Sea of Slaughter



Farley Mowat (1921–2014) was a famous Canadian nature writer, a fire-breathing critic of modernity’s war on wildness.  He spent much of his life close to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, and was an avid outdoorsman.  By 1975, he and his wife were becoming acutely aware of the sharp decline of wildlife during their own lifetimes.

Mowat chatted with 90-year olds who confirmed his suspicions, and revealed even more tragedies.  Then he began researching historical documents, and his mind snapped.  Early European visitors were astonished by the abundance of wildlife in North America, something long gone in the Old World.  To them, the animals appeared to be infinite in number, impossible for humans to diminish, ever!

At this point, spirits of the ancestors gave him the heart-wrenching task of writing the mother of all horror stories.  His book, Sea of Slaughter, focused on the last 500 years in a coastal region spanning from Labrador to Cape Cod.  The book has five parts: birds, land mammals, fish, whales, and fin feet (seals, walrus).

For thousands of years, Native Americans hunted for subsistence, taking only what they needed to survive.  Europeans were strikingly different.  They suffered from brain worms that inflamed a maniacal obsession with wealth and status.  They were bewitched by an insatiable greed that was impossible to satisfy — they could never have enough.  Today, scientists refer to this devastating, highly contagious mental illness as get-rich-quick fever — the villain of this story.

In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed by the Isle of Birds, a rookery for auks (northern penguins).  He wrote, “This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed.”  Auks were large, flightless, fat, and laid eggs in accessible locations (not cliff side nests).  Vast numbers were clobbered, salted, and loaded on ships.  Others were chopped into fish bait.  Many were boiled in large cauldrons to extract the oil from their body fat.  In Europe, it had taken over a thousand years to exterminate the auks; in the New World, advanced technology got the job done in just 300 years.  The last two died in 1844.

Prior to the emergence of the petroleum industry in the late nineteenth century, civilization acquired large amounts of oil from wildlife — seabirds, whales, walrus, seals, porpoises, and fish.  An adult polar bear killed in autumn provided lots of meat, a valuable pelt, and twelve gallons (45 l) of good oil.  Animal oil was used for lamp fuel, lubrication, cooking oil, soap, cosmetics, margarine, and leather processing.

There are a number of repeating patterns in the book.  The hunger for money was the heart of the monster.  Nothing else really mattered.  If there were just ten whales left in the world, and they were worth money, the hunters would not hesitate to kill them all.  God made animals for us to obliterate.  Whenever possible, wildlife massacres were done on an industrial scale — kill as many as possible, as fast as possible.

Conservation was an obscene, profit killing, four-letter word.  When there were fewer cod, whales, or seals, the value of each corpse increased.  So, the industry got more and bigger boats, used the latest technology, and raced to kill as many as possible, before competitors found them.  Rules, regulations, and prohibitions were always issued far too late to matter, and they usually included enough loopholes to make them meaningless.  The slaughter industry ignored them, and bureaucrats winked and looked the other way.

Five hundred years ago, cod grew to seven feet long (2.1 m), and weighed up to 200 pounds (91 kg).  An observer noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them.”  Today the average cod is 6 pounds.  For many years, they were killed in staggering numbers.  By 1968, the cod fishery was rubbished.  It has not recovered, because fish mining has also depleted small fish, the cod’s basic food.

Nobody ever confesses to overfishing or overhunting.  What happened to the cod?  Obviously, they moved somewhere else, we don’t know where.  Efforts are made to find them.  When searches failed, it was time to seek and destroy scapegoats: whales, porpoises, loons, otters, cormorants, and many others.

In 1850, loons lived in nearly every lake and large pond in the northeast, from Virginia to the high arctic.  Hunters rarely ate them, but they were excellent flying targets for gun geeks.  When folks noticed salmon and trout numbers declining, it was time to look for loon nests and smash their eggs.  Cormorants got the same treatment.  Their rookeries were invaded, and all eggs and chicks destroyed.  Sometimes they sprayed the eggs with kerosene, to kill the embryos.  Birds continued sitting on lifeless eggs, instead of laying new eggs.

