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ANDY SHARPLESS: Thanks very much.
So, thank you all for coming.
I'm going to speak briefly.
And then, I hope you'll ask me questions.
We can take advantage of the fact that we have a group
small enough to do that.
So, now, in my role as an author, for the first time, I
get asked this question, why did you write this book?
It's like the starting question I get asked.
And I wanted to think, in a genuine way, about where the
kernel for the book really comes.
What was the experience that started us down this path?
And I think it's a moment in Geneva, about five or six
years ago, when I was there to talk to the World Trade
Organization about helping to stop overfishing and stop
ocean collapse.
And we went to see the Chinese trade
representative in Geneva.
And it's quite interesting.
In Geneva, 150 countries of the world represented there,
for international discussions about
managing the world's trade.
The United States Embassy is surrounded by
perimeters of fences.
And the Chinese Embassy is open.
You walk in.
You meet the Chinese ambassador, then who was about
35 years old, very distinguished young man, very
well dressed.
We sit down with him.
And we said, we have a bad history as a planet in
managing the oceans.
They are collapsing.
And he said, we have a billion people in China.
They're very hungry.
We're going to feed them.
You guys have gotten your chance.
We need to make sure we can feed our people.
It was a very sincere and strong message on behalf of
the food side of the equation.
And I went away and thought about it and said, OK.
So there we have two very morally compelling gulfs.
Protect life on the planet--
the traditional conservation agenda, protect biodiversity--
or feed people.
Make sure people aren't hungry.
Make sure that in the year 2050, when there are 2 billion
more people on the planet, we don't have children waking up
hungry everywhere.
We have nearly a billion, 950 million, people, now waking up
hungry frequently on the planet.
So this is not an imaginary problem.
Now, if you think about the origin of the conservation
movement, it goes back about 100, 120 years ago.
And it starts on the land.
And on the land, if you ask the question, what is the
biggest driver of biodiversity loss on the planet, the answer
is agriculture.
This is the reason that we are losing species.
It's the chief reason we are losing species on the land.
And so, the history of the conversation movement is--
because there's a fundamental moral kind of war between
feeding people and protecting life--
that you kind of choose sides.
And the conservationists' side is we're going to protect
biodiversity.
And if that means we have to stand against agriculture,
we'll stand against agriculture.
Because we don't see on the land that you can
simultaneously optimize for food production and for
biodiversity protection.
So there's a kind of a war in people's heads that comes from
the land-based experience of conservation.
And when we went into the ocean, when the conservation
movement went into the ocean, oh, about 30 years ago--
and your colleague Jennifer therefore can date herself to
being one of the early pioneers of thinking about the
ocean, because it's really only about 30 years old--
that mindset was taken with us.
So we went into the ocean, and we thought the job of
optimizing food production at the ocean cannot be
simultaneously optimized with the job of biodiversity
protection of the ocean.
You have to make a choice just because we're used to making
that choice on the land.
That framework drove the conservation agenda in
opposition to the food production
agenda in the ocean.
Now, we are right now on a path where we are getting
fewer fish from the ocean every year despite increasing
efforts to catch them.
Despite using advanced technologies of all sorts to
track down and catch fish, the world's fishery catch, just in
tonnage, peaked in the late 1980s and
has been coming down.
You've heard of peak oil.
Well, we've crossed peak fish, wild fish.
At a moment when we have all of these hungry people, you
would want that to be going the other direction.
That opportunity turns out to be real.
And the message of the book is that if we will manage our
oceans well, we can have a future, by 2050, that is
different in this very quantifiable way.
We are on a path to be feeding about 450 million seafood
meals a day in the year 2050 if we'll stay on
the path we're on.
If we manage the oceans better, we can do 800 million
meals a day.
And if we stopped feeding fish to pigs and animals, it could
be a billion people a day forever being fed healthy
seafood meal.
So that's the order of magnitude of the choice, 450
million versus on the order of 1 billion people a day, a
seafood meal every single day.
Now, how do we do that?
How do we get there?
Now, the common idea--
now, in all of your heads, unless you're way more
advanced than the typical group that I've talked about
it, which you may be, since we are here at Google--
is that you're thinking about the map of the world.
And you're thinking, you know, the map of the world's oceans
looks like a pretty international place.
