Demand generates suppliers. If we stop consuming fish and marine protein, the mining and scraping will cease. But we won't do that will we? So they will continue. De-populate please! One solution will cure a thousand ills.
I think often, Michael, of the benefits of fewer people. Or I think of what the world would look like if we were still at 2 billion (less than a century ago) or 1 billion (two centuries ago). We won't see those numbers for the foreseeable future, but if we can take the right steps now - fully funded family planning and girls' education around the globe, for starters - we'll get to a peak population soon with a slow decline to follow.
I sure hope so. But it seems sometimes to me that there is an actual momentum force propelling and perpetuating human folly, as real as that involved in moving a bowling ball in its course down the alley. So I generally am pessimistic about quick global turnabouts.
Well, at least in the bowling alley the ball comes back to you to make another shot at a good decision, right? But yes, societies have their own momentum (and inertia), but the physics involved are more about redirection than turning around. That's both good news and bad.
Good article, Jason, although I have known about this despicable practice already, having read many of the sources you cited. It leaves me wondering what I can do. The only possible answer is to eat as little fish as possible. Perhaps none. I am close to being a vegetarian, so not consuming fish is not only my protest of practices, but also my way of protecting the oceans.
Thank you, Perry. Consuming less is helpful, certainly. What I'm finding interesting, and what I'll explore next week, is why the stewards/messengers of sustainable fisheries, Monterey aquarium and others, are finding bottom trawled fish sustainable under the right circumstances. I haven't dived into the topic yet, so am not sure what direction the essay will go.
If not for Sylvia Earle and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's work, I would have been as shocked about bottom scraping as when I first learned of the brutality of clearcutting.
The 2024/2025 factory size boats slated to launch from China will accelerate the destruction.
How amazing that you and my other favorite Thursday Substack writer @jannisse ray referenced Robert Macfarlane's Orion article about Barry Lopez.
Thank you, Katharine. I'll be sure to look more deeply into the role Chinese ships are playing. You're saying there's a new fleet about to launch? I've read about their siphoning up of stocks in African and other waters. And yes, that's a nice coincidence about that Macfarlane/Lopez essay.
Jason, I came across the 'planned mega factory fishing fleet' as part of my ongoing research into the krill industry. I will keep looking for the article; it's in an unorganized notebook. In the meantime, here's a related article where the vacuuming method is used on a gross scale.
Thanks for this, Katharine. I do worry about the krill fishery, or really all Southern Ocean fisheries, but as long as someone has a handle on illegal fishing (which I doubt) I will give CCAMLR some credit. It's a purely scientific organization, though politics plays a role I'm sure, and has been thinking and talking about Antarctic conservation for decades. But this Guardian article brings up good concerns about the specifics of management.
Jason, thanks for this. I covered Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s work last week. Though much of her marine focus is coastal, she’s been an advisor to Secretary of State Blinken, on the Patagonia board when they decided that profits go to Earth, and has a new anthology coming out in July~What If We Get It Right. (And she’s proof that, as I continue to tell you, there’s something in the Maine water that makes for brilliant writers!)
Finally read your excellent piece on Johnson and her NYT interview, Katharine. I loved that interview as well, which served as my introduction to her. She's brilliant and clearheaded, and the best kind of pessimistic optimist. Thanks for highlighting her work. As for Maine writers, some were born drinking the water and some see it from a distance and come to taste it...
I already knew bottom trawling was bad, but thanks for opening my eyes to just how bad it actually is. I've already given up eating salmon because of the unsustainability of salmon farming and don't eat much fish, but maybe i should go entirely vegetarian.
Thank you for the comment, Juliet. The personal choices through all this are always loaded with trade-offs. I wish I had good answers for anyone, including myself. In the case of eating fish, there are fisheries rated as sustainable by reputable sources, but these ratings are framed by the larger transformation of the Anthropocene, in which sustainable might be defined as maintaining a harvestable population of the target fish without taking into account other non-commercial species. But it can be a case-by-case basis, right? I'm surrounded by lobstermen here in coastal Maine, and the fishery will be in decent shape until warmer, more acidic waters change everything (which is sooner than later), but it's being called unsustainable because of concerns for northern right whales, which are critically endangered. Yet the greatest threats to the whales seem to be crab fishing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and ship strikes. How do we measure the trade-offs, and how do we define sustainable? The more we know, the better we can navigate the ethics, but there's rarely enough knowledge to make easy decisions.