Big game hunting was a profitable industry, catering to <bleepity-bleeps> who found killing to be thrilling.  It generated the shiny coins that make men crazy.  What could be more fun than cruising around shooting beluga whales?  In the old days, many beaches were jam-packed with walrus that could grow to 14 feet long (4.2 m), and weigh up to 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg).  Rich lads enjoyed walrus hunting competitions.  One guy, in three weeks, killed 84 bulls, 20 cows, and a number of youngsters, not counting those that died unseen after being wounded.

Mature whales and walrus had no natural predators, so they never evolved defensive aspects or strategies.  They didn’t need to be aggressive or speedy.  They were often curious and friendly.  Hunters preferred to kill black right whales.  Their bodies had a layer of blubber up to 20 inches (51 cm) thick, containing up to 3,500 gallons (12,250 l) of oil.  Abundant blubber meant that the dead ones floated.  Other species sank when killed, and were lost.  With regard to all whale species, it was common for the number of lost carcasses (sinkers) to exceed the number landed and butchered.  Extreme waste didn’t matter as long as the carcasses landed were profitable.

Anyway, Sea of Slaughter is over 400 pages of back-to-back horror stories with no rest stops.  The book is painful, disgusting, and illuminating — a mind-bending experience.  Reading it puts you into an altered state of consciousness, an otherworldly trance state.  Our brains aren’t designed to process flash floods of stupidity.

Many readers will be shocked to see the degree to which screw brained beliefs can turn ordinary people into mindless monsters — an important concept for folks trying to understand the world.  Some readers may be tempted to dismiss the foolish destruction as an aspect of the bad old days, when we didn’t know any better.  Readers having a larger collection of working brain cells will realize that the greed is still with us, in a multitude of new forms, and it’s destroying more than ever before — a vital idea to grasp.

It’s much easier for us to acknowledge horrors that happened in the past, rather than the horrors our shopping is causing today.  History can be powerful medicine when it is taught by competent elders, instead of the usual cheerleaders for wealth, empire, progress, and human supremacy.  Mowat was an excellent wordsmith, and a passionate storyteller.  You will never forget this one.

Postscript.  In 1985, following the publication of Sea of Slaughter, Mowat was scheduled to do a book tour in the U.S.  Shortly after boarding his plane in Toronto, customs officials escorted him back off.  He learned that he was forever forbidden to travel to the land of freedom — and they wouldn’t tell him why.  This was the Reagan era, and Mowat had pissed off many conservatives.  Banishment inspired him to write a smart-assed new book, My Discovery of America.

Mowat, Farley, Sea of Slaughter, 1984, Reprint, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2012.

The Sea of Slaughter documentary, with Farley Mowat (1 hr, 45 min) is HERE.

The Mortal Sea

Until the twentieth century, it was commonly believed that the oceans, filled with vast quantities of fish, were immortal.  It was impossible for mere humans to ever make a dent in the sea’s enormous bounty.  Similarly, iron miners once believed that the Lake Superior lodes could be mined for eternity.  The white pines of the region were so numerous that it would be impossible to cut them all down.  Incredible fantasies are common among folks who are blissfully ignorant of eco-history, and don’t understand the reality of fish mining, mineral mining, forest mining, soil mining.

A society unaware of eco-history is like an elder lost in an Alzheimer’s fog.  He doesn’t recognize his wife or children, and has no memory of who he is, where he is, or what he’s done.  History turns on floodlights, sharply illuminating the path of our journey, making the boo-boos stand out like sore thumbs.  It’s more than a little embarrassing, but if we can see the pitfalls, we’re less likely to leap into them.  In theory, we are capable of learning from our mistakes.

Jeffrey Bolster is a history professor who once loved to fish.  He realized that the Hall of History desperately needed more illumination on humankind’s abusive relationship with the oceans, because it was a tragicomedy of endlessly repeated self-defeating mistakes.  He wrote The Mortal Sea, which focused on the rape of the North Atlantic — and he quit fishing.

