Good Management and Difficult Decisions

6/20/24 – The future of bottom trawling

Chinese fishing boats heading out to sea from Zhoushan / source

Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read this week’s curated collection of Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

In the quiet wake of Father’s Day, I’ll start by revisiting something I wrote about my father, Vaughn Anthony, in my inaugural Field Guide essay on Earth Day, 2021. Dad had a long and brilliant career in the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), focused largely on stock assessments of commercial fish species like cod, haddock, herring, etc. He and his colleagues estimated the size and distribution of fish populations and decided how many should be caught each year. These catch limit numbers were derived from thousands of hours writing papers and gathering in smoky conference rooms, arguing cheerfully over math and species management with scientists from around the North Atlantic.

I never understood, even for a moment, the math. But the idea of management on such a large scale became real to me one day when dad said something like, “we’re managing everything already, just by fishing and eating. We might as well do it the right way.” In other words, we need to manage the species we impact, because that impact is already a form of management. Here’s part of what I wrote three years ago:

Dad was only talking about those species we harvest, but before long it became clear to me that the story was bigger than that. Now that we know that every living community on Earth is impacted by human activity through transformations of land, sea, and atmosphere, everything has to be managed. Anything less is privileging our right to decimate the array of life on Earth and undermine our own survival in the process.

So everything in the Anthropocene is being “managed,” whether we’re paying attention or not. The goal of good management, then, is to pay attention with good ethics, comprehensive science, and thoughtful policy. I’d like to think that once we embrace good management, we take responsibility. And when we take responsibility, we offer respect. Respect, because the goal is, at the very least, a healthy population of fish.

Of course, we need to continually define what management means and what responsibility looks like for each species, habitat, and ecosystem, but to be clear it’s not the cod and haddock (or grizzlies or monarchs or grasslands) that need to be managed. It’s us.

Managing resources is really about learning restraint. Protecting species or ecosystems is about protecting them from us.

Which brings me back to bottom trawling, which, at the end of last week’s essay, I summed up as a fairly obvious lose-lose proposition, because it’s a nightmare for ocean biodiversity at the same time it may contribute significantly to the heating of the planet and the acidification of the oceans.

A report from Seas At Risk and Oceana on bottom trawling in Europe, where it accounts for nearly a third of total fish and shellfish biomass brought to shore, sums up the damage succinctly:

It contributes to the overexploitation of EU fish stocks through high bycatch and discards rates; puts pressure on EU seabed integrity and its associated benthic ecosystems; and significantly jeopardises attempts to mitigate the climate crisis…

“Discards,” I should explain, are the bycatch fish thrown overboard and wasted. Bottom trawling accounts for 93% of discards in European fisheries. The profits made by the trawling industry, the report notes, “don’t take these external costs into account, instead passing them along to society.” Worse, a significant portion of the haul from bottom trawling is turned into fish oil supplements or food for farmed fish – both inefficient or unsustainable uses of ocean resources – rather than for direct human consumption.

If we’re looking for the low-hanging fruit of solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises, then banning or severely curtailing bottom trawling seems like a good choice. But that is unlikely to happen, mainly because it employs millions and feeds billions.

Even the Seas At Risk report, which advocates for alternative fishing techniques to replace bottom trawling, describes that prospect as a “real challenge” that will require a wide variety of fishing practices, each more finely attuned to different fishing areas, scaled up far beyond what is available today, and then dealing with whatever problems those practices create.

“The more selective the method of fishing,” according to marine biologist, policy expert, and writer Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “the more sustainable it is.” But the extractive and economic advantage of bottom trawling is that it is indiscriminate: scoop it all up and let the deckhands sort it out.

So why has the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the foremost evaluator of fisheries sustainability, certified 83 different bottom trawling fisheries around the globe? (Think of a “fishery” as the fishing efforts in a particular ocean region.) Half of these are in Europe, a quarter in the U.S., and the rest in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and Africa (countries not specified). Many of these fisheries are also recommended as sustainable by the Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The answer is good management, or at least what passes for it in the Anthropocene. I’m relying this week on a relatively pro-trawling science article in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, titled “Evaluating the sustainability and environmental impacts of trawling compared to other food production systems,” which notes that the evaluations by MSC and Seafood Watch

consider not only the status of the target stock but also the marine environmental impacts of the fishing method and have specific criteria regarding the management of bottom-trawl impacts on benthic communities.

