Why Saying "Fishing Is Bad" Backfires

0:00 Picture a woman on a beach before sunrise sorting the night's catch to feed her kids and sell at a local market. Then picture a campaign poster that says, "Stop eating fish." Who do you think that poster just reached? Here's what most people don't know about who catch the world's fish. You tell a fishing family their livelihood is destroying the ocean. And then I want you to watch what happens. They stop showing up to the meetings, they stop sharing their catch data with scientists, and they stop answering the phone. They don't wanna talk to people who are gonna say, "What you're doing is wrong." And now the people who know that water the best and like more than anyone is, are out of the conversation. And today we're gonna be talking about why the simplest conservation message about fishing does so much damage, and what to do at the fish counter instead.

0:42 Now welcome back to another episode of the How to Protect the Ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. I am a marine biologist and science communicator here to give you all the stuff that goes on in the ocean, ocean news, ocean conservation, about ocean science, so that you can make a better decision around the ocean. You can kinda understand what's happening and feel better. Like, may hopefully feel a little bit more hopeful and know how to approach conversations about the ocean. Now yesterday we went to a reef in the Pacific where parrotfish, sharks, and pink crust helped corals come back from a six months of heat and bleaching. Now every one of those fish is part of a food web. And in most parts of the world, people are part of that food web too. So let's talk about that feeling you get at the seafood counter, that one where you're like, you've seen the documentaries, you've read the headlines about overfishing.

1:25 Part of you think you should stop eating fish. And another part of you shows that it's complicated, Because people somewhere depend on catching it, like, their, families depend on it. So you either feel guilty or you stop thinking about it because you don't wanna, like, approach this difficult topic. I've been there. Like, I get it. I've seen the frustration at the seafood counter and where, like, the person behind the counter not knowing how a fish is caught or where it comes from. And of course, I've watched all the well-meaning conservation message about fishing land on exactly the wrong people. And you get also, like, crazy ones like Seaspiracy, which is full of misinformation and misdirects and takes away from what we really should be talking about, more realistic options about what we need to do. And but we always see people say fishing is bad, and here's the problem with that when we say fishing is bad.

2:10 It treats a family with a small boat and a hand line the same as those fleets of industrial trawlers, and it treats a fishery with strong management the same as the one that didn't have a strong management. And in a lot of places, fish is the main source of protein that people have. That's what they do. That's how they survive morning, noon, and night. And so you tell a kid in one of those communities that the fishing is bad, and you're attacking how their family eats and their culture. And the adults here too, they step back from the scientists, they step back from conservationists, and honestly, I don't blame them. To understand how big the gap is between the message and the reality, you need to know who actually catches the world's fish. And for a long time, almost nobody did. Researchers called it the hidden harvest.

2:52 For decades, fishery statistics were built around what's easy to count, so big boats landing at big ports. The catch gets weighed, recorded, and sold through formal markets. But what got missed was everything else, so the woman wading at low tide to collect shellfish, the man in the canoe with a net on a lake, the fishers who land their catch on a beach and sell it to a village by noon Those never show up in a national database. Back in 2012, a study ti-tried to estimate just how much of that was being missed. It found that the catch from inland fisheries was likely underreported by about 70%. And in developing countries, small-scale fisheries were producing over half of the fish catch, and almost all of it, 90% to 95%, was eaten locally, often in rural places where poverty is high and good nutrition is hard to come by.

3:39 That's where it was. So a group of organizations went back to do it properly, and the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization and Duke University and the World Fish Research Center spent years pulling together case studies from 58 countries, plus surveys and national data. And in 2023, they published a 376-page study called Illuminating Hidden Harvests, and here's what they found. Small-scale fisheries bring in at least 40% of the entire global catch from wi-wild fisheries. They employ ar-around 60 million people, and that's about 90% of everyone who works in fisheries on the planet. Another 53 million or so fish for subsistence to feed their own families.

4:22 And roughly four out of every 10 people in small-scale fisheries are women So when we say fishing is bad, the majority of the people hearing it is small-scale fishers, and they're often the ones losing out when big industrial fleets come in and work the exact same waters. So if the blanket message is aimed at the wrong people, where should the energy go? So you're probably asking yourself, "Well, Andrew, like, if all these small-scale fishers are around, and they're the ones that are, like, doing most of the fishing, and they're getting this blanket message, like, teaming them up with or putting them in the same category as industrial fish, like, so where should that message go about sustainable fishing and everything?" Before we get into that, you have to understand that sustainable seafood is complicated. I'm not gonna, pretend otherwise, but there are a few simple principles that you can use.

