Four Fish Read online

  Even though the International Whaling Commission was intended to be a fisheries-management organization, over the course of the seventies and early eighties environmentalists pushed it into playing an international environmental-protection role. This was ultimately codified in a landmark agreement that took place in 1982. For the sake of those countries that were only grudgingly brought to the whaling negotiating table, the agreement was given three years to be put into effect and expressed not in environmental or ecological terms but rather in the language of fisheries management.

  From 1985 forward, the International Whaling Commission declared that throughout the world there was to be a “zero catch quota” for whales. In other words, a complete and total world moratorium on hunting an entire scientific order of animals. It was the broadest and most far-reaching act of kindness humanity has ever bestowed on another group of species. Though contested and embattled and fraught with disagreements that result in violations, this kindness has persisted. The whaling moratorium remains in effect to this day.

  In the summer of 2006, an editor from the New York Times’ opinion page e-mailed and asked me if I would like to write a short article on whether people should continue to eat fish. “We were wondering if you’d be interested in writing an essay whose basic argument would be that we should get our Omega3’s from somewhere else and just not eat fish anymore because of all the problems fishing causes,” the editor wrote. “Or, alternately,” she continued, “an essay arguing that we shouldn’t feel guilty eating fish despite all the problems it causes.”

  I considered this question for a long time and conferred with many people on both sides of the issue. In the end I decided to try to track a middle course, saying that yes, we should still eat fish, that it was important that we still regard the ocean as a living source of food and not just a place to dump our garbage. However, I stipulated that a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability. I covered the usual topics one comes across at sustainable-seafood conventions: That one should favor fish caught by small-scale hook-and-line fishers because of the lower impact on sea beds and underwater reefs. That when choosing aquacultured fish one should choose vegetarian fish, like tilapia and carp, because of the lower strain they put on marine food webs. When it came to tuna, though, I offered no triangulation whatsoever, because in my view there simply was no compromise possible. “Don’t eat the big fish,” I declared toward the end of the editorial. “Dining on a 500-pound bluefin tuna is the seafood equivalent of driving a Hummer.”

  But two weeks after making my high-minded pronouncements, I found myself at a family dinner party at an upscale Manhattan restaurant. The appetizer choice on the prix fixe menu was either a mini-sirloin steak or bluefin tuna carpaccio. It would seem the choice should have been simple. I had my principles, and I had expressed them quite publicly. But unlike the earlier moment in Norway when I successfully kept myself from ordering whale carpaccio, this time, nearly without hesitation, I chose the bluefin. I quickly scarfed it down and nearly forgot about the delicious paper-thin slices after they had been washed away with a glass of pinot grigio. I turned to my twelve-year-old daughter, who had ordered the sirloin steak, and asked her how her food was. She had just read my New York Times op ed in draft form. “Hypocrite,” she said coolly.

  In my feeble defense, I am not alone among seafood writers in my sampling of bluefin. In several of the fish-in-danger books I’ve read over the course of researching my own fish-in-danger book, the intrepid author inevitably visits Japan’s vast Tsukiji fish market and marvels at the giant carcasses of bluefin tuna being put up on blocks for auction. After condemning the trade, the author in question slips into a side stall and has one last delicious bite of bluefin tuna before promising never to eat it again. My guess is that if these authors were served whale carpaccio, they would, like me, have no trouble refusing. In the modern world, whales are simply not considered food, while bluefin tuna is judged an acceptable delicacy.

  But based solely on numbers, the whale carpaccio is the carpaccio of choice. The whale on my menu at that restaurant in Bergen, Norway, was most probably a minke whale, an animal whose population in the wild, after the moratorium was put in place, has grown to over a quarter million animals (estimates vary widely, with some putting the population at close to a million). Norwegians have partially withdrawn from the whaling moratorium and now conduct “scientific whaling” for research purposes. Some of those research subjects end up in restaurants as whale carpaccio.

