The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Daniel Pauly: "Peak Fish and Other Ocean Realities"

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

On this episode, we meet with Professor at the University of British Columbia and Founder of Sea Around Us, Dr. Daniel Pauly. Dr. Pauly shares the role warming sea water plays in fish migration. How do warming temperatures affect water oxygen levels and fish behavior? Dr. Pauly explains that the world has passed peak fish, and why contemporary metrics do not always paint a complete picture of our dire situation. About Daniel Pauly Dr. Daniel Pauly is a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia, the Founder of the Sea Around Us, and author of more than a dozen books. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/15-daniel-pauly

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Today's guest is Ocean Fisheries expert Daniel Pauley. Daniel is a marine biologist who teaches at the University of British Columbia. He is also the founder of the Ocean Fisheries Project, The Sea Around Us. Daniel's the author of numerous books and over 500 academic papers.

He's quite simply one of the world's foremost experts on the relationship between humans, oceans, fish and on the state of the earth's oceans and the fish that live in them. Today we talk about why fish are migrating northward because they need more oxygen due to warming water, about the world passing peak fish and about farm-raised salmon and many other topics not often discussed. I expect you will enjoy and learn from this conversation with Professor Daniel Pauley. Dr. Pauli, good to see you, sir. Good to see you, too.

We haven't seen each other in a couple years. So I have enormous respect for you and your work. You are not very well known outside of your circles, but everyone that I know who knows you refers to you as an Uber Mench, someone who's dedicated to the oceans and a brilliant scientist. So I have a lot of questions for you. Let's dive in. So many of the listeners of this podcast have heard of the concept.

of peak oil, but probably fewer have heard of the concept of peak fish. You're an expert on global fisheries. Can you give us, just to start this conversation, a view from the stratosphere on the state of the world's fisheries. Has global fish catch already peaked and has declined? What's the situation? Indeed, the world fish catch has peaked in 96, quite precisely in 96. Actually, in the North Atlantic, for example, where fisheries became industrialized. The peak was achieved in 1975, but worldwide it was achieved in 96. And basically, you have in the countries of the world that have good statistics and active fisheries, industrialized fisheries, the peak was reached early.

And the catches are continuing to increase. Some really, and some as an artifact of statistics that have to be. optimistic, and we have made a global review of our fisheries in the world, and we have corrected statistics in so far as this is kind of specialized, but when countries submit the statistics to the UN, which is the only organization that compiles world's global statistics, when the statistics method, the statistics method improve, they don't correct retroactively the catch that they have. In other words, they don't cover certain fisheries. Now they cover them, but they don't retroactively cover, reintroduces the capture fisheries that were not covered before. So you have an

increase that is not real. And when you're correct for this point, then you can see that we caught earlier much more than now. So there's two things going on. We're 25 years past the peak and fish catch globally and also the decline from that point is understated because of statistics. Yeah, and the UN or the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, because it doesn't correct the statistics retroactively, it has peak catch that is not very pronounced, but our reconstruction of the world catch has a very pronounced peak in 96. And since then, the catch declines about 1 million tons per year. Out of how many total?

Over 120, 120, 125. And it depends what you count, whether you count the catch that is discarded or not. So the official catch that FAO, the UN, produces is 80 to 90 million tons per year. And the real catch of the world is about 130 million tons per year. year because lots of fisheries are not monitored by the countries that are members of FAO and the FAO doesn't correct their statistics, the statistics that they submit. So using the best scientific guess of statistics, how much of a percentage drop is the global catch today versus 1996?

About 10 to 20 millions? So 10 to 20 percent? No. It's a little bit less than 20 percent. Yeah, okay, 15 percent or so. And is that all ocean fish or does that include freshwater fish? It doesn't include freshwater fish. Okay.

The freshwater statistics are even more messy. And we are in a process of looking at them. And we expect the catch statistics to be much higher than reported because African and other countries do not monitor very well the fisheries. You see, when you have to do that in space, which you do with freshwater fisheries, as opposed to monitoring them along the coastline, It's more difficult. So you are a world expert in the health of and the risks to global fisheries. And we're going to get into your work a little bit later. But how did you first get interested in this topic in fish and the oceans?

