I
seldom put articles written by other authors on my blog.
This
article was sent to me by a friend and a business associate a few hours ago.
In
my view it needs to be read by everyone in the world.
I
have given the author and the source total credit. This is a very important message.
I
went on my first factory trawler when I was 35 years old, that is 26, almost 27
years ago.
The
carnage, the suffering, the waste, the by-catch was reminiscent of a scene from
Dante's Inferno.
I
went on my first shrimp trawler when I was 39. I went on my first "long
line " sword fish boat when I was 40.
They
were as bad or worse.
What
we have done and continue to do to this planet and to our oceans is evil,
vile, and most incredibly, ultimately global suicide for all human beings.
I
try hard not to sound like a "bunny hugger" or a "greenie"
, because frankly the NGO's have become just as business driven and greedy as
the companies that rape the earth.
That
said, I truly with all my heart believe what we (GBT) are doing will prove over
time you can feed the earth sustainably, make a decent profit, and not destroy our
planet.
As a
very dear friend of mine, a hard core "greenie" once remarked,
"even the dumbest bird in the world knows you simply do not shit in your own nest".
This
is a lesson humankind has not yet learned.
Until
my friend sent this to me I had not seen it.
It
is concise, viscerally moving, and spot on. Please read it.
Weekend Edition May 9-11, 2014
The Decline and Fall of America’s Last Great Fishery
Oceans Without Fish
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
This week CBS News devoted a rare segment to the rapidly deteriorating
ecological conditions in the world’s oceans. The report cited new research from
the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia predicting that the world’s oceans
will be largely depleted of fish by 2048. The report quoted lead scientist Dr.
Boris Worm as saying: “This isn’t predicted to happen. It’s happening
now.”
In fact, some scientists have been predicting an
oceanic apocalypse for nearly 20 years. In 1997, I spent several months
investigating the shocking decline of fish populations in the North Pacific and
Bering Sea, including a short stint on several factory trawlers, including the
SS Gijon, based out of Seattle. I filed dozens of articles for CounterPunch, In
These Times, the San Francisco Examiner and other publications on the looming
disaster. What follows is a slightly revised chapter from my book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me
on the economics and politics driving the looting of the North Pacific
fisheries. –JSC
The SS Gijon cuts through the slate-colored swells,
trailing a white V in the waters of the Bering Sea. The trawler lowers its
giant pelagic net from the stern of the ship and it unfurls into the waters
below. The vast net, thousands of yards of nylon mesh, sweeps in a lethal
curtain across the depths.
Hours later, the nets are cranked up to the piercing
whine of straining engines. Inside: more than 400 tons of fish, crabs and
squid. A Stellar’s sea lion and a few fur seals, indiscriminately snared while
foraging for salmon, are also part of the haul.
The sea lion and seal are not spared. Indeed more than
forty percent of the haul is considered worthless by-catch and will simply be
ground up and spewed in bloody currents of saturated chum from the bilges of
ship back out into the sea. Some 500 million pounds of marine life are wasted
in this way in the North Pacific every year.
The Bering Sea is now the most productive fishery in
North America. More than one-third of the United State’s commercial catch come
from these frigid waters near the top of the world. Among the species sought by
the fishing fleets of the North Pacific are yellowfin, sole, herring, halibut
and ocean perch. But the most cherished target is pollock, the tofu of fish.
Pollock, craved by the Japanese for surimi, turns up in American markets as
fish sandwiches at Burger King and McDonalds and as imitation crab in the fish
freezers at Safeway.
The SS Gijon is registered to the Seattle-based
American Seafoods Corporation, a subsidiary of Resource Group International, a
Norwegian conglomerate. The ship is a floating factory, longer and wider than a
football field. The $40 million trawler can process 80 tons of fish mass a day,
turning sole into fish meal and pollock into surimi. The catch is stored in
huge freezers, where it can linger for months.
Resource Group International’s primary competitor in
the lucrative Pollock fishing grounds of the North Pacific is the Arctic-Alaska
Fisheries Company, another Seattle-based outfit. Arctic Alaska was acquired in
1992 by Don Tyson, the chicken mogul and Clinton patron from Springdale,
Arkansas. Since then Tyson’s company has bought up three other Alaska seafood
operations and, as a consequence, began fending off anti-trust investigations
by the Federal Trade Commission.
The incursion of the big factory trawlers into the icy
waters of the North Pacific began in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 2000,
there were 45 factory trawlers operating in the Bering Sea fishery. The big
ships are powered by super-charged diesel engines fed by massive fuel tanks
that permit the trawlers to remain at sea for months without returning to home
ports to refuel or off-load their catch. Often the processed surimi is simply
transferred at sea to smaller ships owned by Japanese fish merchants. The long
range of the factory ships allows them to operate in several distance fisheries
in a single season and evade the catch quotas that saddle smaller operations.
