Hooked: Bottomless Appetites and Overfished Seas

Bullit Marquez/AP Images
Fish porters, the Philippines

In The Odyssey, Homer depicts the cruel and vindictive nature of the sea through the figure of Poseidon. It's the sea god who prevents Odysseus from returning home, provoking a severe storm with his trident after Odysseus has blinded his son, Polyphemus. Homer called Poseidon the "shaker of the earth" and the sea, and not insignificantly he was also a fertility spirit who dealt in the ocean's barrenness.

If Poseidon was still a part of our climate, the depletion of the ocean's fish would surely have earned his wrath, and he would likely wonder how we came to be so blind to this tragedy. More than a decade ago, Mark Kurlansky wrote a book that meticulously traced the collapse of one fish population: the North Atlantic cod. After the explorer John Cabot made his transatlantic voyages to North America in 1497, he observed that the coast of Newfoundland was so thick with cod that schools of them could be scooped up from the sea with weighted baskets. By the mid-1990s, as Kurlansky explains in Cod, Gloucester, Massachusetts, had only about 400 working fishermen, down from 2,000 in the 1950s, when cod were more plentiful. In 1994, having estimated that the current fleet was about twice as large as what the fish stocks could sustain, the National Marine Fisheries Service levied harsh regulations and strict catch quotas on cod fishermen. Two years earlier, the Canadian government had issued a complete moratorium on fishing cod in Newfoundland and Labrador. There were barely any cod left. Since then, there have been stirrings of a slightly revitalized population: the head of the fish conservation group at a Newfoundland university recently returned from a scientific voyage to cautiously report some healthy, promising behavior among cod. Still, it is hard to imagine how the species could return to the level of ubiquity it used to enjoy generations ago, let alone in Cabot's day.

Tuna is another population blighted by overfishing. According to some estimates, commercial fishing of bluefin tuna has reduced populations by as much as 90 percent in the past thirty years. The insatiable sushi market in Japan and increasing popularity of the fish elsewhere is the main cause of the depletion; demand is so intense that a 350-pound bluefin will fetch $120 a pound at Japan's biggest and most famous fish market, Tsukiji. The World Wildlife Fund called for an immediate closure of all Mediterranean tuna fisheries in the eastern Atlantic a couple of years ago because "Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks risk imminent commercial collapse." The fishing industry, a business that employs 200 million people and brings in $71 billion a year, has ignored this plea. In today's global economy, international fishing conglomerates, modern trade policy and fish markets and restaurants willing to pay exorbitant prices form the trident that rules the sea.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.