Catch of the Day: Can Dwindling Fish Stocks Continue to Sustain Us?

Fish is a huge part of the diets of many poor, coastal people. It's a huge part of the diets of many wealthy coastal people too, but the wealthy have options. When I hear about the depletion of the ocean's fish stocks and past and coming crashes, I get concerned about those who use fish as a subsistence food. While we can grow fish in human-created environments and can even grow them on land, it's much simpler for people to harvest them from the ocean. Unfortunately, those days may be coming to an end.

Shall we who have the luxury of choice simply throw our hands up in the air and say that it's the fault of those who subsist on fish? We certainly have had a role too, what with our interest in tuna for sushi and the feeding of fish to our pets. Fish have been feeders that sustain the world of industrial food. But I digress. We do need to steward what fish stocks we have left, and use them sensibly. There are projects that focus on reducing particularly damaging methods of fish harvesting, methods like blasting all of the fish in an area and scooping them up from the surface.

However, we need to do more than that if we are going to reframe how we fish. We need to begin to see ourselves as fish stewards, rather than those who harvest the bounty of the oceans. Some who fish on a small scale already practice this approach. They work to restore mangrove swamps and riparian areas so that fish can have a place to breed. They even work to intervene in the life cycles of aquatic animals, helping them breed.

There are fishermen in Thailand who used to hunt for crabs. That was fine, except that the crabs kept on getting smaller and fewer in numbers, so their jobs were becoming more difficult. They started a crab nursery, capturing the female crabs so that the females could steward the young crabs in peace, without having their babies eaten or washed away. Now, the crab population is gradually increasing.

It is thoughts like these that make a huge difference to our fish stocks. For those who subsist on fish and other aquatic animals, moving from a hunting mentality to a stewardship mentality may be the change that saves food, livelihood, and fish stocks. If we want to eat fish, we can no longer collect the fish that we want to eat without giving something back, each and every time.