Empty Oceans
Imagine going to a sushi restaurant that can no longer serve fish. Such a scenario may seem
very difficult to believe, but the fish populations of the earth’s oceans face severe threats. Like land
animals that have been hunted to near extinction, such as buffalo, elephants, and tigers, marine
animals also need to be protected if they are to survive future generations. Governments are urged
to encourage sustainable fishing practice and other regulatory guidelines to ensure that the oceans
preserve their variety of animal and plant life as well as sufficient fish populations.
The oceans are being depleted primarily due to consumer demand for seafood, which
generates a financial incentive for marine businesses to overfish. As National Geographic
documents,’’ Demand for seafood and advances in technology have led to fishing practices that are
depleting fish and shellfish populations around the world. Fishers remove more than 77 billion
kilograms (170 million pounds) of wildlife from the sea each year.” Similarly, Pichegru and her
colleagues (2012) researched the challenges facing fish populations due to industrial fishing. They
concluded that “the development of industrial fishing in the twentieth century has reduced the total
number of predatory fish globally to less than ten-percent of pre-industrial levels …and profoundly
altered marine environments’’ (p.117). Because of the enormous reduction, many species of fish and
shellfish cannot reproduce quickly enough to compensate for the numbers that have been removed,
which further compounds the problem.
What is also disturbing is that shifting ocean environments have made it more difficult for
many fish to find enough prey to feed upon. Without sufficient food supply, their population growth
can be severely limited. Overfishing causes many other problems in the oceans. Changing the
oceanic environment drastically multiplies the challenges that sea creatures face, as evidenced by
such factors as the collapse of the coral reefs in oceans throughout the world and other such
worrisome trends.
While some people may downplay the problem of overfishing of our oceans, the statistics
confirm its gravity. The number of fish is decreasing, and fishermen have to go farther and farther to
find fish to catch. Stronger government controls of the fishing industry would help limit overfishing.
Additionally, tax breaks could be given to companies that operate fish farm, which are perhaps one
of the simplest solutions to this problem. Rather than taking fish and shellfish from the ocean, fish
farmers build unique facilities, such as tanks, aquariums, and other marine enclosures, to raise these
animals. With modern advancements in technology, fish farming promises to revolutionize how
human beings fish.
Most people have not thought about oceans without fish because the oceans are huge.
Nevertheless, the fish in our oceans are in real trouble. In 1992, the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development defined the goal of sustainable development as meeting “the needs
of the present without limiting the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ (Caulfield,
1997, p.167). Without practical responses to the issue of sustainable fishing, including the necessity
of suspending certain harmful fishing practices and monitoring the health of the ocean, earth risks
losing many species of marine wildlife. By limiting fishing in the oceans and developing commercial
fish farms, the government can succeed in both raising the fish for human consumption and
preserving fish for the future.
