Paying The Price For Human Health
My newspaper’s front page recently featured a major study that found men who eat fish at least once a week cut their risk of sudden cardiac death in half.
“There’s certainly no detriment to eating more fish,” said Dr. Robert Eckel of the University of Colorado who is also on the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association.
If you flipped to Page 7 in the same Globe, more than 1,600 scientists from 65 nations warned that our oceans are in deep trouble from pollution, coastal overdevelopment, and overfishing.
“Too much is taken from the sea,” said Patricia Morse, a biologist at Northeastern University, one of those scientists.
It will be no surprise if the medical studies spark more fish consumption, no matter what biologists say. Fish tastes good. Fish are part of our economic history. Cod are associated with Massachusetts. A lobster has been on the license plate of Maine. Salmon, shrimp and crab are synonymous with the Pacific Northwest, New Orleans, and Maryland, respectively.
Not only are fish delicious, but they inspire nothing of a human nature. They are slimy and cold to the touch. They have frozen eyes and the face of a grump. We may talk about their schooling behavior, but that is nothing compared to how we laud the power, intelligence, and playfulness of lions, dolphins, sea lions, monkeys, and owls.
We have come to treat fish more like corn than koalas. The fishing industry is only too happy to oblige, calling its catches a “harvest.” In classrooms and Imax movies, the image still lingers of fishermen as small bands of half-shaven souls with deeply etched faces who battle giant swells on small boats to risk their lives for an unsure bounty.
But the wildest imagination of bumper crops by Nebraska cornhuskers or full nets by the man at the wheel in Gloucester cannot touch what is happening underwater. In wealthy countries, fishing boats are the technological equivalent of Sherman’s army. Giant trawlers with satellite tracking and sonar lay nets that are either wide enough to entrap several 747s or long enough to stretch over 30 miles, with thousands of hooks.
Such ships catch not only so much of their intended prey, but also kill 20 million tons of “bycatch,” unwanted fish that are then discarded. That 20 million tons is the equivalent of 10 pounds of food for every person on Earth, according to the National Audubon Society, the World Wildlife Fund and other groups. The collapse of cod and haddock in Georges Bank is well known to New Englanders. In U.S. waters, 36 percent of the fish species regulated by the federal government are overfished and 44 percent are being fished at the maximum level.
The endangerment of fish has no relation to the price you see at the market. For instance, fresh swordfish was $3.99 a pound last week at Bay State Lobster. What the label does not say is that virtually all of the swordfish we now consume are baby swordfish. Thirty years ago, the average weight of a swordfish brought to market was 266 pounds. Today it is 90 pounds.
Swordfish are but one of the fish that are the ocean’s equivalent of lions, tigers, and bears, top-of-the-chain predators that are disappearing faster than Dorothy can say “Oh my.” The estimated number of adult bluefin tuna (eight years and older) in the western Atlantic Ocean has dropped 90 percent since 1975, from 225,000 to 22,000. Between 1979 and 1989, the catch of shark in U.S. waters rose from 300,000 pounds to 16 million pounds. Some species of coastal sharks dropped 80 percent in the last decade.
The crisis of wild Pacific salmon is well known and in a move to prevent what happened in Georges Bank, the federal government two weeks ago imposed severe limits on cod, sole, and rockfish in the Pacific. The fishing of pollock in the north Pacific and abalone off California has not only decimated the fish but taken food away from seabirds and sea lions.
Globally, this is a crisscross crisis. Most of the bluefin tuna caught in the Atlantic goes to Japan while we in the United States devour shrimp from south Asia and bay scallops from China.
Like the United States, the United Nations says 70 percent of the commercial fisheries are either at the limit of exploitation or in decline. Now that the waters of the wealthy are exhausted, much of the new exploitation comes off the shores of poor nations where fish constitute up to a third of a person’s protein.
The biologists can chart the decline. Governments can impose limits. But something else has to happen. Up to now, wealthy countries assume that what is good for us is our birthright to consume. Fish show us that there is a limit to that assumption. Fish are good for the heart, but such knowledge will soon be of little use if we cut the heart out of the ocean.
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