Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (32 page)

While fish farm production can still increase considerably in sheltered inshore waters, with the currently available feed supply there are three ways in which production could become much larger.

First, aquaculture operations can move offshore, where the pens can be anchored below the surface to avoid the destructive power of storms. There are already a number of pilot offshore aquaculture operations in service around the world. A float at the surface is tethered to a submerged feeding tube that can be pulled to the surface by a ship servicing tens of such cages along the continental shelves. The activists are so strongly opposed to fish farming that they have set themselves preemptively against open ocean fish farms, where all of the previously mentioned supposed environmental harms have even less validity. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has proposed greatly expanding fish farming in the internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zones that extend 200 miles from each nation’s shoreline. The U.S. wants to sell multiyear leases to fish farmers based on a percentage of their sales. In these open waters, wastes from the fish are greatly diluted and washed away with the currents to be absorbed by algae. Experimental offshore fish farms miles from shore have raised halibut, cod, red snapper, and tuna. The response from the environmentalist community has been predictable wailing over the “industrializing” of the seas by greedy big business. Anne Mosness with the anti-biotech, antidevelopment Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy told the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
that the U.S.’s open ocean proposal is “the equivalent of having a hog farm in a city park flushing its wastes into the street.”
[24]
Pure nonsense.

Second, if geneticists can enhance land crops like soybeans and corn so that they contain omega-3 oils and other essential nutrients, this will vastly increase the feed supply. It will then make more economic sense to feed these crops to fish rather than to less efficient land animals. Don’t worry: there will still be steaks for the barbecue and bacon for breakfast, but it would be very good for all of us who eat meat if fish consumption went up and consumption of red meat went down.

Third, we will learn how to use the waste from fish farms as a way of feeding shellfish grown nearby. The beauty of shellfish, such as oysters, mussels, and clams, is that they obtain their food from plankton growing in the ocean: there is no need to feed them directly. Plankton thrive on the nutrients from fish waste. Designed properly, the combination of finfish and shellfish farming could dramatically increase seafood production while simultaneously removing any excess nutrients from the ocean.

There is every reason to believe that we could increase seafood production by five to ten times over the next century while at the same time improving the environment for wild fisheries. We are quite capable of managing wild fisheries sustainably. The real problem is our inability to manage fish stocks that spend their time in international waters or migrating from one country’s territory into another’s. The collapse of the Atlantic cod and Atlantic salmon were both the result of 15 or more nations’ fishing fleets competing for the same fish with no coordinated management plan. In the North Pacific, where only four countries—Canada, the U.S., Japan, and Russia—had fleets, they were able to create formal agreements that resulted in considerable success in managing halibut and salmon sustainably.

The greatest obstacle to the sustainable management of many fisheries is the classic “tragedy of the commons.” It is virtually automatic that a species will be overfished if it is a public resource with no effective management system in place. As each fisherman or fishing fleet tries to maximize its catch, so do all the others. This leads to declining stocks and declining catches, which spiral downward and end in collapse. It is easy to blame this on “corporate greed” and other such scapegoats, but it is really the lack of any institutional framework for effective management that is to blame.

One of the most effective ways to overcome this tragedy is to establish a system of allocations known as individual tradable quotas (ITQs). Each fisherman buys or is granted a quota, allowing him or her to catch a certain amount of a given species with a particular type of gear. The sum of the individual quotas is the allowable catch, which can be raised or lowered, affecting everyone’s quota proportionally. The quotas can be bought and sold on the open market, so the healthier the stock the more value the quotas have. Therefore it is in every fisherman’s interest to ensure that the stocks are healthy, and so they will support reductions in catch when necessary. Through private interest a self-policing system emerges that results in the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. It is the triumph of self-interest, transforming “greed” into “need.”

The only problem with the ITQ system is that many so-called environmental groups, entrenched fishing interests, and leftist activists remain vehemently opposed to it. Even though there are well-established successful examples, such as the Alaskan salmon fishery and the Dungeness crab fishery, they object to the “privatization” of a public resource. They argue that because fish are a public resource all members of the public should have access to them and that ITQs amount to turning public property into a private monopoly. Certainly there are some good examples of socialism, like universal health care, but free-for-all fishing isn’t one of them. Under the ITQ system, the public, through government, receives their rent from the fishermen through a royalty, some of which can be used to enhance the fishery. In the end, it is the seafood-consuming public that is the real beneficiary, certainly more so than if the species were wiped out through lack of effective management.

[1]
. Paper Buying for Individuals: Go Ancient Forest Friendly, Greenpeace International, December 3, 2008, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/forests/solutions/paper-buying-for-individuals

[2]
. Steven Hedlund, “FAO: Aquaculture Nearly Half of Global Seafood Production,”
SeafoodSource
, March 2, 2009, http://www.
seafoodsource
.com/newsarticledetail.aspx?id=2678

[3]
. UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “World Review of Fisheries and Aquaculture,” ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/011/i0250e/i0250e01.pdf

[4]
. Optimal Heart Health, “Heart Attack and the Benefit of Fish Oil,” http://www.optimal-heart-health.com/benefitoffishoil.html

[5]
. Laterlife, “Oily Fish Reduces the Risk of Dementia and Alzheimer’s,” May 2004 http://www.laterlife.com/laterlife-oily-fish.htm

[6]
. Martha Clare Morris et al., “Consumption of Fish and n-3 Fatty Acids and Risk of Incident Alzheimer Disease,”
Archives of Neurology
60, no. 7 (July 2003).

