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The Fate of our Fish
By Laura Knoy on Wednesday, February 18, 2009.
After years of dwindling fish populations, a new report from the UNH shows some success stories in our seas. Certain fish stocks are up and scientists feel more confident that sustainability could be a reality in the future. We’ll look at the state of our region’s fishing industry.
Guests
- Andrew Rosenberg director of the Ocean Process Analysis Laboratory at the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, former dean of the College of Life Sciences at the University of New Hampshire and former northeast regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service
- John Williamson, fish conservation manager for the Ocean Conservancy, former member of the New England Fishery Management Council and formerly a fisherman for 20 years
We'll also hear from
- Erik Anderson, president of the New Hampshire Commercial Fishermen's Association
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From your most interesting discussion of fish stocks, listeners might have been left with the impression that fish stocks are distinct and separate manageable units. In fact, as both of your guests made reference to, they interact and can strongly influence one another. For example if large cod eat small crabs, as they do, then a cod recovery can cause a crab decline. So the whole fishery system has to be considered including the fishermen, a view that is contained in the current catch-phrase "ecosystem management".
The words one uses matter. Laura referred several times to stocks "bouncing back". Actually they claw their way back in a process that is long, laborious, and almost impossible to predict.
RL Haedrich
Norwich VT
I may be a minority of voices but the term "fisheries" implies the entire marine ecosystem was intended to support human economic driven industries and a manipulated desire for fish flesh. Ms. Knoy calls them "Our fish" as if they belong to humans and not to themselves.
We seem to be failing as the species claiming higher intellect(although it's confirmed that even fish are sentient, have cognition, feel pain and stress, and score high on tests administered by marine biologists) to afford other beings the same freedoms, homes, families, social structures we desire for ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln even said, "I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights, that is the way of the whole human being."
Because of human interference in marine ecology, not only are fish imperiled, but massive slaughters of seals, whales, dolphin, sharks are still happening( with little media attention) because they DO EAT fish as their natural diet whereas humans, like sheep, have been marketed to death to adopt our behaviors.
Who has more rights to eat fish, seals, whales, or humans who have abundance of other foods.
We have created a very unnatural order in human society because of our abhorrent consideration of other species as products and commodities. Now, we are falling into the trap we laid for them...
Hooks, Lures, Nets, Harpoons.....Nasty things that inflict incalculable agony...
Who are we really?
www.all-creatures.org
Mr. Rosenberg does his religion a dis-service. As Jews, we are obligated to alleviate pain and suffering of other creatures, not inflict it.
Tolstoy Said, From the murder of animals to the murder of humans, is only a small step."
In parts of Asia,and the Middle East, they slice open pregnant Ewes just before they deliver to extract the fetal lamb for their tight wooly coats for fashion. It's called Kurakul Wool.....Are they ours too?
The underlying assumption in this report that fish are "our fish" to kill and maim as we please is not just disturbing to me, but it also illuminates, I feel, the essential crisis of our culture. We are all ritually injected with the view (and this radio report is an example of that injection) that animals have no other purpose on this planet than to be used, killed, eaten, and "managed" by us humans. We lose both compassion and wisdom, and steal their purposes, failing to see that our violence toward them and their ecology and our Earth boomerangs inevitably as social malaise, disease, war, pollution, despair, anxiety, and a basic sense of having lost our purpose on this Earth. Fish are fully sentient beings, as we are, who are the subjects of their lives and are endowed with intelligence, as recent studies in both the U.S. and England show, at the level of non-human primates. We have no right to enter their world with vicious cruelty. Might does not make right. I was raised to hook, clean, kill, and eat fish, and finally awoke from that nightmare realizing that sowing seeds of violence leads to further violence. I haven't eaten fish or any animal-derived foods for 30 years, and if I can do it, so can others. It is profoundly liberating to liberate others, and I hope NHPR will explore the links between our violence toward animals for food, and the violence and suffering we cause each other and ourselves. Now that would be progress!