Carl Safina has one of the worst jobs in science – but he can’t stop trying to save the world’s big fish

CARL SAFINA SPEAKS calmly, often softly. Initially, he even seems slightly retiring. But over the course of a conversation, it becomes clear that his words, be they spoken or written, are filled with urgency. Instead of raising his voice, though, he calls on his scientific background – a PhD in ecology, plus years of field experience – to show how dire the situation is for many species of the world’s big fish. Instead of resorting to histrionics, Safina quietly calls on a life lived near and on the water – he was raised on Long Island – to express a deep and rooted love for the oceans and a reservoir of sadness over their present condition.

When we met, Safina had just spoken at a school in Manhattan, acting as an emissary of the oceans. Additionally, there is his written work, three books – Song for the Blue Ocean is the best-known – and countless articles chronicling the ecological costs of our way of life. Over the years, Safina has received numerous citations and rewards, including a MacArthur Prize, and waged a host of campaigns to pass laws to better protect our seas. A particular focus are bodies such as the Atlantic Tuna Commission, which were ostensibly founded to protect fisheries but, in Safina’s estimation, have sided almost exclusively with industry and consumers.

In 2003, Safina founded the Blue Ocean Institute, the base for his operations, travels and writings. Among its initiatives is a wallet-sized seafood guide listing the health of species one might be tempted to order in a restaurant or buy in the market. power is including the guide overleaf: clip it out and don't leave home without it. It's meant to encourage our avaricious species to better look after creatures with whom we share the planet.

How did the talk go?
Fine, very well. A lot of enthusiastic young kids.

What do you try to get across to audiences like this one?
That there are real problems. That the world is not dying but it is sick and they need to help it get better. What I talk about is not terribly complicated. It tries to be comprehensive and eye-opening but it’s not that complicated. None of our problems are very complicated. Everyone seems to think they are and I think they’re not.

What would you boil them down to?
You shouldn’t hate people. You shouldn’t have more than two children. That’s about it.

Sounds simple enough.
And clean energy. We’ve known for about 30 years that it’s bad to have dirty energy, for a variety of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with the environment. I think that’s pretty much it. Everything else is just extremely commonsensical. But people say things are complicated because people are intransigent about their own turf and their own greed.

You seem particularly infuriated by bodies that are ostensibly protecting our resources, whether it’s the tuna industry or the banking industry.
They’ve done a terrible job with a lot of things. It doesn’t seem like a matter of opinion. It seems like a lot of chickens coming home to roost right now.

Tell me about be the Atlantic Tuna Commission, which you have been battling for years now.
Those guys, like many of these commissions, they have done a horrible job. They’re bureaucrats from a few dozen countries around the Atlantic that catch tuna and large fish from national and international waters. Many are supposedly commissioners and minister of fisheries and natural resources in their country. The Atlantic Tuna Commission was created in the late 1960s. And every single species they are responsible for is either largely depleted or very, very depleted from what it was when they first were “empowered.” 

And the tuna they’re allowing in great numbers goes where? Japan? And sells for big money?
Mostly Japan. US$274,000 for one fish is the highest price I’m aware of. That was a 700 pound [318kg] fish.
The problem with these commissions is they all have science bodies. The scientists say you can take 100 tonnes. The commissioners say we have to balance it, so we’ll take 200 tonnes. But the scientists are not advancing a bargaining position. They’re advancing an estimate of what is possible on the upper limit of what can be taken. All of the big fish throughout the entire world, with almost no exceptions, are extremely depleted from what it was 20 years ago, and certainly 40 years ago.

They’re knowingly overextending the fisheries?
Yes, knowingly. Complete irresponsibility. We see the same kind of complete irresponsibility in the banking system and in other things. They need oversight. They need checks and balances. You can’t just have a few people in a room that are not accountable except to the people they are enriching in the short term.

It sounds like you deal with a lot of bad news.
Popular Science magazine had an article on the worst jobs in science. I personally was awarded “world’s second worst job in science,” because, as they said, it’s nothing but bad news.

If you could be the voice in someone’s head who was going to the morning fish market in Tokyo or the live fish market in Hong Kong, or any sushi restaurant anywhere, what would you say?
If they had our fish guide in their pockets and it was accessible in their language it would be helpful. Generally speaking, the things that are big are the most vulnerable and probably the most depleted, and the things that are small and fast growing are the ones that can withstand the pressure. Things like anchovies and herring are a lot better than things like tuna. Sharks just cannot hold up. 

You wrote that it’s a looming end of days for tuna?
Well, for blue fin tuna in the Atlantic, that population is about to go really critical. We’ll probably lose that Atlantic blue fin tuna at the rate we’re going. Maybe not complete extinction but commercial extinction, and the other tuna in the world, most of them are in long-term decline, some of it quite significant. Even in my time, what we used to see is nothing like what we can see any more. And I got there at a time when people 20 or 30 years older than me were saying what you can see now is nothing like what we saw. Or as one charter boat captain told me an old timer said to him: “I saw the best of it and you saw the last of it.”

