By Ben Harder
Give a man a fish, goes the Chinese proverb, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. If he catches too many fish, however, he may leave few fish behind for his children’s table. It has taken less than a generation for modern industrial-scale fishing, once it’s deployed in an ocean area, to exhaust the vast majority of that area’s edible bounty. These massive harvests have left behind devastated ecosystems and depleted economic opportunities.
“There’s no place in the ocean left where there are undisturbed fish stocks,” says ecologist Boris Worm of the Institute for Marine Science in Kiel, Germany. “The whole ocean has been transformed.”