Have they, and we as a nation, learned nothing from this disaster? Here are some questions to ask ourselves now. Can we be assured that an oil spill of this magnitude will never happen again? Is there a fail-proof method way of extracting oil from deep water wells?

I was born in New Orleans. My family moved, along with much of their community, to Los Angeles when I was a child, but New Orleans and Louisiana stays in your blood; once it gets hold of you, it never lets go. My father made almost yearly visits there throughout his life. One of my grandmother’s last requests before she died, was to visit New Orleans. Now my mother, who is in her 80’s, is for asking the same thing.

On a summer trip to New Orleans, when I was a teenager, and old enough to begin noticing these things, I marveled at the low price of shrimp in the local grocery stores. My Uncle JuJune (yes, we have colorful names) responded “hell, they’ll just give ‘em away if you drive a pick up truck down to the Gulf, they got so much of it.” Unfortunately, they are not quite so plentiful now.

While over a third of all the seafood consumed in this country comes from the Gulf, there have been problems. Residual chemical fertilizers, used in the corn and wheat fields of the heartland, wash down the Mississippi River causing algae blooms resulting in huge dead zones in the Gulf. Still, the commercial fishing industry in the state accounts for over 300 million dollars of the state’s economy. In the past couple of years, Gulf Coast oysters have picked up the slack in the oyster market, as there have been problems with Chesapeake Bay oysters. And, as most any Southerner will tell you, Gulf shrimp and oysters have a sweet, delicate flavor unique to the area, because of the microorganisms in the Gulf they eat.

The coastline of Louisiana makes up 40-45% of all wetlands in the lower 48 states, and they have historically offered a natural buffer to the hurricanes that hit the region. They are also home to a vast array of wildlife.

It’s been badly damaged from heavy equipment trucked down to the Gulf, as well as rising ocean waters.

There are only a few industries in the towns and villages along the Louisiana coastline: fishing, tourism (which is largely a subsection of fishing), and of course, oil. Drive a bit further north to New Orleans, and it doesn’t get much better.

On a visit there five months after Hurricane Katrina hit, I met a young college aged couple with whom I shared dinner at a French Quarter restaurant. The young man was from Chauvin, a village near the Gulf where most of the men worked on oil rigs. His date was a New Orleans native. We talked late into the night touching on, among other things, whether they felt they could stay in Louisiana. There was a palpable sadness in the air, as the young woman concluded she could not. She is not alone. This past fall, a young cousin of mine chose to move to Los Angeles to begin her career after graduating from college. When I asked her why, she stated “there’s just nothing down there for me.”

I often find myself passionately defending New Orleans, against those who wonder why anyone would want to live there, so here goes:

Southern Louisiana is home to a vibrant culture, one of lively music, a wonderful cuisine (arguably the first major regional one in this country), a deeply rooted religious tradition, with its own language and customs; and one that values family and community above anything. One of, if not the most unique, in a country increasingly plagued with a commercial culture of “sameness.”

It’s a gift to history buffs, writers, musicians, and food lovers. Southern Louisiana has given much more to this nation than this nation has given back. The nation would never have been built without the port of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was the major port of entry and highway leading into the heartland of this continent since the beginning of Europeans’ settling here, before there was a railroad, before there was an interstate highway system, and it remains an important port today.

Andrew Jackson understood that, as did the British who remained encamped at the mouth of Lake Bourne, even after a treaty was signed ending the War of 1812. Realizing how vital New Orleans was to our emerging nation, Jackson continued a fierce fight to beat back garrisons of British soldiers. His victory there catapulted him to the Presidency.

So I would offer one final question we need to ask ourselves now. Are we willing to continue sacrificing this vital area to further sate our gluttony for oil?

As a massive, growing oil spill threatens to crush the Gulf seafood industry, Louisiana locals are snatching up fresh, locally-harvested shrimp in droves.

The Crescent City Farmer’s Market in uptown New Orleans was out of seafood by 11 a.m. Tuesday. FOX News reported that Gulf seafood markets as far as Florida were selling four times more seafood than usual.