In prehistoric Western Europe, many folks congregated along the water’s edge.  They harvested shellfish from the sea, but most of their fish came from rivers and estuaries.  Following the transition to agriculture and metal tools, their population grew and grew.  Forests were cut, fields were plowed, and streams were loaded with eroded soil, livestock wastes, human sewage, and industrial discharges.  Hungry mobs got too good at catching too many fish with too many traps.  England passed the Salmon Preservation Act in 1285, but it was little enforced and generally ignored.

Meanwhile, Viking innovations resulted in boat designs that were excellent for travelling the open seas.  They made it possible to aggressively pursue saltwater seafood, which was incredibly abundant.  Vikings learned to air-dry cod, which could be stored for years, and provide sustenance for long voyages of walrus hunting, auk killing, raping, and pillaging.  Before long, all coastal communities started building seaworthy boats, and hauling in the cod, mackerel, herring, and so on.  The human population grew, and marine life diminished.

In the sixteenth century, when Europeans explored the American shoreline, they were astonished by the abundance of sea life.  They observed hundreds of thousands of walruses, which could grow up to 2,600 pounds (1,180 kg), critters that were nearly extinct at home.  In those days, the oil industry was based on whales, walruses, and seals.

Halibut could grow to 700 pounds (317 kg).  There were sturgeons more than 600 pounds (272 kg), and cod five feet long (1.5 m).  One lad caught 250 cod in an hour, with just four hooks.  They killed seabirds like there was no tomorrow, using many for fish bait.  Lobsters were huge and plentiful, but their flesh spoiled quickly, so they were fed to hogs, used for bait, and spread on fields for fertilizer.

Maine and northward was home to the Mi’kmaqs and Malecites, who got 90 percent of their calories from sea life.  Their population was not supersized by agriculture.  They had no metal tools or high tech boats, nor a spirituality in which humans were the masters of the universe.  For some reason, they had failed to destroy their ecosystem.  Then, they were discovered, and the whites went crazy with astonishing greed.  “By 1800 the northwest Atlantic was beginning to resemble European seas.”  Where’s the fish?

Between America and Europe, the boreal North Atlantic had been among the world’s most productive fishing grounds.  The bulk of the book discusses how clever white folks skillfully transformed unimaginable abundance into an aquatic disaster area.  In the waters off Maine, Peak Cod occurred around the Civil War, long before industrial fish mining.  By 1875, writers were speculating about the extinction of menhaden, lobster, halibut, eider, shad, salmon, mackerel, and cod.

The fish mining industry was driven by a desperate arms race.  Hand-line fishing had been the norm since the Middle Ages.  Each fisherman set four to twenty-eight baited hooks.  Then, geniuses invented long-line fishing, which used 4,000 hooks.  More fish were caught, and more money was made.  By 1870, some fishers were setting 63 miles of lines with 96,000 baited hooks.

By 1880, geniuses were delighted to discover that gill nets could triple the haul — and they eliminated the need for bait, which was getting scarce and expensive.  For mackerel mining, the new purse seines were fabulous.  They used nets to surround an entire school of fish, and could land 150,000 per day.  In 1905 came steam-powered otter trawls — huge nets dragged across the sea floor that caught everything.  Only 45 percent of the fish landed were kept.  Unmarketable fish were tossed back dead, including juveniles of marketable species.  Millions of dead juveniles did not grow into mature fish, reproduce, and maintain the viability of the species.

Throughout the long gang rape of the North Atlantic, there were always voices urging caution and conservation, but they never ran the show.  As more and more capital poured into fish mining enterprises, resistance to regulation increased.  The one and only objective for fat cats was maximizing short-term profits.  Government bureaucrats who monitored the industry experimented with many interesting programs for increasing fish stocks — everything except for reducing fishing pressure.

New technology expanded the market for seafood.  Salting and drying were replaced by keeping fish on ice, and shipping them to market by rail.  Later, canneries created even bigger demand for fish.  The first floating fish factory was launched in 1954, and was followed by many more.  These boats had assembly lines for gutting, cleaning, and filleting the fish.  The fillets were quick frozen, for indefinite storage.  Waste was turned to fishmeal, another source of profit.

