Jacques Cousteau - back when he was a young man on black and white TV - suggested ‘the bounty of the sea can sustain mankind’
he did not foresee the technologies that today allow factory fishing ships/fleets to find the fish, then sweep mega-swaths of the ocean totally clear of any fish…
My old roommate Mary moved to Alaska (Kenai peninsula) in her early 20s. We went halibut fishing one day when I was visiting her, and a friend had dropped off three coho salmon while we were gone. Heaven on earth. We went clamming at Clam Gulch one morning and got half a five gallon bucket of 5-8" razor clams, which we made short work of. she also had a king crab trap in the 70s and early 80s. She lived for the food available there and was totally into the wildlife.
In her late 50s she married and moved to Oregon. One of the things she told me about was regret that she felt like she was part of what she’s seen as the catch being so barren. The salmon were obviously reduced, she gave away her crab pot, and the razor clams in clam gulch were now around 3", give or take. She felt guilty about being a part of the reduction in wildlife.
I’m afraid that we’re being sold a bill of goods about Pacific Northwest seafood sustainability. I know that geoducks were unavailable to US sushi bars for a long time, althought there are people farming them now, which is better than letting them go extinct. I feel like our longing/greed for the exotic has imperiled our Pacific northwest.
In MOBY-DICK, Melville asserted that there would always be enough whales because they could not be killed fast enough to deplete them: “Though so short a period ago–not a good lifetime–the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated.” He, too, failed to see the future of whaling.
