Alaska’s Fisheries Are Collapsing
politico.com
politico.com
We're destroying our local ecosystems for a quick buck, and a cap on exports would be the quickest fix. In the long term we should turn more to fish farms.
> Based on USDA data for 2021, only 3.9% of all U.S. hay produced and 6.4% of all alfalfa hay entered the export market.
[0]: https://www.hayandforage.com/article-3825-Year-end-hay-expor....
The problem is that due to the system of water rights and allocations, California is effectively subsidizing Saudi Arabia by selling water to local farmers at below market rates. Thus we have a water shortage which impacts everyone while benefiting only a tiny number of farmers.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-...
> Alfalfa's deep roots are capable of extracting water from deep in the soil, thus much of the water applied is not wasted. Additionally, deep roots enable the crop to survive periodic droughts.
> Perenniality—The fact that the crop grows for 4-8 years, grows quickly with warm conditions in the spring is a major advantage of alfalfa—it can utilize residual winter rainfall before irrigation is necessary. This is unlike summer-grown annual crops that need to be replanted each year (water use efficacy is low during this time). In many areas, the first cutting of alfalfa of the year requires zero irrigation– supported only by rain and residual soil moisture.
> Very High Yields—Alfalfa is a very high yielding crop, and can grow 365 days a year in warm regions (such as the Imperial Valley of California and southern Arizona). Its biomass yields are very high—we can get up to 12 cuttings per year in those regions, and growers with top management can obtain more than 14 tons/acre dry matter yields. High-yields create higher water use efficiencies.
> High Harvest Index, High Water Use Efficiency—Alfalfa's Water Use Efficiency is not only due to high yields, but because nearly 100% of the above-ground plant material is harvested (known as the harvest index). In most seed-producing and fruiting crops, only a portion of the plant is harvested (typically 30-50% of the total plant biomass).
[0]: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=1772...
The problem is that farmers are being blamed for poor city planning and management. Los Angeles, for example, lets tens of billions of gallons of fresh water flow into the ocean. [0]
The farmers are at least using the 40% share of the water they get and in return Californians get affordable food.
> According to the Pacific Institute, California's urban areas are letting between 770,000 and 3.9 million acre-feet of water spill away every year (depending on how dry or wet the year is).
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/us/california-drought-sto.... [1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2023-01-16/ess....
We need to move towards a free market solution where all water users pay market rates instead of subsidizing politically favored sectors. If that means that prices rise for certain water-intensive crops then so be it. That's preferable to a water shortage.
There isn't a water shortage. Cities are wasting their fresh water through mismanagement. They could syphon off 10% of the runoff to little to no environmental effect, but they don't because there is no political capital to be gained.
And water rights are attached to land, it isn't just "given", farmers need to buy, own and maintain the land to preserve their water rights. Which has more free market qualities than any proposal I've heard coming out of the California legislature.
Herring season was interesting since all the herring roe went, apparently, to Japan. A Japanese inspector would arrive and test the herring that the cannery had stored in large brine vats, stacked around the facility. Only when he said it was "ripe" would we begin processing (separating) the roe from the herring.
The non-egg part of the processing was, I was told, to become crab bait or cat food.
It seems very few of my friends kept fishing in Alaska as we got older. I suspect that is normal, but a few friends still go up to work summers. Sometimes I wish I had gone up to do it.
They also have a giant vacuum cleaner type thing four stories tall as loud as two jet airplanes. People casually walk the small village as the "herr rn sucker" deafens everyone.
https://www.statista.com/chart/2280/the-global-fish-farming-...
China's being smart about it too - they are farming fish which are ubiquitous and easy to farm (Carp and Tilapia):
https://thechinaguys.com/aquaculture-in-china/
China could do a much better job at regulating their fishing industry though...
In the West we eat Tilapia, but we probably should learn to eat Carp. Unfortunately as a family of fish, it gets a bad rap for a few reasons (Americans don't like bones, Carp has a low-class association, Carp can be "muddy" if not raised and prepared right).
I will have to pick up some smoked carp if I make it to said area. I've never seen it for sale. The only time I've seen Carp for sale period is in Asian supermarkets.
https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/11/f...
Here is an article I found about it:
https://www.outdoorlife.com/blogs/cast-iron-chef/ritters-fis...
Asian species are a different story - some of them are filter feeders. Some other European species don't have bottom feeding mouth parts as well (Crucian, Prussian).
