Posted by Casson on Jun 7, 2011 in
4 Oceans This installment of my monthly Alternet column, “4 Oceans,” was originally published on June 2, 2011.
From bad...
A powerful conservation movement is afoot in the United States. Shark finning — the practice of catching sharks, slicing their fins off, and then dumping the animals overboard (often still alive and slowly bleeding to death) — is being exposed for the monstrosity it is. Globally, we slaughter tens of millions of sharks each year. And for the most part, we do it for the fins, which can fetch hundreds of dollars a pound.
This is insanity. We need sharks in our oceans. Without sharks and other top-level carnivores to keep populations of sub-predators in check, we run the risk of losing productive and well-balanced marine ecosystems to trophic collapse. Thankfully, some communities are finally saying no to shark finning. Hawaii banned the possession and sale of shark fins in 2010. Washington State signed a similar prohibition into law on May 12 of this year, and in California, a ban on trafficking in shark fins is working its way through the legislature.
It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of such a law passing in California. More shark fins are sold and consumed in the Golden State than in any of the other 49. If we can manage to protect these unique animals under California state law, we may not be far from a nationwide moratorium on this staggeringly unsustainable practice.
Here are several common arguments being used to defend this practice, followed by my thoughts on why they’re unsound.
1: Shark fin consumption is a cultural practice and tradition.
Some cultures have a history of consuming shark fin. I am not in any place to pass judgment on these cultures, and I don’t want to. All I want to say is that culture is not the unchanging monolith that some make it out to be.
... to worse...
Culture is a dynamic representation of both the history and the current state of a particular group, be it based around attitudes, ideals, goals, shared experiences, or other connective forces. A culture is not a static thing — it changes with the times. Over the centuries, many cultural practices have ended in favor of the evolving wisdom and consciousness of the human race. For example, while I may not be part of a culture that has historically practiced shark finning, I am a member of a culture that has historically practiced slavery.
I am a Caucasian American and a direct descendant of slave-owning ancestors who believed in the inferiority of human beings with a darker skin color than their own. I even have relatives who died while shooting at the Union army to protect this cultural practice (among other things, of course). Slavery was a common practice in North America for centuries. It was part of our culture. It was also wrong. And, thankfully, it ended.
Human beings evolve. Our cultures evolve. As we learn more about our planet and ourselves, we gain the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. We now know far too much about humanity’s dependence on Earth’s environment to keep slaughtering sharks for their fins. The tragedy of shark finning is more than just sharks dying for shortsighted profit — it’s that today, when we have learned so much about sharks and their irreplaceable roles in our oceans, we continue to mindlessly slaughter them in the name of “culture.”
2: Shark fin is good for your health.
Some schools of Eastern medicine equate shark fin consumption with heightened energy and virility. I am certainly no nutritionist, and will not attempt to dispute this belief. That said, it’s a proven fact that a typical bowl of shark fin soup is in actuality quite devoid of most vitamins when compared to, say, a similar serving of vegetable soup. Shark fin does have some nutritional value — especially some key elements like iron and zinc — but it’s nothing one couldn’t get from any number of other foods. To kill a shark for such a meager nutritional reward is a terrible bargain for the planet at large.
3: Sharks are dangerous! They eat people!
Certain works of art, literature and film have such a profound impact on society that they literally shape our culture. Jaws was one of those films. It terrified an entire generation and set shark conservation efforts back 20 years.
... to even worse.
Jaws was also one of the most inaccurate and unfair films ever made when it comes to portraying actual shark behavior. The film that made us all afraid to go back in the water had virtually zero basis in reality, yet it engendered a phobia of sharks that has afflicted us for decades. The problem is so acute, in fact, that Peter Benchley, the creator of Jaws, had a massive crisis of conscience and dedicated much of his later life to ocean conservation and shark protection efforts.
Globally, shark encounters with humans account for about 10 deaths a year, give or take a handful. By contrast, lightning strikes kill over 20,000 people each year. Dog bites, pig attacks, and even fugu blowfish (due to improper preparation) cause more human fatalities annually than sharks. Sharks are not the mindless killing machines that we once feared they were. The contribution sharks make to a healthy ocean vastly outweighs their danger to the human race.
4: We can fin sharks in a sustainable manner.
