After decades of flourishing as the North Star for fisheries managers, activist consumers, and, even corporate America, sustainable seafood fell victim to climate change in the Gulf of Alaska. There, on December 6, in one of the best-managed fishing grounds the world has ever known, biologists declared that there weren’t enough Pacific cod to sustain a fishery. The water had simply become too warm for cod to reproduce.
The closing of that fishery, no matter how long it lasts, should end all doubt that sustainable wild harvested fisheries are environmental fictions that no longer serve utility in the era of climate catastrophe. (This op-ed, and its claims, focuses strictly on wild-harvested fisheries. It make no claims about aquaculture or farmed fish, which, too, will face new realities with climate change, only different ones that are beyond the scope of this op-ed.)
If ever there was a place where good management and human ingenuity should have sustained a wild harvest, it was in the Gulf of Alaska, where state and federal agencies annually spend millions of dollars on research and management. From here forward, the longer we perpetuate the myth of sustainability in fisheries the more lasting damage we will do to fish populations, fishermen, and, ultimately, the eaters who want to consume fish.
To explain why this is so, we need to travel back to the birth of sustainable seafood, which, we too, can trace back to a single, momentous day: July 2, 1992.
On that day, thousands of miles east of the Gulf of Alaska, the Canadian government closed the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic to cod fishing. The shock to the globe’s markets and to local and international fishermen was palpable: the Grand Banks had provided cod for the world’s eaters for at least half a millennium and jobs for much of the East Coast of Canada and for nearly as long as that. In a day, they were gone.
In that case, the culprit was overfishing, not climate.
Before the closure, Canadian fisheries managers had attempted for decades to reign in overexploitation. They fashioned new forms of international environmental cooperation, built cutting-edge models for catch rates, and extended Canadian management jurisdiction out 200 miles to cover most of the famed Banks. These innovations are now pillars of modern sustainable fisheries management, but they failed to stop the cod’s collapse at the hands of advancements in maritime technologiesnew diesel engines, at-sea freezing, and advances in underwater mapping, among themthat had been forged during World War II to inflict mass casualties on enemies other than fish.
But then something remarkable happened: Humans learned a few lessons.
In the next decade, sustainable seafood took its modern form, emerging as a movement of consumers, fishermen, governments, corporations, and NGOsa maritime analogue to the terrestrially-focused local food movement. These actors sought to rectify the mistakes of the past by ending over fishing and protecting the integrity of ecosystems, all while ensuring consumers would have fish to eat in the future.
2019 New Food Economy