In other words, the certifying entities look not just at how well the target fish populations are doing, but how well the fishery avoids bycatch and how well it treats seabed communities. Which sounds to me like good ethics, comprehensive science, and thoughtful policy.

Given the devastating impacts of bottom trawling as I’ve described them, how do some of these fisheries qualify for certification as sustainable?

First, I should say that the MSC and Seafood Watch certifications aren’t assessing either the fuel-burning carbon footprint, the possible climate and acidification impacts from disturbed sediment, or the significant fuel subsidies for fleets which encourage both. Furthermore, the ICES JMS article indicates that a) fuel consumption from trawling varies widely and can be improved, particularly in fisheries that keep their target species in abundance, and b) the research that claims bottom trawling releases huge amounts of carbon from sediments “has been widely criticized and is likely to be two orders of magnitude too high.”

The regulatory and technical solutions to reducing bycatch and discards are often the same solutions for reducing harm to benthic communities. They include, per the ICES JMS article, “technical measures related to gear and operations, spatial controls, impact quotas, and fishing-effort controls.” Let’s break that list down.

“Technical measures” include trawl designs that keep the doors and front of the net from touching or gouging the seabed (which also reduces fuel use), larger mesh size to allow smaller fish and juvenile target fish to escape, and excluder devices to keep sea turtles or marine mammals from being trapped by the net. “Spatial controls” might include off-limits Marine Protected Areas, prohibitions on trawling known sensitive habitats, seasonal prohibitions, and minimizing the fishing footprint to allow surrounding areas to resupply it with fish. “Impact quotas” limit how much biomass of a target species or bycatch a boat or fishery is allowed to catch. “Fishing-effort controls” can be seasonal or time-limited, or might include observers on vessels, “move-on” protocols (when too many fish have been caught in an area), or discard bans (meaning everything caught must be brought to shore and counted against their quota).

Some well-managed fisheries show impressive numbers. To cite two examples from the ICES JMS article, the flatfish-chasing Bering Sea bottom trawling fleet reduced its bycatch to 6-8%, and a scallop fishery off the Isle of Man reduced its impact to 3% of the fishable area.

For an upbeat assessment of a well-managed trawling fishery, check out this video describing the regulatory and technical solutions in place on the U.S. west coast:

Likewise, you can watch this pro-trawling video from Seafood New Zealand titled “What does bottom trawling really look like?” It films the trawl underwater at different angles, each of which shows a fairly clean harvest across a sandy bottom. There are no panicked sea turtles, no tumbling corals, nor even a massive cloud of sediment.

Like most large-scale resource extraction operations in the Anthropocene, though, there are probably good days and bad days for what lies beneath.

The story that comes out of these videos and other sources is that these fisheries want to be sustainable at the same time they want to turn a profit. They want to trawl over easy ground – mud and sand – because rocky, more diverse bottom is bad for the nets and bad for bycatch. I don’t really know how true either the pro-trawling or anti-trawling stories are, but my research suggests that both are true. Bottom trawling has been, and continues to be, a nightmare in the wrong place and with too few regulations, but seems to work fairly well in the right place and with the right rules in place.

Bottom trawling is like clearcutting a forest, yes, but much of the global trawling footprint is going back over the same ground, and as the ICES JMS article puts it, “you cannot clearcut the same area twice.” Here’s a shocking example: Every square meter of seafloor in the southern Baltic Sea is trawled an average of seven times per year.

As with so much in the Anthropocene, when every square meter of the Earth feels the burden of the changes we’re making, good management consists of painful trade-offs, of losses in the fullness of life in exchange for the fullness of our eight billion bellies, and of protected no-go zones amid a world of sacrifice zones.