“I have no more seafood, sorry!” Clara Gerica, a vendor at the three-times-a-week New Orleans farmers market told a disappointed customer. “Come back Thursday or Saturday, I’ll set some aside for ya.”

“Today was extremely busy. I haven’t had a day like this since before Katrina,” explains Gerica, whose family is still rebuilding their house and three boats, all casualties of the hurricane.

From the minute the market opened, locals were lined up to secure their seafood. “People are afraid they aren’t going to be able to get it,” notes Gerica, adding that she is not worried about the local supply. “[The oil spill] will slow me down on crab meat, but everything else should be fine.”

“Unless something drastic happens,” she says, the rich fishing waters west of the Mississippi will likely be spared from oil contamination.

The hope that New Orleans will be able to keep a steady supply of fresh, local seafood is based on two assumptions: that the weather will continue to push the oil east and that BP will be able to stop the flow of oil in the next few days.

If the west side of Louisiana is spared from the “oilpocalypse,” it will be heavily relied upon to help fishermen keep up with demand, much of which is local.

As well-known New Orleans chef and local foodie John Besh wrote last week in The Atlantic, “We will have a supply of seafood, but that supply will be affected. In the short term our supplies will be cut in half–and that’s if we’re lucky. In the long term I’m afraid for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Texas, the Florida panhandle.”

“This is much more than about birds,” wrote Besh. “It’s about a culture, an economy, the livelihood of thousands and thousands of people–and wetlands that have been the most concentrated source of seafood production for our entire country.”

The Gulf oil spill and our plate

Around 40 percent of our domestic seafood comes from the Gulf of Mexico. The seafood industry there is not only economically important for the region–bringing in around $2.4 billion annually–but it’s also important for those of us who like to know where our food comes from.

Just look at shrimp, America’s most popular seafood.

Over 90 percent of shrimp consumed in the U.S. is imported, mostly from Asia, the largest portion coming from China. Much of that is wild caught by trawling–a practice that has some environmentalists concerned, as it that harms the ocean floor and often kills other sea life, like turtles. But a growing portion of the shrimp on our plates is actually from aquaculture farms, which bring a whole host of other problems ranging from the destruction of mangrove forests to unregulated antibiotic use.

As Ray Brandhurst, an inspiring Chalette, Louisiana shrimper, who’s family has been shrimping since the 1700s, told me this week, “Unfortunately these imports are coming in here unchecked. In most of the European countries they wont allow this stuff to come in, but it comes into the U.S. unabated.”

Imported shrimp should be avoided altogether, if you follow the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide.

“Our shrimp in the Gulf is antibiotic-free. We aren’t destroying mangrove forests,” says Ray.

Unfortunately the future supply of Gulf seafood continues to be threatened by a lake of carcinogenic oil the size of Delaware.

Adapted from an article originally published on Food Safety News, reported from New Orleans, LA.

In 2007, a research vessel stationed off the coast of eastern Canada cast two fishing lines, each with 1,500 hooks, in order to estimate how many cod were left in this region’s waters. They caught only a few fish. Eleven years earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had declared a moratorium on cod fishing with the goal of rebuilding the species’ population back to a secure, if not profitable, number. The Arctic cod population, like that of Western Atlantic bluefin tuna, Chesapeake Bay scalloped hammerhead shark, Atlantic salmon, North Sea haddock, Southern Atlantic snowy grouper, East Gulf of Mexico red snapper and American plaice, is reaching what director Rupert Murray foresees as “the end of the line.” His so-titled documentary examines the decline of our ocean’s diverse species while proposing immediate solutions.

His film gives us the chance to see what the ocean actually looks like and how it is affected by industrial fishing. Murray frequently returns to frames of our oceans’ surface waters—their vastness extends toward an infinite horizon line. We witness fishermen from Senegal and the Strait of Gibraltar pull netted fish from the water, we see images of bounty, and we begin to reckon the sheer mass of fish killed. There are recurring images of hooks, blood and swarming catches. Anchovies are processed for fishmeal—the pile of dead fish appears limitless.

