Mother Davis remembers an old aphorism as she writes,
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Give a European corporation a permit to fish, and it will take every last scrap of food from the sea.
Do you remember that old line of consolation – Oh, well, there are plenty of fish in the sea? Well, it turns out that there aren’t.
The latest happy news from the West Coast of Africa, published today in the journal Science, is that European fishing companies are dredging so many fish out of that part of the Atlantic Ocean that local peoples that traditionally make a living from the seas are not able to find enough fish to eat. So, they’re running into the jungle, killing all the animals they can find, and eating them instead.
Because of Europe and America’s taste for seafood, the North Atlantic is threatening to become bare. Cod is scheduled to go extinct in ten years. But, instead of restraining their palates, Europeans are moving on to other waters, to wipe them clean as well.
From the land, we cannot see what lies beneath the waters’ surface. The waves look just as pretty without anything living in them. However, the looting of the oceans’ bounty is now so complete that it is wrecking our land-based ecosystems as well. Africa’s jungles are being stripped bare by former small-scale fishermen, now reduced to hunting for “bush meat” in order to find a meal.
Well, we’ll all still get happy singing songs and going to the zoo, I suppose, as we breed the last few hundred zebras, and giraffes and lions into extinction. We’ll read our children stories of jungle life, and we’ll show them movies like Finding Nemo, and we’ll wait until they reach high school to tell them that it’s all pretend, that we cleared the jungles and bleached the coral reefs.
There will always be the crows and the seagulls to clean up the mess that we leave around the edges, and the next generation will write children’s stories of the rats and feral dogs that live on the borders of our waste.
Oh, yes, happiness is a tuna steak.
Looking in the seine and finding it half empty,
Mother Davis
These days, teach a man to fish and PETA is going to come after you. PETA is a good example of the radical radical left. The polar oppisite of Rush Liebagh. Instead of wanting to manage resources they want you to adopt a fish. To appease these people we can start a drive to help them. It will be called fruitcakes for the fruitcakes.