Imagine the classic, traditional American image of father-son bonding – a lazy Sunday spent fishing down by the lake. Perhaps you’re imagining a rowboat, a shining sun and a good time. But here’s a shocking statistic to wake you up from that pleasant picture – “more than 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are ‘fully exploited’, ‘over exploited’ or ‘significantly depleted’.” All wild fish fleets now fall below natural levels. Since the rise of industrial fishing in the 1950’s, all tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, skate and flounder have been depleted by 90%. In addition, levels of halibut, bluefin tuna, swordfish, haddock and yellowtail flounder have dropped over the past decade to all-time lows. It is expected that Atlantic bluefin tuna will disappear completely in several years.

In theoretical and numerical terms, humans’ appetites for fish have officially now exceeded our oceans’ capacity to hold them and nature’s ability to produce them. Consumer demand rose in 2006 to over 8 times what it was in the 1950’s. It is estimated that the world will need an extra 37 million tons of farmed fish annually by 2030.

Marine ecologists think that the biggest threat to marine environments is overfishing by humans. Fisheries are already diminishing. The main codfish fishery collapsed in 1992 and led to the loss of 40,000 jobs, which demonstrates the dangerous fragility of our marine dependence. It is expected that cod stocks in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea will follow the collapse of this formerly-spectacular Canadian fishery.

Scientists also predict that the devastating reduction of top predator fish (our favorites to eat) will shift the entire ecosystem of oceans in such a way that commercially-valuable fish will be replaced by small, plankton-feeding fish and jellyfish. See? Our overfishing is so drastic that it is changing our oceans in permanent ways, some that we do not even understand yet.

And unbelievably, the fishing industry continues to ignore the extremely fragile state of the Atlantic, turning their attention to the slightly-less-depleted Pacific. I find this downright disgusting and so unbelievably frustrating. The future of the marine health of our PLANET is on the line here, and they don’t even care.