The crisis of the fisheries is similar to our economy. This is not one fishery failing, but the whole system.
Daniel Pauly
While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people - even those who profess great environmental consciousness - continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice.
Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.
Tilapia have often been represented as the aquatic chicken, and it's perfectly justified.
Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.
We transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there.
An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. Therefore, they're not perceived as a big loss.
In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families.
People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.
If you think of having a family as being loved as a child, cared for - I did not experience that.
There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish.
I'm developing a physiological theory of growth and oxygen requirement. If it's well-understood how fish require oxygen to grow, then we can understand how to deal with the impact of global warming.
I personally like the idea of shellfish aquaculture. These are animals that stay quiet, they stay where you put them, and they clean up the water.
