In the middle of the 19th century, millions of wild passenger pigeons were slaughtered each year in the United States to feed the appetites of city-dwellers. Once numbering in the billions with flocks that would blot out the sun, by the 1890s, the birds had virtually disappeared. The last survivor, Martha, perished in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
What does the tale of a long-extinct bird have to do with global fishing regulation? More than you might think. Much as the decline of once-abundant game animals such as passenger pigeons and bison paved the way for a crackdown on commercial hunting of wild game in the U.S., the growing depletion of fisheries in the world’s oceans has prompted a group of fisheries scientists to call for a revolution in how fishing is regulated.
“The current concept of ‘sustainable fishing’, adopted by governments and private actors since the post-war period is scientifically obsolete,” said Callum Roberts, a prominent University of Exeter marine scientist whose credits include working as the chief scientific officer for the BBC’s “Blue Planet II” television series. “Marine life is a public good that should both benefit society and nature, not be the object of a resource race driven by private gains.”
That kind of language would have a familiar ring to people steeped in modern hunting culture in North America, where most commercial hunting and fishing is limited to prevent a repeat of the carnage of a century ago. Wild animals belong to the public, so the thinking goes in what is known as the “North American Model,” and aren’t there just for private profit.
While Roberts and his collaborators don’t directly reference this hunting philosophy in their new paper in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability, I think it’s a useful way to understand the way such thinking might translate into a transformation of how ocean fisheries are regulated and thought about.
Today, to the degree that such fisheries are actively managed, they tend to be considered more like a private crop than public property. Fisheries officials calculate how much of a particular species in a certain patch of ocean can be “harvested” without taking so many fish that the population can’t bounce back. It’s known as the “maximum sustainable yield.” Stay below that level and, according to this approach, and you are practicing sustainable fishing.
“It relies on a simplistic, productivist theory which assumes that as long as global catch volumes remain below a set limit, anyone can fish just about anything, anywhere, with any method,” says Roberts.
That might be an oversimplification, at least with the most closely managed fisheries. Some parts of the ocean inside some nation’s boundaries have limits on particularly destructive practices, such as bottom trawling in which nets are dragged across the sea floor. Likewise, regulators can impose limits on the size and sex kept from species of, say, Maine lobsters.
But in much of the ocean and for many species, the limits are few. Huge commercial fishing vessels often operate like floating factories, deploying kilometer-long lines festooned with hooks that will catch anything that takes the bait or drifting nets that entrap whatever swims in. In other places, nets or dredges are hauled across the ocean bottom, tilling up habitat in pursuit of their quarry.
Imagine if someone showed up for a deer hunt with a bazooka and land mines. Not only would it be illegal, they would be decried as “unethical” or “unsporting.” The 30 authors behind the new paper evoke some of the same ethos. “Can we truly claim that all fishing gear is environmentally and socially equal? We currently label fisheries as sustainable without considering their impact on marine ecosystems or human factors, such as crew safety and rights,” said Jennifer Jacquet, an expert in natural resource management at the University of Miami who has studied international fisheries policy.
The new paper spells out a vision in which fisheries are managed with a much bigger focus on public and ecological benefits, and less attention to squeezing fisheries for the sake of private profit.
Rather than set regulations chiefly with an eye toward the ups and downs of a particular species, managers, they write, should prioritize activities with a lower impact on entire ecosystems. Among other things, that could mean bans on fishing gear that damage habitat and a reduction in fishing intensity to protect the most sensitive species. In a world where climate change is already hammering some fishing stocks, such as snow crab in the Bering Sea, fisheries managers should take an even more conservative approach, not trying to push catch levels too close to their ecological limit, the authors write.
The researchers also advocate for restrictions on the size of boats and gear that can be used, one way to reduce fishing pressure while increasing the likelihood that local, small-scale fishers won’t be pushed out by massive fishing ships. Regulations should be run with an eye toward fairness and including local people most directly affected by the fate of the fish, they say.
Meanwhile, the authors argue, seafood should only be bought from places where fisheries are recognized as being run with robust scientific information and a cautious approach to how much fishing to allow, as well as not stained by human rights abuses towards fishing workers and others.
Bits and pieces of such thinking are woven into segments of the fishing industry already. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, for example, rates the sustainability of a fishery partly on the type of gear being used and the effect on other species. Small island states in the Pacific have helped recover some tuna populations by pushing for stricter fishing limits.
But when fierce political battles break out over the smallest changes in how much fish can be caught or who can catch them, the changes promoted by these researchers will be no easy sell. They paint a picture of a world where fewer fish are caught with smaller boats, less intrusive gear and an eye chiefly on public and environmental benefits. It would be a sea change. It would make commercial fishing on the open ocean look more like hunting in America.
But if it’s going to happen, will it take a crisis like the death of the last passenger pigeon or the near disappearance of the bison before there’s enough political will to do it?
Roberts, et. al. “Rethinking sustainability of marine fisheries for a fast-changing planet.” npj Ocean Sustainability. Sept. 23, 2024.
Photo: Oregon Sea Grant