So I’m thinking, we mostly eat “wild caught” salmon for the lots of fish we consume. And I thought, ok no problem, salmon are not bottom fish in any sense. Then I found this article.
Back to trying to do what can be done, little by little.
Thanks for this, Sylvia. I didn't know about this either. I wouldn't have thought salmon would be caught near the bottom, but again, I don't know the topic. The article is a bit confusing, in that it mentions both groundfish trawling and midwater trawling (which is towing a net higher up in the water column). So I'm not sure if this is a bottom trawling story or not. But yes, in the end, as you so wisely put it, we need to learn what can be done, little by little.
A horrifying practice, bottom trawling. And that’s not hyperbole, or at least shouldn’t be. For those who can responsibly, reasonably consider what it is, what it does, and the extent of the practice, a description of the activity as anything less than horrifying would seem to suggest a diagnosis of sociopathy, it seems to me. To say that bottom trawling is a form of mass murder *might* be hyperbolic, but only if we restrict the notion of murder to something occurring within our own species. A thought to be pursued another time, I suppose. (First maybe we consider the definition of ‘sustainable’ as applied—or not—to the bottom-trawling industry. The mind boggles, totters, and collapses into a quivering heap.)
There are at least two major hurdles to be dealt with, it seems, in getting the broader public to come to grips with what’s being done. One is the nature of it. If one tells Grandma and Uncle Bill that two-thirds or more of the living things a bottom-trawling fishing vessels hauls up are maimed, killed etc. and then just dumped back into the sea, it’s not surprising or unusual to find that they just can’t grasp that reality. Then there’s the matter of scale. Bottom trawling does not wipe out, every year, the equivalent of a few city blocks, a few square miles, or an area the size of, say, Nebraska; no, per Brannen, the total area ‘roto-tilled’ and denuded of most macroorganisms is roughly twice the size of the continental U.S. Every year. Rounding down, that’s about 6.2 million square miles. Start Monday morning, and you have Nebraska obliterated that week, in time to take Friday afternoon and the whole weekend off. It’s dang near impossible for our minds to grasp the immensity of the thing. Try telling people to imagine a giant earth-moving machine as a satellite several times larger than the Internationational Space Station, reaching down and scraping the surface of the land, like the world’s worst hurricane, obliterating an area the size of Los Angeles County (a bit over 4000 sq mi) every morning before that 10 AM coffee break. Most of the time, our brains activate alarms and read ‘Tilt’ like an old, abused pinball machine.
Sometimes I am asked why I often seem depressed. I don’t know where to start.
Thank you, Perry, for the thoughtful comment. It is all too much, sometimes. And yet there's so much good work being done too. Even in the world of bottom trawling, as I'll get into next week, there are good regulations and lots of prohibitions on where it can take place, and some great new engineering to reduce the harm to the seabed and bycatch. The problem is that these best practices aren't universal. Even these better bottom trawling practices are still harvesting shocking amounts of food for 8 billion humans, of course, and so our definition of sustainable may have to include the collateral damage that comes with everything else in the Anthropocene. Stay tuned...
Thanks, Jason. I’m very much looking forward to next week’s piece—I sincerely hope that I can come away from it modestly encouraged that maybe, just maybe, progress is being made. Though, as pretty much always these days, I’ll probably remain worried that it’s another circumstance in which efforts toward sound environmental stewardship can be filed under ‘Too Little, Too Late’.
I do have to say, though, that reading your work, and that of others of like mind, gives me hope. For which I’m very grateful.
Thank you very much, Jan. Like so many of these Anthropocene stories, this one is overwhelming, isn't it? But nature rebounds given a chance, and there are good folks doing good work to limit the harms of bottom trawling. I'll get into that next week. Thanks again for your comment.
Demand generates suppliers. If we stop consuming fish and marine protein, the mining and scraping will cease. But we won't do that will we? So they will continue. De-populate please! One solution will cure a thousand ills.
I think often, Michael, of the benefits of fewer people. Or I think of what the world would look like if we were still at 2 billion (less than a century ago) or 1 billion (two centuries ago). We won't see those numbers for the foreseeable future, but if we can take the right steps now - fully funded family planning and girls' education around the globe, for starters - we'll get to a peak population soon with a slow decline to follow.