In 1992, the cod landings in Canada vanished, and the fishery was closed.  The U.S. closed fishing on Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine.  “The impossible had occurred.  People had killed most of the fish in the ocean.”  Folks had been overfishing since Viking days, but industrial fishing put the process into overdrive.  The cod show no signs of recovery.

Bolster concluded that the way to avoid unsustainable harvests was to adopt the precautionary approach, which meant always selecting the least destructive option.  This was an excellent idea, for a world ruled by pure reason.  Maybe we should contemplate phasing out all commercial fishing, because history is clear: any enterprise having to do with the accumulation of personal property, wealth, and social status tends to turn ambitious folks into insatiable parasites with no respect for the future.  Actually, the industry is working hard to terminate itself — before oceanic acidification beats it.

One more thing before I go.  Some folks have dreams of replacing today’s maritime fleet with zero emission sailing ships, but they don’t remember the downside.  Bolster warns us, “Fishing made coal mining look safe.  No other occupation in America came close to the deep-sea fisheries for workplace mortality.”  In just Gloucester, from 1866 to 1890, more than 380 schooners and 2,450 men were lost at sea.  When powerful squalls race in, sailboats are hard to control, and very dangerous.

Over the centuries, interregional commerce has made many fat cats fatter, but it’s also led to many catastrophes, like the spread of bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, influenza, measles, smallpox, rinderpest, potato blight, chestnut blight, assorted empires, and on and on.  Countless millions have died as an unintended consequence of long-distance travel.  It isn’t necessary for a sustainable future.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey, The Mortal Sea — Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012.

Feral (Rewilding)

Beneath the pavement in London, archaeologists have found the bones of hippos, elephants, giant deer, giant aurochs, and lions.  The Thames watershed was once a gorgeous, thriving, wild paradise.  In the early Mesolithic, the western seaboard of Europe, from Scotland to Spain, was covered by a magnificent rainforest.  Europe was once a thriving wild paradise.

Evolution created utterly fantastic masterpieces.  The megafauna of the Americas grew to enormous size, in the absence of too-clever two-legged tool addicts.  Ground sloths weighed as much as elephants.  Beavers were the size of bears.  The Argentine roc had a 26-foot wingspan (8 m).  All of them vanished between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, about the time you-know-who arrived, with their state of the art hunting technology.

On a damp gray dawn, the English writer George Monbiot woke up screaming once again.  He suffers from a chronic spiritual disease that he calls ecological boredom.  Living amidst endless crowds of two-legged strangers can become unbearably unpleasant for sensitive people with minds.  Human souls can only thrive in unmolested wildness (the opposite of England).  He leaped out of bed, packed his things, and moved to the coast of Wales, where there was more grass than concrete.  He hoped that this would exorcise his demons.

They weren’t demons.  Obviously, ecological boredom is a healthy and intelligent response to the fierce madness of twenty-first century life, and it’s curable.  What’s needed to break this curse is a holy ceremony called rewilding.  During five years of country living in Wales, Monbiot wrote Feral, to explain his voyage and vision.  It’s a 500-decibel alarm clock.

Humans were wild animals for millions of years.  In the last few thousand years, we’ve declared war on wild ecosystems, in our whacked out crusade to domesticate everything everywhere, and lock Big Mama Nature in a maximum-security zoo.  Rewilding is about throwing this sick, suicidal process into reverse.

It’s about allowing long extinct woodlands to become healthy thriving forests once again.  It’s about reintroducing the wild beings that have been driven off the land — bear, bison, beavers — a sacred homecoming.  It’s about creating marine reserves so aquatic species have places of refuge from the insane gang rape of industrial fishing.  Importantly, it’s about introducing our children to the living planet of their birth.