[7]
. Salmon Farming Backgrounder, Wilderness Committee, http://wildernesscommittee.org/what_we_do/salmon_farming_backgrounder

[8]
. West Greenland Commission, “West Greenland Fishery Sampling Agreement,” 2008, http://www.nasco.int/sas/pdf/wgc(08)06.pdf

[9]
. Stephen Leahy, “Fish Farms Pushing Wild Salmon to Extinction,” December 14, 2007, http://ipsnorthamerica.net/print.php?idnews=1218

[10]
. Martin Krkosek, Jennifer S. Ford, Alexandra Morton, Subhash Lele, Ransom A. Myers, Mark A. Lewis: “Declining Wild Salmon Populations in Relation to Parasites from Farm Salmon,”
Science
318, no. 5857 (December 14, 2007): 1772-1775.

[11]
. Brian E. Riddell, Richard J. Beamish, Laura J. Richards, John R. Candy: “Comment on ‘Declining Wild Salmon Populations in Relation to Parasites from Farm Salmon’,”
Science
322, no. 5909: 1790 (December 19, 2008). DOI: 10.1126/science.1156341

[12]
. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, “Facts About Sea Lice,” November 3, 2009, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/aquaculture/lice-pou/lice-pou04-eng.htm

[13]
. “Sockeye Run Estimates Upped to 34 Million,” Michael Loubet,
FIS Canada
, September 1, 2010, http://fis.com/fis/worldnews/worldnews.asp?l=e&country=0&special=&monthyear=&day=&id=37982&ndb=1&df=0

[14]
. “Critics Claim Wild Fish Still At Risk From Farm Stock,” Carlito Pablo, Straight.com, September 2, 2010, http://www.straight.com/article-341759/vancouver/critics-claim-wild-fish-risk-farm-stock

[15]
. European Parliament, “The Fish Meal and Fish Oil Industry: Its Role in the Common Fisheries Policy,” December 2003, http://www.consult-poseidon.com/reports/EP%20Role%20of%20Fish%20Oil-Meal%20in%20the%20CFP.pdf

[16]
. Mera Pharmaceuticals, “Carotenoids,”

http://www.astaxanthin.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3:carotenoids&catid=14:general&Itemid=4#Q2

[17]
. Health Marketplace, “Canthaxanthin,” http://www.health-marketplace.com/Canthaxanthin.htm

[18]
. Emma L. Teuten, Li Xu, Christopher M. Reddy, “Two Abundant Bioaccumulated Halogenated Compounds Are Natural Products,”
Science
307, no. 5711 (February 11, 2005),: 917-920.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/307/5711/917?hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&FIRSTINDEX=0&maxtoshow=&HITS=10&fulltext=whale+pcb&searchid=1&resourcetype=HWCIT

[19]
. Ronald Hite et al, “Global Assessment of Organic Contaminants in Farmed Salmon,”
Science
303, no. 5655 (January 9, 2005),: 226-229. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/303/5655/226

[20]
. Sierra Williams, Jon Buchholz, Krystin Habighorst, and Will Newberr, “Persistent Organic Pollutants in Alaskan Consumers,” March 22, 2004,

http://seagrant.uaf.edu/nosb/papers/2004/soldotna-pops.html

[21]
. James West, Sandra O’Neill, Greg Lippert and Stephen Quinnell, “Toxic Contaminants in Marine and Anadromous Fishes From Puget Sound, Washington: Results of the Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program Fish Component, 1989-1999,” August 2001, http://wdfw.wa.gov/fish/psamp/toxiccontaminants.pdf

[22]
. Susan Sampson, “The Great Salmon Debate,”
Toronto Star
, September 15, 2004, http://www.beattystreetpublishing.com/confessions/references/the-great-salmon-debate

[23]
. The Demarketing of Farmed Salmon, Vivian Krause, April 23, 2010,

http://fairquestions.typepad.com/files/demarketingfarmedsalmon30s.pdf

[24]
. Bruce McClure, “Bush Seeks Expansion of Offshore Fish Farms,”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, June 8, 2005, http://www.seattlepi.com/local/227623_fishfarms08.html

Chapter 13 -
Round Tables and Square Pegs

Back to late 1989 at Quatsino Seafarms. I received a call from Lee Doney, then Deputy Minister of the Environment for British Columbia. He wanted to know if I would be interested in joining a new initiative, the B.C. Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. I was thrilled and jumped at the chance.

The United Nations report,
Our Common Future
, which had first publicized the concept of sustainable development five years after I heard it discussed in Nairobi, put forward two other important ideas. It suggested governments, at all levels from local to national, should appoint round tables, with representatives from all walks of life, to provide elected bodies with advice on how to achieve sustainability. The round tables would operate according to the principles of consensus, in other words, not by Robert’s Rules, where a majority vote defeats a minority. In addition the report suggested that not enough land was protected from industrial development. The figure then was about 4 percent globally. The report advocated that it be tripled to 12 percent on the basis of representing the many varieties of ecosystems (forests, grasslands, wetlands, alpine regions, etc.).