Many lay people believe that widespread ‘pollution’ endangers ocean life, perhaps a lingering impact of books such as ‘The sea around us’ (Carson 1951), and the pronouncements of Jacques Cousteau. Fisheries, by contrast, have long been seen as benign, and their growth not related to the decline of their target species, which is usually attributed to ‘environmental change’ or some form of ‘pollution’.
Why is it that commercial fishing, which, after all, is devoted to killing fishes and removing them from their habitat so we can eat them, has so generally been perceived as having little, if any, impact on the populations that were being fished? We suspect that this has to do with notions from another age, when fishing was indeed a matter of wrestling one’s sustenance from a foreign, hostile sea, and from tiny boats, close to one’s village, using equipment barely capable of making a dent in the huge populations of fish known to inhabit the ocean’s unfathomable depths (Pauly & Maclean 2003). This perception is still present, and it is time to realize how ill conceived it is.
One of the effects of the perception of fisheries as local folklore, featuring self-reliant fishers as stewards of local resources, is that we fail to even see the giant enterprise now feeding the tightly integrated, global market that supplies the fish that we order in restaurants or purchase in supermarkets. The problem with this is that the giant enterprise in question is having so severe an impact on its own resources base that, if present trends continue, it will collapse in the next decades, and drag down with it, into oblivion, many of the fishes it exploits (Parrish 1995, 1998), together with their supporting ecosystems (Pauly et al. 2003). This is probably one reason why at least one among the major fish distributors in the world, Unilever, partnered a conservation NGO, the WWF, in creating the Marine Stewardship Council, designed to bring market pressure to bear on what is perceived as underperforming management regimes (see contributions in Phillips et al. 2003).
Unsustainable fisheries have been with us for a long time. The earliest fishing implements so far identified are sophisticated bone harpoons, recovered from 90 000-year-old old middens by archaeologists working a site in present-day Congo (formerly Zaire). The main species that was targeted is a now-extinct, 2 m long, freshwater catfish; most probably the fishers in question moved on to other species (Yellen et al. 1995). This pattern of fisheries exterminating the population upon which they originally relied, and then moving on to other species, has continued ever since (Cushing 1988; Ludwig et al. 1993; Jackson et al. 2001), with periods of ‘sustainability’ occurring as a result of certain species being exploited in only part of their range, owing to equipment or vessel limitations, or subsidies not yet secured (Pauly et al. 2002).
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