100 million pounds of lost gear by the fishing industry is such a ridiculous underestimate that, judging by some of the comments here, make people believe this number to be somehow OK. The fishing industry has been dodging responsibility for ocean pollution and habitat destruction for forever, good to see more research that people can use to put pressure on them to actually give a s** and change their ways.
My first thought as well that it's a massive underestimate. I live on a fishing island in Iceland (Commercial fishing, not quaint little boats like some people imagine) and there are piles of nets everywhere the size of houses, a factory that does nothing but make new plastic nets 2 shifts a day, and we can remove several large black garbage bags worth of fishing junk a day from just a few of the beaches surrounding just our 3km across island.
The crazy part about this is how this is the fishermen shitting where they are eating. All of the ocean pollution contributes directly to collapsing fish populations, which puts them right out of a job. Why doesn't the appeal of "if you keep doing what you're doing you won't be able to keep fishing, and your children definitely won't be fishermen" work?
I get that they are trapped in the cycle of overfishing, but it seems like cutting back on the pollution is a first step everybody could take.
A lot of fishers where I live blame the damage on previous generations. They aren’t the problem, it was the people before them. They talk about how sustainable their practices are (despite stocks decreasing every year).
We had massive glass sponge reefs. They were destroyed by trawlers. That’s prohibited now. I suppose we’re expected to believe the industry wouldn’t be trawling today if they were allowed to, but I don’t buy it. Although the glass sponges were nurseries for untold millions of fish and their prey, and those stocks are so incredibly depleted and unable to recover, they still fish every single bit of quota they can and fight tooth and nail to increase quotas. Many complain that they aren’t allowed to trawl, too.
I suppose what it comes down to is that everyone thinks they are the exception. Even our meat eating practices on land are so resource intensive and absurd, but no one things they are complicit in an activity like what we’re seeing with fishing. None of this is sustainable, but we’re all participating and all very sure it’s someone else’s fault.
Really, sustainable fishing at our population scale seems like an absurd notion.
In many places trawlers are to fishers what trucks are to cyclists, so there is some truth when people blame trawlers for destroyed reefs. Bottom trawlers in particular bulldoze the ocean floor, and trawler fleet are basically floating factories that operate by moving to new locations once a current location is dried up and destroyed. Trawler fleet also tend to focus on creating oil and animal feed, which mean they don't really care what they catch.
Once an area is destroyed in this fashion there isn't much future for fish or fishermen. Fishermen can continue to fish or not, but without a healthy ocean floor the fish won't reproduce, the nurseries won't be there, and parasites/diseases will wreck the remaining population for decades. The best society can do is to help fishermen to move to a different profession and turn the harbor into apartments.
> it seems like cutting back on the pollution is a first step everybody could take.
Just a simple tragedy of the commons I guess. The obvious steps towards sustainable fishing involves either higher cost or lower yields in the short-medium term. The few who would be willing to would go out of business. Since fish don't generally respect borders, the same dilemma occurs even between countries. If you voluntary give up your yield, other countries get more.
The only way I know to solve this is to properly price externalities, Milton Friedman style.