It looks, to me, as a naive observer of the world's
oceans, that we are only going to manage the oceans well if
we construct international committees to collaborate
around the rules and enforce the rules for managing
fishing, because that's the way the map looks.
And if you are a practical person, you would be
discouraged.
Because we don't do a very good job in the world, sadly,
at doing international management of anything.
We don't do a very good job of international management of
stopping killing people, let alone too
much killing of fish.
So how could you, as a practical person, get excited
about the job of producing all of this
seafood for the future?
Here's the very good news for you.
It turns out that life in the ocean is not equally
distributed.
Seven out of eight pounds of the world's wild fish are
caught in the coastal zones of the oceans.
Now, that is a surprising insight, because the most
charismatic fish in the ocean are, like the most charismatic
creatures on the land, big predators, lions and
tigers of the ocean.
And like lions and tigers on the land, they have big
territories.
And they have the tendency to spend a lot of their life out
in the international zone of the seas, which is
called the high seas.
And indeed, they do need to be protected by international
cooperation.
So the tunas, the sharks, that we think of and we love, are,
in fact, extremely vulnerable.
And the future will struggle to see many of those, because
they do require us to do what we don't do well,
international agreements.
But here's the good news from the point of view of food.
The coastal zones of the world's oceans are controlled
country by country, by the adjacent country.
Every coastal country, out to 200 nautical miles, by itself
sets the rules for what happens in that ocean with
respect to fishing.
Nobody fishes within 200 nautical miles of the United
States Coast without fishing under the rules that the
Americans set.
So they have to fish with our quota rules.
They have to fish with our habitat protection rules.
They have to comply with our bycatch rules.
You cannot overfish the American ocean because the
Spanish come in and decide they want to fish our ocean.
It's not a tragedy of the commons, in that classic way,
where nobody's in charge.
The Americans are in charge of their ocean.
The Chileans are in charge of their ocean.
The Europeans are in charge of their ocean.
And on and on and on.
And, in fact, by the way, interesting fact, the country
in the world with the biggest coastal territory, by square
miles, is the United States of America.
So if you're an American, you can think of yourself as
having more opportunity than the average citizen of the
world to influence the future of this part of the world's
nature, natural systems.
From the point of view of food, though, we want to ask
the question, how many countries would it take to do
a good job managing their ocean, managing their ocean
fishery, to deliver the ocean intact and abundant to the
year 2050, to feed all these people, that are going to be
here then, healthy seafood meals, delicious seafood meals
like we had today in the Google cafeteria?
So we, at Oceana, made a list, with the countries with the
biggest catch from their coastal zones at the top and
the ones with the smallest catch, by
weight at the bottom.
And we asked the question, if the top 10 countries on that
list, just the top 10 countries on that list, were
to do a good job managing their oceans, what share of
the world's wild fish catch could we deliver in a healthy
state to the future?
And the answer is 2/3.
Nine countries and the European Union together
control the catch of 2/3 of the wild's
fish catch by weight.
The tunas and the swordfish are not.
You know, they're charismatic and they're important.
But by weight, they don't contribute as much as you
would think.
And from the point of view of feeding people, weight is what
we're concerned about, weight of healthy animal protein.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: When you say weight, do you say weight that goes to
human consumption or also, like, farms and pigs and
everything?
ANDY SHARPLESS: The question is, when I say weight, am I
talking about fish that gets fed directly to people or
including stuff that gets fed to animals?
And I'm talking about the catch, no matter where it gets
delivered to.
And so, that question points to another interesting fact.
And I mentioned it earlier.
We have a big opportunity in the future to feed people by
stopping or reducing the practice of feeding fish to
fish or feeding fish to animals.
Let me just address that directly.
Very often, people will say, isn't the solution to
overfishing of the oceans farming of fish?
And when I eat a farmed fish, aren't I doing something
that's good for the ocean?
And intuitively, it sounds like you are.
In fact, you have to ask the following question.
What does the fish that you are eating, that is farmed,
what does it eat?
And the answer to that question creates three
categories that are, basically, good, bad, and
indifferent, depending upon what the fish eats.
If the fish eats fish, that's a problem category.
If the fish eats grain, it's a kind of a neutral category.
If the farmed fish eats algae, like oysters, clams, mussels
do, that's basically an unalloyed good thing.