Wales was a land of lush forests 2,100 years ago.  Today, it’s largely a mix of sheep pasture and other assorted wastelands.  One day, Monbiot climbed to a hilltop in the Cambrian Mountains, where he could see for miles.  He noted a few distant Sitka spruce tree farms, and a bit of scrubby brush, but otherwise, “across that whole, huge view, there were no trees.  The land had been flayed.  The fur had been peeled off, and every contoured muscle and nub of bone was exposed.”

Some folks now call it the Cambrian Desert, whilst shameless tourism hucksters refer to it as one of the largest wilderness areas in the U.K.  To Monbiot, rural Wales is a heartbreaking sheepwreck, reduced to ecological ruins by the white plague — countless dimwitted furry freaks from Mesopotamia that gobble the vegetation down to the roots, and prevent forest recovery.

One day, Monbiot met a brilliant young sheep rancher, Dafydd Morris-Jones, who had no sympathy for rewilding at all.  His family had been raising sheep on this land for ages.  Every rock in the valley had a name, and his uncle remembered all of them.  Allowing the forest to return would amount to cultural genocide, snuffing out the traditional indigenous way of life, and erasing it forever.

I had great sympathy for Dafydd’s view.  In 1843, my great-grandfather, Richard E. Rees, was born in the parish of Llangurig, Wales — deep in the heart of sheep country.  His mother was a handloom weaver.  They lived down the road from the wool mill in Cwmbelan.  My ancestors survived for many generations by preventing the return of the forest, deer, and boars, by preventing an injured land from healing.  Of course, for the last several thousand years, none of my ancestors had been wild people — they suffered from the tremendous misfortune of having been born in captivity.

Every generation perceives the world of their childhood as the normal state, the ideal.  Many don’t comprehend that the ecosystem was badly damaged long before they were born.  What they accept as normal might give their grandparents nightmares.  Monbiot refers to this shortsightedness as Shifting Baseline Syndrome.  The past is erased by mental blinders.  Each generation adapts to an ongoing pattern of decline.  Humans have an amazing tolerance for crowding, filth, and stress.  The result is the wounded wheezing world you see around you.

Monbiot gushes with excitement when describing the amazing changes that followed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park.  They promptly corrected deer overpopulation, which led to forest regeneration, which led to healthier streams, which led to more fish.  When they reduced the coyotes, the result was more rabbits, mice, hawks, weasels, boxes, badgers, eagles, and ravens.  Here is Monbiot enthusiastically discussing this process in a 15 minute TED talk. 

A number of European organizations are promoting rewilding.  Pan Parks has protected 240,000 hectares (593,000 acres), and is working on a million more.  Wild Europe is working to create wildlife corridors across the continent.  Rewilding Europe promotes the reintroduction of missing species (here is a brief video trailer).  Pleistocene Park in Siberia is reintroducing many species in a 160 sq. km. park (62 sq. mi.), which it plans to expand to 600 sq. km. (232 sq. mi.).

In continental Europe, the rewilding movement is building momentum.  Wolves, bears, bison, and beavers have begun the path to recovery.  Not every effort succeeds — Italy reintroduced two male lynx, and the cute couple mysteriously failed to produce offspring.  Britain and Ireland remain out to lunch.  Most of the land is owned by wealthy elites who are obsessed with preserving a “tidy” looking countryside — treeless and profoundly dreary.  They enjoy recreational hunting, and wolves would spoil their fun.

Monbiot delights in goosing every sacred cow along his path, and readers of many varieties are sure to foam at the mouth and mutter naughty obscenities.  For me, Feral had a few zits, but they don’t sink the book.  He leads us to the mountaintop and allows us to view the world from above the haze of assumptions, illusions, and fantasies.  Who are we?  Where is our home?  Where are we going? 

He rubs our noses in the foul messes we’ve made, hoping we’ll learn from our accidents and grow.  He confronts us with big important issues that we’ve avoided for far too long — the yucky stoopid stuff we’re doing for no good reason.  I like that.  This is important.  He recommends intriguing alternatives to stoopid.  It’s about time.

Monbiot, George, Feral — Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, Allen Lane, London, 2013.

