This article is part of a package on ethical seafood. For mouth-watering recipes, sustainable seafood news, and myriad resources to help readers stay informed and eat sustainably visit www.utne.com/Seafood.

The world’s oceans are being transformed, and not for the better.

Around the world, unappetizing creatures are proliferating in the absence of big fish. Carpets of primitive sea squirts now cover continental shelves. The filter-feeding fish that once cleaned the oceans are being caught and ground into fertilizer, causing giant abundances of toxic plankton. Flotillas of jellyfish, some 10 miles square, are stinging sea cages full of salmon to death.

Scientists now know that the eating habits of a single species, Homo sapiens, are driving these changes. By knocking out the chain’s upper levels (which include predatory fish like tuna, swordfish, and shark) through violent overfishing, and skimming off the middle and bottom for industrial use, we are changing, perhaps permanently, the structure of an environment that nourishes us. Unless we adjust our attitude toward seafood, ours might be among the last generations able to enjoy the down-to-earth luxury of freshly caught wild fish.

The good news is that there is a way to eat that balances conservation and health—even when it comes to the complex, multispecies cuisine that is seafood. And it can be done without leaving the oceans, or our plates, empty.

 

Choosing fish ignorantly is no longer an option. In too many cases, following the line connecting the fish on the plate to the hook or net that caught it—or the aquaculture pond it was grown in—leads directly to a scene of devastation. Popcorn shrimp in the strip malls of America leads to poisoned drinking water in some of the world’s poorest countries. Steamed wrasse in Shanghai, to corals poisoned by cyanide and ripped apart by dynamite. Roasted monkfish in New York, to the Atlantic seafloor reduced to mud by bottom trawls.

Not much can stand in the way of supertrawler nets, whose mouths, held open by doors that can weigh 12,000 pounds each, are big enough to swallow whole houses. The steel rollers that keep the net off the sea bottom plow through corals, sea fans, sponge gardens, and other fragile, centuries-old structures, on the hunt for shrimp, cod, monkfish, and orange roughy. We are, in effect, clear-cutting the oceans. Off the coasts of Florida, bottom trawling has ground 90 percent of the state’s Oculina coral reefs into rubble.

“Imagine using a bulldozer to catch songbirds for food—that’s what it’s like,” says Sylvia Earle, an American biologist who has led more than 60 deep-sea expeditions, describing the devastation of bottom trawling.