So what's a fish that eats a lot of fish, that's farmed a
lot, that we see a lot of?
Salmon.
This is a carnivore.
Salmon eats other fish.
And I've been to the salmon pens in Chile.
And they take wild fish, grind them up into little pellets
that look like dog food but smell like fish.
And they feed them to the farm salmon in the pens.
And in the process, they convert four or five pounds of
wild salmon into one pound of farmed fish.
So it's a reduction activity.
By contrast, by happy contrast, the farmer of
mussels, the farmer of clams, the farmer of oysters, is
creating a healthy and delicious seafood out of
something that eats algae.
It's not something human beings eat or livestock
generally eat.
And, by the way, in so doing cleans the ocean, because it's
a filter feeder.
And, by the way, it's even better because it's that
rarest of things in the world.
It's a for profit company with employees and with profits and
with all of the connections that profitable businesses
have to the political establishment, which must have
a clean ocean.
Because if you're finding oysters in a polluted ocean,
they don't taste good or they die.
So we, as people who want there to be an abundant ocean,
encourage you to eat as many farmed mussels, clams, and
oysters as you can stomach.
Go today, and eat mussels tonight.
There's a recipe for them in my book.
And there were some today at the cafeteria, one of those
recipes, clams.
So we talked about nine countries plus
the European Union.
I want to address an important fact.
You're wondering if I slipped something tricky in there by
saying the European Union, because you will know that
there are 27 countries in the European Union.
So I didn't, like, finesse this by getting 9 plus 27 to
sound like 10.
The European Union manages its fisheries on a continental
basis out of Brussels.
The rules for all 27 member states on quotas, habitat and
bycatch, or on overfishing or not are set in one place by
one set of decision makers in Brussels.
So for purposes of fishery management, it's authentic and
legitimate to treat the European Union as one country.
So nine countries plus the European Union, if they will
stop overfishing, can manage, do manage, 2/3 of the world's
fish by weight and can deliver those in healthy
state to the future.
If you go to 25 countries, counting the European Union as
a country, which is the correct way to count it for
fisheries purposes, you get the 90% of the world's wild
fish by weight.
So this is a very doable thing.
We can.
It comes down to 10 decision makers doing basically one
thing, stopping overfishing, to make sure all this natural,
healthy seafood is available for the future.
Now, I want to point out one last thing.
In the forecasts for the planet between now and 2050,
there is an optimistic plan that the middle classes are
going to grow and that there will be a big expansion in the
middle class of China, Brazil, India.
This is devoutly to be hoped for.
This is a good thing.
That means, among other things, that they will be
eating a lot more animal protein.
And if you face up to what the consequences of expanded
livestock production will be for the planet, you will be
very worried, because livestock production is one of
the most intensive forms of agriculture.
And remember, I talked about agriculture broadly being the
enemy of biodiversity on the planet on the land, while
livestock production is a really tough problem for
biodiversity on the land.
It also is a big producer of methane and, therefore,
climate forcing activity on the planet.
It also is a huge demander of fresh
water and aquifer depletion.
So if you care about those things--
climate change, aquifer depletion, deforestation--
you need to care about making the ocean abundant.
I assume all of us here care about feeding
poor and hungry people.
But if you are so hardhearted that that's not part of your
agenda, and all you care about is these other things, you
also have a reason to fight for an abundant ocean.
I have had some people say to me, I
don't really like seafood.
I don't even understand how somebody in the middle of
Africa, who lives nowhere near seafood, is going to benefit
from an abundant ocean.
Tell me why I should care about this.
My answer is, seafood right now is equal to eggs as a
source of animal protein in the human diet--
A-- so it's bigger than you think it is.
And B, if you're a person who eats food--
let's imagine that possibility--
or you're a person in the middle of Africa who is never
going to see a fish but who is hungry, and that's your
client-- in your head, you want to help that person--
you can help them by making the oceans be abundant,
because the price of grain in the year 2050 will be
different if we have an abundant ocean or not, because
livestock production is a big demander of grain.
And so, the price of a taco, the price of a loaf of bread,
will be different in the year 2050, and better and more
affordable for that person in the middle of Africa, if we
have an abundant ocean.
So I really want the world to see this opportunity.
And I really want us to capture it.
