Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 20
Towards Sustainable Seafood:
The Evolution of a Conservation
Movement
Michael Sutton and Laura Wimpee
20.1
Introduction
In the early 1990s, the international conservation community began to turn its at-
tention from the terrestrial environment to the oceans. While a few organisations in
the US and overseas - such as the Center for Marine Conservation (now the Ocean
Conservancy) and Greenpeace - had a tradition of ocean work, the mainstream con-
servation community had mostly ignored the oceans for the previous two decades.
Aside from high-profile issues such as the conservation of whales and dolphins, the
ocean environment and especially fisheries were essentially left to the attention of
government, industry and user groups.
Around 1990, the National Audubon Society, World Wildlife Fund and others
began to hire marine specialists and develop ocean conservation programmes of
their own, encouraged by key funders such as the David and Lucile Packard Foun-
dation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. It quickly became obvious that governments,
including that of the US, had seriously mismanaged the ocean environment. Man-
agement failures were painfully evident at all levels of government. The cod crisis
in New England and maritime Canada had left thousands of fishermen out of work
and on government welfare programmes (Kurlansky 1997). The International Com-
mission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT) had presided over 30 years
of overfishing with the result that species like bluefin tuna, swordfish and white
marlin were at all-time low abundance. The population of Atlantic bluefin tuna, for
example, was estimated to be at less than 10% of its historical unfished size.
Governments sometimes resorted to extraordinary measures in an attempt to deal
with the social implications of fishery management failures. In 1990, Massachusetts
Governor Weld, for example, on behalf of his beleaguered cod fishermen, attempted
to tap into the Earthquake Relief Fund created by Congress in the wake of the 1989
Loma Prieta earthquake in California. That led one observer to note that the main
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