I've written a lot more about livestock treatment and the environmental costs of industrial agriculture than I have about overfishing, in part because I don't understand the issues around oceans quite as well. Tom Laskawy, however, has a useful post on the difference between arguments on how you should treat a turkey versus whether you should eat a tuna:If nothing else, we've found ways to make acres and acres of turkeys (and chickens and pigs and cows) and sell them at a heavily subsidized price. "Turkey" will survive even if today's turkey on the table, god bless its wattled soul, didn't.But the bluefin tuna? Let's put it this way: eat it while you still can. Tuna is being fished into oblivion, despite the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, which sets quotas and "manages" the fishery...The irony is that by creating the illusion of plenty through overfishing, the fishing industry creates a true tragedy of the commons among consumers. With turkeys (and meat in general) you can make the choice to eat sustainably produced meat: the competition is between different styles of, for lack of a better term, making meat. The problem at its core is too much, not too little.But with tuna you are left with what I'll call the Chait Choice, which is to say the choice not to eat. So you don't eat tuna. But then it turns out that your friends (or at least the people at the table next to you) don't have the same compunction and they eat the tuna. Which makes you feel like you should eat the tuna after all - why make the sacrifice if no one else will, and this may be your last chance to enjoy it. So you eat the tuna, too. And soon the tuna are all gone, so no one gets to eat it.No one is concerned that we're on the verge of eating cows into extinction. We have managed to transform cows into a sort of plant: We can, given sufficient land and nutrients, grow virtually as many of them as we'd like. This is true with certain types of fish, too. Farmed salmon has its problems, but fundamentally, we know how to make lots of it. Not so with bluefin tuna and a variety of other wild fishes, where the question is whether current consumption patterns might lead to the fish's wholesale extinction. The problem, for now, is that no one knows how to breed bluefish tuna in captivity. They take about 12 years to reach sexual maturity, and they don't like to breed outside their natural habitat. Bluefin tuna are nevertheless farmed, but that means capturing them in the wild and then fattening them in captivity to speed their path to the market. Which depletes the stock of adult bluefins able to reproduce. So for now, farming tuna does not mean growing them, as it does with salmon and cows. Which is not to say scientists aren't trying.Image used under a CC license from Sifu Renka.