Really? Can we? I personally doubt that very much. We understand very little about most species of sharks, and it is extremely difficult to properly manage a fishery when we lack such key information as growth rate, migration patterns, and reproductive behavior.
It's not worth it.
That, however, is not even the main issue. Sustainability goes beyond choosing which species are acceptable to consume and which aren’t. One of the core issues here is respect for the animal — which, in this case, is manifest in how we are using it for our own purposes. How can we have a sustainable fishery that involves cutting off the fins of a living creature and dumping the rest? This kind of waste and disrespect has no place in a modern food system that is based on ecosystem awareness and sound resource management. To look at this in simple economic terms: If a given shark weighs, say, 150 pounds, the fins might be 10 pounds of that. So to cut off the fins and dump the rest is equivalent to a retention rate of 1:14 — one pound of catch, 14 pounds of waste.
The very act of shark finning flies directly in the face of sustainable living. We need to outgrow this practice and embrace a positive relationship with sharks. For those of you residing in California, please contact your state representative as soon as possible and urge her/him to support AB 376. An ocean without sharks just won’t work.
Tags: ab 376, china, chinese food, fin, finning, great white, green, leland yee, mako, san francisco, shark, soup, thresher
Dynamite fishing?
This installment of my monthly Alternet column, “4 Oceans,” was originally published on April 1, 2011.
The thunderous power of the dollar can obliterate nearly all barriers between consumers and the objects of our desire. If one is willing and able to throw out enough cash, there’s very little in this world that we can’t have. Sadly, this reach extends to a number of aquatic species that just aren’t built to cope with such pressure. In this month’s “4 Oceans,” we examine several seafood items that we just shouldn’t eat, even if we have the wherewithal to acquire them.
Bluefin tuna
This is probably old news to a lot of readers, but the current state of the world’s bluefin tuna populations have been reduced to shadows of their former glory. The fish that fed Rome’s legions now barely ekes out an existence as it is hunted relentlessly to satisfy the top echelon of the world’s sushi industry. Bluefin prices soar while stocks continue to plummet, shackled to the twin lead weights of insatiable demand and ineffectual management.
I can answer that
Last year, a smattering of different countries attempted to grant the bluefin protection under the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which would have effectively ended international trade in this animal. This push was mercilessly quashed by a larger and more committed cadre of governments led by Japan, which hosted cooperative delegates at a pre-vote banquet where they served – you guessed it – bluefin tuna.
Bluefin stocks around the world are verging on utter collapse and yet fishing pressure does not abate. Politics and short-sighted economic interests are nearly always victorious over science and environmental consciousness whenever this bluefin is involved. But even if we can’t depend on political processes, we can least put the chopsticks down.
Orange roughy
Over the last four years, ten of the twenty largest seafood retailers in the United States have discontinued orange roughy. Some stores, like Whole Foods and Wegmans, even made public statements on the environmental impacts associated with this fishery when explaining their decisions to stop selling this species. It’s comforting to see for-profit retail enterprises taking stands that seem based more on ethics and long-game considerations than simple quick-fix cash grabs.
You're having a rough day, orange you?
Anyhow, orange roughy is a fish that has no business playing any significant role in our seafood industry. The animal simply isn’t built to withstand heavy fishing pressure. First off, it reaches market size well before sexual maturity – a lamentable characteristic, since this results in many roughy being eaten before they’ve had a chance to reproduce and repopulate the fishery. Second, the animal itself can live to a tremendous age – ninety-year-old roughy are not uncommon (at least, they weren’t before we started eating them all.) Fish that live that long are generally not built to reproduce in great numbers; they have evolutionarily invested in longevity rather than in quantity of offspring.
To worsen matters, orange roughy is caught using wantonly destructive bottom trawl nets, and its flesh is a simple, flaky white fillet (there are other, more sustainable sources for this type of product.) It’s best to avoid this species altogether.
Shark (and shark fin)
Mmm-mmm-bad
The more we learn about the role that sharks play in our oceanic ecosystems, the more bat-shit crazy we have to be to keep slaughtering them. Sharks are apex predators, feeding slowly from the top of the food chain and ensuring that the populations of other animals in their areas are kept in check. Without sharks, we see population explosions of their prey items, which in turn devastate the organisms that they prey upon, and so on and so forth. The removal of a single shark from the food system it polices is akin to hurtling a massive monkey wrench into the core gears of the ocean’s ecological stabilization machinery, and we are tossing out somewhere between 50 and 100 million of these wrenches every year.
