Imagine this: the way deer were hunted is to line up 100 bulldozers, and send them forward over miles of rangeland to scrape everything — trees, brush, squirrels, birds, dogs, foxes, everything in the landscape — into a big pile, and then the drivers would jump out and pick through the debris to pull out any deer. They’d leave behind a wasteland, and a wasteful pile of wreckage, and photographers and journalists would descend horrified on the mess and pillory the perpetrators.
I don’t think we’d stand for it. It would also be completely unsustainable — each pass would destroy the land and it would take decades for it to recover.
But apparently, if it takes place underwater and you can’t see it, it’s OK. Christie Wilcox explains the consequences of trawling.
“Deep-sea trawling is currently carried out along large sectors of the oceans, and it appears to have severe consequences on deep-sea sediment dynamics at a global scale,” the authors write in their conclusions. “Cumulatively, the impacts of trawling on the sediment structure, the benthic biodiversity, and the most basic of all the nutritional resources in these deep-sea sedimentary ecosystems resemble the catastrophic effects caused by man-accelerated soil erosion on land.” Their results show that trawling is a scorched-earth way of fishing that leaves little behind to rebuild. Not only are fish, corals, and invertebrates wiped from an area with each sweep, the very nature of the sea floor is altered by chronic trawling. Since upwards of 98 percent of all marine species live on or immediately above the sea floor, such dramatic changes in sediment biodiversity and chemistry are bound to ripple outward. These data explain why deep sea communities affected by trawling take longer than expected to recover, if they can recover at all.
“Intensive and chronic bottom trawling is deemed to transform large portions of the deep continental slope in to faunal deserts and highly degraded seascapes,” write the authors. “With deep-sea trawling currently conducted along most continental margins, we conclude that trawling represents a major threat to the deep seafloor ecosystem.”
We wouldn’t tolerate deer hunting with bulldozers, so why is it so difficult to get international policy to end this destructive practice?
Given what is currently be done to acquire many other resources on land and the devastation they leave, I’m not so sure we wouldn’t stand to bulldozer deer hunting. It is all still horrible of course and much of it will never recover. Also, whether “we” will stand for it or not isn’t going to be enough as long as money is the political currency.
No worries, there will be plenty of time for recovery once humans go extinct. Maybe when the cockroaches become sentient they will do a better job of controlling their appetites. If not, then whatever comes after them. “Earth abides”.
Cockroaches (the pests / insects, not the pests / brothers) are sentient: They are avoiding humans, and not drawing attention to themselves…
Deer don’t make up nearly as significant a portion of the general dietary intake as the seafood that is obtained from deep sea trawling.
If we look at the land based foodstuffs that are equivalent in dietary importance, like beef, grains, etc, then bulldozing the landscape as an integral part of harvesting the resource is exactly what we are doing….
@1
Oh. OK then. Since money always was and always will be “the political currency” I’m guessing you were actually trying to type “fuck it,” leaned on the keyboard at some point, and then forgot to spellcheck. Please be more cautious next time.
@2
As above. But what won’t recover is lost species and ecosystems, and what we didn’t even know was down there. What won’t recover is our children’s understanding that we didn’t particularly care. What won’t recover is the portion of our own species that didn’t even try to make something of x to the y years of our own evolution, and could have. What won’t recover is your jadedness. Earth does indeed abide. Jump in, if you wish.
OMIF. Sometimes I feel like I’m right back where I never wanted to be, listening to the same redneck complaining through bad beer and chewing tobacco, with fancier words here and there.
I can see the big draggers have stirred up the bay
Leaving lobster traps smashed on the bottom
Can they think it don’t pay to respect the old ways
That Make and Break men have not forgotten?
-Stan Rogers “Make and Break Harbour”
Yup, that’s trawling all right.
This is a result of our continuing fishing down the food web and we’ve been moving farther offshore for years. The main issue with deep sea trawling, as compared to near shore trawling, is the recovery time. The deep sea communities that are being trawled will take a long time to recover because of low temperatures and low nutrient input into the system.
Unfortunately trawling is one of the most efficient methods to get certain fish and shrimp. The only “advances” in trawling have been nets to reduce the by-catch as a larger mesh will exclude smaller fish from coming up in the haul. This doesn’t work for shrimp since they are small and aI don’t know if anyone knows how much this has actually reduced the killing of these small fish, they just don’t come up in the net. Sea turtle exclusion devices have decreased the number of their deaths.
