Wednesday, July 09, 2008

The forests of Easter Island

A timely piece from George Monbiot, on the fishermen fighting for their own extinction. Despite their technology, the last of the hunter gatherers of our society are dying out, an industry eating itself, gorging on rapacious fishing. This is a failure to live sustainably, and a visible manifestation in our time of what happens when ecological and resource limits are ignored.

We've seen the impact of this kind of behaviour already destroy the Grand Banks cod fishing.

There is no shortage of solutions: protect spawning grounds from fishing, create reserves, stop beam and reef net trawling and even perhaps paying fisherman not to fish to allow fishing grounds and stocks to recover.

And say goodbye to cheap fish.

1 comment:

punkscience said...

Dude, I've got to call you on "saying goodbye to cheap fish": Prices may well go up as fishing is halted in no-take zones but in a decade the brood stock will have recovered, recruitment to the fishing zones will be climbing rapidly and so will catches, all from less fishing effort.

Did you see this? I thought it was right up your street.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/11/localgovernment.localgovernment