While many sharks are killed accidentally as bycatch in longline fisheries that target other animals (longlined swordfish is particularly worrisome), the majority of annual shark casualties are perpetrated intentionally by those the shark fin industry. Shark fins – used for soup, especially for weddings and other significant events, by certain segments of the world’s Chinese communities – can fetch astronomical prices and are often used to convey a message of status and wealth. Luckily, the world is waking up to the damage that finning wreaks upon our ocean. Shark fin bans have been enacted in Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan (Mariana Islands), and have been proposed in California, Oregon, and Washington State. If these landmark pieces of legislation pass, we will have taken a great step towards protecting these unique and mysterious creatures.
Chilean sea bass
The Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish (aka Chilean sea bass) are long-lived, slow-to-reproduce apex predators. Still, there are those that claim there is such a thing as a sustainable Chilean sea bass fishery. Some would argue that a particular population, under the guidelines of a particular management authority, governed under a certain catch quota, can in fact be fished sustainably, and that this particular fishery, cut off from the larger amorphous Chilean sea bass industry – dominated as it is by pirates and a rapacious gold-rush mentality – merits our support.
The face of overfishing?
Allow me to propose a slightly different line of thought.
The world is a finite place. I know it doesn’t seem as such, but the ocean is a contained area, and it has boundaries. It does not go on forever. It ends – and in more than one sense.
Over the past century, the way that we fish has changed. Decade after decade, we have pushed the boundaries of our oceans in every way imaginable – geographically (ships are going farther), bathymetrically (ships are fishing deeper), and temporally (ships are spending more time on the water). In our quest for seafood, we strain at the very boundaries of our food system, until we reach the ocean’s farthest-flung reaches in all three categories – by dropping hooks to the ocean floor off of Antarctica in the middle of winter.
That is how, where, and when we catch Chilean sea bass.
Sustainable fishing simply cannot occur in an area and at a depth that is so obviously a reaction to an overblown and exhausted food system — a food system that, because of its inability to balance itself, has cantilevered out into dangerous extremes. The very existence of a Chilean sea bass fishery is in itself evidence of an unsustainable fishing paradigm. To label a Chilean sea bass fishery sustainable only serves as evidence to the contrary, as the claim itself underscores our failure to grasp and to apply the true meaning of sustainability to our seafood industry.
Tags: 4 Oceans, alternet, bluefin, chilean sea bass, dollar, dynamite, fin, finning, orange roughy, otoro, overfishing, shark, toothfish, toro
Open wide
Sharks? I hear they eat people.
I hear they’re vicious, blood-thirsty death machines bereft of qualms or conscience, living only to feed, sowing terror in the hearts of beach bunnies and surfer dudes everywhere.
Best get rid of ‘em.
Oh, and something else: you know those funny things that stick out from their bodies? Those cartilaginous ridges that help them to turn, accelerate, and maneuver in the water? The ones without which they wouldn’t be able to function? The ones with an off-putting chewy texture, virtually no flavor, and only the most dubious gastronomic appeal?
I hear they make a damn fine soup.
Because of nonsense like this, sharks have been in our cross-hairs for decades. Due to a combination of unjustified fears and an insatiable appetite for shark fins in east Asia, it’s been an absolute bloodbath. We kill tens of millions of sharks every year. A countless number of them die on tuna longlines, ending their lives as ignominious tick marks on a bycatch report that no one ever sees. Many are killed by fishermen and aquaculturists as a part of “predator control” programs. Some are taken by recreational anglers that simply want the thrill of the fight.
But most of them? Most of them die for their fins.
On the chopping block
The global shark finning fleet is a vast network of hundreds of vessels that operates as countless independent cells, terrorizing sharks from the Red Sea to the Caribbean, from the icy coasts of Greenland to the Cape of Good Hope. Dozens of species are targeted solely for their fins, which can be exchanged for buckets of cash in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other centers of the trade. Shark finners catch the sharks on lines or in nets and haul them to the surface. Once the animals are immobilized, the finners dismember the sharks with machetes or similar implements. The hapless creatures are then either chopped into steaks or callously tossed overboard to bleed to death as they sink into the deeps.
