Annotated Table of Contents and Study Questions
The Blue Revolution Hunting, Harvesting, and Farming Seafood in the Information Ages By Nicholas P. Sullivan Preface: The Blue Revolution, Version 2.0 This book is about the transformation of commercial fishing— from maximizing volume to maximizing value, from wild hunting to controlled harvesting and farming. It’s about sensible stakeholders staring at a “tragedy of the commons” that has depleted a global, natural resource—and collaborating to preserve the resource and its ocean habitat. Commercial fishing, long a traditional throwback industry, is moving in fits and starts into the postindustrial age— propelled by big data, sensors, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
PART I. Wild-Capture Fisheries Between 1990 and 2018, global fish consumption rose by 122 percent. Given the stress on wildfish stocks in the ocean, farmed fish already account for more than half the fish eaten globally. But wild fish are still a big part of the lean-protein solution, especially as wild hunting morphs into sustainable harvesting. That’s happening in the United States and a significant swath of the rest of the world. Globally, in 2017, roughly 79 percent of marine fish landings were from biologically sustainable stocks.
Chapter 1. Sacred Cod, Sustainable Scallops By the mid-1990s, both sea scallops and Atlantic cod stocks were seriously depleted, and catches of both were heavily restricted. Many scallop grounds rebounded to health quickly, which led to a policy of rotating beds. Since then, scallops have thrived for 20 years and are now one of the top fisheries in the US. But fights over how to limit cod catch raged until 2014, when government scientists saw cod reduced to 1 percent of its 1980s biomass and essentially shut down the fishery to rebuild.
QUESTIONS •
What can policymakers learn from the way sea scallops and Atlantic cod were managed?