other evidence can we provide? What additional study is needed to break through the entrenched eNGO mindset? There is already an abundance of sound science that affirms the need for expansion of offshore aquaculture. Continued opposition to – or indifference to – this position is the environmental equivalent of supporting expansion of coal-fired power plants; it is the socio-economic equivalent of advocating for more condos along America’s waterfront; and it is the public-health equivalent of promoting more smoking of cigarettes.
Hyperbole, you ask? Consider the following … From the planetary perspective, it is abundantly clear that there is insufficient land, fresh water and feedstuffs to sustain 9 billion people hankering for hamburgers at the rate that Americans currently consume cow-flesh. Further, methane and nitrous-oxidebelching bovines represent a significant component of global GHG emissions. On our current trajectory, earth’s atmosphere will be rendered more like Venus, and our soils more like Mars. We cannot mandate vegetarianism, and so the best way that these critical constraints can be avoided is for attractive protein alternatives to be available and affordable. And no, that does not mean carp or tilapia. I do not know anyone who walks into a sushi bar and orders tilapia. No-one sits down in a steak-house and orders carp. It has to be fillets of tantalizingly tasty marine fish, or the billions will want to be buying the beef. The Blue Frontiers study of 2011 (which was the pivotal expose on all the above) now bookends very nicely with the Froehlich, et al., study of 2018, which used marine spatial planning models to project that offshore aquaculture, sited only in under-utilized ocean space out to the 200 m isobath, could produce more than 100 times the current level of global seafood consumption. With
100 times the seafood availability, in marine fish, bivalves and algae (or even with just 3x or 4x), perhaps we could begin to restore some of the overworked terrestrial ecosystems by increasing land devoted to conservation. Isn’t that what a conscious environmentalist should support? Many of the marine-focused NGOs also support maintaining working waterfronts. This, too, can be achieved through offshore aquaculture, alongside commercial fishing. Commercial fishermen readily comprehend this: in Kampachi Farms’ SeaGrant-supported project for a demonstration net pen offshore of Florida, we have been flooded with offers from commercial fishermen to provide dock-space, processing facilities, or boats for lease. These same fishermen also immediately understand the benefits to their bottom line of the FAD effects of an offshore array (which makes it exceedingly curious that commercial, charter-boat and recreational fishermen signed on to the Louisiana lawsuit). And US seafood distributors and processors are among the Stronger America Through Seafood coalition that is ardently supportive of Wicker. They understand the importance of
“The recent Louisiana court decision effectively torpedoed the last ten or more years of NOAA’s efforts to move forward with offshore aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico, and elsewhere”
keeping seafood jobs in America – something the eNGOs also claim to support. There is now an abundance of accumulated environmental science that unequivocally dispatches the eco-hand-wringing that was previously used to besmirch net pen aquaculture. The best distillation of these data can be found in Price and Morris (2013), and Rust, et al., (2014). The former meta-analysis of studies on water quality and benthic impacts around net pens concluded that so long as basic, common-sense siting criteria are adopted, then there is no significant impact, and often no measureable impact whatsoever. The
© The Kampachi Company.
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