The End of the Line

Charles Clover’s book, The End of the Line, is a heartbreaking story about the seafood industry’s War on Fish.  The poor fish don’t have much of a chance anymore, because there’s nowhere to hide from the latest technology.  The eventual outcome of this systematic massacre is already obvious — both sides are going to lose.  When the nets finally come up empty, the unemployed fishers will shape-shift into burger flippers, security guards, and homeless panhandlers.  But until that final day, they’ll keep expanding the fleet, and fishing like there’s no tomorrow.

Back in the good old days of the Stone Age, there were vast numbers of fish, and a few scattered clans of low-tech subsistence fishers.  Most people in prehistoric Europe lived near the water, because that’s where the food was.  In the days before trawlers, the oyster population was astonishing.  Many were the size of dinner plates, and some oyster reefs were so big that they hindered navigation.  The Thames and Rhine rivers had huge salmon runs.  There were massive sturgeons in the Rhine delta.  It was an era of glorious abundance.

With the passage of centuries, tribal subsistence fishing eventually mutated into a business, and sustainability drifted away into the mists of the past.  Commercial fishers had an entirely different mindset, one with vivid fantasies of wealth and power.  Some refer to it as get-rich-quick fever, a painful incurable spiritual disease.  Using the technology of the day, they caught as many fish as possible, and converted them into money.  No matter how much they made, their burning hunger for treasure could never be satisfied. 

Over time, new technology enabled fishers to increase their landings.  By 1848, the “inexhaustible” halibut fishery on Georges Bank crashed, after a mere decade of overfishing.  It was once common to catch halibut as big as a man, but these fish are rarely seen at markets today.  The advent of steam-powered trawlers radically increased overfishing.  Today there are $89 million floating fish factories, 480 feet long, that can catch and freeze 440 tons of fish per day, and store 7,700 tons in the hold.  The Technology Fairy is a demon.

In 1500, there were 4,400,000 tons of cod off Newfoundland.  By 2003, there were just 55,000 tons.  Cod fishing was shut down in 1992, and 44,000 people lost their jobs.  The cod have yet to show signs of recovery.  The same is true for the North Sea mackerel, which collapsed in the 1970’s.  Tuna, sharks, and swordfish are swimming briskly down the Dinosaur Trail.

Experts calculate that global fish production peaked in 1988, and may now be declining at a rate of 770,000 tons per year.  Production statistics don’t include bycatch — the fish, sea mammals, birds, and turtles that are caught but tossed back, because they can’t be sold.  Nobody keeps records on bycatch, but some believe that one-third of the global catch is dumped overboard, almost all of it dead or dying, usually because of ruptured swim bladders or drowning.

Clover complains that we can put a man on the moon, but no nation does a competent job of managing fisheries, with the possible exception of Iceland.  Everybody can see that the industry is heading for disaster.  There are already plenty of intelligent rules on the books, but effective enforcement is almost non-existent.  Overfishing generates good income, fuels the economy, and hurts no one except for our children, the aquatic ecosystem, and poor people in foreign countries — none of whom can vote.  The bottom line is that nobody will voluntarily back off, because the fish that you don’t catch will be caught by someone else. 

Monthly payments on modern boats are huge, and for many fishers, the only way to pay the bills is to catch and sell illegal fish.  There are many ways of getting illegal fish to market.  Port inspectors often look the other way, especially in Spain and Portugal.  Extremely inaccurate paperwork is submitted and accepted.  Illegal fish are delivered in mismarked boxes.  If an inspector appears at port A, the boat will unload at port B, and truck the catch to the processor.  Few violators get busted and punished.  The huge economic benefits of pirate fishing far exceed the trivial risks.

Four times every day, all fish stop what they’re doing, bow their heads, and fervently pray for World War III on the dry land above, because world wars put a halt to most fishing activities.  War provides a much-appreciated break from the underwater mass extermination.  They also pray for skyrocketing energy prices, catastrophic stock market crashes, and major bankruptcies in the seafood sector.  They’re sick and tired of being the target of genocidal maniacs.  Who can blame them?