  But judging Norway’s dubious moral position vis-à-vis whales becomes increasingly problematic when those countries doing the judging are nations that fish bluefin tuna. The most pessimistic estimates indicate that the population of North Atlantic bluefin may have already imploded beyond the point of recovery. Some scientists place the total number of giant bluefin spawners in the Western stock of the North Atlantic at a mere nine thousand animals, or, in food terms, about 43 million individual slices of sashimi—enough for every adult American living along the bluefin’s migration route to have one last bite.

  Every year, though, fishing for bluefin tuna continues to grow. In 2007 every single member nation violated catch limits set by a kind of International Whaling Commission of tuna, called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT).

  Bluefin, then, represent a very whalelike dilemma. They are big. As such, they are ecologically limited in their populations. Even before they were commercially fished, they were never anywhere near as plentiful as cod, salmon, or sea bass. Like whales, whose migrations carry them sometimes from pole to pole, tuna are far-ranging and committed to no single nation. Their transience is intractable and indeed imperative to the continuation of their life cycles.

  They are in all respects an unmanageable fish.

  International regulators have as much as admitted their inability to manage the species. In a recent report on the status of the North Atlantic bluefin tuna stock, ICCAT officials wrote from Madrid, “Based on the Committee’s analysis, it is apparent that the catch limits set by ICCAT are not respected and are largely ineffective in controlling overall catch.” It concluded, rather bizarrely, that “the current management scheme will most probably lead to further reduction in spawning stock biomass with high risk of fisheries and stock collapse.”

  In other words, ICCAT apparently believes that its own management of bluefin tuna is contributing to the fish’s demise.

  Other, smaller tuna—the longfin albacore that makes up the bulk of the canned-tuna fishery, the yellowfin and bigeye tuna that are often labled as “ahi”—may be more manageable—they grow faster, spawn earlier, and have less far-flung peregrinations. But if the bluefin goes bust, the other species are next in line. They are sure to face increasing fishing pressure from a broader range of nations.

  The reasons for the ever-expanding pressure on tuna go back to the original problem with fish, fishermen, and fisheries. Fishing is still governed by primitivism rather than by rational thought. Humans today might be organized into nations with treaties, international negotiation tools, lawyers, and formal protocols, but the essential dynamics of tuna fisheries are akin to the dynamics among members of a hungry tribe surrounding a carcass. In prehistoric times, in periods of food scarcity, individual members of a tribe of humans might have fought over the different chunks of flesh cut from a single animal. In modern times the fight is the same, only the individual hunters are nations and the carcass is an entire population or species of fish. And the term that is used by nations arguing for their rights in this primeval tuna struggle is “fairness.”

  Joseph Powers is a former chair of the scientific committee for ICCAT and currently a professor of fisheries science at Louisiana State University. As someone who has followed the tuna debate for decades, he has seen a consistent argument occur over and over again during negotiations. “In the tuna debate, there are a lot of historical dynamics that date back to co
lonialism,” Powers told me. “When you start talking about negotiating quotas, the first thing that comes up is the historical catches of rich countries. People from developing countries in Africa where a lot of tuna fishing happens will say, ‘You came down and nailed us over the years, and so we’re entitled to catch as much now as you had back when tuna fishing started.’ And so you get countries like Brazil, Namibia, and the North African countries all wanting their piece of the action.” Typically at ICCAT negotiations, representatives from developing nations come to the table highly aggrieved. They have in their hands historical catch statistics that very clearly show that First World nations like Spain, France, and Japan have caught a lot of tuna. But now that African and South American nations are advanced enough to put their own fishing fleets in the water, they feel that they should get as much fish as the developed nations once caught in earlier times. This despite the fact that there simply aren’t enough fish to satisfy the abstract terms of “fairness.” As Powers sees it, “Even though scientific advice says you should stick to a specific catch number, in order to negotiate a deal they tend to nudge that number over a little bit.” That little move to the right or the left is enough to put a population of tuna in jeopardy.