I didn't really get interested because of love for the sea or something. I was studying in Germany with a firm intention of working in developing countries because I was biracial, I still am actually, I was biracial in Europe, and my identity was always questioning, and I didn't want to live my professional life in Europe. I started studying agronomy, but the faculty of agronomy was people with all Nazis,

and not figuratively Nazi, the real thing. They were in the 60s, late 60s, early 70s, still occupying lots of position. And I didn't like this situation. And I moved to the, in the same university, to the Department of Ossonography and Fisheries, which was very good and very reputed. And I grew into that. And my intention, again, when I studied agronomy and later fisheries, was to acquire a skill that would be useful in developing countries. And I have realized that. I did my master in Ghana, in 71, I collected the field, I did the field work for my, and then I did, after I had my master,

I worked two years in Indonesia, and then after my PhD, I worked 20 years in the Philippines. And from the Philippines, I was working in tropical countries in general. So taking a step even further back, if I recall correctly from our discussions over a couple dinners, you were an orphan. So how did you actually get interested in science even before you got interested in fishing. I was not an orphan, but I was taken from my mother who was not married and my father was passing GI, African-American soldier. And I was raised as if I had no parents, but I do have parents. And I met them when I was 19, my mother. And later, when I was 23, I came to the U.S. and met my father. So I was raised in a decades in context.

very difficult circumstances, but I was not often. I misspoke, but how did you get interested in science then? Well, basically, I was, when I left Switzerland where I grew up with this weird family, and I ended up being, I worked one year for in hospital, and as a volunteer, they fed me. But after that, I had only the option of becoming a unskilled worker, and that is not a good prospect. And in Germany they had at the time, in the 60s, a program of encouraging people from the working class to get back to high school in the evening from five to nine, five times a week, four years, for four years. And I did that. I switched from French, which was my first language to German. And then I did this course, four years. I got Germanified a bit. And then I was

And when I was finished with it in 69, I had a degree that enabled me to go to university. And so I kind of transited from being mistreated kids, from working class background, to being a budding scientist. And basically, I evaluated that physics was not for me because I'm not good enough in math. And chemistry is too small. The things that you deal with are too small, the molecules and the atoms too. I don't like that. And I don't like microbes either. They are too small. And so I wanted to do agronomy because it's important, especially in the developing world, growing food. And then I ended up doing fisheries, which is also important in the developing world. So thank you for that. Can you give us a brief history of humans and oceans and fisheries? Didn't most of our ancestors live near seas or oceans at one point?

Yeah, when humans moved out of Africa, the first, almost apiens, and people in the world, they probably moved along coastlines because coastline are never that cold compared to the inland and the technology for living in the cold had to be developed. Also, coastline very rich in all kinds of food items and stuff. So the hunter-gatherers that we were, they people the world along coastlines. And in a process, they exterminated all the large defenseless animal that they could reach. And when they penetrated finally into the inside the continent, into the continent, our ancestors in all continents wiped out most of the large mammals. We know that from North America, where the mammoth and the mastodont and all kinds of giant. sloth were eliminated, but it occurred in all continent. In Australia, in Europe, also the mammoth

were exterminated by people. And we know that also from islands, especially in the Pacific, where Polynesians, every time they came to a new island, they would wipe out the large animals, the moas in New Zealand, and so on. So that's what we do. But it's harder to wipe out things in the ocean because they're more diffuse than on land. Yeah, that's right. And that's precisely why we're doing that in this century and not in previous centuries. We saved the hardest for last. Yes, it's very true, actually. As we first, as hunter-gatherers, we wiped out the large mammals and other humans that were not our species. And then we've invented agriculture, which wiped out much vegetation that was there, the vegetation we didn't like, and replace it by vegetation that we like.

wheat field instead of a forest, kind of. And then we invented the use of fossil energy. And I think that the big transition is the use of fossil energy. Started with steam trawlers in 180 about in the UK. The use of fossil energy is the big transition in fishing. And this allowed us to punch into marine ecosystem to remove lots of things. We were whaling before, but whaling is the large animal exposing themselves because they have to breathe is one thing. But getting fish from one kilometer depth or one mile even depth, that you need heavy technology.

And this technology was developed in the 20th century. So getting back to my first supposition could peak oil reverse peak fish? Actually, I have wrote a paper like that in science in 2003 or something like that. If you look at peak oil, it's very similar to pig fish. The shape is very similar. And I was stupid enough to make a prediction, which you should never do, that fisheries would have to be running down when fuel costs become too high because the fuel costs render fishing in the high seas and profitable.

But I had not counted with the key fact. subsidies. Fisheries, big industrial fishing in the depth and in the high seas could not be conducted without subsidies, but they are subsidized big time. And that's the reason why they continue, but they heavily subsidized. Why are they heavily subsidized? Because that's a cheap way of getting protein to the populations? No, the reason is that the big fleet owners, they play golf with the ministers. That's the only reason. You're kidding. No, no. The subsidy, as fisheries do not produce fish. They produce their fish for subsidies. They don't fish for fish. You could replace the subsidized fisheries that we have by artisanal fisheries and smaller scale

fishing that would not be subsidized and we produce as much fish as the present fisheries that are subsidized would produce. This would only require that for a while the fishes are permit, the older fisher are permitted to retire and you would have less fewer fissures because they are now super efficient compared with before and you would rebuild the stocks that have been decimated and that are at very low level. Then you could without subsidies produce catchers that are bigger than now easily, but the subsidies are a purely political decision by the elite of various countries. And is there a activism fight against that? Yes, there is, in fact, there has been several initiatives that almost succeeded at the WTO, because it's not only the left politically

