As we reported last month, one of the biggest obstacles to sustainable fish farming is that raising big, popular carnivores such as salmon and tuna requires us to fish – and overfish – far down the food chain, in the ranks of smaller species like anchovies. Those are the little critters the bigger fish like to eat — and they …
Oceans
Why It’s a Bad Idea to Fish Out the Bottom of the Marine Food Chain
I’ve been spending much of the last couple of weeks doing radio and other media for my aquaculture cover in TIME. Everyone wants to know the same thing: is fish farming really sustainable? “It depends” isn’t a very satisfactory answer, so I’ve been focusing on the efforts of some in the aquaculture industry to raise fish more …
Can the U.S. Close Its Seafood Trade Deficit?
As I write in the cover story of TIME this week, we’re in the middle of a seafood transition. Once nearly all of our fish were caught wild—indeed, as Paul Greenberg has written, fish are the last wild food in a world where nearly everything else we eat comes from a farmer’s labor. But that’s changing—around half of the seafood …
A Must-Read Book on the Future of Fish
I have the cover story this week on the state of global seafood, examining the rapid growth in aquaculture—and looking at the challenges facing the fish farming industry as it begins to provide an ever larger proportion of our seafood. It’s a massive subject, as you can imagine, and I wasn’t able to go into depth on everything I …
Sea Levels in North Carolina—and Elsewhere—Rising Fast
This week we learned that bad planning in the face of climate change isn’t a particularly new phenomenon: the Vikings did it too. The collapse of the Norse settlements in West Greenland was caused, in part, by the Vikings’ poor adaptation to cooler conditions and extensive sea ice over 1,000 years ago, which severely affected …
What Eric the Red and Modern Greens Have in Common
Environmentalists can be a gloomy bunch, but they’re also realistic. In the past several years, most have given up on the idea of stopping climate change altogether; there’s just too much greenhouse gas already in the system for that. Instead, the refrain has essentially been: adapt or die. Even as we try to curb future greenhouse-gas …
Retro Environmentalism: Is Plastic the Next Carbon?
Back in the day, before Al Gore informed us about a certain inconvenient truth, before we started to calculate our commutes in carbon, and before people in the South Pacific had to start heading for higher land, there were beach clean ups. People walked along the sand — maybe sometimes only on Earth Day, like once-a-year churchgoers …
Activists Camp Out on Arctic Oil Drilling Rig
Oh Greenpeace. Only PETA outshines you in the shameless publicity stunt department, and yet here I am, falling for your tricks, because this week your eco-warriors have attached themselves — literally — to a topic I can’t resist: the quest to find oil in the Arctic.
At 3AM on May 29, a Greenpeace team left the Esperanza, the …
Can Sharks Tame the Invasive Lionfish?
Another interesting story over on Time.com’s science page: Christy Choi writes about how the lionfish, an aquarium-pet-turned-ocean-invader with a voracious appetite and bad manners, “has residents and scientists throughout the Caribbean and Northern Atlantic worried about the threat it poses to coastal ecosystems and economies by wiping …
Put Down That Spoon and Back Away From The Soup
The last place you’d expect to see the folks from CSI sleuthing around is the bowl of soup you’re having for lunch — unless, of course, you’re having shark fin soup. In that case, you may be enabling an environmental crime, and now there’s DNA evidence that can give you away.
People who grew up on shark fin soup insist the stuff is …