There are places that rate seafood from a health and sustainability standpoint like Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch on the west coast and the Safina Center at Stony Brook University on the east coast.
“but we gota eat how will we feed ourselfs if we cain’t trawl”
where will we get palm oil if we don’t plow the forest up..
yes when it is out of sight we don’t notice it. We also don’t seem to notice trouble if the effects are cumulative or are slow to show you know the long term effects of our choices.
I have no idea when or if we will learn to recognize the damage before we experience it. I have doubts because we don’t much of a history of recognizing long term negative effects of much of anything we like short term.
like smoking and health, or the farming practices of the “bust bowl”
uncle frogy
correction:
we don’t have much of a history of recognizing the long term negative effects of much of anything we like short term
@ #9,
So it’s kind of like we were frogs sitting in a lidless pot with the heat slowly building?
A larger ocean disaster looming is ocean acidification. We talk a lot about global climate change, but if CO2 levels continue to rise as much as they are expected to, the whole marine food web as we know it is at risk. The main linkage between phytoplankton and larger fish are the zooplankton. Copepods, a very important crustacean zooplankter, need CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) as part of it’s shell and they may not survive in an acidic ocean.
There are also studies out there that show the direct impacts of increased CO2 levels on developing fish and shellfish.
Well, that explains the garlic butter and side of tiny carrots.
@PZ Myers
Jurisdiction issues are a big part of it. Countries can police their own territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones (anywhere 200 miles out from the coastline) with varying degrees of effectiveness, but beyond that ships are only subject to their flag state’s rules and enforcement. That means that as long as commercial fisherman stay in the high seas and only go into territorial/EEZ waters when they can’t be caught*, it’s almost impossible to regulate them.
* Just look at Somalia, where you’ve got piracy because Somalia was incapable of policing its own fisheries and factory ships from elsewhere moved in and trawled the crap out of their waters.
Happy go lucky us :
This video by the WWF Canada and the Marine Stewardship Council was pulled the very next day after pressure from the seafood corporations; around 80% of ‘MSC sustainably certified’ fish (by weight) are trawl-caught.
http://adland.tv/commercials/wwf-we-dont-farm-2013-90-canada
Sigh.
That’s now how it works: they use one really, really big bulldozer, and they pick through the debris using machines that separate the coal from the other toxic crap that they shove down into the valley. That or they steam-clean the debris to get out the oil.
And then we use the oil to fuel farming machines to grow feed for the cows that we eat.
Scallops used to be harvested like this in Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne, Australia until it was banned 15 years ago after lobbying by recreational fishermen and environmentalists (gee those Greenies spoil everybody’s fun, don’t they?). A single licence is about to be (already has been?) issued for up to 12 tonnes to be taken by dive fishing. Recreational fishermen are commenting on the size and quantity of fish that have returned to the bay recently.
As for the bulldozers, this is how land is cleared in Queensland. Two bulldozers with a huge chain attached either side of a massive steel ball drive through the bush and flatten everything; trees, shrubs, termite mounds, whatever. Some years ago the then Labor (roughly equivalent of Democrat) government announced restrictions on land clearance. Unfortunately (stupidly imho) they didn’t take immediate effect and the obvious result was an increase in land clearance before the deadline. The current Liberal (roughly equivalent of Republican) government has recently announced an easing of those restrictions claiming that “cuts to ‘green tape’ will save business tens of millions of dollars.”
The planet will survive but we’re stuffed.
There are places that rate seafood from a health and sustainability standpoint like Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch on the west coast and the Safina Center at Stony Brook University on the east coast.
Bump. I keep a couple of Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood watch cards in my wallet, and always pull it out when getting sushi (well any seafood), especially around others.
Deap-sea trawling is a practice that needs to stop now. Our fisheries are already F*d beyond belief. Shit, if we hadn’t already screwed our major fisheries over, we wouldn’t need to trawl*.
*I’m thinking in particular of the California Rockfish. A delicious fish that pretty much can’t be commercially fished any longer. So, fishermen found a replacement – the Spotted rat fish. The meat is very close to Rockfish, but are deep-sea fish and are trawled for. They are also one ugly looking fish. NOTE: This was years ago, so I have no idea if rockfish has bounced back in the area or not.
This is why I’ve stopped eating seafood. Meat is still on the menu, but trawling has put me off seafood until it can be shown that fishing techniques and management are actually sustainable.