Reimagining wild fisheries with the whole ecosystem in mind

In the past two decades, as Americans have been increasingly encouraged to eat more seafood for their health, a host of metrics to inform them about the sustainability of their purchases has also emerged. You can check a label to ensure your canned sardines were caught without injuring sea turtles; that the flounder for your filet from the fish counter was not harvested with a trawler; that pink shrimp from off the Oregon coast were caught with minimal damage to the surrounding ecosystem.

“We all say that the only way to feed the future is to produce more and more and more but sometimes I wonder if we need salmon poke bowls in the Alps when we go skiing,” says Ingrid Kelling, a socio-economist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, who studies what’s known as “wellbeing economies” that move countries away from thinking only of GDP and toward living within their ecological boundaries (New Zealand, Iceland, Wales, Finland and Scotland are all Wellbeing Economy Governments). “It’s also very convenient for some people to imagine just a single stock, and it’s politically expedient. But I think it’s a failure to not see things as a whole, and that includes not just other fish stocks, but the entire ecosystem that these fish interact with — that includes coastal communities. It includes fisheries on the high seas. It includes the entire food chain, upwards and downwards.”

Fisheries, reimagined

Jacquet’s 2024 paper presents two multifaceted “core principles” to mitigate the destruction wrought by fisheries that fail to think in a more holistic way: minimizing environmental harm to allow marine life to bounce back, and rethinking fisheries so that they enhance the wellbeing of actual humans over the corporations that exploit fisheries for profit. In addition to catching less than MSY, that also means fishing with less-destructive gear — banning trawls and dredges allowed in current certification schemes, for example, that “pulverize” marine life — from well-governed fisheries that pay workers a living wage. Also, “It would be better for countries to consume what they catch locally; there’s no doubt that part of the exacerbating pressure on the ocean has to do with global trade,” Jacquet says. Kelling’s research has found that even small and artisanal fisheries can contribute to overfishing due to economic pressures, but the gear they use, such as handlines and small nets, tend to be less devastating to ecosystems.

Even more than that, Jacquet says “our relationship to seafood is due for a major overhaul that boils down to seeing seafood as animals,” as we do dolphins and birds. “You wouldn’t allow the industrial exploitation of any songbird species, where you deploy tens of thousands of machines to harvest these birds for some kind of warbler soup,” she says. And she wonders why we can accept whales as creatures to protect and not tuna, which are “wild animals with agency, sentience, cognition, maybe even culture.”

Kelling believes that reforming the “greed”-based economics of fisheries, with a focus on the needs of nature, human dignity and overlooked stakeholders like subsistence fishermen, is essential to their improvement. However, she and other economists admit with frustration that the sort of change that’s needed has so far been slow to take off, even among those countries that signed on to the Wellbeing Economy Government partnership. “I’m not against growth, I’m against growth at all cost,” Kelling says. “Can we talk about the environment for its own sake, without the economic aspect? I would love to, but that’s not the reality we live in. If we’re going to see change, we need to appeal to people’s pockets as well, and we need to point out that [we] can gain long-term and better if we’re willing to value the environment and people within our industry.” She sees Patagonia’s purpose-driven model as one that might be replicated to good effect in fisheries.

Kelling admits that industrial fishing enterprises are not likely to give up money or power without a fight and that they “would need to be compensated,” she says, pointing out that for the time being, these entities hold capital, rights to access certain fish from particular parts of the ocean and “political leverage.” But at her most optimistic, she imagines that wellbeing governments, using a more ecosystem-based approach, could minimize exploitation and then begin to phase it out institutionally. There would be “no question of needing certification anymore, because every product you get is sustainable — environmentally and economically and socially. Whereas at the moment, the reason we need certification is because that can’t be guaranteed.”

In 2019, Canada amended its fisheries policy to include the consideration of Indigenous knowledge in decision-making around fisheries. Frid’s research has found this policy-making to be so far almost wholly “aspirational.” And yet, he believes the braiding of Indigenous knowledge with Western fisheries science — and figuring out how to scale this sort of partnership — shows a way forward.

One success has been a collaboration between Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Haida Nation in working to restore a depleted commercial herring fishery. Having Indigenous voices (i.e., small-scale, artisanal fishers) at the table meant starting off with “definitions of a rebuilt herring population that included cultural values, governance, economic, every aspect [Haida] consider needed for Indigenous health,” Frid says. “Rather than thinking of the entire region as one herring population, they broke it down into areas where they knew the timing of spawning, the different growth fluctuations. The management measures that come out of this, like how much do herring have to rebuild before you can start fishing, and how much can you fish them when they reach that level, was done in a much more precautionary way.”

That fishery is not yet able to be harvested, and Frid knows such a collaboration is applicable only to fisheries that occur within the boundaries of one country (fisheries in international waters are co-managed by their member countries, which is a whole other level of complexity). But he also believes Indigenous values could have resonance across broader fisheries management. Switching to whole-ecosystem management is hugely challenging, “not because it’s logically flawed but because it’s really hard to do from a rigorous scientific perspective, and scientists are working in a system where we still want to get as much as we can out of the ocean,” Frid says. But Indigenous managers “wouldn’t get hung up on all the technicalities; your obligation is to be respectful and live with reciprocity to a species. So, by default, you’re going to leave more than you think you need.” That, says Frid, “is the beginning of change.”

Top photo by Andrea Izzotti/Adobe Stock.