During the research process, Clover was surprised to discover that McDonalds got a top score for their fish, all of which is certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).  At the opposite end of the spectrum are most chi-chi restaurants.  World-famous celebrities, who would never dream of wearing a fur coat, are often photographed with famous chefs who serve the seafood equivalent of rhinoceros steaks or condor barbeque — species on the brink of extinction, like the extremely endangered tuna served at gold-plated sushi places.  MSC-certified fish is also sold at Wal-Mart.

Clover has no kind words for aquaculture, which many perceive to be the amazing high-tech “solution” to all of our seafood problems.  Industry is vacuuming up the smaller fish in the ocean to make feed for high value fish raised in horrid concentration camps.  This game cannot last long.  Be aware that “organic” farmed salmon is given feed made from overfished species.

Thankfully, Clover provides us with a brilliant alternative to aquaculture.  Rather than feeding low-value fish to concentration camp salmon, why don’t we simply eat the perfectly edible blue whiting, herring, horse mackerel, and sand eels?  They could provide us with excellent high quality protein and oils that totally bypass the mega-harmful worlds of agriculture and aquaculture.  Eating small wild fish is healthier for us, much less cruel, causes less harm to the seas, and makes us feel like an intelligent species.

Did you know that recreational fishers catch 30 percent of the cod taken off the coast of Maine?  Did you know that about 25 percent of “catch and release” fish die soon after being returned to the water?  Sport fishers now have sonar, fish finders, GPS systems, and small fast boats.  Their impact is not insignificant.  Anglers often break the rules, and their chances of getting caught are close to nil.

Clover provides us with intelligent, effective, commonsense solutions that are politically impossible, unfortunately.  We should set aside 50 percent of the ocean as reserves where fishing is prohibited.  We should also cut back industrial fishing by 50 percent.  We should create an aggressive full-scale oceanic police force that would have absolute authority to promptly end illegal fishing, and provide extra-generous punishment to offenders.  We should consume less fish, and shop more mindfully.  And so on.  “We have on offer two futures.  One requires difficult, active choices starting now.  If we don’t take those choices, the other future will happen anyway.”

Clover, Charles, The End of the Line, The New Press, New York, 2006.

Swimming in Circles

Swimming in Circles is an unflattering exposé on salt water aquaculture and the mindset that promotes it.  Author Paul Molyneaux has watched Maine's fishing industry go from boom to bust in his lifetime.  Old timers lament that the coast was once so crowded with big fish that you could almost walk across the water on their backs — no more.  In recent years there has been a growing exodus of ex-fishermen, and many communities are in the process of becoming boarded-up ghost towns.  Buying a pair of shoes can require a 100 mile round trip.

Maine’s seafood industry was driven into the ground by perpetual overfishing.  Despite sharply declining catches, the industry vigorously resisted stronger regulations and better enforcement.  Instead, they got bigger boats, and they fished harder.  They bought the latest technology, which allowed them to locate and land surviving schools of fish.  Powerful magical thinking insisted that abundant fish were still out there, somewhere, regardless of the increasingly empty nets.  Economic growth was their one and only sacred objective, and they were committed to pursue it by any means necessary.

Just in the nick of time, the Technology Fairy appeared and filled the coast with salmon farms — a new fish industry!  Hooray!  These were huge cages in which salmon were raised in high density, and spent their miserable lives swimming in circles in filth and pesticides.  Of course, when any creatures exist in unnatural crowding, diseases hear the call to duty.  The farms were owned by multinational corporations and they did an excellent job of spreading pests and diseases to other sites around the world.  They also excelled at automation — producing more fish while shrinking their workforce to barebones, much to the displeasure of impoverished coastal communities.

A virus called infectious salmon anemia (ISA) has killed millions of captive fish, and it readily spreads to wild fish communities outside the pens.  Farm salmon receive vaccine, but the virus displays an impressive ability to rapidly mutate and evade silver bullet cures.  Each rise and fall of the tides flushes the toilet for the fish farm, sweeping pests, pathogens, antibiotics, and poop soup out into the open sea, much to the displeasure of the wild ecosystem.

