What scientists say
“The general consensus is that deep-water fisheries are unsustainable and most, if not all, should be closed.”
Dr John Gordon of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, one of the authors of the paper: Bailey, DM et al. (2009) Long-term changes in deep-water fish populations in the northeast Atlantic: a deeper reaching effect of fisheries? Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online 11 March 2009.
“The genome of each Homo sapiens is focused on its inclusive fitness, or roughly put, self-reproduction. Self-reproduction is largely sex, shelter, and feeding. These three processes drive and shape human society, and all its consequences, over all the Earth. To survive, a non-human species must be too diffuse to be thoroughly captured, too trivial to be noticed, or too immutable to be changed.”
Daniel Janzen, Gardenification of Wildland Nature and the Human Footprint. Science 27 February 1998: Vol. 279. no. 5355, pp. 1312 – 1313.
« Most deep-sea fishing is unregulated, but no licensing, quota scheme or effort control can save deep-ocean life, because it can be depleted or destroyed much too rapidly for these mechanisms to work. The answer is to create marine reserves that are entirely off limits to fishing. »
Roberts, Callum M., Deep impact: the rising toll of fishing in the deep sea. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 17 No. 5, May 2002.
“We analyse stock assessment data of all major fish stocks of the Northeast Atlantic to determine whether Europe will be able to deliver on this commitment, which it has helped to bring about. The analysis shows that, if current fishing pressure continues, 91% of the European stocks will remain below target. If European ministers in charge of fisheries were serious about meeting their obligations, they would have to reduce drastically fishing pressure and halt fishing completely on some stocks. But even if fishing were halted in 2010, 22% of the stocks are so depleted that they cannot be rebuilt by 2015. If current trends continue, Europe will miss the 2015 deadline by more than 30 years.”
Rebuilding fish stocks no later than 2015: will Europe meet the deadline? Rainer Froese & Alexander Proelß, Fish & Fisheries, 15 Jan. 2010.