or the conservativeist group that are against subsidies, but also market fanatics. They don't like subsidies, right? People who think that the market should self-regulate, they don't like subsidies either. So there have been several initiative at the WTO to get rid of that. And last, various colleagues and various scientists had succeeded in making such a stink that the WTO was going to make this its major emphasis. And an Omicron came and the amputus was kind of lost. But it is possible that the WTO takes a big chunk out of subsidies. So let's assume away climate and ocean acidification for the moment, which is not a good thing to assume away, but we'll get back to that. But I read somewhere that if totally left alone, that an ocean fishery could completely recover

in like seven years, is that true? Well, the seven years is probably very optimistic, and it certainly would be true for short-lived fish, such as anchovies and sardines. To recover fish like rockfish, you need a cod. You need a bit longer, say, double that, 14 years. But yes, in principle, and in reality as well, if you don't fish or fish very lightly, the stocks will recover. Nate, an important point. The only country that has successfully rebuilt stocks based on legislation is actually the US.

The US has one of the probably the best fishing policy in the world. And they have rebuilt lots of stocks that were devastated previously. But the U.S. alone is not sufficient. And in fact, other countries like Canada and Europe, the European countries, they have similar legislation, but they don't implement it. And the result is that the stocks don't recover. I wonder how much of that is due to our economic privilege that we can afford beef and other things and other countries don't have that luxury. And also the privilege of importing 80% of the fish that is consumed. So you can afford to.

So this is a fish version of NIMBY. So you invented the term shifting baselines, which I use a lot in my college courses. Can you explain what this means and how this relates to fisheries? So basically, shifting baseline is the notion that when something changes over several generations, say any generation perceive the change that occurs only doing their life, down, their own. In other words, young people, they become self-aware, they become aware of the world around them, and that becomes the baseline that they will use in the course of their life to evaluate change. And they will complain and they will, maybe they will fight to maintain what they had when they were young. But they don't have the same relationship to change that happened to their parents or their grandparents.

because these changes are not subjectively perceived. They are not real. So every generation resets the baseline that it used to evaluate the world. So it shifts that baseline. And so you can have a situation where in one film that is kind of amusing, there is a young man who says, oh, this big fish about and shows something that is about one meter. and this the same on the same dock in the same an old guy is talking about the same fish all the way talking about two meters

he's talking about swordfish and swordfish of one meter are small they are juvenile and to that young man this were a big fish because he didn't know that that swordfish get to be four meters tall but this is so relevant not only to fisheries, but our entire natural world. This applies to many things in our society. We only look at things day by day. And even when I was a child, we had windshields full of bugs that would hit our windows and we'd take it for granted. And I have vague memories of that. But it makes me worry, Daniel, that the largest animal in the world when young people are my or your age is going to be a cow and people are going to be happy when they see a squirrel. There is a thing that is, I also use a shifting baseline for teaching purpose.

And an example with a windshield, actually, I do remember the windshield of cars being covered with dead bugs. And this is an amazing thing. And this is particularly scary with global warming because people get used to this normal. And this is terrifying if you think about it. Because every generation has another standard and young people will not want to get back to the cold winter that we had when we were young. They will not. I'm happy when it gets really cold here, knowing what I know, I actually get emotionally happy because it feels like normal to me. So how do we try to counteract the effects of shifting baselines? Is there any strategy? The only way we can deal with it scientifically is by identifying periods doing which we have

for which we have lots of data so that we can construct a world that is credible that has various dimensions and use this as an anchor point to assess change. The climatologists do that. The osanographers do that. They choose different

period because it depends on the data that they have. You cannot use a period going back. For example, I have a journalist George Mambiot of Great Britain. He has a wife who is a paleontologist,

and they talk about elephants and rhinoceros in Britain, and they talk about that would be nice to reintroduce them. That does not want to, she's never going to work. But for the kind of work that you work on, you have to have a solid baseline. And in fisheries, a solid baseline, stupid, because it could be earlier, but it is 1950.

Why? Because 1950 is the time where industrial fishing had not restarted from World War II and where lots of countries became independent. This before they became independent. So you have pre-neocolonel situation. And also this is the first year from which the United Nations published annual review of the World Catch. So for our work, it's crucial to use 1950 as a baseline. But people who do so-called stock assessment for managing fisheries, they use the last 20 years. And that's a big problem because the last 20 or 30 years is a period where the big stocks have all been wiped out.

