Ocean Solitaire: The Story of Declining Fish Populations

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Until 1992. That's when, all of a sudden, the boats went out and came back—empty. No fish. At all. What had happened, apparently, was that the success of the new technologies had disguised the decline of the cod. As the electronics got better and better, the fleet had managed to search out the fish wherever they were, so the catch had remained steady year after year even though the fleets were beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

And now Canada pays out millions in welfare checks—via the Atlantic Groundfish Strategy, a program expected to expire this summer—buys up boats, and retrains fishermen to operate computers or style hair. The dragger boats have been sent farther afield by the big Canadian companies that own them. "A guy I know is fishing off Namibia this year," Donovan says.

But the cod aren't coming back—not yet, anyway. "There's a certain amount of theoretical support for the idea that they might never come back, at least in their former abundance," Haedrich tells me. The sea-floor ecology has been altered in many places by all the draggers, and new, less valuable fish such as skates and dogfish are thriving where the cod once reigned. The most prudent course of action would be to bar any kind of fishing entirely for a few decades, argues Haedrich—but by then, of course, a way of life would be destroyed.

The same story, in different accents, is told on every seacoast on earth. In 1990 the London Daily Telegraph reported that every square meter of the sea bottom in the Dutch region of the North Sea was being dragged by a beam trawler at least once each year—some spots were hit seven times—and the trawling chains were plowing the bottom into a virtual desert. In Indonesia, "fishermen" routinely kill miles of coral reef with blasts of dynamite, and some even pour cyanide into the water and collect the poison-stunned fish for sale to fancy restaurants. Around the world, huge nets bring up millions of tons of "bycatch" each year—"trash fish" that are tossed back overboard, usually to die, because their swim bladders burst during the quick ascent in the net. Meanwhile, the most expensive fish bring out every technological marvel. Spotter airplanes circle the North Atlantic, calling in boats as soon as they find bluefin tuna; one 750-pound specimen sold for $83,500 in the Tokyo market in 1992. When the Japanese squid fleet turns on its high-powered lights at night to lure the creatures to its nets, you can see the flash from space.

In his book Song for the Blue Ocean, Carl Safina, director of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program, uses the past tense to describe our time: "The last buffalo hunt was occurring on the rolling blue prairies of the ocean."

If you want to fathom this sea change, you need to take off your rubber boots and oilskins and trade in your skiff for a shuttle flight to Washington, D.C., where the Worldwatch Institute has its headquarters.

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