WHY WHY WHY? A question about fish.

Elizabeth Kolbert, environmentalist and resident New Yorker writer on all things environmental, is easily one of my favorite author/journalists in that magazine. She is also one of the people who depresses me most. Call me masochistic, but I guess I like to be depressed.

A recent article, "The Scales Fall: Is there any hope for our overfished oceans?" is not only depressing, it's downright damning. As most of my friends know, I stopped eating fish around 2002 to try to address the plight of our wild fish and numbingly quickly dying oceans with my meager seafood appetite. In the process, I've managed to spread the no-fish gospel to nearly everyone I've had a meal with (much to the annoyance of many of those people) and hopefully affect how those around me view fisheries.

Yet, as Kolbert points out, "peak fish" - or where global seafood catches hit their peak - occurred in the late nineteen-eighties, and global fish catches have been going down ever since. In the past century, we've witnessed the wholesale collapse or dangerous overfishing of nearly every large predatory fish, including halibut, cod, swordfish, marlin, just to name a few. Estimates - conservative - of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna fisheries places their numbers at just 20% of what they were a half century ago. We are likely taking at least 100 million sharks out of the ocean each year. The numbers are staggering, and the result of continued fishing at this pace are obvious and unimaginable at the same time: an ocean devoid of life.

This is a problem. There can be no doubt, there can be no arguments, that THIS IS A PROBLEM. So, why, now, in 2010, over 20 years after our increasingly effective technologies, our more global scale, and out greater efforts to catch more fish have actually resulted in decreasing annual catches, do people still not seem to see fisheries as being in crisis? Why do I still get funny looks from people when I tell them I stopped eating seafood because we are over-fishing the oceans? Why do organizations like ICCAT (that is supposed to be managing Atlantic bluefin) end up being corrupt and useless bodies that actually enable countries to empty our oceans?

What will it take to ACTUALLY save our oceans? Yell out suggestions, and let's get it done. I would like to let my grand-kids have the choice of eating a fish. Not sit there and read about them only in books.