Right. So you see a 10% increase and you think it's a huge success, but it's still 90% down from 80 years ago. Exactly. Exactly. And then you have the testimony of young people being utterly ridiculous. You would see them, young fishes, they would say, I've never seen so many. The stocks has double in size. Yeah, it moved from 2% of what it was before to 4%. That's real. That is real. That happens all the time. Yeah. Well, here's another complicating factor is you've probably seen in my work I talk about as humans we have discount rates. We care about the present more than the future. So a discount rate like climate change, we don't think about the year 2100 because it's too far ahead. But when you're talking about shifting baselines is we also, the discount rate goes backward. And we can't remember the distant past. We only look at the last few years or the last 10 years or whatever. Yeah. So more broadly, how have humans, and maybe it's just our modern culture, becomes so untethered to the state of the oceans? Because even in climate change circles, the large risk to the oceans, ocean acidification, sea level rise, declining oxygen, the Atlantic meridional ocean current slowing down the risk to a Canfield ocean. These are all distant seconds in the media to fires, rainfall, temperature on the land. Yeah, I agree. But I don't think this is, we have become unthethered.

Because if you look at the older literature, people have never been familiar at ease with the ocean. Is that because we just live on land and we rely on land? Yes, that's because we live on land. For example, look at the older literature about 150 years ago. The coastline was not seen as something that you. wanted to live in, that only poor fishes were living on the coastline. The idea of looking at the coast and looking at the sea and liking it is a modern idea. And they have been, people who have written about that, our love for the ocean is actually a new thing. If you read

the Odyssey, again, the Greeks, they didn't like the ocean. They didn't have an emotional relationship to it. They feared it. It was dangerous place. It was inhabited by sea monsters. It was not a world where people felt comfortable. So we're one of the few generations of our species to understand that there's more living area in the oceans on this planet than there is on Earth. And we're learning this at a really late date. Yep. Exactly.

And our relationship with the ocean and with water is deadfully wrong. For example, I work on fisheries, but I also work on the physiology of fish growth. And you could say that's very esoteric. But fish breathe water, right? And there is no very little oxygen in the water. So they have to work the head off to get the water across the mouth that they can extract the oxygen that they need. Now, that is the work that they have to do. And on the other hand, for them, for fish, it's very easy to grab something to eat.

But once they have eaten something, a smaller fish, they still have to burn it, link it with oxygen, right? Well, they have to extract from the water. So the big work is not catching a prey. The big work is getting the oxygen out of the water into their bodies. And every time they take their gills move, like how much oxygen are they extracting? What percent? The gills are very efficient, about 80% is being extracted, but moving that water is lots of work. What I want to say is you find that in biology, people have projected our mammal consideration,

which is we have to eat lots of food in order to maintain our own temperature at a high level. That's the reason why we are not like reptile eating every six weeks. We need to eat all the time. And so food is the thing. But fish, it's not the thing. The thing is for them is breathing. And you can see the problem they have at breathing in that they are moving now rapidly toward the poles because the temperature gets higher. Well, I'm no expert on this.

I'll just ask you. Isn't it the ocean oxygen content is already dropped 2% and much higher than that in the shallows? But there is the thing. There is a thing. It's true that there is less oxygen in the water. But the important thing is that fish don't have their own temperature. Their own temperature is that of the water. And then the water temperature increase.

They need more oxygen. How much is the water temperature increased in the last 20, 30 years? One degree, say? That means they have to consume 10, 20% more oxygen. Because there's a multiplier. They don't have to consume 1% more oxygen. It's 10 or 20% more? Yeah, yeah.

Is that what your work is called? Gil-Oxygen limitation theory? Yes. Yes. And the problem is not so much that they get, there's less oxygen in the water. It's true. But the big problem is that they need more when the water is warm. So they have a double-wamy. They need more oxygen and there is less in it. Now, you find, though, that most doctor work and thesis work that student do is about food. It's about the fish feeding. Well, the problem is breathing. And now it's being realized now because of global warming that fish have a problem breathing. And that's the reason, for example, while they move toward cooler water, water that remains cool,

toward the poles. Because it's kind of like a behavioral homeostasis. They don't know about climate change. They're just trying to be in water that fits their oxygen absorption capacity. Exactly. But in the literature, you find all kind of question that people ask themselves. Are they moving in the north hemisphere to the north toward the north? Are they moving because there is more food there?

No, they're moving there because they just want to breathe. So this is a dumb question, but we're like around one to one and a half sea, depending on the boundaries, warmer temperature in the earth. Does that temperature equate with the one degree increase in the oceans? Are they kind of commensurate? So most of the ocean is getting warmer, and that causes the, fish to want to move forward in the south. And you can see this. I don't know if it's one degree here or there, but in the U.S., you get fish now in New York that before was where in Florida. In BC, where I live,

you get fish now that way before in California. In Australia, you get in Sydney fish that way before in Brisbane. Historically, when there was big bursts of CO2 at volcanic provinces and previous eras were all the fish near the poles? They probably were floating dead on the water surface. In other words, this moving toward the pole, poleward, is a reaction that is a slow thing that they do. But if the warming is sudden, like in a heat wave, they die. When we met the last time, or yeah, you're right, the only time that we met a few years

back, you weren't talking about this. This sounds horrible to me. I was unaware of this. Basically, my work on this oxygen problem was my dissertation about 40 years ago, and it was totally ignored. And now it's because of global warming that is being revived and it's getting some attention. It breaks your heart. Because the other stuff that I do about shifting baseline, about fishing down mine, food, web, and so on. These are obvious things.