The popularity of lobster went up first when canning technology allowed boats to cook and package them up immediately after they were caught but they were still a cheap source of protein. It didn't become the delicacy it is today until after the great depression when the economics allowed fishermen to specialize in lobster fishing and keep them alive until they reached the customer.
That set of circumstances is difficult to repeat for other species
Edit: I was thinking saltwater fish, freshwater fish is a different story.
Fisheries would be one example, agriculture which a sibling comment mentioned, another. But it's also pollution, labour laws, access to housing.
It's tricky because the US is literally the most powerful economy ever, so it must be doing something right, equally it seems other countries care more about their citizens. Not China or North Korea ofc but Europe or Canada etc.
The US’s wealth is in it’s people not it’s fisheries.
Who would have thought spreadsheets and magic market numbers had little material connection to the resources extracted to extrapolate those numbers.
But the whole premise of technology is that you can break the zero-sum and reach arbitrarily high levels.
For example Deuterium–tritium fusion runs on hydrogen that's pretty common to find. Yes, if we learn to exploit it, we will one day run out, but by then we'll have new sources of fuel. Similarly solar energy is just 'free' energy that rains down on our planet.
We could use that energy to farm fish or cultivate natural populations. We don't do that which is bad, but it's not some impossibility.
In many ways these arguments of "there's free energy from hydrogen fusion" feels similar to arguments about solving invasive species with another species because we haven't figured out that the new species will be invasive yet. And in a similar fashion, the local ecology may eventually re-balance (indeed, likely will) but what time scale are we looking at? Humans need human time scales.
For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet.
The reason why fisheries are collapsing is because we don't spend much making our environment more habitable and pollute or use up what's already there.
> Eh, only within the current context of society and technology.
> For example, most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted. Meanwhile, the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet.
You can't magick away the problem with sci-fi fantasies. Those technologies don't actually exist and (with a fairly high probability) may never exist.
And in any case, a bigger finite does not an infinite make.
We don't have the technology to pave the planet in solar panels, because we don't have the technology to make it cost effective. Also the solution to the "problem" of "most of the energy from the sun that hit our planet are just basically wasted" is to literally destroy the environment in an industrialization project.
Solving the "problem" of "...the sun uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet," is also limited by that cost effectiveness problem AND the problem of we don't have the technology to do anything with energy collected by satellites, especially ones half-way around the solar system. Then there's the issue of putting up a few trillion solar power satellites still would allow the sun to "uselessly radiate away energy that's not even hitting the planet."
We'd need only 254x254 km of solar panels for the whole world.
https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... - page 25
While interesting, that's an answer to a different problem/challenge than I was responding to.
At the expense of *most* of its citizens. I know people who make a shocking amount of money fishing in Alaska every summer. The problem with the US is that it always prioritizes a few of its citizens getting rich, to the diffuse and often intangible detriment of the rest of us.
A good representation of the people I found were Native Alaskans, immigrants, or felons who were attracted to the job because it was one of the damn few available to them. It was brutal work to eke out a basic existence.
Not sure about the natives. Their way of life was wrecked by western influence and fishing even on a modern vessel is about the closest thing they have to continuing their way of life while making some income near their home. I have no idea what they would shift to if they moved.
In any case USA's highly regulated Bering Sea fishing industry is shared with Russia. Even if we eliminated/downsized our fishing it'd have to be done in concert with Russia to get the desired outcome, otherwise we'd just be handing the lions share of our catch to Russian fisherman.
Per capita we’re still doing ok but far from #1.
Seriously, the highest population in any state with a higher GDP per capita than the US is the UAE.
#1? Maybe not, but it's certainly pretty close in any useful discussion.
Remove resource extraction and financial services from all economies and the list does look different, but the US’s position is still far from #1. Also, PPP comparisons between countries are rather suspect as costs for housing, food, etc vary widely across the US. There’s plenty of ways to run these numbers but the results are surprisingly arbitrary.
Consider the fact that when the US was colonized, the native population was small and had a significant technological disadvantages - also true to some extent for central/South America. That gave the colonists a whole continent for virtually free, whereas in their territories of origin they would have had to compete with large incumbent populations that had similar technology, from weapons to the administrative organs of states.
