People talk about over-fishing all the time, but what does it exactly mean? Perhaps the above graphic from a paper out of the University of British Columbia [PDF], which used "ecosystem models, underwater terrain maps, fish catch records and statistical analysis to render the biomass of Atlantic fish at various points this century," will help clarify. As you can see, the supply of popular fishes like bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon and turbot has greatly diminished in the past hundred-plus years. But how come, with all those environmentalists calling on restrictions the past thirty years, that number of fish in the sea keeps dropping? Blame it on bad generational memory, apparently.
InformationIsBeautiful's David McCandles explains that we humans suffer from "shifting environment baselines":
This is when each generation views the environment they remember from their youth as "natural" and normal. Today that means our fishing policies and environmental activism is geared to restoring the oceans to the state we remember they were. That's considered the environmental baseline.
The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young.
So this is a kind of collective social amnesia that allows over-exploitation to creep up and increase decade-by-decade without anyone truly questioning it. Today's fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.
Maybe time to skip the sushi? [via Kottke]