At a glance, the regulations for bottom trawling in the U.S. seem good. It’s prohibited in over half of federal waters. The video above explains that only about 10% of the continental shelf off the western U.S. is impacted by trawling. The Gulf of Maine, where I presume the cod Heather and I ate last week was caught, has significant permanent closure areas. The Ecologist@Large, Dr. Bradley Stevens, writes that new mission of NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees NMFS) is ecosystem-based fisheries management, “defined as a method to obtain sustainable benefits without harming populations, the environment, or ecosystem.”

And yet we hear so many impassioned organizations seeking to protect the seas from the horrors of  bottom trawling, which “have fueled strong public campaigns, resulting in bottom trawling being demonized, severely restricted, or effectively banned in some countries and regions.” In this sense, bottom trawling shares a lot with the beef industry, which employs millions, feeds billions, but takes a terrible toll on the living world. But bottom trawling has a much smaller carbon footprint than beef.

And bottom trawling, like all wild fishing, uses no antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. It doesn’t release excess nutrients into water supplies or introduce exotic species. It is better in these aspects than non-organic land-based agriculture, and better than some fish-farming, in fact. When properly regulated, bottom trawls have been shown to reduce benthic biodiversity in sand, mud, and gravel ecosystems by less than 10%.

Cattle farming in Brazil // source: © Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá

Once we start thinking about bottom trawling in comparison to terrestrial farming, the horrors of the practice seem less dire:

Perhaps the clearest difference between the ecosystem impacts of marine capture fisheries and agriculture’s impact on terrestrial systems is encapsulated in the MSC’s Principle 2, which states, “Fishing operations should allow for the maintenance of the structure, productivity, function, and diversity of the ecosystem on which the fishery depends. The ecosystem includes habitat and associated dependent and ecologically related species.” Many trawl fisheries have met this standard, yet no form of large-scale crop production could do so, whether for direct human consumption or as feed for livestock or aquaculture.

Where bans on bottom trawling are introduced, replacement levels of food must be found elsewhere. Organic vegetables and fruit are a much better option, but not widely available, and anyway to replace fish protein most consumers will likely look for farmed fish, poultry, or beef, which are much worse choices. (Read up on factory farms for a reminder why.)

As the ICES JMS article says simply, “Bottom trawling is a food production method that has environmental impacts.” Like every other food production system, the larger the scale the larger the impacts. But as with the others, greater awareness of those impacts now is driving some improvements. What we need is policy that drives these changes faster and deeper.

For bottom trawling, we need policy at the meeting ground between the precautionary principle – avoid harm where it may occur – and the maximizing of harvest with minimal effort. One term for this is “maximum sustainable yield.” We need to use the best fisheries management science to create abundance which can be harvested in limited fishing grounds, and use advances in tech to make fleets more fuel-efficient and less likely to destroy non-commercial fish stocks.

Somehow, we must rebuild and/or protect fish populations while feeding 8 to 10 billion people. To view it this way, however, is to admit our definition of sustainability – meeting the needs of today’s generations while protecting the interests of future generations – is human-focused rather than ecological.

The nonprofit Transform Bottom Trawling has four primary goals to regulate the practice across the globe, all of which seem reasonable to me: 1) create and protect inshore exclusion zones to keep trawlers from destroying local small-scale coastal fisheries, 2) prohibit bottom trawling in all Marine Protected Areas, 3) stop subsidizing bottom trawling, 4) prohibit the expansion of bottom trawling to new areas – like deepwater habitats, seamounts, and the Southern Ocean – unless trawler fisheries can prove they will do no harm.

Newly arrived Chinese trawlers in Freetown, Sierra Leone / credit: TMT / source

And it’s this global view that I want to close with. For all the regulated, inventive, and thoughtful fisheries in North America and elsewhere, there are many other thoughtless and harmful ones scraping their way through the world’s oceans. China in particular, with the world’s largest fishing fleet, is one of the worst offenders of IUU fishing – illegal, unregulated, and unreported – haunting the deep sea and the national waters of other, weaker nations (often staffed with forced/slave labor). Taiwan faces similar accusations, but the Chinese fleet alone accounts for 28% of the global bottom trawling catch with an estimated 1500 ships fishing beyond Chinese national waters. There, not coincidentally, bottom trawling is now banned year-round.

