Cowboys of the sea aim to sink marine reserves
Rebecca Clarren
Let’s face it: the Western landscape, home to the cowboy and tumbleweed, is the stuff of legend. Like most Westerners today, I live in a city where I buy my food at the grocery store and meet my cowboys in the pages of Cormac McCarthy novels. The era of the self-reliant cowboy is dead.
Except for one place.
The open ocean remains the last true frontier. Fishermen still harvest something wild. There are few cops at sea. Like cowboys, fishermen tend to be independent, tenacious and scrappy.
However, like any good Spaghetti Western, the plot has gotten a little thick lately. As we all know, ocean ecosystems are in trouble. Worldwide it’s estimated that 75 percent of the world’s major fisheries are fully exploited, or worse, according to a National Marine Fisheries Service report on over fishing. A 2004 HCN story Mending the Nets detailed the more depressing state of the Pacific Coastline.
Overfishing doesn’t account for all of this – water pollution and seaside development take some of the credit. But the news about fishery collapse, about the potential for a future of nothing but farmed fish, hooks your attention.