August 8, 2014 — The United States is, increasingly, a coastal nation. It’s estimated that by the end of the decade roughly half of all Americans will live within 50 miles of a coast, and that doesn’t include the Great Lakes. Our government controls 13 percent of the ocean as our exclusive economic zone, more than any other country on Earth. But we define ourselves by the land we possess, not the sea. Terrestrial parts of the country get the highest form of praise: the heartland, middle America and so on. Our seafaring days are now in the distant past.
With his new book, “American Catch,” Paul Greenberg aims to change that mind-set.
It is a call to arms, suggesting that the highest form of patriotism would be to embrace the bounty that can still be found off America’s shores, rather than relying on the imported seafood that graces more than 85 percent of our plates. We are, in his words, now “a seafood debtor nation.”
Writing about fisheries policy is, to put it mildly, challenging. It is one of the wonkiest aspects of environmentalism, especially when issues such as aquaculture, the mechanics of buying and selling fish, and reef restoration enter the equation. On top of that, the main characters — in this case, Eastern oysters, Louisiana brown shrimp and Alaska’s Bristol Bay salmon — don’t speak.
But Greenberg, whose previous book, “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,” made the bestseller lists, is skilled at finessing this challenge. He populates “American Catch” with several compelling characters, including autocratic mollusk researchers, profane water-quality crusaders and iconoclastic defenders of Alaskan rivers. These activists are all engaged in the fight to reclaim America’s seafood heritage or preserve what is left of it.
Read the full story from The Washington Post