Animal aquaculture, the farming of fish, has outpaced the amount of wild-caught fish by tens of millions of metric tons each year, bringing with it negative environmental impacts and enabling abuse, says Carl Safina, an ecologist and author.
On this episode of Mongabay’s podcast, Safina speaks with co-host Rachel Donald about his recent Science Advances essay describing the “moral reckoning” that’s required for the industry, pointing to environmental laws in the United States, which put hard limits on pollution, as examples to follow.
“In the 1970s in the U.S., we had this enormous burst of environmental legislation. We got the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act … all of these things were not because somebody invented something new. It's because we felt differently about what was important,” he says.
The global fishing industry also contributes to forced labor and other worker abuses, as revealed by whistleblowers and media outlets, including Mongabay. Read our award-winning 2022 investigation, which revealed systemic abuse of foreign workers by China’s offshore tuna fleet.
Like this podcast? Share it with a friend, and please leave a review.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website or download our free app for Apple and Android devices to gain instant access to our latest episodes and all of our previous ones.
Image caption: An Atlantic salmon. In the U.S., the Washington state legislature banned farming of Atlantic salmon in 2018. A state official banned all commercial finfish aquaculture. Alaska and California have similar bans. Image by Hans-Petter Fjeld via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
---
Timecodes
(00:00) Aquaculture and its impacts
(15:32) How values shape environmental policy
(32:56) The tragedy of the commons
(35:52) Ecological empathy
(45:07) Credits
