Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
conservationists then began asking themselves - why not try and do the same for the
seafood industry and swing its support behind efforts to make fishery management
more effective?
The sustainable seafood movement was founded on the premise that public policy
alone will not save marine fisheries. The idea was to harness market forces and
consumer power to build powerful incentives for ocean conservation. Knowing
how politically potent industry can be, conservationists hoped that leading seafood
companies - acting in their own enlightened self-interest - might be persuaded
not only to change their own business practices but also to lobby for meaningful
management reforms. Conservationists also sought to enlist seafood consumers
around the US and convince them to demand fish and shellfish from sustainable
sources.
The National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program (now the Blue Ocean
Institute) was the first to issue a consumer guide to environmentally friendly seafood
in 1998. The Audubon Guide to Seafood was published in the May-June 1998 issue
of
Audubon
Magazine (see Chapter 7). It was an instant success, in part, because
it offered consumers something they could do in their own lives to make a differ-
ence. The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch programme was launched in
2001 (see Chapter 17) with similar results. For the first time, seafood lovers had
information at their fingertips that enabled them to make better choices on behalf
of ocean conservation.
Enter the celebrity chef! Early architects of the movement, such as SeaWeb,
recognised that conservationists needed powerful allies to be effective (see Chap-
ter 6). SeaWeb, founded in 1995, brought the principles of social marketing and
strategic communications to the ocean conservation community for the first time.
In 1997, SeaWeb launched the Give Swordfish A Break campaign with the Natural
Resources Defense Council and the Wildlife Conservation Society (Basile 2001).
They set out to recruit celebrity chefs, already committed to the organic foods
movement, to draw attention to the decline of Atlantic swordfish and the need for
better management. The response was immediate - leading chefs such as Nora
Pouillon of Washington DC's Restaurant Nora and Rick Moonen of New York's
Oceana quickly became spokespeople for the swordfish campaign (Seaweb 1999,
Basile 2001). Their message was simple: take Atlantic swordfish off your menus
until such time as the species' 30-year decline could be reversed by the US and
ICCAT. Hundreds of chefs and restaurateurs eventually joined the campaign.
The seafood industry and swordfish fishers were incensed. Past consumer boy-
cotts had proven highly effective at convincing countries like Iceland, Norway and
Japan to cease commercial whaling and join the International Whaling Commis-
sion. Later, in 1990, consumer pressure also succeeded in persuading US tuna
importers to deal only in dolphin-safe (or dolphin-friendly) tuna. But Give Sword-
fish A Break was a different type of campaign - it was not about marine mammals,
it concerned the fish themselves. The National Fisheries Institute (NFI), the Blue
Water Fishermen's Association and other leading trade organisations viewed the
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