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Raven Johnson
Professor Dursema
ENG 1010
11/21/15

The Dark Side of the Thriving Fishing Industry

Earths oceans are the most vast and mysterious part of our world. We
know more about the surface of Mars and the dark side of the moon than we
do about our very own ocean. With valleys deeper than the Grand Canyon,
peaks reaching as high above sea level as volcanoes, and only 5% of its
floors explored, the ocean easily contains the highest amount of biodiversity
in the world. This biodiversity is not only essential to the stability of the
entire planets ecosystem, but it has immeasurable intrinsic value. Because
of the growing human population and the resulting increased consumption of
fish, this beautiful and mysterious underwater world is at risk, and instead of
taking much needed conservations measures, our government is actually
funding the unethical practice of overfishing and deep sea trawling.
Its clear that aquaculture plays an important role in our ecosystem, in
2008 fish accounted for just over 15% of the global populations animal
protein intake and 6.1% of all protein consumed according to the 2010 World
Review of Fisheries and Aquaculture by the Food and Agriculture

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Organization of the United States (FAO), but it also plays a large part in our
economy as millions depend on fishing as a means of livelihood and income.
But what cost are we really paying when we support the steadily growing
fishing industry? Humans have nearly depleted marine life in coastal areas
for food so we keep moving farther into the deep sea destroying precious
coral reef and diminishing entire communities of fish. None of this would be
possible though, without government subsidies.
Rashid Sumaila and Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia
Fisheries Centre found that without these subsidies of $150 million US
dollars, deep sea fisheries would operate at a loss of $50 million a year
(SeaWeb). Most of this money pays for fuel, which is only necessary because
of how far out the boats have to go to find fish.
Not only does deep sea fishing cost millions of dollars in fuel, but it
targets the most vulnerable communities of fish. [Deep sea fish] have
evolved to live a very long time so they can get the chance to reproduce
many times. Anything that shortens their lifespan defeats their primary way
of surviving says Selina Heppell, an ecologist from Oregon State University
(SeaWeb). Species of fish who live in shallow waters near coastal areas
should have greater resilience because they breed often and produce large
amounts of offspring, these are the only species that would be ethical for fish
for yet they are the communities we have already nearly depleted.

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As the fishers go farther out to sea, they run into more obstacles than
just reaching the depths with their nets, coral makes catching fish harder so
in some places, theyve began to drag large chains over the ocean floor to
take out coral before scooping up the fish to prevent their nets from tearing.
Some of the coral being destroyed can be dated back before the pyramids
were built, so they hold invaluable historical records, and the species of fish
in these areas could take centuries to recover at this point.
Overfishing to the point of depletion in parts of the ocean is not a
practice that is new, but one that should be outdated by now. Author
Nathaniel Philbrick talks in his book In the Heart of the Sea about a time as
early as 1760 that whalers in search of oil from whale fat wiped out an entire
population of whales off the coast of New England forcing the whalers to
venture father into the sea making their trips longer, more dangerous, and
more expensive (6). Instead of evolving, learning from past mistakes, and
searching for better ways to harvest sea life, we continue to mimic this
pattern causing inevitable doom not only to ocean life, but to ourselves.
[It] is not surprising that industrial-scale fishing should generally not
be sustainable: industrial-scale hunting, on land, would not be, either states
an article Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries published on nature.com.
If the government spent money finding ways to regulate fishing in the
coastal areas instead of spending money to find new ways to fish deeper and
destroy more coral, fishing would have a chance at being a sustainable
industry.

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In the Netherlands, the government has a sustainable fishing policy
that requires all fish sold to be certified. This means that the fish was caught
without damaging seabeds or collecting unwanted by-catch which gets
thrown back into the ocean as garbage. The Dutch government, the fishing
industry, and the European Union work together to develop new ways to
make fishing sustainable while still keeping it profitable. In an article The
Netherlands Raises the Bar on Sustaianable Fishing written for
theguardian.com, Huw Spanner explains one strategy that effectively got the
country to switch to sustainable fishing, The North Sea Foundation (NSF)
and WWF-Netherlands produced a traffic light card advising consumers
which fish they could eat with a clear conscience, which they had best avoid,
and which they shouldnt touch on any account. Spanner goes on to explain
how with this knowledge consumers became more conscious of where their
fish came from forcing the unsustainable fisheries to switch to newer, more
ethical methods of fishing. While the changes were initially difficult and
expensive to make, they have not only saved parts of the ocean but much of
the industry that was struggling with fuel costs.
While it may seem at first like a good thing that the fishing industry is
growing, profitable, and finding new creative ways to catch more fish is more
parts of the ocean, and providing jobs to millions, if we continue to support it
the way that it is currently operating without making drastic changes, there
will soon be no fish left in the ocean, and therefore no fishing industry at all.
Switching to more regulated and ethical ways of fishing will in the long run

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save both money and jobs, but perhaps more importantly, our ocean and the
countless lives that inhabit it.
As Aldo Leopold profoundly put it in his essay The Land Ethic There is
as yet no ethic dealing with mans relation to land and to the animals and
plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus slave-girls, is still property.
The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not
obligations (203). Although this was written in the 1940s it is still sadly true
today. It is the responsibility of the consumer to be more aware of the
products they are eating and the responsibility of the government to provide
subsidies more wisely so that we do not one day deplete the entirety of our
natural resources, especially the largest and possibly most valuable one, our
ocean.

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Works Cited
FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department. The State of World Fisheries and
Aquaculture 2010.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States. Rome: 2010.
Print.
Leopold, Aldo. The land Ethic: A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1949.
Print.
Pauly, Daniel, Villy Christensen, Sylvie Guenette, Tony J. Pitcher, Rashid
Sumaila, Carl J. Walters,

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R. Watson, Dirk Zeller. Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries.
Vancouver: Nature Publishing Group, 2002. Print.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship
Essex. New York:
Penguin Books, 2015. Print.
SeaWeb. The Last Wild Hunt: Deep-sea Fisheries Scrape Bottom of the Sea.
San Fransisco:
SeaWeb, 2007. Pdf File.
Spanner, Huw. The Netherlands raises the bar on sustainable fishing.
Theguardian.com.
Guardian News and Media Limited. 2015. Web. 22 November, 2015.