quickly from side to side to see what was happening. He hesitated and then paddled strongly, instinctually, over the cresting wave. He was a natural born swimmer. His nose pointed high above the water, he breathed easily, swimming at a constant pace, his long tail stretched behind him like a rudder. He looked at me with bright golden eyes and it seemed as if he was smiling. I think he was enjoying his first swim as much as I was. I took a breath and dove down under the water to watch his underwater pull.
He was pulling efficiently, his stroke powerful. From just beneath the sea surface Cody’s stroke reminded me of a polar bear’s and I remembered what Adam Ravtech, a wildlife filmmaker and friend had told me about polar bears, that the sea ice where they hunt for seals was receding and that the multi-year ice was disappearing. One result was that the chunks of floating ice that the bears would climb onto and rest, as well as leapfrog from to make it to shore were dwindling. The bears now had to swim further which could over exhaust them. In a warming Arctic, the bears’ future will rely heavily on their ability to adapt and diversify their food sources.
Like the polar bears, our future as human beings will depend upon our ability to adapt to the changing Arctic, our ability to recognize that everything in nature — the oceans, earth, and universe –are interconnected, as are the relationships between all the worlds’ great nations.
With the Arctic sea ice melting, the shipping lanes that have long been blocked by frozen sea are opening, making it cheaper and quicker to carry cargo from Europe to Asia over the top of the world through either the Northeast or Northwest Passage rather than through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope. Minerals and energy resources that have been inaccessible for hundreds of thousands of years are becoming exploitable and new fishing areas will open, with no regulations to control either exploitation or over-fishing. There will be an increase in tourism and new and growing chances for pollution.
As the Arctic ocean opens there needs to be an opening of minds, a way for the nations of the world to assume stewardship of the Arctic region, to manage our interests with an awareness and concern for the animals, and the entire Arctic ecosystem.
One of the most prominent writers on ocean issues, Richard Ellis is also a pre-eminent wildlife painter. A research associate at New York’s American Museum of Natural, his book “Tuna, A Love Story,” is the definitive take on the health of one of the world’s most elegant – and endangered – fish. This “quintessential ocean ranger, the wildest, fastest, most powerful fish in the sea” may be gone from the oceans as soon as 2012. An excerpt from OCEANS, The Threats To Our Seas and What You Can Do to Turn the Tide.
The canned substance in tuna fish sandwiches and salads is either skipjack, a three-foot-long tuna species that is caught in prodigious quantities around the world and served as “light-meat tuna;” or albacore, another small tuna that is marketed as “white-meat tuna.” A couple of larger species of tuna that are also heavily fished are the yellowfin and the bigeye tuna, but neither of these makes for particularly desirable sushi, and they are usually served grilled. The bluefin tuna, a giant among fishes, is the fish of choice for sashimi, and has become the most desirable food fish in the world, and as such, has vaulted to the top of another, more insidious list: It is probably the most endangered of all large fish species.
Reaching a maximum known weight close to three-quarters of a ton and a length of twelve feet, the bluefin is a massive hunk of superheated muscle that cleaves the water by flicking its scimitar-shaped tail. It is one of the fastest of all fishes, capable of speeds up to fifty-five miles per hour; able to migrate across entire oceans. While most of the 20,000-odd species of fishes are “cold-blooded,” with a body temperature the same as the water they swim in, the bluefin is one of the few hot-blooded fishes. During a dive to 3,000 feet, where the ambient water temperature can be 40°, the bluefin can maintain a body temperature of 80°, close to that of a mammal. Like wolves, bluefins often hunt in packs, forming a high-speed parabola that concentrates the prey, making it easier for the hunters to close in. Tuna are metabolically adapted for high-speed chases, but as opportunistic (and by necessity, compulsive) feeders, they will eat whatever presents itself, whether fast-swimming mackerel, bottom-dwelling flounder, or sedentary sponge. A study of the stomach contents of New England bluefins by Bradford Chase revealed that the most popular food item (by weight) was Atlantic herring, followed by sand lance, bluefish, and miscellaneous squid. (In addition to these prey items, Chase also found butterfish, silver hake, windowpanes, winter flounder, menhaden, sea horses, cod, flounder, plaice, pollock, filefish, halfbeak, sculpin, spiny dogfish, skate, octopus, shrimp, lobster, argonaut, crab, and sponges.) Tuna will eat anything they can catch, and they can catch almost anything that swims (or floats, crawls, or just sits on the bottom.) By and large, they hunt by vision.
At one time, the bluefin tuna was known as “horse mackerel,” and its red, strong-flavored flesh was considered suitable fare only for dogs and cats. Around the turn of the last century, while still thought of as inedible, the bluefin was targetted by big-game fishermen off New Jersey, and then Nova Scotia, because these powerful fish, reaching a weight of half a ton or more, were considered worthy opponents for fishermen in quest of “sport” and world’s records. Zane Grey was one of the most popular authors of the 1920s, with western novels such as Last of the Plainsmen and Riders of the Purple Sage, but his passion was big-game fishing, and he invested most of his not inconsiderable royalties (his books sold more than 13 million copies) on fishing gear, fishing boats, and travel to exotic locales in search of tuna, swordfish and marlins. Other “sportsmen” wrote of their fishing exploits, but in The Old Man and the Sea, (1952) and Islands in the Stream (published posthumously in 1970), Ernest Hemingway took up where Grey had left off, elevating his fishermen to heroes, and his great game fishes to icons. Although swordfish were certainly considered edible, the other big game fishes, such as tuna and marlins, were thought of as objects of the hunt, to be fought and conquered by brave fishermen with expensive gear and more expensive boats, plying the world’s offshore waters in pursuit of records. The record bluefin tuna, caught off Nova Scotia in 1979, weighed 1,496 pounds.
At one time, it was believed that there were two separate populations of North Atlantic bluefins, one that bred in the Gulf of Mexico and stayed in the western part of the ocean, and another that spawned in the Mediterranean and hung out in the European quadrant. But tagging experiments, pioneered by Frank Mather and Frank Carey, and followed by Barbara Block, showed that, as with so many aspects of bluefin biology, the fish confounds the conventional wisdom. Yes, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean are the breeding grounds of bluefins, but individual fishes can (and do) migrate across the entire Atlantic Ocean, and that the “two populations” are actually one meta-population distributed across the entire North Atlantic. The International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) consistently based its catch quotas on the two-population concept, and has therefore failed utterly to set realistic limits on who could fish and where, resulting in a massive collapse of the entire Atlantic bluefin population.
If possible, things are worse in the Mediterranean. Employing ideas and technology originally developed in South Australia (with the southern bluefin, Thunnus maccoyi), fishermen corralled schools of half-grown tuna, and towed them in floating pens to marine corrals where they were fed and fattened until they could be killed and shipped to Japan. There are catch limits on tuna fishing in the Mediterranean, but none on catching immature tuna and fattening them in floating pens. Every country (except Israel) on or in the Mediterranean takes advantage of this loophole and maintains tuna ranches offshore. The fishermen of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Malta are capturing half-grown tuna by the hundreds of thousands. If you had to design a way to guarantee the decimation of a breeding population, this would be it: catch the fish before they are old enough to breed, and keep them penned up until they are killed. In 2006, the World Wildlife Fund called for the cessation of all tuna fishing in the Mediterranean, but in the light of all that money to be made, you can imagine how effective the WWF plea was.
Post A Comment