The good management of the oceans we seek, then, must occur within the framework of global politics and the ethical leverage (such as it is) of international commerce. All the righteous anger at bottom trawling won’t help the Philippines or Sierra Leone push back against an aggressive Chinese fleet, nor will it directly address the massive siphoning of bycatch to feed farm-grown fish across Asia.

From a consumer’s point of view, we can do a few things: eat less fish, ensure (as best we can) we’re eating from sustainable fisheries, and find ways to pressure national and international forces to create an ever-expanding list of Marine Protected Areas (in which harmful fishing practices should be banned or very tightly regulated) amid the push to safeguard 30% of the natural world by 2030. Ideally, we’d find ways to encourage good fisheries management in every part of the world, but the levers to do so are hard to find.

We need to treat the sea floor like the fragile and essential habitat it is, but for the foreseeable future we will have many billions of people to feed and an endless series of difficult trade-offs to choose from in feeding them.

But at least with fisheries “we know the math,” my father said, “and we know how to manage.” It’s other realities, political, financial, or otherwise, that get in the way. The art of sustainable living, seen through a management lens, involves both clever solutions and the wisdom to reduce our harm. It is, in a word, about practicing restraint.

In that first Field Guide essay in which I discussed my father, I also memorialized the great Barry Lopez, who spent a lifetime articulating the art of right living through the wisest of lenses. Here he is, in Arctic Dreams, on restraint:

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent… Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From the great investigative team at ProPublica, “Selling a Mirage,” an excellent deep dive into the lie that we call plastic “recycling.” The system we have now, with the three cute arrows chasing each other around a mysterious number, is already largely a lie. Only a tiny percentage of plastics are recyclable, and only a small percentage of those are actually recycled. But the new, larger, and more dangerous lie is that of “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, in which plastics of all types are heated and transformed for use in other plastic products. It is an incredibly toxic process and one which requires far too much energy. The industry’s lie is that this is the beginning of a circular economy for plastics, but in reality it’s a dead end meant to delay what must be done: severely reduce plastic production and maximize its replacement with sustainable materials.

In related reporting from Grist, a long and fascinating history of recycling in the U.S., focused on the three-arrows symbol and how it came to mean so much to so many, and yet mean so little to environmentalism.

From the Times, chemical manufacturers are of course suing the EPA over its landmark decision, under the authority of the Safe Water Drinking Act, that requires water utilities around the U.S. to remove PFAS “forever chemicals” from municipal water systems. The industry is suing because they know that water utilities will sue them to recoup their costs.

From BBC Future, the possibility of turning concrete into battery storage. Researchers at MIT have already proven the concept, but it’s too early to tell if it will work at scale. Theoretically, an off-grid house could be powered by solar panels during the day and by its foundation at night.

From Nautilus, mushrooms rather than animal hides may be the future of leather.

From Ecowatch, as part of its grotesque harm to the living world, Russia’s war on Ukraine has increased carbon emissions by 175 million tons.

Do you like finding birds? Do you like solving mysteries? From the Guardian, here’s an opportunity to do both, as researchers have compiled a list of 126 birds not seen for decades and not yet listed as endangered or extinct.

From Reasons to be Cheerful, a remarkably serious, well-funded, and well-developed plan by Denmark’s government to shift the nation toward a more plant-based diet.

From the Post, a good-news update on the planet’s ozone layer. The ozone-eating chemicals the world came together to ban, in the only treaty every nation on Earth has signed, have finally peaked and begun to decline in the atmosphere.

In contrary news about the ozone layer from the CBC, the tens of thousands of satellites either in or planned for orbit will burn up, and when they do the chemistry of that burning may well interact badly with ozone molecules. The 42,000 planned Starlink satellites are a particular problem. This is, one of the scientists interviewed said, not something anyone had thought about.

From Inside Climate News, one more reason that the U.S. ethanol industry is an insane waste of resources. The biofuel refineries in farm communities across the U.S. are releasing toxic chemicals in huge quantities.