The End in Sight for Tuna

Carl Pope with the Sierra Club thinks that global warming can create a tipping point, catalyzing Americans to become concerned enough about environmental problems to actually do something about them. Bully for him. I just hope that people can stop being transfixed on a global climate change problem that’s generations out, long enough to focus on something more immediate, such as tuna being fished into extinction:

It's common knowledge that we are running out of oil. What's not so well known is that we are also running out of big fish.

The harsh realization that catches of big fish—marlin, sharks, swordfish and tuna—are declining rapidly is beginning to sink in. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization considers about 75 percent of all fish fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted.

The crisis can be seen most extremely across the Pacific, the world's largest source of tuna, where catches are shrinking along with the average size of the fish. Today a 70 pound swordfish—which is too young to have even reproduced—is considered "a good sized fish" and can be legally landed in the US. Just a few short decades ago the same fish averaged 300-400 pounds and could be caught close to shore with a harpoon.

In the past two years, the Pacific has seen quotas, restrictions on catches, freezes on effort and even moratoriums. The US longline fleet had to shut down for the second half of 2005 in the Eastern Pacific. Japan and China were not far behind.

Just last December, the new international body with the unwieldy name Western and Central Pacific Fishery Commission imposed a freeze on further efforts to catch bigeye and albacore. Throughout the Pacific, it is widely documented that these two species have recently joined the lucrative southern bluefin tuna on the overfished list. In fact, southern bluefin already has a step up on its cousins and is considered an endangered species by the World Conservation Union. Shameful shark finning has also caused numerous shark species to plummet as well and a few sharks such as the great white to be considered vulnerable to extinction.

All told, recent scientific reports document that the biomass of these large fish have declined by about 90 percent in the Pacific since 1950—about the time that new technologies allowed us to fish further from shore for longer and catch more fish. Since then, technology has eviscerated those last areas of the ocean safe from us only because we were unable to reach them and stay there.

The recent announcement last month by the US government that yellowfin tuna is also being overfished in Pacific will undoubtedly send a shockwave throughout the US and the Pacific.

We are now faced with incontrovertible evidence that the lions and tigers of the sea—the ones we feed our children for lunch—are disappearing fast.

Imagine the day when cans of tuna, a staple food source for millions of Americans, can no longer be found. According to the warning signs that day may already be here. That's bad news for the dozens of impoverished Pacific island nations that have leased their national waters for pennies on the dollar to foreign industrial longline vessels to catch and export their fish primarily to the US, Japan and the EU. For some of these nations, these meager licensing fees contribute as much as 70 percent of their GDP.

When greed and waste finally leads to collapse of these fish, millions of people throughout the Pacific will sink even further into poverty. Canneries are already cutting their hours or even shutting down for want of fish. Stories of crews mutinying or being abandoned in foreign countries by captains who couldn't pay them abound.

The days of three cans of tuna for a $1, a vivid memory from my childhood, are long gone.

The way out of this crisis is to catch less and pay more while staying out of critical areas of the ocean. It only seems fair that the countries with the resources should receive a far larger share of their $2 billion a year resource and still have some of the big fish around to attract far more lucrative game fishing tourism. The US has taken the right step by restricting longline fishing for tuna in the Eastern Pacific and banning it on the West Coast. Now it's time to put the pressure on other countries to do the same.

Otherwise we may start having to add these fish to the endangered species list.

Despite the presence of international commissions, marine problems still abound, such as overfishing, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, regulatory gaps leading to poor enforcement and compliance, and perverse subsidies that promote and encourage overfishing. The World Conservation Union quotes the United National Food and Agriculture Organization:

The depletion of stocks contravenes the basic conservation requirements of the 1982 UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and of sustainable development. It is also contrary to the principles and management provisions of the 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. It affects the structure, functioning and resilience of the ecosystem, threatens food securing and economic development and reduces long-term social welfare.

More on the definition of threatened and endangered species such as southern bluefin tuna can be found on the World Conservation Union’s Red List. Seafood Watch is a project sponsored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium that helps consumers make seafood choices that produce less of an impact on ocean ecosystems. It’s something to think hard about – fishing tuna into extinction isn’t the way to get rid of federal fish advisories.

I found this tidbit on Lowbagger. When I really want to see what environmentalists really think, I don’t look to the Sierra Club. I check out Lowbagger instead.

On Hold

Generally, I’m not a prolific business traveler, averaging six to eight trips per year. This year, I’ll have logged eight trips before June, most of them since the end of April. Since I haven’t been a power-traveler, I’ve been indifferent to the things available to marginally ease the burdens of air travel, such as accumulating frequent flyer miles for the occasional upgrade to a seat designed for a normally-proportioned male (the folks who get affordable first class seats via upgrade must rack up an astounding number of air miles per year). Losing 40 pounds was helpful in getting me to fit width-wise into economy- or business-class seats, but it isn’t much help in the other direction – airlines must use the same assumptions as risk assessors which is that we all weigh 70 kg, and are all around 175 cm in height; that’s 154 lbs in weight, 5 ft, 9 in tall, for my not-so-oppressively scientific readers. Please help me understand why economy-class seats are thought to be designed for someone over six feet tall. The 30 percent of Americans with BMIs greater than 30 must truly suffer on airplanes.