  For people who have seen the scientific evidence ignored year after year, particularly with bluefin tuna, it is the feeling of watching Ted Ames’s imbecile making that same mistake again and again and never learning. And now advocates trying to save the bluefin have realized that in this atmosphere of tribalism, getting nations to reach a consensus that is in line with scientific evidence is impossible.

  Bluefin-tuna conservationists have therefore opened up a second front. In the last two decades, they have pushed multiple times to list the bluefin with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, a status achieved by tigers, rhinos, and whales and a change that would end the international trade in bluefin, theoretically putting an end to its export to its primary market, Japan. But every time this option is put forth the internal squabbles of the tuna-hunting nations prevail. At the most recent CITES convention, in the spring of 2010 in Qatar, for the first time both the United States and the European Union backed a CITES listing for bluefin. But the usual dynamic prevailed: one developed nation proposed the species for CITES inclusion and a host of other developing nations along with Japan torpedoed the process, even though everyone knows full well that a complete moratorium is the only thing that would be truly fair to all nations—a whalelike scenario in which the bluefin would be taken off the table for everybody. Some tuna advocates are coming to the conclusion that, as with whales, a different tack has to be taken, one that has more to do with the popular consumer mind-set than with science and policy. One that would ask consumers to evaluate all the negatives of bluefin tuna and end the fish’s plight by choosing not to eat it.

  The first step in effecting any kind of change for any kind of issue is drawing attention to it. I think with fish we are still in that phase of ‘awareness enlightening.’ ” These are the words of Vikki Spruill, a dedicated ocean conservationist who is one of the key minds behind Seafood Choices Alliance, an organization of organizations that all, in their own way, try to spread the message of eating correctly from the ocean. A slender blond woman in her mid-fifties, Spruill grew up fishing on the Florida coast and had originally started out academically trying to become a marine biologist. But because of what she saw as the male-dominated nature of the discipline, she drifted away from her first love and moved into a career in public relations. She might have continued her corporate work, advising major American businesses on marketing strategy, had the Pew Charitable Trusts not tapped her to help with a public-relations initiative that had been brewing ever since passage of the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act.

  “My charge was to put ocean conservation on the map,” Spruill told me. In the late 1990s, she directed a two-year research investigation focusing on American consumers and fish. The goal was to divine what it was that Americans understood about the sea and what it would take for them to make ocean conservation a higher priority. “What we found is that people relate to fish as much as food on their plate as they do wildlife. People wanted to continue to eat seafood. So we started looking at that ‘food/plate connection.’ We thought, ‘Okay, let’s think about how we can build a campaign around getting people to protect seafood because they want to protect the livelihood of the fishermen and the lives of fish.’ ”

  After much deliberation she concluded that it was necessary to focus on a single very big fish to make their point, because “you have to create these visual images for people.” Spruill and her team considered the bluefin tuna but in the end felt they needed something with better research and a greater potential for recovery. This led them to another large, open-ocean fish that often crosses paths with the bluefin, the North Atlantic swordfish. “We picked swordfish, first and foremost because if you look at any fisheries graph for swordfish, you just see an absolute straight line plummeting down since the 1960s. We had really good documented science on the status of North Atlantic swordfish. . . . And we liked swordfish because it was something that people were already eating; they were already connected to it.”