This are trivial things in a sense. But the oxygen thing is the most subtle thing, and you can think about it only if you get rid of this mammalian bias that we have, that food is everything. So does this scale with the size of the fish, like cetaceans, is the 1% change in oxygen? No, no, no, they don't have problem, cetaceans. They don't have that problem because they breathe air. Okay. They don't have that problem.

Okay, so what about large fish? Large fish are the ones that have most trouble because the surface area of the gil, divided by the weight, is lowest. So in a short-term self-interested sort of way, are people in Russia and Alaska listening to this podcast happy because they're going to have more fish moved into their fisheries in coming decades? Yeah, the Norwegian are quite explicit about it. This is one country that is located in high latitude that will see. for a while, an increase of the biodiversity and an increase of the major stocks of fish, whereas other countries, for example, in the tropics, they are the losers again, because the fish that leave their water are not being replaced by any. So does this get into the difference in the fishing industry between developed and developing nations? And again, the poorer nations

around the equator are going to be at the short end of the stick from their fish catch in coming decades? Yeah, certainly. Basically, if you present the fish catchers, predicted fish catchers in latitudinal zones, the cold-tempered countries will benefit, and tropical and subtropical countries will be devastated fishery-wise. And you can see that on, for example, on our coast, the salmon in California, in California, California are wiped out, right?

They are gone. In Washington and Oregon, they are not doing well. Is that because of this, Gill oxygen limitation? Yes, because temperature is going up. And in BC, they are not doing well. But in Alaska, they're doing very well. And in Arctic Alaska, there are salmon runs that are establishing themselves. And the Inuit don't know about them because they didn't have salmon before.

Oh, my God. So it is happening. This transition is already happening. And with salmon is very visible because there is a major industry built around salmon. So we could argue and everyone would argue on ultimately how climate change will warm the earth. On the one hand, I think the fossil fuel availability forecasts are way over optimistic. but on the other hand, I think the biological feedbacks are probably way underestimated. But if we do go to 2C, 2.5C, doesn't that have a massive implication based on your Gill oxygen

limitation for another? Yes, but this is not will. This is already happening. If you go to a country like Britain, they fish now, fish that way before in Spain. and the spaniard fish before that were in Morocco. And in other words, the composition of the catch has already changed. And we published in 2013 a paper in nature, which we call the mean temperature of the catch, the concept. And basically, you assign to each fish species a preferred temperature, which is very stable.

And you can compute then the mean temperature of the catch, which is the catch multiplied, with the temperature of that fish. And you average it over all species. And you can see in all countries of the world, in most countries of the world, the mean temperature of the catch in start picking up in the 70s, 80s. The fish were very much smarter than us.

They picked up very early. And the hockey stick, the famous hockey stick, that man and others, you can see the fish doing it. And we have reproduced this, For example, with Chinese colleagues, I have the Yellow Sea, which is cold, the East China Sea, which is medium, and the South China Sea, which is tropical. You can see this effect in the Yellow Sea and in the East China Sea, but in the South China Sea, you don't get this effect.

Why? Because the fish that leave are not replaced by fish from even warmer temperatures, because there is no hyper-tropic, right? So this effect, you can see it everywhere. And we have colleagues in Greece that have reproduced that result. And we have recently another paper come out that described contrasted Japan, Australia, with Indonesia. Indonesia, the mean temperature of the catch doesn't change. And in Japan, it goes up. In Australia, it goes up. Meaning all countries now are experiencing change in the composition of the fisheries catch.

that are due to migrations. Well, this change is one of the questions I had planned to ask you. I was going to ask you what are one or two major things that could be improved about our current fishing practices and industry, but it gets back to the climate thing. Yes, if I may, this movement of the fish that are temperature, that are caused by temperature, they can be anticipated, right? And the first case that comes to mind is negotiation between, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland about a stock of mackerel, a very important stock of mackerel,

that they had to share because it was intermediate between their waters. And the negotiation took five years. During the five years, the mackerel moved and ended up only in the exclusive economic zone of Iceland. And at the end of the five years, they had an agreement, but the Asander says, we are not going to do it because we don't need to. They now are in our waters. And this problem, it sounds like a totally esoteric problem. You have it also in the U.S. Because the coastal, say in South Carolina,

you have a management by the state of the coastal fisheries. But the stocks are now found, not in South Carolina, they are North Carolina. Oh, my God. And so they cannot spend five years renegotiating an agreement of fishing them because in five years, it would be some, there would be in New Jersey. So I was going to ask you what can individuals do to support replenishing the world's fisheries. And what I'm hearing, what I'm intuiting is the answer is not to eat less fish. It's to use a less dramatically less fossil fuels.

