No More Fish? Let Them Eat Cake

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/farago04022010.html


The Oceans in the Age of Greed


A noteworthy report in The New York Times, "In Florida, the Seafood Becomes Less Local", makes the case obvious to anyone with half a brain: the vision of the oceans to be the world's future breadbasket is rapidly fading in the rear view mirror. I grew up with that vision. I can remember it in my fourth grade social studies because we were tested on it: where will our future food come from? From the oceans.

Damien Cave reports from the Florida Keys. The Keys are, of course, that special bastion of ignorance when it comes to measuring the impact and calibrating the response of rules and regulations meant to protect natural resources. Cave notes how little fish consumed in the Keys actually comes from Florida waters. We haven't been able to protect our fisheries because we live in an age of Idiocy where the reality of scarcer resources we need to survive provokes the opposite of conservation-- it provokes the impulses of greed: get what you can, while it lasts. We live in a time when being "for" a rule or regulation to protect the long term interest-- which surely, the health of oceans is-- instantly summons a hail of spitfire and brimstone from Fox News acolytes and dittoheads fueled by corporate interests. Instead of common sense and wisdom, we get a race to the bottom where crabs and scavengers flourish. That's freedom.

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You don't have to look any further than Biscayne Bay, where until the mid-1950s a highly productive fishery provided both food and incomes for Miami and beyond. It has all been fished out, and the fish have been prevented from coming back by the destruction of breeding habitat on mangrove coastlines sacrificed to development. “Unfortunately,” Ault said of today’s fishermen, “certain people have to pay a price for other people not paying attention to the resource.” The people not paying attention to the resource would be all of us and the Idiocracy that passes for elected officials and their legislatures over a very long period of time. It would be all of us who keep blindly putting deposits in banks and financial institutions whose shareholders couldn't care less about protecting a resource if it affects their bottom lines. Then, they pass of their own net worth issues as grandly important to the broader public interest; in "jobs, jobs, jobs" or some other hooey.

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Right now, the US EPA is trying to impose standards on nutrient pollution in Florida, because Florida has failed its responsibilities under numerous laws. Stopping pollution of our rivers, bays and estuaries is one of the very most important measures to heal the food chain that fisheries depend on. This important effort has been opposed by the state for decades, fortified by campaign cash. The energy for this opposition comes from Florida's agricultural industry, from developers, and the Chamber of Commerce: all of whose constituents do their own fishing in the Bahamas, or Gulf of Mexico, Panama and Costa Rica for predictable reasons. Nowadays, if you want to eat fish in the Florida Keys, more likely than not it is frozen from one of those places our own gold-plated standards have not touched. God bless, America.
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true

far too many people in the Keys have gone by - 'f--k the regulations, eat it until its gone'


now its gone.

Japan has eaten all its sealife too.

[pscot]

1. There used to be fish in Puget Sound too

Not all that long ago.