While feeding my OCD-like habit of checking my e-mail, I noticed an article about California's newly proposed network of marine reserves to protect marine-life off their coast. In these areas, reaching from Santa Barbara to Half Moon Bay (near San Francisco), fishing would be banned or heavily restricted, and some of them overlap very productive fishing areas. Of course, the fishermen (both commercial and recreational) aren't happy about his and on the other side scientists are saying we need to take action now to preserve what we have left. But who is right? It's a difficult issue, as it nearly always is, but I think it's a step in the right direction while not being enough.
To say the least, mankind has been hard on the oceans. Various species have been overfished or nearly driven to extinction (cod, sharks, marlin, whales, tuna) and the pollution we create is setting the world's oceans up for a major collapse via carbon dioxide buildup (thus creating a more acidic ocean). At some point, you have to say enough is enough and let populations have a chance to bounce back, otherwise the seas will no longer be sustainable. If people just laid off the cod population in Canada for a while, it could build itself back up and then we could harvest more responsibly, but instead the people who depend on those fish for a living are putting a constant pressure on the stocks, not giving them a chance to bounce back. This also feeds into other issues, as seals are often blamed for cod depletion, but to the best of my knowledge all the studies done have shown that cod are a very small part of the seals diet, shooting down the "We have to hunt seals to help the cod population." A similar argument was used in California in reference to salmon. Even though it was shown the seals were not eating enough salmon to cause a problem, fishermen were convinced and set up "ladders" to help fish get back and forth from the sea to their breeding grounds more easily. Interestingly enough, this made the salmon easier prey, and then the seals DID start eating them more often.
California is taking a step in the right direction; we definitely need more protected areas. Even so, many species in trouble (like tuna) are transients and won't always stay inside protected areas. Other cultures (particularly Asian) have a bigger appetite for seafood as well, and they seem to care less about ecological impact or harvesting (like Japan wanting to hunt whales again officially, even though it's been illegally doing it for "research" for some time), so until coastal nations all over the world get on the same page, it will not be enough. People's mouths need to be fed, and in every arena harvesting food seems to trump sustainibility or responsible policies. I don't want anyone to go hungry, but we're also setting ourselves up for problems in the future when there will be even more people and even less food. Just because you can harvest something until there's almost nothing left doesn't mean we should be doing it, and alhtough some groups are being progressive others turn a blind eye to the problems. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a major oceanic ecosystem crash in my lifetime, and even if we started doing the right thing today, some populations or ecosystems may never recover fully from the damage done. We terrestrial know-it-alls only occupy a small fraction of the planet compared to the oceans from whence we came, and we're always hoping that the oceans are big enough to never run out of bounty for us. Hopefully we can rectify that mistake before it's too late.