If youg et a huge resource boost you will surely find ways to profit, just as if you received a billion $ to play with. But getting thins for free - especially land - also means you can afford to care less about externalities, because you don't have as many neighbors or you are not jammed as closely together. And so it's easy and natural for people in that situation to prioritize resource extraction and profit maximization. California's gold rush is a relatively recent example of the same phenomenon.
My pet theory is that when you do this on a continental scale, you end up with a culture that defaults to thinking of economic inputs as infinite, and even if they're not, to maximizing output for as long as possible and then moving on. It's slash-and-burn agriculture's mentality (with a side dose of captive labor) but on an industrial-technological scale.
Fast-forward to the present, and there's an awareness that the civilizational free lunch is over, resources and livable territory are finite, and pollution has a nasty habit of ending up somewhere, but where it's still profitable to do business with the attitude described above. A lot of the bitterness in contemporary politics is due to the economic calculus being increasingly obvious thanks to widespread availability of scientific data and network infrastructure.
Incumbents and wannabes whose economic interests/preferences tend toward extraction of resources or rents cannot publicly admit the validity of data about the downsides of their economic activity, because then they would also have to admit that they simply don't care and prefer making money in the short term to any sort of sustainability in the long term. Though numerous, they are too few in number to sustain such a position in face of broad opposition, so they maintain a set of policy arguments (and a polity) based around different but more emollient axioms. The more questionable or untenable those axioms, the more fervently they must be upheld, to maintain the support of their polity.
In the US, the hardline extraction position has a significant overlap with Chrisitan Nationalism, a belief strongly held by ~10% of the population and accepted/supported by another ~20%. The CN position, when you get down to it, is that mankind was meant to exert total dominion over the Earth by divine fiat, and that in the not-too distant future the divine power will return and re-establish itself on earth following a period of apocalyptic upheaval.
Those neighborhoods don’t get renewed - their cheaply-built houses just get passed down the economic ladder, while the previous residents buy bigger, nicer houses further out in a new subdivision.
The Dominionist worldview is, as you said, quite common in my home region, and I was told in church youth group that environmentalism was basically paganism.
I nearly turned down my JHU admission because there was no on-campus parking and freshmen were strongly discouraged from having cars - I couldn’t fathom life without a car. One of the first people I met at freshman orientation was a guy from NYC who not only didn’t have a driver’s license, much less a car, neither did his parents! We managed to throughly culture shock each other, as he’d never met an Evangelical or a Texan before, and couldn’t understand why I was so apprehensive about not having access to a car.
Resource constraints can have appalling results (I live near Nuremberg, so I’m well aware), but no sense of them (what I and many middle-class and up Texans grew up with) carries its own dangers to oneself and one’s world.
Well this rather neatly explains New Orleans East as well.
If you were to look at the details, I do not doubt that it would be the same in Europe. Please don't think that any of the 'developed' countries are holier-than-US.
If you buy "stuff", you participate in the exploitation of nature.
1. "Addition of a carbon" tax is highly misleading because it was enacted almost half a decade ago, and while there was an increase in carbon taxes during an inflationary period, that was scheduled years before.[1]
2. Dropping carbon (or similar) taxes to fight inflation is terrible policy. It's untargeted, benefits rich people more (the more gas you use the more you benefit), and encourages more consumption by lowering prices. If you want to provide relief, targeted subsidies work far better.
3. Carbon in the atmosphere is fungible so whether there are trees or not in your country is irrelevant. If your country is pumping 20 tons (or whatever) of carbon into the air, that's still 20 tons of carbon that's heating the atmosphere, or 20 tons that a developing country can no longer emit.
4. Forests are "carbon sinks" in the sense that if you keep them around you'll keep a lot of co2 from entering the atmosphere, but mature forests don't suck much carbon out of the atmosphere (on net).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_pricing_in_Canada#2020:...
I think the size and heterogeneity of the US is under-appreciated.
Canada is a 1/10th the population of the US. Europeans are more likely to identify as Germans, Italians, etc. and see to their national interests before those of the EU as a whole.
The US is the 3rd most populous country after China, India - ahead of Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil... And the 4th largest by landmass after Russia, Canada, and China.
2019 figures:
* U.S. commercial fishermen landed 9.3 billion pounds of seafood * Americans consumed 6.3 billion pounds of seafood
Given imports are more processed than exports, a part of that difference is presumably waste & less desirable byproducts. So it seems fair to conclude that the US eats pretty close to the amount of seafood that it produces.