I sure hope so. But it seems sometimes to me that there is an actual momentum force propelling and perpetuating human folly, as real as that involved in moving a bowling ball in its course down the alley. So I generally am pessimistic about quick global turnabouts.
Well, at least in the bowling alley the ball comes back to you to make another shot at a good decision, right? But yes, societies have their own momentum (and inertia), but the physics involved are more about redirection than turning around. That's both good news and bad.
Good article, Jason, although I have known about this despicable practice already, having read many of the sources you cited. It leaves me wondering what I can do. The only possible answer is to eat as little fish as possible. Perhaps none. I am close to being a vegetarian, so not consuming fish is not only my protest of practices, but also my way of protecting the oceans.
Thank you, Perry. Consuming less is helpful, certainly. What I'm finding interesting, and what I'll explore next week, is why the stewards/messengers of sustainable fisheries, Monterey aquarium and others, are finding bottom trawled fish sustainable under the right circumstances. I haven't dived into the topic yet, so am not sure what direction the essay will go.
Jason and your people,
If not for Sylvia Earle and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's work, I would have been as shocked about bottom scraping as when I first learned of the brutality of clearcutting.
The 2024/2025 factory size boats slated to launch from China will accelerate the destruction.
How amazing that you and my other favorite Thursday Substack writer @jannisse ray referenced Robert Macfarlane's Orion article about Barry Lopez.
I will read your links. in kinship, Katharine
Thank you, Katharine. I'll be sure to look more deeply into the role Chinese ships are playing. You're saying there's a new fleet about to launch? I've read about their siphoning up of stocks in African and other waters. And yes, that's a nice coincidence about that Macfarlane/Lopez essay.
Jason, I came across the 'planned mega factory fishing fleet' as part of my ongoing research into the krill industry. I will keep looking for the article; it's in an unorganized notebook. In the meantime, here's a related article where the vacuuming method is used on a gross scale.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/07/license-to-krill-the-destructive-demand-for-a-better-fish-oil
Thanks for this, Katharine. I do worry about the krill fishery, or really all Southern Ocean fisheries, but as long as someone has a handle on illegal fishing (which I doubt) I will give CCAMLR some credit. It's a purely scientific organization, though politics plays a role I'm sure, and has been thinking and talking about Antarctic conservation for decades. But this Guardian article brings up good concerns about the specifics of management.
Jason, thanks for this. I covered Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s work last week. Though much of her marine focus is coastal, she’s been an advisor to Secretary of State Blinken, on the Patagonia board when they decided that profits go to Earth, and has a new anthology coming out in July~What If We Get It Right. (And she’s proof that, as I continue to tell you, there’s something in the Maine water that makes for brilliant writers!)
https://winship.substack.com/p/the-extraordinary-ayana-elizabeth
Finally read your excellent piece on Johnson and her NYT interview, Katharine. I loved that interview as well, which served as my introduction to her. She's brilliant and clearheaded, and the best kind of pessimistic optimist. Thanks for highlighting her work. As for Maine writers, some were born drinking the water and some see it from a distance and come to taste it...
I already knew bottom trawling was bad, but thanks for opening my eyes to just how bad it actually is. I've already given up eating salmon because of the unsustainability of salmon farming and don't eat much fish, but maybe i should go entirely vegetarian.
Thank you for the comment, Juliet. The personal choices through all this are always loaded with trade-offs. I wish I had good answers for anyone, including myself. In the case of eating fish, there are fisheries rated as sustainable by reputable sources, but these ratings are framed by the larger transformation of the Anthropocene, in which sustainable might be defined as maintaining a harvestable population of the target fish without taking into account other non-commercial species. But it can be a case-by-case basis, right? I'm surrounded by lobstermen here in coastal Maine, and the fishery will be in decent shape until warmer, more acidic waters change everything (which is sooner than later), but it's being called unsustainable because of concerns for northern right whales, which are critically endangered. Yet the greatest threats to the whales seem to be crab fishing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and ship strikes. How do we measure the trade-offs, and how do we define sustainable? The more we know, the better we can navigate the ethics, but there's rarely enough knowledge to make easy decisions.
https://pacificwild.org/press-release-alarming-waste-of-salmon-by-trawl-fishery-revealed-in-dfo-report/
So I’m thinking, we mostly eat “wild caught” salmon for the lots of fish we consume. And I thought, ok no problem, salmon are not bottom fish in any sense. Then I found this article.