Shark fins are coveted due to their alleged medicinal value. When purified and injected, shark cartilage has been linked to an antiangiogenic effect (blood vessels shrinking away from the injected area.) This is particularly interesting in the realm of tumors and cancer treatment. The link between such an effect and a bowl of boiled shark fins in broth, however, is theoretical at best.
Just dying for some soup
Sadly, the unproven nature of shark fin’s medicinal status hasn’t hindered demand in the slightest. Bowls of shark fin soup can fetch over $100 each, and the Hong Kong market alone handles over 3000 tons of shark fin every year. All the while, shark populations across the planet are crashing – some have decreased by 90% or more.
Thankfully, governments are starting to wake up to the reality of the situation.
In March of this year, the United States House of Representatives passed the Shark Conservation Act, which would amend both the High Seas Driftnet Fishing Moratorium Protection Act and the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act to improve the conservation of sharks. Unfortunately, this bill is now tied up in committee in the Senate.
Just this week, Scotland enacted legislation that will prohibit all shark finning in Scottish waters. While this is not the comprehensive fishing ban that is necessary to truly protect the animals, it is a tremendous step in the right direction, and will hopefully send signals to the European Union that shark conservation is a critical issue.
Toribiong: Shark Savior
Last month, Johnson Toribiong, the President of Palau, announced a ban on all forms of shark fishing anywhere in Palauan waters. Henceforth, he proclaimed, his entire country would be a shark sanctuary. Palau is the first country in the world to take such progressive action.
So how can we continue to turn the tide and save these incredible creatures?
1) Boycott companies like Seagate that try to legitimize shark finning.
Shark fin isn’t just sold in Asia. Believe it or not, you can find it in markets all over the world — largely because it is camouflaged by gel caps and a white plastic bottle. Seagate, a supplement company, renders shark fins into powder, hides them under a childproof cap, and markets the resulting product to natural food stores. The actions of this company — which actually has the audacity to proudly proclaim itself “the only producer of [powdered shark fin cartilage] in the world” — cannot be tolerated. I encourage you to contact the company directly, at 1-888-505-GATE.
Oh, and when they tell you “No, we’re not taking sharks for their fins, it’s actually a byproduct of a food fishery” — just ask them what part of the shark is worth the most. Then feel free to lambaste them for supporting an unmanaged, unregulated shark fishery that targets diminishing stocks off the coast of Baja California.
Let's be clear
2) Avoid buying seafood from grocers that sell shark.
Incredibly, some major US seafood retailers still sell shark and shark products. Publix, Giant Eagle, H.E.B., and Supervalu (the company which operates as Albertson’s, Cub Foods, Lucky, Shaw’s, and many other regional banners) are all known to sell shark in some locations.
3) Support political initiatives that promote shark protection.
The United States and Europe are moving forward, but not quickly enough. We need to demand that the US Senate to ratify the Shark Conservation Act, and the European Union needs to incorporate the Scottish example into its overall fishing policy.
4) Go to Palau.
No, I can’t afford it either, but it’s still important to mention. Palau is a small and relatively impoverished country; it is making tremendous strides towards sustainable ocean stewardship, but there are certainly grumbles about the costs of such behavior in the short run. Anything we can do to inject dollars into the Palauan economy would help to reward these progressive decisions and to support current leadership.
Paradise indeed
It’s comforting to see us finally throwing off the anachronistic sharks-are-bad misconception. We’ve come a long way in that respect. Movies like Sharkwater are changing the way that we think about sharks by transforming them from monstrous to magnificent. Even the creator of Jaws, Peter Benchley, has done a tremendous amount of work supporting shark conservation efforts and rebuilding the image of these animals in the public eye.
So let’s make use of this progress. Sharks are mysterious, charismatic creatures – why are we tolerating the cruel barbarity of finning?
Stop the slaughter. Get shark products out of our markets. Demand more shark sanctuaries and marine protected areas so these creatures can thrive. If we can do that, well, we may just save them after all.
Tags: albertson's, antiangiogenic, benchley, bycatch, cartilage, fin, finning, giant eagle, hong kong, jaws, johnson, medicinal, palau, peter, publix, scotland, seagate, senate, shark, sharkwater, toribiong