In $ terms (because of the value add of processing), US seafood imports are roughly 4x exports.
Source: https://media.fisheries.noaa.gov/2021-05/fus-2019-fact-sheet...
One complexity with this plan is that the vast majority of the seafood processing occurs overseas. We export fish to China to be processed, then ship it back.
Sadly, that happens all over the world. 'We' prefer to not see long term effects for having a 'better' life now.
It seems no matter where in the world the same thing is happening in different ways and there seems to be a common response: it's not us - its foreign fisherman, big fishing companies, climate change, different types of fisherman, marine use etc.
I think that's a but wishful. Just look at stuff like CAFOs. The majority of consumers don't give a damn as long as the price in the store is cheap enough. They're not thinking of where the stuff they're buying came from.
I've done a lot of highway driving around the US and CAFOs are probably the worst part of it. They are depressing to look at, and you can often smell them miles before you see them. Central California, all of Nebraska, and Northern Indiana are three places that stand out in my mind for having outrageous "density" of abhorrent-smelling places.
I used to joke that senior tech role at Waste Management would be an efficient pairing but the CAFO angle was unknown to me before this.
PS HN being HN, I realize that even if I can't smell, my clothes etc might acquire an odor from being in smelly places.
viva Las Vegas
Wealth inequality is a huge part of the reason consumers won't opt for the more eco-friendly or ethical options on the market.
Generally speaking, people as individuals are simply not willing to change and will always point to someone else as being the problem.
The only thing that has a chance at "solving" climate change and environmental collapse is individual action and individual change.
The driving factors of climate change: * industrial * end of list
Individuals changing their behavior will not do a single thing to solve, reduce, or delay the climate crisis. It’s a feel-good thing for individuals to do, yes, but it doesn’t help in the slightest.
This nonsense-belief of "individual change" as a necessary precursor to societal adaptation of necessary policies is an absurdity most likely cooked up by industry spin-doctors.
Of course, it is exactly the other way around. Abstract insight into a problem and its solution needs to be implemented into policy by the government. That is it's primary function.
That's all well and good if you live in a dictatorship, but those of us under democracy are lead by the same individuals that who won't act. Only once they have decided to act and feel the need to clean up the outliers who continue to go against the grain will they use their governmental powers.
This has nothing to do with democracy per se. The constituency in the US isn't directly involved with legislature. They vote for "representatives" who supposedly defend their interests in a role of mediation.
In reality, long-term interests of the public are of little import. Public perception is easily swayed, what counts more than votes is, who has money and knows how to use it.
Those responsible steal themselves out of accountability.
Pro-animals and vegan movements have different roots. Dairy & meat industry is trying its best to discourage individual actions ... their concern with plant based alternatives and naming of stuff is a clear indicator. Even terms like almond milk (1000 years old term) is somehow a problem.
Plastics are very visible within our environment, that was the reason behind population accepting recycling.
Animals do not have the voice and the horrors of their lives are generally hidden from the consumers. If most of the population remains ignorant incl. politicians, we cannot expect that anything will change.
Depressing.
I wonder if fisheries recover? For example what’s the state of North Atlantic fisheries?
> The trawlers also caught enormous amounts of non-commercial fish, which were economically unimportant but very important ecologically.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_nor...
Wikipedia ends it's history with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
> In 2015, two reports on cod fishery recovery suggested stocks may have recovered somewhat.[56][2][57]
> A Canadian scientist reported that, cod were increasing in numbers, health, normalizing in maturity and behavior, and offered a promising estimate of increased biomass in particular areas.[2]
> A US report suggested that a failure to consider reduced resilience of cod populations due to increased mortality in warming surface water of the Gulf of Maine had led to overfishing despite regulation. Thus, overestimates of stock biomass due to generalization of local estimates and ignorance of environmental factors in the growth or recovery potential of a cod fishery would lead to mismanagement and further collapse of stocks, through further unsustainable quotas, as in the past.[58][59]
> In June 2018, the federal government reduced the cod quota, finding that the cod stocks had fallen again after just two years of fair catches.
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/in-cods-shadow-redfish-ri...
While people are clearly happy about the return of this fish, seems clear there's a lot of uncertainty around what to do next and whether fishing for it is a good idea.
After 20+ years, you need to realize the doomsayers were wrong.
