Can we save ocean fish?

• Author: Helvarg, David
• Position: Essay

I respect my friend Sylvia Earle's refusal to eat seafood, as well as the famed ocean scientist's argument that no market hunting has ever been sustainable. Still, there's nothing as delicious to me as a wild salmon I've caught myself, or raw oysters from cold waters with their fresh briny sea flavor, or fried calamari with beer and the Giants winning another World Series. But I'll only eat fish, bivalves, and cephalopods that still have a fighting chance--and my menu options are rapidly shrinking.

Most fish--including 90 percent of the largest pelagic (open ocean) fish, such as sharks, big tuna, and black marlin--have disappeared from the world's oceans since the end of World War II. Actually, they didn't disappear. They ended up on the plates of white linen restaurants and in the supermarket seafood aisles of the developed world.

At the end of World War II, about fifteen million tons of ocean fish were being caught each year. Today, we're taking some eighty-five million tons--perhaps more, according to a study soon to be released.

After World War II, we started catching fish using conflict-spawned technologies like radar, sonar, and later satellite surveillance. The catches skyrocketed, reaching a peak around 1989. Since then, fish and marine wildlife populations have been crashing. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 85 percent of the 600 commercial species it monitors are currently fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted.

Having decimated many familiar species, like cod and red snapper, fishing companies began chasing less accessible fishes, including orange roughy (slimeheads) and Chilean sea bass (Antarctic toothfish), in the ocean depths and the polar seas. This military-industrial fishing has also endangered global food security for close to one billion people in the developing world who still depend on local "artisanal" fishing as their main source of protein.

Imagine an aircraft carrier that weighs more than 80,000 tons, with 5,000 crew members and a four-acre flight deck with jet fighters launching and landing--a deadly floating city of steel and iron. Now try to imagine the weight of 850 aircraft carriers being taken out of the world's oceans every year as living, thrashing biomass. That's what the world's fishing fleets, many subsidized by their governments, are now doing, catching fish faster than they can reproduce, the very definition of overfishing.

On April 2, a 330-foot Russian Factory Trawler, the Dalny Vostok, sank in the Pacific, killing sixty-nine crewmembers from Russia, Burma, and elsewhere. It keeled over while trying to haul in an eighty-ton fishing net full of pollock. After...