These images reappear variously in many local landscapes documented. Halifax, Alaska, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Lampadusa and Senegal bear a universal problem and it blends into one common visual. But opinions on industrial fishing tell a less cohesive story and this documentary presents the argument through two divergent perspectives.

“We are fighting a war against fish,” scientist Daniel Pauly explains. Though he is pro- sustainable fishing, he identifies man’s increasing power within the fishing industry—technological nautical advancement, increasing consumer demand, influential policy-making and greedy corporate control—to explain why humans are unwilling to restrain themselves from destroying fish populations. “Fisherman cheat because they can. Fisherman cheat because they won’t get caught. That’s true of all systems,” says Charles Clover, on whose book this movie is based. On a phone call with the manager at Nobu London, Clover asks why the restaurant refuses to take bluefin tuna off the menu. The manager avoids the obvious answer: because it is popular, fish are fashionable and consumers will buy it. Instead, he offers a guarantee that the menu will warn customers about endangered fish by putting an asterisks and a note beside any fish that qualifies. We know that bluefin tuna are in crisis, yet corporations large and small care little about preserving the population.

The largest purchaser of bluefin tuna is Mitsubishi. Estimates by one tuna researcher claim that the multinational corporation now controls about 60% of the total production of Northern bluefin tuna in the Atlantic and Mediterranean through its freezing and transportation capacities. Each year scientists calculate in tons the numbers needed to regulate and rebuild tuna populations. They then recommend their findings to an EU fishing ministry. To maintain the Atlantic bluefin tuna population, fisherman would have to reduce their yearly catch to 15,000 tons. To see the population rejuvenate, the catch limit would have to be 10,000 tons. Knowing this information, EU ministers have voted for a cap of 29,500 tons—and in real numbers, Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean are actually fished to unregulated capacities of 61,000 tons per year, about 1/3 of the total bluefin population. When governments simply refuse responsibility for stricter regulations, fishery commissions can ignore scientific truths. But the race against fish, controlled by human competition, is also influenced by denial—a fisherman in Senegal speaks straight into the camera to claim “the sea has betrayed us.”

Still, there is optimism in the End of the Line. Understanding the resistance they are up against, scientists regulating fish extinction believe that there is hope in unveiling real numbers, actual species disappearances and major changes to our ecosystem. Public knowledge enhances transparency. Because fish populations are collapsing at calculable, consistent rates, scientists aver with confidence that if changes are not made to the fishing industry, most fish we eat today will disappear by 2048.

End of the Line is an educational tool and a call to arms. Murray imparts three written commandments to his viewers as the film ends: consumers, politicians and advocates must enact change. We must be curious eaters, asking questions about where our fish comes from and whether it is sustainably produced. Helping us on this front, Clover has launched a new site called Fish2Fork, which features sustainability grades for restaurants that serve fish all over the world — and you can add reviews. In addition, politicians need to value science and take control of fishing regulations and fisherman must be forced to observe the rules. Advocates for a sustainable fishing movement must work for the creation of more ocean reserves like the one filmed in the Exuma Cays of the Bahamas. Here, endangered and collapsing fish species swim freely in an area protected by no-fishing laws. 1% of our ocean is currently protected from commercial fishing; the remaining 99% is an illusion of abundance.

When industrial fish farming began in 1952, the number of boats trolling for catch was not anywhere near today’s fleet. One and a half billion fishing hooks a year are attached to lines so long, they could wrap around the world 550 times over. One-tenth of the world’s entire catch captured using long line and trawling methods is thrown back overboard. Seven million tons of sea creatures ranging from turtles to dolphins to sea birds are not even brought to market. As we “win” the fight against fish by exploiting the ocean’s exhaustible resources, Murray challenges us to ask what we have to gain by doing so.

