Four fish
In the majority of cultures around earth, many have at least one species of fish that is a staple of their diet, or holds a religious, spiritual, or philosophical meaning. In the book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, the author supports an explanation as to why we, as humans, have such a love affair with not only fish but the open ocean. Mr. Greenberg, who is a devoted angler and also a fish conservationist, introduces the four fish that are eaten the most around the world. These are salmon, tuna, bass, and cod. He has a section covering each fish that includes, the history of the fish in relationship to human societal development, the various instances of domestication, the attempts at aquaculture, and also the state of the current wild populations for each. Mr. Greenberg then goes on to the political spectrum of the fish industries and highlights many of the problems that not just Americans face but all humans. Overfishing, depleting entire ecosystems, no fishing regulations or quotas, public demand for fish on the dinner table, and polluting fish farms are just a few of the topics he discusses. He has written articles for The New York Times Magazine, Book Review, and in the October 2010 issue of National Geographic, he wrote an article that is a base summary of this book. This text takes anyone interested on a ride around the world to see how the fishing industry really functions.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
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2010–2018years
75% recommend25% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- In his (really great) book Four Fish, Paul Greenberg says that research shows it takes today's modern fleet roughly 36x the effort to catch the same amount of fish that the fleet of 1900 could catch with sail power. So even radar, sonar, and satellite hunting technology can't keep up with the disastrous decline in ocean stocks.
https://www.amazon.com/Four-Fish-Future-Last-Wild/dp/0143119...
- Highly recommend Four Fish by Paul Greenberg, does a good job showing all sides of the fishing industry and the projected future if we keep going the same way.
- Four Fish by Paul Greenberg - tackles this very subject. I recommend it. http://roundvalleyfishing.com/2011/06/15/book-review-four-fi...
- That's an inaccurately bleak summary.
While the author is discouraged about the fate of the bluefin tuna, and her final note is one of worry, her last three paragraphs are mostly about things that could work:
And yet this is never where the new fish stories, or stories about the fish stories, wind up. Just when things seem bleakest, hope—dolphinlike—swims into the picture. David Helvarg concludes his memoir-cum-ecological-disaster narrative “Saved by the Sea” by declaring that, owing to a new attitude in Washington, things seem “to be looking up for the ocean.” Similarly, Roberts closes his chronicle of more than a millennium of overfishing by asserting, “We can restore the life and habits of the sea because it is in everyone’s interest that we do so.”
The way to keep fishing, according to Roberts, lies in not fishing—or, at least, in not fishing everywhere. He proposes that huge swaths of the sea be set aside as so-called “marine protected areas,” or M.P.A.s, where most commercial activity would be prohibited. In “Four Fish,” Paul Greenberg argues that the salvation of wild fish lies in farmed ones, though not in the kind you’ll find on ice at Stop & Shop. (Today, most farmed fish are fed on wild-caught fish, a practice that only exacerbates the problem.) Greenberg is a believer in what’s sometimes called “smart aquaculture,” and thinks we should be eating species like Pangasius hypophthalmus, commonly known as tra. Tra happily feed on human waste and were originally kept in Southeast Asia to dispose of the contents of outhouses. Michael Weber, the author of “From Abundance to Scarcity,” is encouraged by the introduction of new regulatory mechanisms such as “individual transferable quotas,” or I.T.Q.s. The idea behind I.T.Q.s is that if fishermen are granted a marketable stake in the catch they will have a greater economic interest in preserving it.
M.P.A.s, smart aquaculture, and I.T.Q.s—these are all worthy proposals that, if instituted on a large enough scale, would probably make a difference. As Roberts notes, it is in “everyone’s interest” to take the steps needed to prevent an ocean-wide slide into slime. But it is also in everyone’s interest to save the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Still, it is being fished to the edge of extinction, which is why a hopeful ending is not always the most convincing one.