The arrival of the industrialized super-trawlers
spelled an almost immediate cultural and economic disaster for the communities
of coastal Alaska. For decades the flourishing Alaskan fishing industry had
been characterized by independent ship owners and small processing plants,
sprinkled down the coast in towns like Kodiak, Cordova and Ketchikan.
In the 1970s, nearly 80 percent of the Alaskan pollock
catch was made by small operators. Now the situation is almost entirely
reversed. More than 70 percent of the Pollock in Alaskan waters is taken by
factory trawlers and dozens of independent boat owners have gone bankrupt. But
it’s the shore-based factories, making value-added fish products, that have
been hit the hardest by the new generation of trawlers. The canneries, surimi
plants and frozen fish processing factories provided year-round high wage jobs,
an important stabilizing force for rural Alaska’s predominantly season economy.
Today many of those plants and jobs are gone, replaced by the factory trawlers,
which increasingly tend to employ Mexican and Vietnamese laborers at sweatshop
pay rates.
Many of the Artic-Alaska Company’s ships unload their
catch not in Seattle, but in Shanghai, China, where Tyson purchased a fish
factory in 1994 from the Chinese government. The deal was brokered with the
help of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and was back by federal government
insurance and loan guarantees from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation
(OPIC). In fact, the growth of the American factory trawler fleet was heavily
underwritten by the US treasury, thanks to effective inside work by the
congressional delegation from Washington state. Tyson’s company alone swept up
more than $65 million in low-interest loans to fun the construction of 10
factory trawlers. In total, the Seattle-based factory trawler fleet raked in
more than $200 million in so-called Fisheries Obligation Guarantees and other
federal subsidies.
The economic dislocation brought about by the invasion
of the mega-trawlers into Southeast Alaska is grimly paralleled by an
ecological catastrophe in the waters of the Bering Sea and North Pacific. Again
most of the blame can be laid squarely on the industrial behemoths. Using
sophisticated sonar and electronic tracking devices, factory trawlers like the
Gijon can swiftly zero in on new spawning grounds and fish them to near
extinction. This is called pulse trawling. A particularly outrageous example of
this genocidal method occurred in the 1980s in the Shelikoff Strait off the
Aleutian Islands, when a newly discovered pollock stock was relentlessly fished
to the point of collapse. According to a report on factory trawlers by
Greenpeace, in less than a decade the Shelikof pollock fishery had declined
from an estimated biomass of 3 million tons in 1981 to less than 300 thousand
tons in 1988.
Every since the factory trawlers began flocking to the
Alaskan waters the pollock season has closed earlier than planned. In the late
1970s, the pollock fishing season regularly ran for 10 months. In 1994, it
closed after 70 days. It’s not surprising. The annual harvest capacity of the
trawler fleet may well be greater than the entire Pollock population of the
Bering Sea. The ramifications of this dire situation were contemplated in an
internal assessment by executives at the American Seafood Company: “the
catching capacity of vessels operating in the Bering Sea fishery appears to be
double or triple the annual quota.” And these were quotas that most marine
biologists considered to be dangerously inflated.
It’s not just the species targeted by the trawlers,
such as pollock and sole, which are depleted. Crab, halibut and arrowtooth
flounder are also in trouble. The consequences extend even to fish-eating
seabirds, such as puffins, thick-billed murres and black-legged kittiwakes, as
well as marine mammal, such as Stellar’s sea lions, fur seals, and sea otters.
Pollock, for example, accounts for nearly 70 percent of the rare sea lion’s
diet. A report by the National Research Council warns: “It seems extremely
unlikely that the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem can sustain current
rates of human exploitation, as well as the large populations of all marine
mammals and bird species that existed before human exploitation—especially modern
exploitation—began.”
The trend toward over-exploitation of the Alaskan
fishery will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. For one thing, even
the most stringent federal fishing laws have often served only to exacerbate
the problem. Take the Magnuson Act, passed in 1976 as a way to protect American
off-shore fishing grounds from growing incursions by foreign fishing fleets.
The measure, rammed through Congress by the acerbic Senator Warren Magnuson, a
Democrat from Washington, extended the federal government’s jurisdiction over
fish matters from 3 miles to 200 miles off the US coastline, a move that was
bitterly denounced as an act of ecological imperialism by the Japanese and
Norwegians. In reality, it was simple economic protectionism.
