Promoting healthy ocean ecology is a great cause and one I will get behind. However, I think we need to have a good idea of exactly what we are promoting and why.
Commercial fishing is not the problem. Banning commercial fishing in favor of farming is A) not going to happen and B) wouldn't fix anything if it did happen. The trouble is unsustainable harvest and lethality to bycatch. These problems are being addressed well by some countries, and not at all by others; there needs to be worldwide cooperation in these matters.
This is really something that can only happen with cooperation between national governments. In other words, there isn't much we can do about it except to encourage our elected officials to make it a priority. There are already various lobbying groups doing this; it would be better for us to add our voices and support to one of those groups than to form a new, superfluous group to do the same thing.
What we can do as individuals is make sure we only consume responsibly harvested or farmed seafood. There is a lot of info on the web about this. For example, orange roughy are slow-maturing fish that are very susceptible to overfishing, so avoid those. Farmed salmon is ecologically very destructive, so choose wild-caught instead. Farmed tilapia from the Americas (but not from Asia) on the other hand is a good responsible choice. Farmed shrimp and prawns are somewhere in between, but markedly improving. Do your research!
So what could we do as a group? I suggest that a very good thing for us to do is to help disseminate information on the impacts of various species. Education is the key to change. Another possibility is providing grants to researchers looking at marine and aquatic conservation, sustainable harvest techniques, low-impact farming, etc.
*EDIT* A good source for info on sustainable seafood is Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch: http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/sfw_whatsnew.aspx
Commercial fishing is not the problem. Banning commercial fishing in favor of farming is A) not going to happen and B) wouldn't fix anything if it did happen. The trouble is unsustainable harvest and lethality to bycatch. These problems are being addressed well by some countries, and not at all by others; there needs to be worldwide cooperation in these matters.
This is really something that can only happen with cooperation between national governments. In other words, there isn't much we can do about it except to encourage our elected officials to make it a priority. There are already various lobbying groups doing this; it would be better for us to add our voices and support to one of those groups than to form a new, superfluous group to do the same thing.
What we can do as individuals is make sure we only consume responsibly harvested or farmed seafood. There is a lot of info on the web about this. For example, orange roughy are slow-maturing fish that are very susceptible to overfishing, so avoid those. Farmed salmon is ecologically very destructive, so choose wild-caught instead. Farmed tilapia from the Americas (but not from Asia) on the other hand is a good responsible choice. Farmed shrimp and prawns are somewhere in between, but markedly improving. Do your research!
So what could we do as a group? I suggest that a very good thing for us to do is to help disseminate information on the impacts of various species. Education is the key to change. Another possibility is providing grants to researchers looking at marine and aquatic conservation, sustainable harvest techniques, low-impact farming, etc.
*EDIT* A good source for info on sustainable seafood is Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch: http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/cr_seafoodwatch/sfw_whatsnew.aspx
