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(This illustrates the folly of equating ecological limits with
neo-Malthusianism.)
NY Times Op-Ed, May 10 2015
When Humans Declared War on Fish
By PAUL GREENBERG and BORIS WORM
ON Friday we humans observed V-E Day, the end to one part of a global
catastrophe that cost the planet at least 60 million lives. But if we
were fish, we would have marked the day differently — as the beginning
of a campaign of violence against our taxonomic classes, one that has
resulted in trillions of casualties.
Oddly, the war itself was a great reprieve for many marine species. Just
as Axis and Allied submarines and mines made the transportation of war
matériel a highly perilous endeavor, they similarly interfered with
fishing. The ability to catch staple seafoods, like cod, declined
markedly. Freed from human pursuit, overexploited species multiplied in
abundance.
But World War II also brought a leap in human ingenuity, power and
technical ability that led to an unprecedented assault on our oceans.
Not only did ships themselves become larger, faster and more numerous,
but the war-derived technologies they carried exponentially increased
their fishing power.
Take sonar. Before the 1930s, electronic echolocation was a barely
functioning concept. It allowed operators to trace the vague contours of
the seafloor topography and crudely track the pathway of a large moving
object. But the war pushed forward dramatic advances in sonar
technology; by its end, sophisticated devices, developed for hunting
submarines, had grown infinitely more precise, and could now be
repurposed to hunt fish.
Schools of fish could soon be pinpointed to within a few yards, and
clearly differentiated from the sea’s bottom. Coupled with high-powered
diesel engines that had been developed during the global conflict, the
modern fishing vessel became a kind of war machine with a completely new
arsenal: lightweight polymer-based nets, monofilament long lines that
could extend for miles and onboard freezers capable of storing a day’s
catch for months at a time.
Even human resources developed during the war were later redirected
toward fishing: Japanese fighter pilots adept at spotting subsurface
Allied submarines were later retrained to look for whales. Likewise,
more than a few former Allied pilots found postwar employment hunting
bluefin tuna and Atlantic menhaden.
In some ways, the “war machine” wasn’t a metaphor. Across South Asia,
leftover explosives were “recycled” for “bomb fishing,” an obscenely
destructive way of killing coastal fish, which turned many coral reefs
into rubble fields. And the technological overkill continued into the
Cold War era: Satellite imagery and GPS technology originally intended
to track the movements of the Soviet nuclear arsenal eventually allowed
well-populated fish habitats to be clearly identified from space.
Because the war incentivized the creation of ships with much longer
oceangoing ranges, it also meant that fishing was transformed from a
local endeavor into a global one. “Industrial fishing,” maybe the first
globalized economic enterprise, meant the wholesale, permanent
occupation of marine ecosystems, instead of the local raids practiced by
previous generations.
In addition, emerging economies of scale meant that it wasn’t just the
target fish that suffered. With the invention of postwar super trawlers
that scooped up everything in their path, a sort of scorched-earth
approach to fishing became commonplace.
Taken collectively, the rise of postwar fishing technology meant that
the global reported catch rose from some 15 million metric tons at war’s
end to 85 million metric tons today — the equivalent, in weight, of the
entire human population at the turn of the 20th century, removed from
the sea each and every year.
Only the turn of the third millennium saw a new kind of reprieve, this
time not caused by human adversity, but by the insight that we need to
make peace with other species as well. Growing signs of exhaustion and
failure in global fisheries made humans reconsider the totality of their
assault.
Marine protected areas, an environmental version of a demilitarized
zone, started to spring up, and now cover some 3.5 percent of the ocean.
Countries formerly at war began to work together to hammer out new deals
for fish, exemplified by both the recent revision of the Common
Fisheries Policy in Europe and new efforts underway at the United
Nations to better regulate fishing on the high seas, the 60 percent of
the oceans outside national control.
Collateral damage to sharks, turtles, whales and sea birds is
increasingly becoming unacceptable. And some of those same technologies
once used to kill fish with precision are now being used to save them:
War-inspired satellite technology is being deployed to identify and
pursue rogue vessels fishing illegally.
But in remembering the end of World War II and the deliberate steps that
led to a lasting peace, we might contemplate a broader Marshall Plan,
which would further restrain our destructive tendencies and
technological powers elsewhere, not just in fishing the oceans, but in
mining, drilling and otherwise exploiting them.
To be sure, the postwar assault on fish mostly sprang from an honorable
intention to feed a growing human population that boomed in a prosperous
postwar world. But as in war, everybody loses when there is nothing left
to fight for. Only when we fully embrace that simple fact, and act
accordingly, will our celebrations resonate among what the author Henry
Beston called those “other nations caught with ourselves in the net of
life and time.”
Paul Greenberg is the author, most recently, of “American Catch.” Boris
Worm is a professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie
University, Nova Scotia.
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