Here’s one green initiative Via Meadia supports: tackling the global problem of overfishing.
The depletion of key species threatens the global food supply (and a vital source of protein for the poor) and given the speed at which overfished species can collapse it is the single most urgent environmental problem before us.
As the NYT reports, the menhaden is a fish not normally found on a plate in a restaurant but it is vital to the ecosystem and has been overharvested to the point of population collapse. Now it has some protection, in the US, from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission:
Millions of pounds of menhaden are caught along the Atlantic Seaboard each year, most by Omega Protein, a company that grinds it and reduces it to fish meal and oil that goes into fertilizer, feed for livestock and farmed fish, pet food and even dietary supplements. But menhaden — which is rich in Omega 3 fatty acids and is also known as bunker or pogy, depending where you live — is also an ecological building block, serving as a crucial food for larger fish like tuna, striped bass and bluefish, as well as birds and marine mammals.
Whether the fish is pretty and delicious – like tuna – or creepy and delicious – like the Patagonian toothfish (also known as the Chilean seabass) – or marginally edible but still important – like the menhadan – overfishing threatens a vital resource.
Read the full article at The American Interest.
Analysis: Nowhere in the most recent data available on the menhaden fishery is there any indication that it "has been overharvested to the point of population collapse," as the article claims. In the last stock assessment conducted by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) menhaden are not considered to be overfished, and overfishing had only occurred once in the last ten years. The number of eggs produced was also at its target level, which is another sign that the population is not currently in danger of collapsing.