Yes, at the end of the day, everything that we do, if we don't reduce the fossil fuel and the emission, and we should add also now the methane from the tundra and so on, right? But if we don't tackle that problem, the other stuff would be completely useless. Now, I should add, though, that every individual fish has another preference, say a species of fish is about 15 degrees centigrade. Well, there will be some at 13 and some at 17 and so on. And the more fish you have in the water, the more variants you have. And we know that from COVID, right?

The more people are not vaccinated, the more variants you have. And it's also true for fish in the water. So if you had lots of fish in the water, you have some that can handle the higher temperatures. What are the type of fish that are selected for in higher temperatures? Can you give some examples? Oh, the groupers and snappers on Florida can handle high temperature much better than cod in Canada. That's an example. But also within the species, there is also variation, like they are variation between us, white humans.

We are small ones, big ones, brown one and white one. And so you have a distribution around these means. And if you have a temperature increasing, there will be variants that can handle this temperature. But if the population is very reduced because you have overfished it, then there would be fewer variants, right? And so what we can do and should do is reduce the fishing effort that we have, that reduce the fishing quota. we will have more fish. We can fish them more economically, more profitably. We will make more money. We will supply markets better. And there will be more fish in the water that can handle the heat. So by throttling down our consumption of fish and the overfishing, we will, a, increase the diversity of the fish, which makes it a higher likelihood that some fish will make it through this bottleneck to maybe replenish and replenish.

heal the fisheries and also maybe bias time to solve the climate emissions, et cetera. Yes. But Nate, what at this point, what I tell people is, yes, we must reduce consumption, but the individual route, I must tell my friend and my buddies, doesn't work. What works is not this horizontal, that friend to friends protest and action. What works is vertical action. We go We raise hell and we distribute leaflet in front of a supermarket. That works. And we change the politician. Politician, we address them. We cannot limit ourselves to acting as consumers. We must also act as citizens, especially if we live in democracy. Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion. So if someone is listening and they care about the oceans and the fisheries and the future, Setting aside the emissions question, which, you know, is a really difficult one, what can individuals do to support some of the things you've been discussing in there? You join an NGO, you join a group that fights for these things that you believe in. And depending on your disposition, you join radical group or less radical group because they all needed.

Like in a civil right, Malcolm X was needed and Martin Luther King was needed. And both were needed. And in an environmental front, there is group that push and group that then settle agreement, that do agreements. And you need both. And depending on your temperament, you join them. And the point is that you cannot, as individual working on your consumption, hope to affect anything. Because your consumption is much of its virtual displaying. Yeah.

Much of it is virtue displaying. and it has no effect. That's what I tell my students is rather than minimize their impact, they should try to maximize their impact in whatever passion about. So given your temperament, and if you were somehow the benevolent dictator and your sole goal was to improve the health of ocean fisheries, what sort of wish list of changes would you implement? I would immediately abolish subsidies that are directed at making.

fishing effort cheaper. Okay. And fuel subsidies and other subsidies, if the fishing industry had no subsidies, they would immediately stop fishing in remote areas where they use lots of fuel. Certain destructive method like trawlings would be, trolling would be immediately abolished because they are not profitable. And the people who use this method are fishing really for subsidies. The subsidies are very important.

Another point is that I would set up the network of marine protected areas that we talked about all the time but don't do. Again, the US has done it in various parts of the world, but like France, it's done mainly in the Pacific away from nasty fishes that will protest. In California, there is a good network of marine protected areas. Without areas where you don't fish, you won't have the big fish that maintain a population. You need so-called big, what is it, boff, big, big old fecant females that produce the eggs that will replenish a population. And without, they happen to be trophy fish also, right?

What the anglers, the anglers want to have is boffs. and they then go after the source of replenishment of a population. So you need areas where there's no fishing. And with these two things, you would actually really have fisheries doing much better. And then I would all over the world impose a system similar to the one that you have in the states where an o-fish stock has to be rebuilt within 10 years. And you have this legislation. It's called a Stephen Magnussons Act.