5:04 So first, you support the people and fisheries doing it well, and recognize that many small-scale fishers are already managing their resources in smart ways. The same study found that co-management, where communities and governments share decision-making is in place for only about 20% of small scale's catch. That's a lot of room to bring fishers into the process instead of shutting them out and just leaving it to government. Second, put the pressure where the biggest impacts are. Very large industrial operations can remove enormous amounts of fish. Like, you see these like, big ships that are just containers of freezers, they just put them in there, and all the little ships bring them back in, and they just take it to wherever they wanna take it. And of course, like, when you don't have, like, management or monitoring, your enforcement is weak, and that's where the accountability needs to land.

5:49 And that's a systems question, how fleets are permitted, monitored, and held to the rules. The third thing you need to know is remember that yesterday's episode when we talked about marine protected areas that they can work in fishers' favor? A healthy protected area can act like a nursery, with fish piling over the boundaries into fishing grounds. When the communities understand that, the conversation changes from, "They're taking our water," to, "This keeps our fishery alive, and we can fish for generations to come sustainably." And the last thing, make the good choice easy for the person buying the fish, which brings us to a restaurant kitchen in Vancouver, Canada. Because here's the thing, most of us aren't going to read fishery stock assessments before dinner. It's just not gonna happen, and neither are most chefs.

6:31 One chef in Vancouver figured out that a long time ago. And in the early 2000s, Robert Clark was the executive chef of a seafood restaurant in Vancouver called C Restaurant. He cared about where the fish came from, but figuring out which seafood was sustainable meant digging through science, reports, and competing opinions. And chefs are busy, they have to worry about the whole business. Most of them didn't even have time for, whatever they were doing in the kitchens. So Clark teamed up with Jason Boyce at the Vancouver Aquarium, and the idea was simple. The aquarium would do the homework, keeping up with the science on which species and fisheries were in good shape. And the restaurants that joined would put a small symbol next to their dishes that were passed on to the customers. Diners wouldn't need a marine biology degree to make sure they're eating sustainable seafood.

7:14 They just have to look for that symbol. They called it OceanWise, and it started with a handful of restaurants, then it spread across Vancouver, then across Canada. Chefs in Toronto, Halifax, and everywhere in between were participating in this program. And grocery stores decided to join. Seafood suppliers joined. Today, the program has more than 750 business partners and over 2,000 locations selling seafood with the OceanWise recommended symbol Now, I wanna give you the honest footnote here. Ocean Wise is a recommendation program. It doesn't certify fisheries the way that, like, the Marine Stewardship Council does. So over the years, some people in the food world have pushed for more transparency about how recommendations get made, and that kind of scrutiny is healthy, It makes the program better, and it's a part of how programs like this survive and become a lot more legitimate and a lot more trustworthy.

8:02 Now, what Ocean Wise proved is that you can take a complicated decision and make it simple the exact moment someone's choosing. And similar programs exist all over the world. South Africa has one called Sassi, and in the US there's a Seafood Watch program from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So what do you actually do with all of this the next time you're at the counter? Here's your, call to action for today. next time you buy seafood, ask where it came from and how it was caught. And to be honest, if they don't know, don't buy from them, Cause at the grocery store, at a restaurant, at a market, you say, "Where's this from? How was it caught?" That's it. That's all you have to do. And if they know, great. You can look it up or you can look for that symbol, like OceanWise. And if you don't know, you've just told the business that the customer cares.

8:44 Enough people ask and the business starts finding out. Like, they're starting to like, "Okay, we gotta do something about it." And if there's a local fisher or fish market near you, buy from them, like, directly because they're supporting that fisher and they know where they caught their fish. Most fishers love talking about their fishery. They love it. Now, imagine a coastline where the fishing family and the marine scientists are in the same room. Like, they're talking. The scientist gets decades of on-the-water knowledge 'cause nobody knows more, than fishers who are on the water and where these fish are, and the family gets a protected area next door that keeps their catch coming back. And that person at the fish counter in Toronto or in Cape Town asks that one question that pulls the whole system toward better knowledge, and that's how fishing stays in a family for generations, It happens when the fish, the reef, and the people stay part of that healthy system.

9:34 Now, tomorrow we're wrapping up the week with that feeling a lot of you have told me about, that overwhelming sense that the ocean's problems are too big for one person. And I'm gonna tell you about a penguin, a post box, and a campaign that asked for love instead of money. Now I want you to be able to listen to that, so I want you to hit that follow button if you haven't hit it already. This has been another episode. And of course, I wanna hear from you because this is the beginning of a conversation. I wanna hear what you think and how you approach buying seafood. I would love to hear your thoughts. No judgments, I just wanna know, and does this help you? That's what I would really like to know. Does this episode help you in choosing seafood in a better way? We're looking at Seafood Watch or Sasi or OceanWise, wherever you're located. But anyway, that's it for today's episode.

10:14 thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow, and happy conservation.