  Beginning in 1998, Spruill’s organization, SeaWeb, in conjunction with another U.S. nonprofit called the Natural Resources Defense Council, launched “Give Swordfish a Break”—perhaps the first-ever fish-abstinence campaign that encouraged primarily chefs but also consumers to eschew swordfish on the menu. The campaign launched in 1998 with the endorsement of twenty-seven prominent chefs, then quickly enlisted the support of an additional seven hundred chefs at restaurants around the nation. Participating chefs were required to agree to a Give Swordfish a Break pledge and not to serve the fish in their establishments. Dozens of businesses, including hotel chains, cruise lines, supermarkets, air carriers and others, also removed North Atlantic swordfish from their menus. But there were limitations placed on the program from the outset. As Spruill told me, “We didn’t want one of these open-ended, never-finished boycotts.” The campaign had a discrete, realizable goal—to close portions of the swordfish’s breeding grounds in the Gulf of Mexico to fishing during spawning season. After two years of the campaign, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service agreed to close swordfish nurseries to fishing. The campaign was officially ended. Two years later scientists found that there had indeed been a remarkable recovery for swordfish. From a point of near collapse, the population of these majestic ten-foot-long animals had gone from 10 percent to 94 percent of what biologists considered to be their historical population numbers.

  The campaign is a success story in every aspect. A clear goal was identified. An appropriate citizen response was crafted. But it’s worth looking into what really changed the swordfish’s fate. In the end it was not a diminishment in actual swordfish consumed that changed the dynamic but rather strong, unilateral government action. There were probably no fewer swordfish caught and eaten during the time of the campaign than before its launch. Rather, it was the threat of turning swordfish fishing (and perhaps fishing in general) into a pariah that raised media attention and pressured the fisheries service into closing the swordfish’s spawning grounds and protecting the long-term viability of the stock.

  But this very effective campaign has had a very murky effect on the public’s perception of what is required to save other big, sensitive fish like the bluefin. Ever since the Give Swordfish a Break campaign, more and more nonprofits began embracing the idea of choosing “good” fish over “bad” fish as a means of saving the ocean. Today millions of consumers carry around seafood safety cards with lists of good fish (frequently labled green), sort-of-good fish (yellow), and outright-bad ones (stop sign red). But frequently these lists are not connected to specific policy goals, leading consumers to believe that just through their abstinence they are saving the sea. With globally caught and consumed fish like bluefin tuna, though, one consumer’s abstemiousness is nearly always shadowed b
y another consumer’s appetite. And with bluefin, where the ICCAT, the regulating authority of record, seems to hold limited sway with fishing nations, all the negative reviews in the world do not seem to be helping. Bluefin tuna is now on every single red list on every single wildlife-conservation organization’s seafood card. But in the time period from when nonprofits began listing bluefin in their various “do not eat” columns, global consumption of bluefin has only increased. U.S. demand has indeed declined, but the Japanese demand has increased to the point where there are no longer enough big wild tuna to fulfill the needs of the market.

  In the last three years, the United States could not catch enough fish to meet its legally allotted bluefin quota. In the Mediterranean, where fishermen are also running out of big bluefin to catch, a perverse “farming” strategy has been launched in which wild juvenile tuna are netted, put in pens, fattened, and then sold as “farmed” tuna. It is important to note that this represents an overall loss of wild bluefin, not a gain. In these ersatz farms, bluefin juveniles are being removed from the wild and denied a chance to breed. And so bluefin are now being eradicated at both ends of their life cycle. The big thousand-pound breeders are being caught and sold as wild fish. Their offspring are being netted in the tens of thousands and fattened for human consumption on “farms.” Neither ends up getting a chance to adequately reproduce. Both Eastern and Western stocks of Atlantic bluefin are collapsing.

  Not even the threat of mercury poisoning seems to have had any effect on bluefin consumption. Just as in the debate with PCBs and salmon, mercury and tuna have become linked over the last twenty years to the point where most consumers are aware of a tuna/mercury connection. Like PCBs, mercury enters the oceanic food webs when the pollutant is released into coastal ecosystems. The most famous example of coastal mercury contamination occurred during Japan’s post-World War II industrial expansion. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, the Chisso Corporation consistently discharged waste products from the manufacture of the industrial chemical acetaldehyde into the enclosed, poorly circulating waters of Minamata Bay, Japan. Thousands of people eating local seafood came to suffer from what came to be called Minamata disease, with extreme birth defects and early mortality experienced throughout the local population.