Greenpeace

One way to measure success is to consider the reaction provoked by your action.  Greenpeace released its report on the retail marketing of unsustainable seafood (“Carting Away the Oceans: How Grocery Stores are Emptying the Seas”) on June 17. One reaction has been immediate howls of outrage from the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), particularly a man named Gavin Gibbon.  That’s understandable, since NFI is a trade group representing many vendors who are selling fish that are unsustainably taken from the oceans.

But this discussion shouldn’t be about our respective identities.  It should be about facts and arguments and so far, all Mr. Gibbon has served up has been some pretty thin soup (or in this case, bisque).

Mr. Gibbon leads off by calling our report “unscientific,” which is tactic 1A from the public relations playbook developed by the cigarette industry in the 1960s.  He claims in various blog posts that he’s read our entire report, but I guess he missed the 48 endnotes that cite our sources, which include the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the Marine Resource Assessment Group and scholarly journals like Nature and Marine Policy.

Next, NFI’s Mr. Gibbon says it’s “absurd” for Greenpeace to call for stores to stop selling the 22 species that comprise our “red list.”  We didn’t draw up our red list with the aim of taking an extreme position.  Greenpeace came to our conclusion in this case – as we do with all issues – based on what actions are needed to restore and protect a healthy environment.  It’s an unfortunate – and inconvenient - truth that in this age of industrial fishing, we humans have managed to strip so many fish from the sea so quickly that these 22 species have been pushed to the edge of population collapse.

To be sure, it is with an air of profound sadness that Greenpeace has to be the messenger that the state of our oceans have come to this and that we need to call for such drastic remedies.  But then we consider the likely consequences of failing to take drastic action.  In too many instances around the world, many fishing grounds, including the Georges Banks off New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces, have been fished so hard that they’ve suffered major stock collapses.  Let’s be clear – the stocks off the northeast coast and in all seas where all these 22 species live can recover but to accomplish that, we must give these fish population time to recover and when I write time, I’m not writing about months or years, but decades.

Across our oceanic globe, we also need to create permanent marine reserves – areas forever closed to fishing, so fish populations can always have regions where they can reproduce without pressure from our extremely efficient fishing technology.

As I said above, Greenpeace bases its recommendations on what the environment needs to restore and maintain its health.  There’s also a dash of human-centric interest at work here.  Seafood is a valuable part of our human culture and heritage.  If we want that to continue for our children and grandchildren, we have to take steps – necessarily drastic steps – now, so we can leave this legacy intact for future generations.

Mark Floegel
Greenpeace Research Unit