Ocean Solitaire: The Story of Declining Fish Populations

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At the long, wild economic party we've been throwing on this planet, Worldwatch has volunteered to be the unwelcome guest who reminds us about the morning after. For years, in a dispassionate series of annuals called The State of the World, it has tracked the steady decline in many of the planet's natural-resource systems—the chainsawed forests, the eroded soils, the polluted waters.

It's a grim accounting, but it's a chronicle that has never really seemed to matter; for all the damage we've done, we've not yet run out of food or oil or much of anything else. Ever since the first Earth Day, in 1970, there has been the nervous sense that we're getting close to certain limits, but for 30 years we haven't quite reached them—which has led some to doubt whether physical limits really exist and others to propose that we're so clever as a species that we'll simply be able to evade them.

So here's the fish story, at its most schematic. Decide for yourself whether the numbers lie.

In 1900 the world caught 3 million tons of fish. As we reached new seas and developed new technologies, that number grew steadily through the century—grew by more than 25 times. Between 1950 and 1970, the annual catch rose 6 percent a year, reaching 80 million tons. And then, in the early 1970s, the Peruvian anchovy catch, in what was then the largest fishery in the world, collapsed from 12 million tons to 2 million over the course of three years—a crash that signaled the start of a new era.

For the next two decades, the global catch grew much more slowly—just over 2 percent a year. In 1989 it peaked at 86 million tons and then fell by 7 percent over the next three years. Since 1992 it has hovered at about 80 million tons. We are, in other words, catching less fish now than we did 10 years ago—and because over the past decade the human population has increased by 800 million, to nearly 6 billion, that means there's a lot less fish to go around.

If you look behind the numbers, it gets even worse. To catch that 80 million tons, fishing fleets are working harder each year, employing more expensive technology and more extreme measures. And these fleets aren't netting the same kinds of fish they once did. By the 1990s, as cod and haddock fisheries declined, the trawlers were keeping the catch at the same level only by hauling in huge amounts of Chilean jack mackerel, Japanese and South American pilchard, and various species of anchovy. Cod and haddock you eat, and eat happily; anchovy and pilchard you mostly grind up for animal feed or fertilizer.

According to the United Nations, all 17 of the world's major fishing regions are now fished at or above sustainable levels. If we go through all the pain of buying back licenses and decommissioning trawlers and enforcing sound limits, and if nature cooperates by allowing these damaged systems to recover completely, the situation may not get any worse. But it's not going to get better any time soon. Building bigger boats, adding more shifts, baiting more hooks—they'll only add up to fewer fish, not more.

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