And if other countries were having the same, would be in much better shape. And then I would stop looking at fisheries because we have a much bigger problem. Is there any chance, Daniel, that you envision in the next 30, 50 years where world governments and leaders are populated with ecologists and biologists as opposed to economists? Could such a future exist? Yeah, I can imagine it for, because if you compare World War I with World War II, in World War I, they drafted everybody, scientists and non-scientist, and sent them as cannon fodder to be killed in Flander and in France and so forth. In World War II, all governments had the sense to say, well, wait a second,

do I really want to use my scientist as cannon fodder? No, you use them like Turing and the others to, decode, to develop radar system and so on. So it was understood in World War II that scientists can help deal with a crisis. And I think that our civilization has the option now of destroying itself or beginning to look at what the science, the virus discipline, offer. And there is a good part of the population and the political party in your country, but in other countries as well, that have decided to not listen, to go crazy. But the alternative is that science is embedded more and more and more. And why do we need science all the time? Because we always, with a pushing at the edge,

we are pushing everything to the edge. For example, we have a huge population in huge cities in terms of human protoplasm, this is an ideal place for parasites to bugs and viruses to grow. So you have to do lots of science to maintain this population healthy. Food, same thing. We have the system that we have, we have no reserve. We are at the edge. So how do we not fall into the, from the edge by using? science. So I think the more we push toward the edge, the more we will need science as to prevent

going over the edge. So science will actually play a bigger role or we will go down the tube. I actually agree with you and that's why I'm having these conversations because there's so many issues. Many people are aware of climate change. Not so many people are aware of your area of expertise. And then there's economics and biodiversity and social media algorithms and energy depletion and now geopolitics. I mean, it is the science, the system science of our predicament is really complex. But it does fit together and it does make sense. So can you talk a little bit about your work? You run an organization called Sea around us, as in Ocean and Sea. We'll put all the details on the website. But can you give us like a one or two minute overview of your...

Basically, I'm a great admirer of Rachel Carson. And you know that Rachel Carson could write her book, a most important book, the Silent Spring, only because she became financially independent of necessity and she could, because she had written a successful book. So the Sea Rounders made Rachel Carson in a lots of ways. So the sea around us is my name that I gave to a research initiative that I founded with a generous funding from the Pue Charitable Trust in 99. And we were, the first two, three years, we were kind of floundering, what are we going to do with all these possibilities that we have? But we developed then this idea of documenting. all the fisheries of the world in a standard way. And basically, there is in much of the world

two economies. There is a formal economy that is embedded in statistics and in the formal markets and financial markets and so on. And it is an informal economy. That is well known. And in fisheries, this is also the case. There is throughout the world industrial fisheries that well or badly managed, And there is small-scale fisheries, artisanal fisheries, subsistence fisheries, and recreational fisheries that are not managed and not even monitored. They are pulled together under the heading of small-scale fisheries, and small means you don't have to care, right? But actually, small-scale fisheries make up about a third world fisheries of the world when you account for them. So we put them on a map. We put on a map the fisheries, for example, in the South Pacific,

there is lots of small island states that get the foreign exchange by allowing Spain and China and other countries to fish for tuna. But the population doesn't eat the tuna. Population eat reef fish that are caught around the island. But the ministry of fisheries, when they have one, or the department of fisheries, doesn't care about that and it doesn't record what what they eat. This, for example, we know this because the WHO, the World Health Organization, studies what people eat and what people eat is fish.

But the Department of Fisheries doesn't report any fish being caught. So we, by linking different types of sources, we were able to reconstitute these fisheries that exist. In the U.S., for example, the fisheries. that are run by the states within three miles, they are not reported to the FAO as existing. Also, the subsistence fisheries in Alaska, which are quite substantial, are not reported. And all countries, even developing countries, developed countries with good statistic system, they don't report fish. Does that mean that the amount of catch is underestimated? Does that imply that the amount of fish left is overestimated?

Yes, I know. So the underestimation is real. It range from 10% in the U.S., three, four, 500% in various countries. For example, in Central America, they report only fish that they export. The other fish, they don't care. So they don't know in Guatemala, in Honduras, and so they don't know what they catch. And so the impact that all this fishing has, they have no idea what it is. So when there are people, we have also in fisheries denialists, the same way that you have them in climate change, right?

So the denialists, they look only at fisheries catchers and they say it's a good shape in developed countries and rich countries. So they could be getting the wrong signal on what's really happening. They are getting the wrong signal. Yeah. They are getting the wrong signal. And you have in fisheries the same kind of struggle that exists in climate change. Exactly the same. And so that's what your work is calling attention to that delta between.

Okay, that's excellent. While I have you, and before I get to my final questions that I ask all my guests, I'm just curious about two things. Salmon is at the grocery store, and I eat salmon. should I, A, not eat salmon at all, B, eat farm salmon, or C, eat wildcaught salmon? I live in British Columbia. It's one of the few places, together with Alaska,

where you get more wild salmon than farm salmon. But we are also haunted by this industry, which is driven by Norway, Norway. and they have polluted a good part of the coast and also in Chile by producing salmon. And they have polluted also the intellectual world in that they think, the people believe that aquaculture is reducing the pressure on fisheries. And farm fish are supposed to reduce the pressure. but it's true when it is the fish, for example, tilapia or other herbivores, but it's not, or when the fish are not fish and they are mussels and oysters and so on.

