We humans are capable of enormous devastation, but every now and then, we’re able to agree to stop the worst of our transgressions. We no longer regularly scour the oceans for the great whales only to boil them down for margarine and pet food. We’ve stopped killing wild birds en masse to make hats out of their plumage. We’ve effectively banned DDT — a pesticide that nearly emptied the skies of hawks, falcons and even the bald eagle.
Bottom trawling — a destructive industrial fishing practice that indiscriminately brings to market about a quarter of the world’s wild-caught seafood — should be next. A bottom trawl is a weighted net that is often wider than a football field. As it is dragged along the sea floor, the trawl captures, kills or maims everything in its path. Around 19 million tons of marine life meets its end this way every year — that’s more than the combined weight of all the people in Brazil. At least another six to seven million tons of unwanted organisms are killed annually and dumped overboard. If a similar technique were deployed in the Amazon, people might be more likely to recoil from the mangled pulp of jaguars, toucans, sloths and trees deemed necessary sacrifices to bring meat to market. At our seafood counters, we never see the mangled pulp. Underwater, ignorance is bliss.
This year, that ignorance has been dealt a significant blow. In a major global study of bottom trawling, researchers at the University of British Columbia combed through years of international catch data and found that 3,000 different species are caught in bottom trawls each year. At least one in seven was vulnerable to extinction. As dogged as the researchers were, even they could not parse all the death. “An undifferentiated mass of diverse marine life,” they write, is typically sloughed off for animal feed and “surimi” (the pink mush that’s in your California sushi roll).
When humans do bad things, we often console ourselves that such things were always done. And bottom trawling has existed since the 14th century. Yet, as a planet-wide undertaking, the large-scale dragging of the seabed is quite young. Beginning in the 1950s, Western countries deployed experts to poorer nations to teach fishers how to bottom trawl. The ecologist Daniel Pauly, one of today’s most outspoken critics of commercial fishing, was one of those experts. Any illusions he’d had about the long-term sustainability of this kind of industrial fishing were shattered in Indonesia when, he has said, he witnessed “essentially the bottom of the sea” coming up in the nets. Not only is bottom trawling among the most carbon-intensive fishing methods, but its effects can wreck the economies it was intended to bolster. The codfish shoals of Newfoundland, Dr. Pauly told me in a recent call, supported awe-inspiring hand-line catches and smaller-scale trawling for 500 years. Just a few decades after the first super-sized factory ships arrived on the scene, the grounds were shut down. There were hardly any fish left.
The other excuse often ventured about the bad things we do is that they can at least be mitigated. The University of Washington’s Ray Hilborn, a frequent opponent of Dr. Pauly’s in fish fights, argues that “well-managed bottom trawl fisheries” are often sustainable. And it’s certainly true, as Dr. Hilborn maintains, that seafloors differ. Sandy bottoms recover more quickly from trawling than reefs, for example. It’s also true that trawling technology can be improved so that nets don’t cause quite so much damage. Even in the worst cases, Dr. Hilborn concludes, the species diversity after trawling is better “than any form of crop production.” Prairies remade as agribusiness cornfields, he notes, have a species diversity of one: corn.
But Dr. Hilborn’s terrestrial analogy is, for lack of a better word, shallow. It disregards a more profound history. Before we transformed so many land-based ecosystems into agricultural fields, we first emptied them. Whether it was the extirpation of bison from the Great Plains or the clear-cutting of Pacific Northwest old growth, the eradication of endemic flora and fauna was the first step in de-wilding the land. There are few better ways to de-wild a marine environment than to bottom trawl it. Dr. Hilborn and others have noted that large portions of the world’s continental shelves have never been trawled. Rather than taking that as an opportunity for yet more fishing, perhaps we could imagine those seabeds as something precious to be protected.
In my 20 years of covering oceans, I’ve seen all kinds of destruction. I have stood on the deck of a Louisiana shrimp trawler and watched 10 pounds of wildlife shoveled dead off the deck for every pound of shrimp that went in the hold. As an apprentice field researcher for the Bureau of Land Management surveying the riverside along salmon habitat, I saw whole stands of old-growth trees obliterated in clear-cuts. I noted down how many 200-year-old stumps were left behind and how the tangled slag of the forest lay across the land, too gruesome to contemplate for very long.
Arguments in favor of accommodation and compromise have been made about essentially every environmental problem — and they almost never achieve their goals. In the first part of the 20th century, at the height of the slaughter of Antarctic whales, one Norwegian scientist argued that a sustainable whaling industry was possible. The global collapse of that so-called fishery proved him wrong. The whales began to recover only after a near-total worldwide ban on whaling was put in place.
Can we end bottom trawling and grant lasting protection to the bottom of the sea, just as the 1987 Montreal Protocol banished the chemicals that cooled our refrigerators and thus saved the ozone layer? In a cynical world where bottom trawling occurs even in designated marine protected areas, skepticism abounds. Banning trawling outright has “never had any traction,” the marine ecologist Boris Worm told me recently. “It’s a little bit like saying we want to ban plastic. Or gasoline.”
Maybe so. But regulators in wealthier countries could start by telling us what we’re eating. Around 80 percent of the seafood Americans buy is imported; much of that is bottom trawled. We are a bit like the French police prefect in “Casablanca,” pocketing his winnings even as he says that he is “shocked, shocked” to learn that gambling is going on. We eat seafood from trawlers operating across the world, then claim ignorance of the brutality it takes to get it to market. What if all industrially procured seafood bore a label explaining exactly how it was caught? What if, when we sat down to a bottom-trawled dinner, we knew the list of species that had perished so that one fillet could make its way to our table — an echo of prior awareness campaigns that helped protect threatened fish?
Knowing what we now know, I think we might choose to order something else.
Paul Greenberg is the writer-in-residence at the nonprofit Safina Center and teaches in New York University’s Animal Studies Program. He is the author of the James Beard Award-winning “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.”
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