by Elaine Lipson

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Is the salmon you're serving for dinner tonight wild caught or farm raised? You may be surprised to learn which one is the environmentally friendlier choice.

You try to be a responsible, conscientious shopper: You buy organically grown fruits and vegetables, choose minimally packaged foods, and recycle your glass bottles and aluminum cans. You would never dream of eating an endangered species or openly supporting industrial pollution. Yet each time you go to the store to buy fish, you may unknowingly make just such choices.

If the fish you choose is netted in the wild, chances are good its species is rapidly being hunted to depletion or extinction, or that indiscriminate fishing methods are destroying countless other sea creatures in the process.

If you choosefarmed fish, you may be supporting an operation that contributes to the destruction of wild species, coastlines, habitats and even communities through pollution, contamination, and exploitation and privatization of resources.

Photo from HowardHall.com "Bat Ray entangled in a drift net."

Even the person selling you fish probably won't know if it's from a farm or the wild, its country of origin, how depleted the species is or whether sustainable methods of breeding and farming were used. Unless you've been economically dependent on a fishery that's collapsed, you may notice only that your favorite fish is unavailable or expensive.

Overfishing: An Oceanic Tragedy

Seafood is tasty and offers incomparable nutritional and health benefits. Even landlubbers developed a taste for fish in this century as the advent of canning and freezing methods built an industry that reached far beyond fishing communities. More recently, speedy and effective methods of freezing and transporting fresh fish have helped make seafood an enormously lucrative global commodity. In the last four decades, the global catch has risen from about 18 million metric tons in 1950 to 82 million metric tons in 1990. The industry now uses sophisticated means of locating and capturing large numbers of fish including satellites, sonar devices and other military technologies on ever-larger factory boats and trawlers are "fully fished, overexploited or depleted," according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Overfishing - the general term used to describe fish stocks that disappear faster than they can be replenished through reproduction or growth of young - is rampant and hard to control.

Nets and otter boards hanging outboard on?he MISS EULA, a Vietnamese-American owned shrimp trawler operating in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by William B. Folsom, AMFS Courtesy of NOAA

Throughout history, fishermen, for themost part, have had open access to the ocean and its fish. And they've behaved in a very human and predictable way; that is, putting short-term gain and self-interest first. It's a sociological phenomenon known as the "tragedy of the commons": We take what we can until the common resource has disappeared, and then move on. Only a consensus to exercise restraint and choose long-term sustainability and stability can produce a different result, and then only if the rules are enforced and transgressions met with a serious enough penalty.

Bringing the net aboard during shrimp trawling operations off the THREE SONS. Courtesy of NOAA

It isn't just that we catch too many of the fish we want. Each year, 28.7 million tons of by-catch (creatures the fisherman is neither licensed for nor interested in catching) are caught in the massive nets, lines and trawls of industrial fishing boats; 95 percent of the by-catch, which is fully one-quarter of the total marine catch, dies and is thrown overboard or otherwise destroyed. Shrimp trawlers are especially notorious; they can easily kill up to eight times the weight of their caught shrimp in by-catch, contributing to the endangerment of sea turtles, red snapper and other species.?

Much of this by-catch is avoidable, but methods of limiting by-catch tend to reduce the amount or slow down the speed of the desired capture. Devices that control by-catch can be easily modified, and enforcement is sporadic. If fishermen can make more money by ignoring regulations than they risk in penalties, little other than the spectre of fisheries in decline encourages fishermen to honor the lives of non-target species.

The Spanish tuna purse seiner F/V TXORI-EDER in the western Indian Ocean. Smaller vessel on the stern is secured to purse seineand when a school of tuna is encountered, the small boat is launched and it helps ship encircle it.  Photo by Jose Cort, courtesy of NOAA

We can't, however, blame all our loss on the fishing industry. "Roads, buildings and shopping malls are also part of the problem," says Chris Zimmer, communications director for Save Our Wild Salmon. We build in coastal regions, populate them intensely and then litter the waters with trash, oil spills and chemical pollutants. Fish habitats are drastically altered and hard to repair.

Agricultural runoff including pesticides, chemical fertilizers and waste also makes its way to the ocean. In fact, the Center for Marine Conservation recommends we support organic agriculture. Not only does this help minimize ocean pollutants, it helps us see the interrelationship of the entire ecosystem.

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