But when the fish are carnivores, which is the case for salmon, what you have is they have to be fed and what are they fed with? They are fed with fish. Other fish. The other fish, edible, they are good fish. Enchovies, for example, are very much liked in the fish. in the world, except in the anglosphere. The descendant of British settlers everywhere, they don't like fish, not really, not sardine. But the Spaniards, for example, they love sardines and anchovies and so on. So is it better for me to eat anchovies instead of salmon

in the same way that it's better to eat soybeans instead of beef? What you would end up is getting the fish are tastier, the fish more sustainable in the generic sense, and they contain more of the goodies that you can get from fish there, the omega-3, and so on. All of this is better in sardines than in Norwegian salmon, to which you add also colorant because they don't naturally look that orange. That is so weird to me. So are sardines also? subject to gill oxygen limit? All fish. All water breathers. Okay. So sardines

are going northward. Yes. Maybe not as badly as a swordfish or a marlora. They also do. And in fact, I just saw a paper last week or something about the sardines in the north sea in making smaller.

They're getting smaller because this is also besides migration, this is a reaction. The fish gets smaller. Oh, my gosh. So when we were spent a few days together, I remember you and I had a very long dinner and some wine because you... No, I don't drink wine. I was having wine. You were talking and I was very fascinated because you have so many experiences all over the world. You speak four languages and worked with all sorts of different people.

Do you have a favorite memory or experience that you have from all this or any lesson that you'd like to share? Oh gosh. I should have thought about it ahead of time. I was dreaming when I was a kid or when there was a young man of working in developing countries where I would be useful because this was the thing in the 60s. You wanted to help the people and be useful, right? Well, boy, I wish we could have that again, right? Yes. And you know what? I've been able to realize this. I've been able to be recognized as somebody who has helped empower people because I have developed. tools and concepts that people can use to do their own research. And that makes me feel really good about what I've been able to achieve, to empower people. And I continue to try to do that. And for what is worth 80%, I had 70 PhD and master's student, and for what is worth 80% were women. That's another point. My student have mainly from developing countries and a woman. And so this empowering thing I take seriously. Now, there were some difficulties. And the

point is that if you want to be innovator, you have to have a hell of a thick skin. And because people will attack you for anything. Because essentially, if somebody has not found something and you find something, whatever it is, you are saying, you're not saying it, but they think that you're saying, that they were stupid. So every time you come up with something, there is somebody who is aggravated by the fact that it's not them. And so you incessantly have to fight to legitimize what you do. You're preaching to the choir. You can imagine the podcast I'm having on here with Paul Ehrlich and Dennis Meadows and other people. I mean, it is lots of things that people don't want to hear. So thank you for your lifelong continued work and empowering people. So what kind of

advice would you give to young people today, Daniel, that discover and understand not only the state of fisheries, but nature, climate change, the economies, what's happening? the general human predicament. I would say get involved in fighting what is not tolerable, and you will discover who you are in a process. The nowadays emphasis on yourself and your identity and your personality and stuff is probably misguided because you discover that you can at best discover that you're ready to do something. So you might as well do it. That's great. Here's a personal question for you. What do you care most of about in the world?

For myself, I would like to be able to maintain work. And for the world as a whole, I think I would be like the contestant in beauty contest, peace. Peace in the world is what we need. I grew up in Europe that was reeling from World War II. And I'm very conscious of this. And the notion that we are doing this and doing the second or first day of, a new land war in Europe is profoundly disturbing. What we need is peace. What we need is peace and then and then we can sort out the problem we have, which are big and which require that

we work together and a war is the worst that we can do in this context. What are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so? Well, basically we are faced with the option of, with the possibility of our total, of the destruction of our civilization. We are faced with the potential of that. And maybe we won't do it, and that will be marvelous. Imagine if we make it all the good things that will have to be done, so we make it. And that is the thing that I hope for that the Great Artunberg and the other people with wonderful ideas and ideals will have the chance

to expand and to grow and to and to be. Because the alternative, which is that we are now in the late 30s with a Nazi coming up, it is hard. It's hard to swallow that. Because it's completely gratuitous. We don't need any of this. We don't need war of choice. We never needed war, really.

But the notion of a war of choice is disgusting. Not enough people talk about peace. It is as if it was naive to speak about peace. I remember one time somebody was arguing against the European Union, the European Union. And this person didn't understand that it is the only thing that had prevented European countries from fighting war against each other for 60 years. We never had 60 years of peace in Europe before. Never. And now we can see that two countries that are outside of the European Union are at it.

Ukraine and Russia. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, Daniel. We will be in touch. And I hope many people look at C around us and your work. And we'll have all kinds of references on the website. You're welcome.

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