Apparently it’s not a good day to be a squid. And while you may say no day sounds promising, or wonder why I’m talking molluscs given the Ukraine, climate, and inflation crises, a minor news item about overfishing highlights two major current problems. Or three, if you count paying attention to the wrong stuff. So lend me your tentacles.
Evidently a swarm of fishing boats large enough to be visible from space now descends on various locales to scoop up whatever’s left, including “Argentine shortfin squid,” having already devastated so-called “fin fish,” a.k.a. every fish you ever heard of and some you didn’t. Like “slimehead,” since there weren’t enough tuna, served as “orange roughy.”
There’s this weird environmentalist panic against fish farming. Live Science warned in 2009: “Aquaculture, or the culturing of fish in a controlled environment, now accounts for 50 percent of the fish consumed globally, a fact that’s putting tremendous strain on wild fish.” Actually, more than half is farmed for the same reason cows don’t face extinction. Namely that where property rights are secure the benefits of careful management accrue to those who manage carefully, so resources are looked after with an eye to the future. Where it’s first come, first served and Old Nick take the hindmost, they get depleted.
It was, paradoxically, left-wing environmentalist Garett Hardin who coined the phrase “the tragedy of the commons” to explain what predictably happens when a resource is not allocated to private owners. But the cliché that markets are short-sighted while governments take the long view remains popular among people who work for government, including most of your teachers. So a shocking amount of public policy is conducted as if Hardin had proved “the tragedy of private ownership” instead. Including inviting voters to race to empty the public treasury as if it were the Grand Banks.
The oceans certainly are a commons. Which is not an easy problem to fix. But unless it is treated seriously and soberly, exactly the tragedy that unfolded with “fin fish” and is now striking whatever’s left will unfold. And international security is a “commons” too.
Any nation that tries to protect the world, like one that prevents its own boats from overfishing, just loses. It sometimes happens anyway, for instance the Royal Navy stamping out the slave trade in the 19th century. And it’s not quite as bad as overfishing, because democratic nations that merely look prudently to their own security generate the beneficial “externality” of deterring aggressors. But surely it should have given us serious pause, before complacently accepting John Kerry’s view that the world had said no to aggression, to realize the world hadn’t even managed to say no to overfishing.
On the contrary, what treaties exist are inadequate in content and feeble in enforcement. Even the rules about territorial waters. To no sane person’s surprise, Chinese boats have been detected turning off public tracking systems to avoid, well, being detected fishing illegally in Argentine waters. Xi Jinping may drone, as he did in 2013: “We stand for peaceful resolutions to international disputes, oppose all forms of hegemony and power politics and never seek hegemonism nor engage in expansion,” but I would not believe him if I were you. Or a squid.
Confronting China directly over fishing, like confronting Russia over Ukraine, carries enormous risks. But ducking a problem because it’s hard doesn’t solve it … except to far too many politicians.
Hence another revealing March 7 news item about Canada’s scofflaw environment minister upset that we’re exporting plastic trash through a giant loophole in our treaty obligations. Which might seem even less relevant than squid having eight “arms” and only two “tentacles.” But plastic is another major ocean problem. And while Western governments may virtue-signal about plastic straws, almost all plastic comes down 10 rivers and everyone knows which, if they care to.
Hint: Not the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Thames, Rhine, or Seine. Plot spoiler: Asia’s Yangtze, Yellow, Hai He, Pearl, Amur (yes, five in China alone), Mekong, Ganges, and Indus, and Africa’s Nile and Niger.
So here’s the odd thing. Everyone’s yammering about climate change and nobody’s doing anything about plastic. Or worse. Embarrassed by shipping plastic waste to the Philippines to be “recycled” into ocean trash, our virtuous government went to the virtuous U.N. and amended a key treaty so after 2021 we could only export it to other nations that pledged not to burn or dump it. Except we promptly signed a deal to send it to the United States, which made no such pledge. So a Trudeau not a Harper issue. And a governmental issue, saying one thing, doing another, and thinking… well, as fictional detective Nero Wolfe once exclaimed in disgust “I have the brain of a mollusc.”
Sadly, we’re not even at that level. On a bad day for it.