You can see the film at a screening near you. Meanwhile, here is the trailer:

Picture an Alaskan fisherman. Now wipe the slate clean. Thea Thomas is a 52-year-old blonde who wears lip gloss and earrings when she heads out on her boat, a fiberglass vessel called the Myrmidon, named after Achilles’ warriors. She holds a Master’s degree in biology and has been fishing commercially for the past 23 years. She’s also one of the “highliners” of the 540-person Copper River fleet, meaning the volume of her catch is among the highest of her peers, all but four of whom are men.

And she wants to keep fishing, too, at least until she retires, which won’t be happening any time soon. “I still really enjoy it,” she says. “I don’t know if other people enjoy it as much as I do.”

But as much as she enjoys her work, and as much as she’d like to maximize her earnings during the open season (which runs from May through September), she understands that some days she simply can’t fish. It’s not that she doesn’t feel like it, or lacks the drive, but that she’s not allowed to. And neither are the other members of her fleet.

Why? Because Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game tightly controls when the waters are open to commercial fishing, and when they’re not. They do this for one reason: to ensure that the salmon population remains strong and that the waters off Prince William Sound and the Copper River, in southeastern Alaska, do not get overfished. Sustainability, in these parts, is not only mandated, but legislated and enforced as well.

It’s not a watertight system, of course, and there are certainly fishermen who don’t comply with the regulations, but if they fish when, or where, they’re not supposed to, they risk losing their licenses and even their boats. Fellow fishermen have been known to snap photos of lawbreakers and email them off to the troopers.

According to Bert Lewis, a regional resource development biologist with the Department, sustainability is measured in “escapement,” or in the number of salmon not harvested who escape to the spawning streams. The state determines the optimal escapement goal for each species (say king, or sockeye, or coho) and then opens or closes the fishery accordingly. So if not enough fish are “escaping,” the fisheries will close. If the numbers look strong, the fisheries will open.

Escapement is measured in a number of ways, using both high-tech and low-tech methods:

Weekly aerial surveys. Each week, the Department flies 208 streams around the sound counting the salmon from the sky. As they run, the salmon look like long dark lines. Different varieties can be separately tracked based on their unique characteristics. Chums, for example, are bigger and distinctly colored; sockeye travel in smaller groups; and pinks are so prolific they’re counted by the tens of thousands. “We’re not counting every fish,” says Lewis, “but we use it as an index of abundance.”

Sonar. Even if it’s too cloudy for an aerial count, the Department can rely on its sonar system. Salmon tend to swim up against the banks of the Copper River when the currents are strong, and they emit sounds that are captured by a laptop set up at a nearby sonar station. You can actually see the salmon swimming by on the monitor. According to Lewis, the employee on duty counts the salmon for 10 minutes on the top of every hour and then uses this statistical subset to extrapolate how many will pass by in a 24 hour period. These numbers are then applied to the overall escapement goals.

Otolith marking. Now here’s where things really get interesting. Though all of the Alaskan salmon are wild (as opposed to farmed), certain fisheries do use a hatchery system. When wild salmon return to their breeding grounds to spawn, their eggs are taken and kept over the winter in a controlled environment, but with a natural flow of water. This process, which the locals refer to as “ocean ranching,” increases the survival rate of salmon fry up to tenfold. But it’s important to keep track of which fish are hatchery fish and which are not, so the fish are marked; the water in the hatchery is manipulated by heating and cooling it at different temperatures over different intervals of time, which creates marks on the tiny bones in the fish’s head called the otoliths. When these salmon, which are released into the natural plankton bloom, return to spawn, the Department of Fish & Game studies a subset of their otoliths to determine which hatchery they’re from and whether the stocks have mingled. These numbers all factor into the escapement goals as well.

There are some controversies. For one, the salmon are supposed to home back to their original hatcheries, but they don’t always do so. And second, sometimes the hatchery fish stray into the wild population, which can negatively impact genetic diversity and inflate the wild salmon numbers, causing escapement goals to appear to be met when, in fact, they haven’t.

