And so you see this tremendous buildup in fishing capacity, quadrupling in the course of time, from the end of World War II to the present time. All of the technology that we perfected during World War II - sonar, lightweight polymers - all these things were redirected towards fish. World War II was a tremendous incentive to arm ourselves in a war against fish. This is the way we’ve been fishing the oceans over the last 50 years. But how have we headed in this direction? Well … first it’s a very, very new problem.
So it makes sense that we’ve headed in this direction. But telescope ahead to the age of modern animal husbandry, and you’ll see four: turkeys, ducks, chicken and geese. You look at the menus in New York City restaurants 150 years ago, 200 years ago, you’ll see snipe, woodcock, grouse, dozens of ducks, dozens of geese. But if you telescope to the age of - you know, 2,000 years ago, you’ll see these four mammals: pigs, cows, sheep and goats. If you look at fire pits from 10,000 years ago, you’ll see raccoons, you’ll see, you know, wolves, you’ll see all kinds of different creatures.
We did it before, 10,000 years ago, when we came out of our caves. It’s not an unusual human characteristic to reduce the natural world down to very few elements. Ordinary people, the way they looked at seafood was like this. Well, when I looked into it, I realized that people didn’t look at it as their team. And I thought this was pretty strange, and as I looked at it, I was wondering, did anyone else notice this sort of shrinking of the market? And when I went to fish markets, in spite of where I was - whether I was in North Carolina, or Paris, or London, or wherever - I kept seeing this weirdly repeating trope of four creatures, again and again - on the menus, on ice - shrimp, tuna, salmon and cod.
And as I sort of looked into that, from a very personal point of view as a fisherman, I started to kind of figure out, well, what was the rest of the world thinking about it?įirst place I started to look was fish markets. It was like literally having your roster devastated. But after I grew up and went to college, and I came home in the early 90’s, this is what I found. And for all of my growing up I fished on the shores of Connecticut, and these are the creatures that I saw on a regular basis. I didn’t like to play them, I didn’t like to watch them.
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