News outlets have been hammered by cutbacks in recent years and oceans have been devastated by a wide range of stresses, including pollution, warming induced by climate change, ocean acidification (another insidious impact of greenhouse gas emissions), tourism in fragile marine environments and, perhaps most dramatically, overfishing.
So perhaps that old saying "Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat the rest of his life" needs a corollary: Teach people how to manage fisheries—and journalists how to cover them—and we’ll continue to have a sustainable source of protein and delicious seafood for future generations to enjoy.
As it stands, it seems unlikely we’ll be able to count on this resource in the future. About 25 percent of the world’s fisheries are over-exploited, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and another 52 percent are fully exploited. These estimates are based on officially reported figures from the seafood industry, which are notoriously unreliable, but the more targeted studies—it’s now estimated that up to 90 percent of the world’s big fish have been fished out—suggest the situation may be even worse than it appears.
Read the complete story from The Columbia Journal Review.