The last thing I want to say-- and then I'll take questions--
when you think about nature, and you think about what it
takes to restore nature, consider that the oceans are
one of the strongest and most fertile and most robust parts
of nature on the planet.
Fish, many of them, lay eggs by the millions.
You can, and it's proven in the data, if you will stop
overfishing and you will allow spawning stocks to rebuild,
you can, in 5 or 10 years, 5 or 10 years, see measurable
increases in ocean abundance.
You can get to a point where you can have a bigger catch, a
sustainable bigger catch, very much in the lifetimes of
everybody in this room.
It's not like the longer-term task of rebuilding a rain
forest, which can take 100 years, if that.
This is something that short attention
span theater rewards.
We can get there.
We can get there.
And we can get there in a way that's measurable.
We think the blunt estimate is that the world, if well
managed, if it managed its oceans well, can increase the
sustainable catch on the order of 20% to 40% over the
previous peak.
So I talked at the beginning of my remarks about the
world's fish catch peaking in the late 1980s.
There is upside on top of that peak on the order of 20% to
40% if we can get these top 10 countries to do a good job.
And then, the fundamental point here is that the mindset
that I talked about at the beginning of my remarks, about
the war between agriculture and biodiversity, the war
between feeding people and protecting life that occurs on
the land, is wrong when it comes to the ocean.
Those two things are actually allies.
Those two enemies are now allies.
The task of feeding people wild seafood, we are eating a
wild creature.
So the things that we do to make the wild creatures
abundant benefit the biodiversity of the ocean.
The way you have a really productive ocean is you have a
biodiverse ocean.
So you do not have to choose, if you are managing them well.
Indeed, you are doing the things that are achieving both
goals at once.
So thank you very much.
That's my quick overview of the book.
I hope you will read the book.
It's called "The Perfect Protein."
President Clinton was nice enough to write the forward
for it, partly because he helped, as Jennifer explained,
to sign the laws in place in the United States that
tightened our regulation of our oceans and made us one of
the better ocean managers in the world.
We are seeing progress around the world.
And I think that this is one of those problems that the
world can actually fix.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
So I am delighted to take questions or comments.
AUDIENCE: So I've been to Iceland, at the invitation of
President Grimsson, and seen how they manage their
fisheries successfully there.
They're profitable.
They're sustainable.
They do sound science.
So, certainly, when the will is there to manage a fishery
effectively, it can be managed.
So what do you think the most important thing that needs to
happen, to inspire the will to tackle the global issue both
the United States and abroad, to actually do
what Iceland has done?
ANDY SHARPLESS: Well, there's good ways for this to happen,
and there's bad ways for this to happen.
Very often, the way the world does this is
that it sees a collapse.
It lets things get to the point of serious difficulty.
Chile, where we have worked very, very successfully over
the last 10 years, is an example of the latter.
They mismanaged their industrial fleet.
They collapsed their three biggest fisheries.
The scientists would come in and recommend the quota.
The fleet would say, we want a bigger quota.
The government would exceed to the fleet demands.
And so, guess what?
They crashed their fisheries.
After about 10 or 15 years of inability to catch their
permitted quotas, because they had overfished so badly, the
fleet was pretty discredited.
The government regulators were now in a position to see that
they needed to do something different.
And we were successful in January of this year in
getting the law there changed from a discretionary regime to
a mandatory regime.
And this is basically what President Clinton did in 1995.
And this is what the European Union is on the verge of doing
in the next few months.
In every place in the world, where you have a law that says
to the regulators, if you would like, you can set
scientific quotas, if you would like, you can protect
nursery habitat, you could choose, the law will allow you
to manage bycatch, if that's the law, it doesn't work.
And what we did in 1995, and what the Chileans did in
January, and what the Europeans are on the verge of
doing, is making those three things mandatory.
And so, the law says you must, if you're the regulator and
the manager of this fishery, set scientific quotas, you
must protect nursery habitat, you must reduce bycatch.
You can get there.
Chiefly, the way the world gets there is by seeing in the
numbers collapses and knowing that they
need to make a change.
That's the bad path the Chileans traveled.
That's the bad path the Europeans traveled.
The Americans didn't let our Pacific fishery collapse
before we realized that we needed to make a fix.
The New England fishery got pretty badly ruined here by
overfishing.
So we had examples of mismanagement of our own.