This mostly fixed the problem but demand keeps on increasing along with changes to water temperature, so local collapses in specific populations are becoming a big problem again.
Seabird populations have declined by 70% since the 1950's.
Studies estimate that up to 40% of all marine life caught is thrown overboard as bycatch.
Six out of seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered due to fishing.
Over 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises are killed as bycatch every year.
2.7 trillion fish are caught every year, or up to 5 million caught every minute.
Fish populations are in decline to near extinction.
I read many years ago, the fishing fleet in the NE US was outdated, but Pres Carter provided subsidies in the 70s to modernize the fleet due to foreign competition.
The result was the same as what the Article mention for Alaska. Boom times for quite a while, then the crash which the NE is still working through.
The obsolete fleet provided more employment and was not as efficient, providing for some recovery on the ocean.
It was named Cape Cod for the plentiful fish back in the day.
I don't think they are wrong here. I think blaming trawlers is looking for rounding errors. But there are still a litany of reasons to start sensibly restricting trawling.
https://www.intrafish.com/alaska-seafood-starring-in-new-tv-...
Unfortunately it looks like his 2006 ad's been pulled from all search results:
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ben-stein-commercial-stati...
http://www.alaskaseafood.org/tv%5Fad/
https://www.ispot.tv/topic/actor-actress/Ac/ben-stein
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ben+stein+fish+commercial&t=h_&iax...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ben+stein+alaska+seafood&t=h_&iar=...
It's remarkable how even today, some of the smartest people in the world are happy to sound like morons for the right price.
https://sunwarrior.com/blogs/health-hub/vegan-dha-omega-3-so...
You can. Your actions matter. Simply refuse to to participate in that. Even saving a small piece of nature has a meaning. Maybe not to you, but to what is saved it has.
If there was no demand, it would not be happening.
Your example can help others to see what's wrong with their way of living. If lot of people change, the laws shall be changed.
> almost zero faith in the government ... when ..is large corporate interest
All (western) governments are puppets of corporate interests. Just look behing most armed conflicts of the last century, and also how are goverments handling the climate crisis. We can expect no meaningful change from their actions.
Demand for change must come from the people, and it must come from a significant part of the population (majority is not required, though), otherwise the status quo and business as usual will prevail.
We should acknowledge that it's our personal responsibility to lower demand, and protect (demand protection of) what remains.
"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." - Rumi
I have a lot of pessimism about our ocean health, we really need to do anything we can to support fish populations -- if those collapse it's just a matter of time before the rest of the ecosystem follows.
[0]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/artifishal/video-79192.htm...
Thanks for the link though, I'll take a look at it when I have some time.
We send certain types of boats with certain types of gear out to certain small areas where we have found concentrations of certain kinds of fish, and they catch lots and bring them back to factories with certain kinds of processing equipment which then send the product out to be consumed.
And after a while we've caught a good percentage of that concentration of fish, and then they start to peter out and it become uneconomical to run that entire costly process. And so we then identify other kinds of edible ocean life, and we change our boats and gear and locations and seasons and factories at great cost, and consume a different batch of fish.
And while we're on that second effort, the first area is being repopulated with the first type of fish, or maybe another, because the food sources for fish are still out there and available - the planktons and smaller fish - and nature abhors a vacuum.
It's all just a cycle. Fish stocks may move around in response to our overfishing - more reproduction over here, bigger schools back in the same place once we move on - but the net effect is that the biomass remains the same.
But change is expensive, and so we hear from the payers about how we're overfishing "their" fishstocks.
We're a tiny blip on the oceans' consumption radar. Don't mourn for the fish. Mourn for the people who need different boats and gear and territories every ten years or so.
We'll never be no-impact (at least until the asteroid hits.) But so long as we're not poisoning life away, we're just another niche species on the ocean.
Please eat fish that is pelagic such as herring and sardines. Otherwise long-line fished cod and salmon are fine as well as farmed fish.
Decrease of 84% of the Alaskan king crabs stocks between 2018 and 2022 so, not... probably not soon.
May be covid-19 messing with the data (by several reasons), or changes in the environment or in the trophic chains, or pirate fishing fleets moving a lot of the stuff under the radar, or Fukushima. Probably all of them attacking at the same time.
In any case it seems that something hit the Alaskan crabs and it must be happened a few years before 2018. Marine biologists should be able to even estimate the exact year.
I do not use that verb lightly. I believe it is accurate and fair.