And our children will see the remnants?
Yeah. What the flocks of waterfowl and abundant animals of field and forest were to people in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, now you just buy some chicken wrapped in piece of cellophane in a store. And I think fish will go that route. There will probably be a lot of fish to eat. There will be a few species that grow well in captivity that are farmed and maybe can thrive on a vegetarian diet. So people will have that, but they won’t have the diversity of choice and the range of flavor.

Are oceans less appreciated than landscapes?
The ocean, more than the land, makes life on earth possible. Most people never think about the ocean. Many, many people think if we didn’t have oceans, so what? We’d simply have more land. But of course, if we didn’t have oceans, there would be no life on this planet.

Was there a moment when you realized something was out of balance in the ocean, or was it gradual?
It was very gradual. Ever since I was a very small child, I knew that animals had gone extinct in the recent past, that the buffalo was gone from the plains, that the passenger pigeon was extinct, that lots of animals were gone or endangered. And I could see, just around me, lots of habitat getting destroyed as housing developments expanded. I could see pollution. And I could see that the fish populations were in widespread, long-term decline.

After I had realized blue fin tuna were declining, but the fishing was occasionally still really excellent, I was out in the ocean, about 100km south of Long Island. A large body of fish was in the area. Everybody was catching them like crazy and somebody got on the radio and said, “Why don’t we leave a few for tomorrow?” Somebody else came on and said, “Screw that, nobody left me any buffalo.”

It perfectly encapsulated the thinking. If you know that nobody left you any buffalo or whatever it was, then why would you want to do that to somebody else? That seems like absolutely the wrong response.

Aren’t we seeing that happen again and again these days, as people in developing countries around the world want to enjoy the resource-depleting habits the western world has indulged in for so long? We’ve got so many more consumers now and a good number of them think the reward is plentiful sushi, or freshwater turtle, or shark fin soup, or mass-produced chicken.
Greed is a hard thing to work against. All of the major religions have commented on greed. Everybody has a version of the golden rule, which is about not only thinking of yourself. And I think there’s a call to compassion that I think is really critical, and is not something that comes naturally. They have to feel that call. It has to mean something to them that they are robbing other people and robbing the world of these things. About 150 years ago, there were dozens and dozens of wild species and other kinds of animals in the markets here in New York City or in San Francisco. Now, instead of having dozens of kinds of ducks, several kinds of geese and deer and antelope to choose from, now you can have chicken. Or you can have beef, or pork, maybe turkey, and once in a while a couple of other things. I think the same thing will happen with the ocean. We’re depleting and impoverishing the ocean but that comes back to us, too. It’s not desirable so we should all agree to stop doing it.

Do you see these things as tied together, as an illness of modern times?
I don’t think it’s an illness of modern times. I think it’s an illness of ancient times. We have not modernized our thinking. We still think very small. We still think of ourselves. We don’t look into the future even though we can see the future much better than we could. We don’t look around the world even though we can see around the world much better than we ever could. We’re still applying these ancient institutions that were fully developed hundreds of thousands of years before we understood anything about how the world really works.

What sort of institutions?
Western philosophy. Western religion. Western economics. The world has become a westernized world. And it is still using institutions that are anywhere from several thousand to several hundreds of years old. But we didn’t start understanding anything about how the world works until about 150 years ago, when Darwin showed us that all life is related. And then all of ecology and genetics and these modern, 20th century sciences showed us how nutrients cycle, how carbon works, how the water cycle works, the distribution and the limits of many of the resources that we use. Many of these things were a complete black box before about 1860. And if we took all the scientific knowledge we have now and said, “Let’s develop a philosophy and a set of economics and a spiritual approach that incorporates everything we have now,” I think we’d have institutions that don’t look anything like the ones that we are stuck with at the moment.

Because they assume things – resources – are infinite?
They assume things are infinite. They encourage greed and they encourage very short-term thinking. They make it almost impossible to think four years out, eight years out, 20 years out. I think almost everybody nowadays fears that life will be harder for their children. They have a lot of really good reasons for being afraid of that. We’re doing almost nothing to think ahead.

This “illness of ancient times” you mention, is that what you meant when you said we still take what we want and discard what we don’t – even though things are very different and there are six billion people on the planet?
When we were chipping stones and discarding bones, it was okay to throw away what we didn’t want. That’s not what we’re really doing any more, but we’re approaching it the way we did back then: We don’t want it, we throw it away.