You cab also have an upside story, which is, of course,
what the book is trying to say, which is that this is a
great opportunity.
There's lots of upside here from good management--
people love seafood.
They like to eat it.
It tastes good.
It's healthy for them.
It's good for the planet.
It's the perfect protein--
and to try to get people to focus on the upside, but
history would suggest that more often people have to have
a brush with disaster to get motivated to
do the right thing.
AUDIENCE: Can you speak, just because we're from the US now,
a little more about how you would
actually change our practices?
So we have quota levels today.
If we were to implement some of the restrictions you
mentioned, how different are they than today's quotas?
Would we be changing the type of fish we would be gathering?
What other measures would you put in place?
Is it the methodology?
Just speak to kind of where on the food chain you'd want to
select from, things like that?
ANDY SHARPLESS: So, in the United States of America, the
good news is, and since we're on the Pacific here, the
Pacific American fisheries are pretty well managed.
So we don't have big problems in the Pacific.
We've done a good job there.
New England fishery is a disaster, as I mentioned.
We need to allow the New England fisheries to rebuild.
So we need to set and enforce lower quotas there, protect
some nursery habitat, especially from bottom
trawling, reduce bycatch.
AUDIENCE: Well, like, what's a rough percentage?
Are we talking about, like, cut it by 20% or cut
it by, like, 60%?
What does it take for it to get a chance to grow back?
ANDY SHARPLESS: It's hard for me to give you a summary
answer, because as species by species, it's different.
And I haven't calculated, but could calculate, like, if you
averaged together the New England fisheries by weight
and what the average change would be there.
And then, you have a decision about how fast you want the
rebuild to occur.
You know what I mean?
There's a trade-off.
Like, you can do the math in your head, right?
There's a trade-off between a lower cut in current fishing
pressure and then a faster rebound versus a smaller cut
and then a slower rebuild.
And that's, in fact, the struggle that is happening in
New England right now.
We would have a preference for a lower cut and a faster
rebuild, because you get more results and
more fish that way.
Reasonable question you're asking.
I don't have the summary math in my head for New England or
the United States.
I do want to shift to two other things that we ought to
do that your question asked about.
As an individual, you ought to guide your fish consumption in
the following way.
Eat wild.
Eat small species.
Eat local.
Eat farmed shellfish wherever you can.
And I'm sorry to say, don't eat any shrimp anymore.
I can explain these five simple rules quickly.
Wild, we talked about, as being better than farmed
already in my answers, in my previous remarks.
Farmed shellfish, we already talked about why that's good.
Local, the American fisheries are generally better managed
than the foreign fisheries.
We import 90% of our seafood.
So if you're eating local, or domestic might be more
precise, you're likely eating a fish that's better managed
than something coming from the rest of the world.
So that's the reason to do that.
And then shrimp, which is loved by America--
and I love shrimp--
effectively, there's no way to feel good about eating shrimp.
If you're eating wild shrimp, you're eating something that
has enormous amounts of bycatch.
Shrimp are appropriately named.
They're very small.
So that means to catch shrimp, you have to have
a small mesh net.
You catch three, four, five pounds of other creatures
along with each pound of shrimp.
I was on "CBS This Morning" the week before last, the day
we launched the book, and the actor who played Bubba Gump
was following me.
You will all recognize who that was.
I wanted to make this joke on TV, but I did not have time
with Tom Hanks to make that joke.
So if you're eating wild shrimp, you have to picture
that you're also eating three or four or five pounds of
other things, including, like, turtles that got caught in the
shrimp nets.
If you're eating farmed shrimp, you're eating
something that's imported typically from the a tropical
country, where a coastal pond was created.
A shallow coastal pond was created, often in a mangrove
forest, filled with shrimp, fed intensively, so
intensively packed in there, so swimming in their own fecal
matter that high levels of pesticides and antibiotics are
applied to keep them healthy until the point when that gets
so contaminated that they have to move to a new place and
create a new pond.
You can fly over Belize, as I've done, and see these kind
of strange zones.
And you don't know what they are.
They're former fish, shrimp ponds,
unpleasant things to see.
The last thing I want to say about what we could do in the
United States of America--
and your question is a very good one--
we have an opportunity, because we import 90% of our
seafood, to effect the conduct of the world's fleets by our
buying practices.