Even with these issues, Alaska’s wild salmon is consistently ranked high on lists of sustainable seafood choices.

There’s a human element to the sustainability equation, too. I asked Mike Poole, a salmon fisherman with the Copper River fleet, whether he was tempted to fish even when the waters were officially “closed” — you know, to try to catch more fish and, obviously, to make more money. He shook his head hard. “We have sons in the fishery,” he said, gesturing toward his colleagues. “We want them to be able to fish in 10 years, too.”

[Editor's note: Check out Samual Fromartz's video of fishing on the Copper River, and visiting the processing and sonar facilities there over on his great site Chewswise]

It seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, the inclination to shout “It’s not my fault!” at the first sign of accusations. And we all know that the louder and the more frequent our declarations, the more likely it is that we actually are to blame.

Thus it goes with fisheries around the world – constantly looking for a scapegoat to blame for the decline of their fish stocks. Or in this case a “Scape-Whale.”

Much to my surprise, there has been a scientific debate raging for decades about the role that whales play in depleting fish populations. The argument goes like this: whales eat fish, therefore we should kill whales to protect the fish.  And then get to eat the whales, too.

The push for this “culling” practice (the scientific term for the ‘selection’ (removing or killing) of surplus animals from an animal population) has largely come from Japan. The Japanese whaling industry, along with members from Iceland and Norway, have been increasing the pressure to support whaling as a way to improve fish populations.

In a 2004 National Geographic article, a Japanese Fisheries Agency spokesperson “said that whales eat at least ten target species hunted by people, including Japanese anchovy and Pacific saury.” But biologist Peter Corkeron with the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research responded:

“The bottom line is that we are exploiting the oceans’ resources more and more.  It’s almost a no-brainer that eventually someone will point the finger at other species that are using the same resources.”

The good news for whales is that a recent study published in the journal Science proves the “whale = bad” argument is spurious.

Arizona State University scientist Leah Gerber and co-authors demonstrate that the impact of whales is small compared to human fishing patterns. Data from the Caribbean and North African locations demonstrate that the impact on fisheries caused by human behavior is hundreds of times greater than the fish consumed by whales.

The paper makes several recommendations; including taking into account the “indirect social and economic benefits of whales” – that is tourism. They also recommend that “despite complicated politics, science should be an integral component of the discussions about managing whale and fish interactions.” (Read: up until now, science has been absent.)  Finally, they recommend managing marine ecosystems based on long-term sustainability, rather than the goal of short term fishery yield as is often currently the case.

In his superlative book The End of The Line, author Charles Clover finds evidence of this “It’s not my fault” syndrome throughout the worldwide fishing industry.  Moving forward, the paper makes a convincing case that we need to take responsibility for the impacts we are having on the oceans – as individuals, as nations, and as a species.

ASU’s Leah Gerber on fisheries

Photo: Arizona Board of Regents, humpback whale swimming through the ocean

The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) today decided to accept recommendations for “organic” fish production that will allow fish to carry the USDA organic label—despite being raised under conditions that fail to meet fundamental USDA organic principles. The NOSB recommendations allow:

• Fish to be fed food other than 100% organic feed—the gold standard that must be met by other USDA-certified organic livestock;
• Fishmeal used to feed farmed fish from wild fish—which has the potential to carry mercury and PCBs; and
• Open net cages to be used—which flush pollution, disease and parasites from open net fish farms directly into the ocean, adversely impacting wild fish supply, sustainability and the health of the oceans.

The Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and USA Today have good pieces on what is at stake for the organic label.

“To slap a ‘organic’ label on this fish is deceptive and undermines the entire organic program,” said Urvashi Rangan, PhD, Senior Scientist and Policy Analyst at Consumers Union, one of the several groups which submitted public comment before the agency during the three-day hearing. “If enacted, this gutting of the organic standards will not only allow sub-par organic fish to be sold with a premium, but will undermine consumer confidence in the entire organic marketplace.”

