Ocean Solitaire: The Story of Declining Fish Populations

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Some species can be farmed more efficiently; certain carp, for instance, eat weeds that can be grown in ponds with animal-waste fertilizer. Two species of carp, mostly grown in China for domestic consumption, are already on the top-10 list of the world's most consumed species. But an awful lot of fish farming aims at higher-value species such as catfish, which thrive on a nice diet of cornmeal. Which means that a catfish farm is exactly like a huge chicken farm, except that the chickens swim.

But why should anyone worry about dumping cornmeal into a Delta catfish pond? Well, that's where the story takes a sudden twist. Because it's possible—indeed, according to experts like Cornell biologist David Pimentel it's highly likely—that the wall we've hit with fisheries is just the first of a series of walls. And that we may, before much longer, be running short of cornmeal, too, not to mention wheat and rice and soybeans. That we may, as a world, be a little short on dinner.

So it's not a great moment to be going in for fish farming. "Aquaculture is now big enough that it makes a measurable claim on the world's grain supplies," says Lester Brown. "If oceanic fish catches are no longer increasing, then we need 2 million more tons of protein each year just to supply the growth in population. One way or another, that 2 million tons has to come from land, and if it's going to get to people by way of fish farms, that will cost 4 million more tons of grain feed each year."

It's possible that these calculations are too gloomy. The Chinese government insists it will increase crop yields enough to feed its people; in other places around the globe, birth rates have begun to fall, leading some demographers to predict that the world population may peak late in the next century at just over 10 billion. There may be technical marvels on the horizon: emission-free hydrogen-fueled cars, for instance, which would help solve the greenhouse mess.

At the very least, however, it's clear that the next 50 years will be a tight squeeze. Many forms of toxic pollution will hit their zenith, as will carbon emissions, deforestation, and perhaps species extinction. And virtually everyone agrees we'll have a few billion more mouths to feed—a few billion. The math is no fun to do. Among other things, it translates into relentless pressure on the remaining fish in the sea.

We aren't going to find more oceans brimming with fish, just as we're not going to come across extra continents covered with fertile fields. Not for us the get-rich-quick excitement of Cabot's day; for us, there is the hard and patient work of protecting the resources we still have and of finding ways to make sure our populations don't overwhelm the sustenance this blue globe provides.

But if we happen to have been born at a narrowing moment in human history, we nonetheless possess certain consolations. Denied the experience of abundance—denied the passenger pigeon blackening the skies, the buffalo shaking the prairie, the cod choking the surf—we have instead been granted a sense of preciousness.

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