I’ve found airline passenger health and comfort to be good exercise in the assessment (or lack thereof) of cumulative and aggregate risks. A few years ago, ASHRAE published a study concluding that most airline passengers rated cabin air quality high, better than building air quality. William Nazaroff at UC Berkeley, in testimony before Congress a few years later, provides a more nuanced contrast and suggests cabin air quality might be a factor in numerous complaints but that too much uncertainty exists in the available data. However, when you overlay this with indoor air quality in the terminal or hotels, outdoor air quality at airports from all of the partially-combusted hydrocarbons, potential for disease transmission due to crowding, crummy airport terminal food (airports are nutritional dead zones if you are truly trying to eat properly; thankfully, airlines have stopped trying to feed you on the planes, as an economy move), limited opportunities for exercise, non-ergonomically designed seats both in planes and terminals, noise and vibration, stress and boredom (let’s hear it for airports with wireless), you would think that clearly air travel potentially presents some health challenges. Even if these were assessed, I’m not holding my breath that anything would be done about it, in the absence of an alternate mode of long-distance travel. However, would it kill airports to subsidize concessions that stock fresh vegetables; would it really kill airlines to pull a few rows of seats out to give economy-class passengers a few more inches of legroom?

Travel and work have been putting other aspects of life on hold, such as the blog. I like the description of work life provided by Jen over at The News Blog: “a slow motion riot in a crowded white-collar asylum”. I know that feeling. Some tidbits I’ve encountered over the past month, which I present in lieu of one of several only partially-completed posts:

I checked out the NAS TCE web site, to see if there’s an update on when the report will be released. There seems to have been a note added recently saying that the project duration has been extended, and that the report is expected to be issued “summer 2006”, which could mean anytime up to mid-September. Originally, the project duration was 18 months starting from September 2004, which meant the report was supposed to be out very soon. I don’t know what’s up – I’m not in that kind of loop.

I’ve been reading Selling Sickness, by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels. It chronicles the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry, physicians and medical researchers, describing how that industry has worked together to broaden the definition of “illness” to increase market share for drugs. It’s quite good, and may challenge you to rethink your relationship with doctors in general.

The OMB’s draft bulletin on risk assessment started me on a journey exploring the state of the practice under the current political climate. I’ve had a chance to compare the different viewpoints of stakeholders such as the American Chemistry Council (current regulatory risk assessments are far too conservative) and Adam Finkel (no they aren’t). The OMB comes out on the side of the ACC, of course. I haven’t had any luck finding Dr. Finkel’s article “Is Risk Assessment Really Too Conservative? Revising the Revisionists” from the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law in 1989, but he’s got a later version published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997 (they nick you $8 for it) titled engagingly 'Disconnect brain and repeat after me: "risk assessment is too conservative"'. Looking at these arguments again, it interesting to see how little risk assessment has transformed in the past 10 years. It may have even lost some ground, intellectually.

I’m back on the road for the next two weeks, so posting will continue to be intermittent.

Dread and Distraction

How much people perceive a hazard, say like exposure to a toxic substance, to be a personal risk depends in part on how dreaded are the outcomes of the exposure. In the case of toxic substance exposure, the possible outcomes may include cancer and birth defects (or may not, but then again, uncertainty is another determinant of risk perception), which if you read any accounts of communities being exposed to toxic substances, are clearly things that people dread.

The New York Times points to this article published recently in Science reporting on a study of the neural basis for the sensation of dread. The investigators found that sense of dread may also be related to having to wait for the outcome:

Given the choice of waiting for an adverse outcome or getting it over with quickly, many people choose the latter. Theoretical models of decision-making have assumed that this occurs because there is a cost to waiting—i.e., dread. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured the neural responses to waiting for a cutaneous electric shock. Some individuals dreaded the outcome so much that, when given a choice, they preferred to receive more voltage rather than wait.

The investigators concluded that the sense of dread may be related to the attention devoted to the expected physical response and not simply from fear or anxiety, and that there is

. . . evidence for a neurobiological link between the experienced disutility of dread and subsequent decisions about unpleasant outcomes.

What this means in terms of managing environmental risks is that taking more time to get to outcomes or decisions (whether it’s cleaning up sites or taking hazardous substances out of the commerce stream) reinforces peoples’ sense of dread and increases their outrage over the risk. This is why effective management of environmental risks not only involves risk communication and public involvement, but the ability to clearly communicate the next steps in the process – when those steps will happen and what they will accomplish.

So, knowing what are the next steps in solving an environmental problem, when they are going to happen, and simply being kept apprised about what is going on, may be an antidote to dread. The ability to stay informed and have some control over the decision making may also help (I’m developing an example for our consideration, to be posted soon).

The Times doesn’t get it. It would have you believe the antidote to dread is distraction. Worried about your health from environmental hazards? Whistle real loud.

Irony is Truly Dead

You have to know that irony is truly dead in the Washington press corps when you see this as a headline. We’re slowly slipping from governance to brigandage (with the exception that the warlords are dignified with titles such as “Secretary” and "Representative”) in full view of the media elite, and they have to be feeling guilty about watching it happen and not making more of a stink about it. How else do you explain the chilly reception for Stephen Colbert’s performance as the hired party clown at the While House correspondents’ dinner last weekend?