Back to trying to do what can be done, little by little.
Thanks for this, Sylvia. I didn't know about this either. I wouldn't have thought salmon would be caught near the bottom, but again, I don't know the topic. The article is a bit confusing, in that it mentions both groundfish trawling and midwater trawling (which is towing a net higher up in the water column). So I'm not sure if this is a bottom trawling story or not. But yes, in the end, as you so wisely put it, we need to learn what can be done, little by little.
Right, its not clear - but mainly about Chinook salmon as bycatch in midwater trawling.
Hard to know what to try to learn about... Thanks for all your researching.
Too much, indeed. When the entire world is changing, I guess we have to learn about the entire world...
Another terrifying assault on our environment.
Thanks Jason for opening my eyes, horrifying. I’m looking forward to next week! Xo
A horrifying practice, bottom trawling. And that’s not hyperbole, or at least shouldn’t be. For those who can responsibly, reasonably consider what it is, what it does, and the extent of the practice, a description of the activity as anything less than horrifying would seem to suggest a diagnosis of sociopathy, it seems to me. To say that bottom trawling is a form of mass murder *might* be hyperbolic, but only if we restrict the notion of murder to something occurring within our own species. A thought to be pursued another time, I suppose. (First maybe we consider the definition of ‘sustainable’ as applied—or not—to the bottom-trawling industry. The mind boggles, totters, and collapses into a quivering heap.)
There are at least two major hurdles to be dealt with, it seems, in getting the broader public to come to grips with what’s being done. One is the nature of it. If one tells Grandma and Uncle Bill that two-thirds or more of the living things a bottom-trawling fishing vessels hauls up are maimed, killed etc. and then just dumped back into the sea, it’s not surprising or unusual to find that they just can’t grasp that reality. Then there’s the matter of scale. Bottom trawling does not wipe out, every year, the equivalent of a few city blocks, a few square miles, or an area the size of, say, Nebraska; no, per Brannen, the total area ‘roto-tilled’ and denuded of most macroorganisms is roughly twice the size of the continental U.S. Every year. Rounding down, that’s about 6.2 million square miles. Start Monday morning, and you have Nebraska obliterated that week, in time to take Friday afternoon and the whole weekend off. It’s dang near impossible for our minds to grasp the immensity of the thing. Try telling people to imagine a giant earth-moving machine as a satellite several times larger than the Internationational Space Station, reaching down and scraping the surface of the land, like the world’s worst hurricane, obliterating an area the size of Los Angeles County (a bit over 4000 sq mi) every morning before that 10 AM coffee break. Most of the time, our brains activate alarms and read ‘Tilt’ like an old, abused pinball machine.
Sometimes I am asked why I often seem depressed. I don’t know where to start.
Thank you, Perry, for the thoughtful comment. It is all too much, sometimes. And yet there's so much good work being done too. Even in the world of bottom trawling, as I'll get into next week, there are good regulations and lots of prohibitions on where it can take place, and some great new engineering to reduce the harm to the seabed and bycatch. The problem is that these best practices aren't universal. Even these better bottom trawling practices are still harvesting shocking amounts of food for 8 billion humans, of course, and so our definition of sustainable may have to include the collateral damage that comes with everything else in the Anthropocene. Stay tuned...
Thanks, Jason. I’m very much looking forward to next week’s piece—I sincerely hope that I can come away from it modestly encouraged that maybe, just maybe, progress is being made. Though, as pretty much always these days, I’ll probably remain worried that it’s another circumstance in which efforts toward sound environmental stewardship can be filed under ‘Too Little, Too Late’.
I do have to say, though, that reading your work, and that of others of like mind, gives me hope. For which I’m very grateful.
scary scenarios!
So much to take in here -- terrifying and complex and gratefl for your research
Thank you very much, Jan. Like so many of these Anthropocene stories, this one is overwhelming, isn't it? But nature rebounds given a chance, and there are good folks doing good work to limit the harms of bottom trawling. I'll get into that next week. Thanks again for your comment.
It does feel overwhelming, but also important to know about.