Description:
The essay is to be on the topic of overfishing cause and effect on economy food supply, etc.
Prompt from my teacher:
1. Explain the causal effects of certain policies or programs as suggested by Divakaruni, Fishman, Saukko or Erlich in their respective essays on the economy and the environment. You can write an essay that modifies one of their specific claims or takes one of their arguments in a different direction, focusing on an issue of your choice. For example, in response to Saukko’s “How to Poison the Earth,” you could write an essay called “Why ‘Fracking’ Should Be Considered a Corporate Plot to Poison Millions of New Yorkers.” You must use at least ONE of the essays listed above and you must supplement it with at least TWO scholarly sources.
Again, follow these simple guidelines:
1. Your essay must have a clear, coherent, and logical introduction with a thesis statement.
2. Follow the introduction with various examples, cases, or arguments that support your thesis. If you use any of the sources listed above, you must cite them in your text and include the bibliographical information on The Bedford Reader that I gave you last month.
3. You should find TWO additional sources to support your argument. Use MLA style for citing print sources (i.e., give author’s last name and a page number in the text and then give a full bibliographic reference in a “Works Cited” list after your conclusion.
4. Finally, provide a conclusion that restates your thesis in some way and then goes beyond it by enlarging the significance of your argument.
Composition (CAP)-Learning Community
1 Pace Plaza, E301
Overfishing
Plenty of Fish in the Sea? Not Always
Led by the sushi market in Japan, the global demand for succulent tuna meat has driven stocks of the once ubiquitous species to the brink of collapse. Fisheries in the Mediterranean, where this catch was landed, are in particular peril, with some studies showing highly prized bluefin tuna near extinction there.
Photograph by Jose Luis Roca/AFP/Getty Images
Ocean overfishing is simply the taking of wildlife from the sea at rates too high for fished species to replace themselves. The earliest overfishing occurred in the early 1800s when humans, seeking blubber for lamp oil, decimated the whale population. Some fish that we eat, including Atlantic cod and herring and California’s sardines, were also harvested to the brink of extinction by the mid-1900s.
Highly disruptive to the food chain, these isolated, regional depletions became global and catastrophic by the late 20th century.
When It Started
Marine scientists know when widespread overfishing of the seas began. And they have a pretty good idea when, if left unaddressed, it will end.
In the mid-20th century, international efforts to increase the availability and affordability of protein-rich foods led to concerted government efforts to increase fishing capacity. Favorable policies, loans, and subsidies spawned a rapid rise of big industrial fishing operations, which quickly supplanted local boatmen as the world’s source of seafood.
These large, profit-seeking commercial fleets were extremely aggressive, scouring the world’s oceans and developing ever more sophisticated methods and technologies for finding, extracting, and processing their target species. Consumers soon grew accustomed to having access to a wide selection of fish species at affordable prices.
But by 1989, when about 90 million tons (metric tons) of catch were taken from the ocean, the industry had hit its high-water mark, and yields have declined or stagnated ever since. Fisheries for the most sought-after species, like orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, and bluefin tuna have collapsed. In 2003, a scientific report estimated that industrial fishing had reduced the number of large ocean fish to just 10 percent of their pre-industrial population.
When It Will End
Faced with the collapse of large-fish populations, commercial fleets are going deeper in the ocean and father down the food chain for viable catches. This so-called “fishing down” is triggering a chain reaction that is upsetting the ancient and delicate balance of the sea’s biologic system.
A study of catch data published in 2006 in the journal Science grimly predicted that if fishing rates continue apace, all the world’s fisheries will have collapsed by the year 2048.
What’s Next?
Over the past 55 years, as fisheries have returned lower and lower yields, humans have begun to understand that the oceans we’d assumed were unendingly vast and rich are in fact highly vulnerable and sensitive. Add overfishing to pollution, climate change, habitat destruction, and acidification, and a picture of a system in crisis emerges.
Many scientists say most fish populations could be restored with aggressive fisheries management, better enforcement of laws governing catches, and increased use of aquaculture. And in many regions, there is reason for hope. But illegal fishing and unsustainable harvesting still plagues the industry. And a public grown accustomed to abundant seafood and largely apathetic about the plight of the oceans complicates efforts to repair the damage we’ve done.
Still Waters: The Global Fish Crisis
Doomed by a gill net, a thresher shark in Mexico’s Gulf of California is among an estimated 40 million sharks killed yearly for their fins. They add to the devastating global fish catch: nearly 100 million tons.
Photograph by Brian Skerry
By Fen Montaigne
Republished from the pages of National Geographic magazine
No more magnificent fish swims the world’s oceans than the giant bluefin tuna, which can grow to 12 feet (3.7 meters) in length, weigh 1,500 pounds (680 kilograms), and live for 30 years. Once, giant bluefin migrated by the millions throughout the Atlantic Basin and the Mediterranean Sea, their flesh so important to the people of the ancient world that they painted the tuna’s likeness on cave walls and minted its image on coins.
The giant, or Atlantic, bluefin possesses another extraordinary attribute, one that may prove to be its undoing: Its buttery belly meat, liberally layered with fat, is considered the finest sushi in the world. Over the past decade, a high-tech armada, often guided by spotter planes, has pursued giant bluefin from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, annually netting tens of thousands of fish, many of them illegally. The bluefin are fattened offshore in sea cages before being shot and butchered for the sushi and steak markets in Japan, America, and Europe. So many giant bluefin have been hauled out of the Mediterranean that the population is in danger of collapse. Meanwhile, European and North African officials have done little to stop the slaughter.
“My big fear is that it may be too late,” said Sergi Tudela, a Spanish marine biologist with the World Wildlife Fund, which has led the struggle to rein in the bluefin fishery. “I have a very graphic image in my mind. It is of the migration of so many buffalo in the American West in the early 19th century. It was the same with bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean, a migration of a massive number of animals. And now we are witnessing the same phenomenon happening to giant bluefin tuna that we saw happen with America’s buffalo. We are witnessing this, right now, right before our eyes.”
The decimation of giant bluefin is emblematic of everything wrong with global fisheries today: the vastly increased killing power of new fishing technology, the shadowy network of international companies making huge profits from the trade, negligent fisheries management and enforcement, and consumers’ indifference to the fate of the fish they choose to buy.
The world’s oceans are a shadow of what they once were. With a few notable exceptions, such as well-managed fisheries in Alaska, Iceland, and New Zealand, the number of fish swimming the seas is a fraction of what it was a century ago. Marine biologists differ on the extent of the decline. Some argue that stocks of many large oceangoing fish have fallen by 80 to 90 percent, while others say the declines have been less steep. But all agree that, in most places, too many boats are chasing too few fish.
Popular species such as cod have plummeted from the North Sea to Georges Bank off New England. In the Mediterranean, 12 species of shark are commercially extinct, and swordfish there, which should grow as thick as a telephone pole, are now caught as juveniles and eaten when no bigger than a baseball bat. With many Northern Hemisphere waters fished out, commercial fleets have steamed south, overexploiting once teeming fishing grounds. Off West Africa, poorly regulated fleets, both local and foreign, are wiping out fish stocks from the productive waters of the continental shelf, depriving subsistence fishermen in Senegal, Ghana, Angola, and other countries of their families’ main source of protein. In Asia, so many boats have fished the waters of the Gulf of Thailand and the Java Sea that stocks are close to exhaustion. “The oceans are suffering from a lot of things, but the one that overshadows everything else is fishing,” said Joshua S. Reichert of the Pew Charitable Trusts. “And unless we get a handle on the extraction of fish and marine resources, we will lose much of the list that remains in the seas.