Furthermore, it was clear at the NOSB hearing that USDA advised NOSB to circumvent the regulations to lower the organic standards bar for fish, standards clearly not wanted by the American public. Just last week, a Consumers Union Poll revealed that 93 percent of Americans think that fish labeled as “organic” should be produced by 100 percent organic feed, like all other organic animals. Nine in 10 consumers also agreed that ”organic” fish farms should be required to recover waste and not pollute the environment and 57 percent are concerned about ocean pollution caused by ”organic” fish farms. Nearly 30,000 signatures have been collected in favor of maintaining strong standards for the organic label for fish.

Some members of the NOSB expressed that they were under pressure from the aquaculture industry to push a substandard through, with the chair of the Livestock Committee, Hue Karreman, claiming that he’s trying to “jumpstart” an industry by finding a middle ground.

“The action taken today by the NOSB illustrate their misunderstanding of their own mission and underscores their willingness to let down the American consumer in favor of industry,” said Rangan. “The NOSB is not a marketing or promotional agency. It is an agency designed to create and maintain strict standards that meet consumer expectations.”

The push to allow non-organic fishmeal—which can be contaminated with mercury and PCBs and environmentally polluting production systems—organic feed and to ensure that waste from farms does not pollute the surrounding environment. The Board said that some “organic” fish that don’t eat 100 percent organic feed receive a “qualified organic” label—something entirely out of line with the law and the goal of the organic program to provide a consistent standard across products in the marketplace and to prevent any adulteration of the USDA organic claim.

The recommendations have been transmitted to USDA, which will issue an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) immediately.

The NOSB Livestock Committee recommendations are available on the NOSB website

Photo: Spiralia, salmon farm

Few seafood lovers can keep from salivating over a gorgeous piece of bluefin tuna. That’s the problem: There are too many seafood lovers and not enough bluefin. But Pacific albacore, a smaller tuna best known as “chunk white” in cans, happens to be plentiful and relatively cheap. Turn the other end of the food chain and you’ll find smelt, sardines and anchovies. Most people think of sardines or anchovies as bait – and they are. But both fish are phenomenal eaten fresh, and Monterey’s sardine fishery has returned with a vengeance after collapsing a generation ago.

Eating sustainably does not mean eating poorly, and to prove it Tom Worthington of the Monterey Fish Market is bringing the best minds in sustainable fishing to the Slow Food Nation event this Labor Day weekend.

Fresh sardines, Alaskan halibut, Dungeness crab – all are world-class foods that are sustainably managed. Worthington says about 30 Bay Area chefs will be using these regional seafoods to offer Slow Food Nation visitors a taste of just how good eating sustainable seafood can be.

But Worthington says the food is intended to draw attention to the dilemmas that face every kind of marine ecosystem, from estuaries to bays to the oceanic fisheries. As it happens, Northern California has examples of each environment, and all are taking a beating from a combination of pollution, habitat loss and fishing pressure.

“Most people have no real clue about the environment from which we obtain fish,” said Worthington. “In essence, I’m telling people what our ‘farm’ looks like, using ‘farm’ as a metaphor…I don’t think a lot of people have an idea about what wild fish is – we’re talking about wild ecosystems that feed us.”

Normally a highlight of a local seafood show would be king salmon from the Sacramento River system – historically the largest king salmon run on the West Coast. But salmon numbers are so depleted this year the state has banned commercial fishing.

No one knows exactly why the salmon have not returned. But Southern California has been pumping record amounts of water out of the Delta, salmon spawning grounds have been affected by a two-year drought and biologists suspect the way the state releases baby salmon – many of which are hatchery raised – into the rivers could damage their rate of return. Some suspect the fish lack the deep imprint of their ancestral streams that drive the salmon runs farther north.

“There will be no salmon here this year,” Worthington said. “It’ll be a striking absence from the show, but we’re going to use it to our advantage. This was not brought on by fishing.”

Visit the Fish Pavilion Saturday and Sunday during the event.

Photo by Hank Shaw