Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Scales Fall: Is there any hope for our overfished oceans?,” The New Yorker, August 2, 2010

In this literature review, The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert recounts the decline of bluefin tuna and other aquatic species due to overfishing, technological advances and lukewarm governance by authorities like the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). According to Kolbert, the world passed “the point of what might be called ‘peak fish’” in the late 1980s, when the global catch topped out at 85 million tons. “For the past two decades, the global catch has bee  steadily declining,” she warns. “It is estimated that the total take is dropping by around five hundred thousand tons a year.”

Kolbert thus turns to several books on aquatic ecosystems and ocean sustainability to explain the confluence of cultural, historical and technological factors that have brought whole fisheries to the brink of extinction. To this end, she trawls such watery tomes as (i) Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish (David Helvarg); (ii) Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Dean Bavington); (iii) Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (Paul Greenberg); (iv) From Abundance to Scarcity (Michael Weber); (v) Five Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosytems (Daniel Pauly); and (vi) The Unnatural History of the Sea (Callum Roberts).

Kolbert concedes, however, that the plight of bluefin tuna has at least drawn international attention to “the sorry state of ocean life.” She particularly notes new efforts to dedicate some waters as “marine protected areas” and to establish new regulatory mechanisms like “individual transferable quotas,” which incentivize sustainability by granting fishermen a marketable stake in their catches. In addition, other ecologists have evidently proposed “smart aquaculture” solutions that do not use wild fish as feed sources. “Just when things seem bleakest,” writes Kolbert, “hope—dolphinlike—swims into the picture.”