Salmon farming seems to be on a collision course with disaster.  Industry boosters boast that salmon convert two pounds of feed into one pound of fish, which is far more efficient than chicken or pigs.  But farm salmon consume feed made from fish meal and fish oil, which come from low-value wild fish that are being harvested at unsustainable rates.  Rising energy costs, combined with over-fishing, ensure rising prices for fish feed, and raise questions about its future.

Cattle consume the primary production of the land: grass.  Likewise, wild salmon consume the primary production of the sea: plankton, which provides 85 percent of their diet.  But feed made from fish comes from higher on the food chain, so its ecological footprint is far greater than the normal healthy diet that majors in plankton.  Thus, the amazing efficiency of salmon farms is based on expensive feed that is the equivalent of super-charged rocket fuel.

Feed pellets for salmon contain processed low-value fish (and their pollutants), dye (to make the flesh orange, like wild salmon), pesticides (for sea lice), and vaccines.  Salmon that consume this fish-based feed have been found to contain 13 organic pollutants at levels ten times higher than in wild fish — and half of them remain in your body ten years after dinner.  Because of the high PCB levels, pregnant women, and women who plan to become pregnant have been advised not to consume farm salmon.  Slice, the sea lice pesticide, contaminates the scallops living in the region.

Several chapters in the book discuss shrimp farming, which is popular in warmer regions.  It’s extremely profitable, extremely vulnerable to viral diseases, extremely harmful to traditional subsistence fishing, and it ravages coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves.  Many of these farms have gone belly up because of bad management and disease.  Tyson lost a billion dollars when it tried to cash in on shrimp farming.  Some folks are experimenting with land-based operations, where the shrimp are raised in aerated tanks.  This isolates the process from the disease pathogens that frequently ravage coastal shrimp farms.

Salt water aquaculture is not about producing low-cost protein and reducing world hunger.  It’s about providing highly profitable seafood products to a well-fed (and poorly informed) elite.  Profit is the keyword here.  Problems could greatly be reduced by raising the critters in lower densities, but stockholders won’t trade profits for quality.  They demand perpetual growth and maximum profits.  In its current mode, this is not an industry with a long-term future. 

Salt water aquaculture is fundamentally unsustainable, and Molyneaux sees no light at the end of the tunnel.  Wild fish are also in poor shape.  In 1992, the famous Newfoundland cod fishery crashed, and Canada banned cod fishing.  The cod have yet to recover.  Possible reasons include pollution, habitat destruction, and overfishing.  The tsunami of human overpopulation is causing severe damage to aquatic ecosystems.  Some worry that growing acidity may make the oceans uninhabitable for most forms of sea life, which may lead to a golden age for jellyfish.

Freshwater aquaculture is beyond the scope of this book, but it is rapidly growing, producing fish like carp, tilapia, and catfish.  Chinese peasants have been farming fish for 3,000 years, using a time-proven, low-tech system that recycles wastes and produces fish in a manner that may actually be sustainable.  Modern profit-driven corporate freshwater aquaculture is an entirely different matter, of course.

Molyneaux concludes: “The only hope springs from a sober realization of how far off course the ship of humanity has strayed, and how absurd the suite of technological solutions we are presented with really is.  If the future belongs to everyone, then it requires new models and a different way of thinking.”

I cannot disagree, but I think Peak Cheap Energy is going to be a godsend for the oceans.  Fish mining is resource-intensive, especially in its twenty-first century mode of energy-guzzling, high-tech floating seafood factories, towing miles-long nets.  The transition to sailboats and rowboats will sharply reduce fish-mining efficiency, and will likely destroy corporate fish mining as we know it.  Oceanic ecosystems will never return to what they were 500 years ago, but it seems likely that Peak Cheap Energy will sharply cut current forms of destruction, and this fills me with limited optimism, sort of.

Molyneaux, Paul, Swimming in Circles — Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2007.