Michael Weber was vice president of programs for the Center for Marine Conservation for ten years and also served as special assistant to the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service; he now works as a freelance writer based in Redondo Beach, California. His books include The Wealth of Oceans (Norton, 1995) with Judith Gradwohl, and Fish, Markets, and Fishermen (Island Press, 1999) with Suzanne Iudicello and Robert Wieland.
Citizens expect their governments to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international conferences like Rio II to the U.S.’s failure to pass meaningful climate legislation, governments’ progress has been lackluster. That’s not to say leadership is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down.
The management of coastal and ocean fisheries is highly contentious. Industry interests focus on maximizing catches while conservationists and marine scientists have become increasingly concerned about dramatic declines in fish stocks and the health of ecosystems.
A significant number of the world's ocean fisheries are depleted, and some have collapsed, from overfishing. Although many of the same fishermen who are causing these declines stand to suffer the most from them, they continue to overfish. Why is this happening? What can be done to solve the problem.
The authors of Fish, Markets, and Fishermen argue that the reasons are primarily economic, and that overfishing is an inevitable consequence of the current sets of incentives facing ocean fishermen.