Despite what I have claimed in the past, I now believe the biggest threat to the environment right now is today's common fishing practices.
Technologies developed in the past 30 years are far too destructive, wasteful, and unselective.
Because I don't want to overwhelm you my dear readers (all two of you), I've broken this up into an exciting 3 part series.
Today's subject is bottom trawling, a fishing technique which involves dragging a fishing net across the sea floor. To be able to give you an idea of just how ridiculous this common technique is, the equivalent would be to bulldoze an entire rainforest in the search for meat. Yes, you would catch some deer, moose, and bear... but you would have entire forests, swamps, and rivers decimated in the process.
Greenpeace has a really great video demonstrating how bottom trawling works:
Greenpeace International describes bottom trawling on their website:
"Bottom trawling involves dragging huge, heavy nets along the sea floor. Large metal plates and rubber wheels attached to these nets move along the bottom and crush nearly everything in their path. All evidence indicates that deep water life forms are very slow to recover from such damage, taking decades to hundreds of years - if they recover at all."
In addition to being disastrous to the ecosystems and fish populations, the Gulf Coast Preservation Society estimates that up to 50% of what is caught from bycatch is thrown back into the waters. This has resulted in the decline of many species who end up caught in fishing nets....for example up to 90% of sharks are caught as bycatch from tuna nets.
The good news is that some countries are moving towards banning bottom trawling, the bad news is that countries like Spain, Russia, and Iceland continue to bottom trawl. And those are the countries we know about. The Wake Project Society explains why its hard to know who's really doing what in international waters here.
The reasons for these fishing techniques and lack of regulation aren't definite, some believe that it's simply ignorance, others use the 'economic' argument (the fishing industry employees millions of people), and some believe that many fishing companies owe their governments millions of dollars for their boats and equipment that they have no choice but to pillage the seas.
But that's not really the point, because the result is going to be the same and none of those reasons hold any water (pun intended).
As mentioned before, the real crisis with our oceans is that we really don't know that much about them. We obtain up to 70% of our oxygen supply from our oceans and it's really anyone's guess as to what will happen if we completely empty our waters (which is slated to happen soon). Well, it isn't really anyone's guess... there are differing theories but ultimately no consensus.
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