Including toxic waste and pollutants and such?
Right. We have an economic system that doesn’t know anything about toxic waste. It doesn’t say, “You want to produce toxic waste? Fine. But it will cost the cost of clean-up, the cost of health, the cost of everything.” That’s the kind of economic system we would have if it was a modern system based on what we really know. But it’s an ancient system from a time when we didn’t know anything, from a time when what we produced was mostly harmless if we throw it away.

I’m not saying it’s bad to use the ocean. I’m saying it’s bad to use it up. There’s a limit to how much the natural world can produce. And there’s absolutely a limit to how many people can live at any given level of affluence. We can choose to have many people who are getting poorer, or we can have fewer people – that would mean fewer poor people – so whoever it is will have a better time.

I think the one-child policy in China hasn’t prevented China from developing and surging ahead economically. If everybody over the last 50 years had four children instead of one child in China, the problems that they’re coping with would probably have completely overwhelmed them. 

Have we already reached the limit of how many can live at a certain level of affluence?
We’re way past it. The world cannot live at the American level of affluence with six billion people. With one billion people, it probably could have. And nobody has ever been able to argue why we would need more than a billion people. Nobody can tell me why we need nine billion people, or 10 or 12 billion people. It doesn’t seem to help a single thing. It traps people in incredible misery. It undermines democracy. It undermines peace. There’s nothing good that comes of it.

Do you support population control measures?
Absolutely. In this country, every time you have a child you get a tax deduction, even though that child puts more strain on everything around it. Why do we give tax breaks instead of incentives for people not to have children? Or, you want to have a child? Pay a tax. The child is going to use up resources, so pay for it. If you can’t pay for it, it may mean you can’t afford to have that child. The same is true even for very affluent people.

And on the other end, people can stay alive longer.
I think that people being kept alive longer necessitates that we limit our reproduction. You can’t just say, “I want to stay alive and I want to be cured of diseases that are supposed to kill me, and I’ll do everything possible. But, I absolutely refuse to use birth control. I absolutely want to have four children.”

That’s makes me think of the Philippines, where overpopulation is “the third rail” of politics even though everyone knows the country doesn’t have the resources it needs. And then in some cases people got birth control pills and condoms but used them to help grow orchids and for balloons at children’s birthday parties.
The Catholic Church has been, in that regard, the most destructive, most irresponsible institution in the world. Because their insistence that we don’t use birth control or no one can get an abortion for any reason creates a lot of human misery. If they cared about people, they would care about preventing human misery. They insist, of course, that contraception is unnatural and against God. Where did people get the idea that God wants dying people to stay alive?

Do you see trends that suggest minds, or markets, are changing? Wal-Mart using green technology, wind and solar being widely discussed, conservation as a topic of mainstream conversation?
Those are indications that minds are changing, but not enough to make a difference overall. I think there are two things. One is that minds have to change in a way that outpaces the growth of the population. Population explosion and people fighting for resources will outstrip any amount of trying to sell sustainably produced farm animals or seafood. I think all these little or medium sized things that don’t individually matter do collectively matter a lot. They change the tone of the country and the public debate. Recycling your garbage, or getting a car that gets high fuel efficiency, will do nothing significant except allow you to speak about the things that are needed. If you don’t care in any way, you will never speak about the things that are needed. But if you speak, and everybody speaks, then all these little things begin to change the way the country is talking, the way the country is thinking about itself and the way the country votes.

Is there some tipping point, a moment when consciousness does shift, because a glacier falls into the ocean or a tsunami takes out Denmark or something like that?
I don’t know. The world doesn’t seem to shift immediately on anything. But if you look back, you realize how many things have changed fundamentally.

But some things, the tonnes of plastic in the oceans, the ice caps melting and such, remain abstract for most people, don’t they?
Well, I just came back from Palau, which is in the tropics, and the melting ice in the poles is flooding people’s back yards every time there’s a new moon or a full moon. And a lot of the people there just don’t have the money to pick up and move out of a house that no
one would want to buy. They’re not the reason we have dirty energy, and they’re not the reason that the climate is changing, but they’re some of the first to suffer the consequence.

How optimistic are you about these things, generally?
I think we’ll have a worsening of a lot of our problems and I think that as some of our problems get really critical, people will react and things will improve. I think we’ll lose some things of tremendous value, like a lot of these bigger fish, the abundance, the productivity of the ocean coastal areas. It has been an incredibly, incredibly productive system and we’re destroying its ability to produce.

What makes science’s second worst job worth it?
In a lot of ways I think it’s the best job in the world. I think that any time a person has an opportunity to spend their working effort on something that is worthwhile is a fantastic stroke of luck. I get to see and experience firsthand these things I so dearly love. And if they are going to survive, or come back, or be destroyed in my lifetime, I experience them while I try to describe for other people what is at stake. I think that’s a very, very worthwhile use of my time.