Time for a ‘moral reckoning’ of aquaculture’s environmental impacts

Aquaculture is often promoted as a solution to declines in wild fish populations, and has outpaced the amount of wild-caught fish by tens of millions of metric tons each year. But it carries its own myriad environmental impacts, to the detriment of both humans and the ocean, says Carl Safina, an ecologist and author. He joins Mongabay’s podcast to speak with co-host Rachel Donald about his recent Science Advances essay about the “moral reckoning” that’s required, citing environmental laws in the United States, which put hard limits on pollution. “In the 1970s in the U.S., we had this enormous burst of environmental legislation. We got the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act … all of these things were not because somebody invented something new. It’s because we felt differently about what was important,” he says. The global fishing industry is also responsible for a multitude of forced labor and other worker abuses, as revealed by many whistleblowers and media outlets, including  Mongabay, whose award-winning 2022 investigation revealed systemic abuse of foreign workers by China’s offshore tuna fleet. Safina writes that an unchecked pursuit of industry interests enables these harms: “Economic development brings far more abuse than does conservation. From Indigenous peoples pushed off ancestral homelands by miners, ranchers, loggers and drillers, to forced labor in fishing and aquaculture.” Safina adds that a lack of education about human interrelatedness with — and care for — natural systems results in an unempathetic…This article was originally published on Mongabay