The Magnuson Act established regional fish management
councils to determine fishing seasons and allocate catch quotas. These
councils, which soon came to be dominated by fishing industry lobbyists, were
expressly exempted from federal conflict-of-interest laws, allowing industry
flacks to direct as much of the haul back to their own companies and clients as
they could get away with.
And they did just that.
Exacerbating this situation is the archaic management
philosophy of the federal agency charged with maintaining the health of ocean
fish stocks: the National Marine Fisheries Service, which, curiously enough, is
under the purview of the Commerce Department. Instead of viewing marine
ecosystems as vibrant, diverse and inter-connected environments, NMFS attempts
to manage ocean fish stocks through a species-by-species approach. This
benefits the bottom lines of the fishing fleets, but flies in the face of
current ecological thinking. By focusing only on the commercial fish stocks,
NMFS ignores the toll industrial fishing methods exact on non-target species
and on the marine habitat itself.
Medical researchers, backed by hefty grants from
companies like Arctic-Alaska, continue to churn out reports touting the
health-enhancing benefits of diets laden with Pollock, salmon and perch. Fish
seems to lower bad cholesterol, reduce heart attack risks (especially for men)
and suppresses the advance of free radicals, those frenzied compounds that
stimulate cancer cell growth.
All this is undoubtedly true. Yet there are also
health dangers associated with fish consumption. Fish can be contaminated with
heavy metals, pesticides and other chemical toxins. One recent study estimated
that consumption of PCB-laced fish from the Great Lakes may lead to 40,000 new
cases of cancer over the next 25 years. Seafood products also carry a host of
food-borne pathogens, including listeria, vibrio vulnifcus and, yes,
salmonella. Testing for such dangers is even more lax and rudimentary than that
in the beef industry. One local seafood merchant in Portland, Oregon told me:
“What it comes down to is smell. When it starts to stink, we yank it off the
shelf. What else can you do?”
But even the most accomplished sole sniffers would be
unable to detect that there is something terribly wrong with many of the fish
being hauled out of the Bering Sea. Thousands of tons of pollock, perch and
black sole taken by ships like Gijon may—metaphorically, at least—glow; they
may make Geiger counters erupt into a chilling stutter of clicks. In short, a
considerable part of the haul from this last, great productive fishery may be
radioactive.
What’s going on here? The story dates back to 1971,
during the glory days of the Nixon administration and the nuclear
sabre-rattling leading up to Henry Kissinger’s détente with the Soviets. In
order to send a message of “American resolve,” Nixon ordered the Atomic Energy
Commission and the Department of Defense to detonate the largest underground
nuclear explosion in US history on Amchitka Island, a volcanic extrusion in the
Bering Sea, halfway down Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
The five-megaton hydrogen “device” detonated on
November 6, 1971 exploded with such shattering force that the middle of
Amchitka Island fractured and collapsed, forming what the mad scientist Edward
Teller delicately termed a “nuclear-excavated lake.” In the wake of the blast,
hundreds of dead puffins were found with their legs driven through their
chests, while sea lions, resting on sea rocks miles from the test site, were
discovered with their eyes blown out of their sockets. Within months, there was
ample of evidence that the test site, called Cannikan Lake, had begun to
steadily leak radioactive waste, despite assurances from James Schlesinger,
then head of the Atomic Energy Commission, that it would take “a thousand years
or more” for transuranic uranium to dribble into the sea.
Thousands of pages of recently declassified documents
released by the Department of Energy to the Alaska Department of Environmental
Conservation reveal that Amchitka blast site began to leak Iodine 131 and
Crypton 85 within two days of the nuclear explosion, draining into the
groundwater and then to the sea through underground fissures in the island.
Soon after the disclosure of these damaging documents, Alaska Senator Ted
Stevens discreetly told Clinton’s Energy Secretary, Hazel O’Leary: “Madame
Secretary, we’ve got a real problem up here. There’s leaking from the Amchitka
test site and it might endanger our North Pacific fisheries.”
Now disturbing levels of Americum, Plutonium and
Tritium are showing up in plants samples on the island. “If we’re finding these
levels of radioactive waste, then the potential for severe harm is there,” said
Pam Miller, a Greenpeace scientist who wrote a detailed report on the radioactive
leakage on Amchitka. “This stuff appears to be leaking into the most important
commercial fishery in the world.”
Even so executives at Arctic-Alaska Seafood remained
tranquil. “We’ve never once found any radioactive fish,” a company spokesman
told me. Moments later, however, the PR man admitted that the company had never
tested its fish for radioactive waste and had no plans to start.
No wonder the surrealists adopted the fish as a symbol
of their movement.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the
editor of CounterPunch.
He is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the
Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