And if we would pass laws, that have now been introduced
into both the Senate and the House, to require that all
seafood sold in the United States is traceable, traceable
to when it was caught, where it was caught, how it was
caught, we would make it very hard for illegally-sourced
fish to get into our supply chain.
And illegally-sourced fish are on the order of 10% to 25% of
the world's catch, fish caught out of quota, in the wrong
place, and so forth.
If we had a strict traceability regime, those
illegal fishermen would have trouble documenting that their
catches were legal.
And they wouldn't be able to sell them to us.
And they would have a self-interested reason,
because they want to sell us, to fix their practices.
Senator Begich from Alaska has introduced a bill in the
Senate to do this.
Congressman Markey has introduced a bill in the House
to do this.
They're called the Safe Seafood Act.
We would like you to contact your representatives or your
senators and encourage them to cosponsor these bills to get
them through Congress.
We've done more seafood testing than any organization
in the country.
We've tested 1,200--
more than the government--
1,200 different samples of seafood around the country and
discovered that, on average, about 33% of the time, what
you bought is not what they told you it was.
Now, sometimes, it's a small mislabeling.
Sometimes, it's a big mislabeling.
But there's a lot of seafood fraud going on.
So the Safe Seafood Fraud Act would also bring you benefits
as a consumer.
It would stop you from being defrauded while also
delivering conservation benefits to the planet.
So, that's one of Oceana's big priorities this year.
And we'd love to have your help on that.
But our fishery management rules are in good shape.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Could you talk through an example where a
fishery collapsed, good practices were put in place,
and it actually recovered?
ANDY SHARPLESS: When I started developing the argument that
is in the book, I would review this with Oceana's board of
directors, the argument, as we were starting
to figure it out.
And they said just what you said, right here.
They said, Andy, could you give us some case examples of
fishery rebounds, please?
And a scientist on our board, who's a very distinguished
scientist, said, you're asking Andy to prove
that gravity works.
And they said, yes, we are.
Please prove that gravity works.
So I went out, and I got some case examples of fisheries
that had been mismanaged and wrecked
and had then rebounded.
And there are many of them.
It's not hard to find them.
There are four of them in this little pamphlet which we will
hand out to you.
And I can show you these charts here.
We famously call these charts u-charts, because they go
down, and then they go up.
And in each of these cases, which I can call out to you,
there was, like, a 40 or a 50-year period of
mismanagement.
The first one here is the Norwegian Arctic cod, which
was badly managed by the Norwegians.
They drove the spawning stock way down and kept it down by
mismanagement.
And in the 1980s, they imposed a discard band.
And it rebounded in 5 or 10 years.
This next example is the New Zealand rock lobster.
From '65 until about '90, badly mismanaged, catch limits
imposed in the '90s.
It comes back.
This next example is the Norwegian herring.
Fishing limits put on.
After bad litmus mismanagement, it recovered.
And this is US haddock, which was really, astoundingly
mismanaged by the United States, punished badly.
And in about 1995--
1995, remember that--
President Clinton and Senator Stevens get together in the
days when bipartisan action was possible.
And that fishery rebounded.
So 5 or 10 years, in the scientific
data, evidence of recovery.
I love that question.
I mean, this is not a theoretical exercise.
This is in the data over and over again.
Now, there is of famous counterexample.
Do you know what the famous counterexample is?
AUDIENCE: Canadian Cod, maybe?
ANDY SHARPLESS: Yes, well done.
The famous counterexample is Canadian cod, which were badly
overfished by the Canadians and by some European fleets.
The Canadians finally imposed tight restrictions on it.
And it has not come back.
And it is the classic nightmare scenario of a
fishery that was once hugely important.
Here's huge cod that were five or six feet long, so important
to the early development of the United States that we
named a part of our country after them, Cape Cod.
That fishery has not come back.
Nobody really knows why.
You could speculate that some other creature came into the
ecological niche that the cod occupied, and now the cod
can't get going again.
But that is the exception.
It's like what I was talking about, tunas
and swordfish, earlier.
Please don't be misled by the exceptions to the rules.
Happily, this is an exception, because
it's a nightmare story.
AUDIENCE: Was this an exception because
they waited too long?
ANDY SHARPLESS: Nobody really knows why it's an exception.
It could be that they waited too long.
But if you look at these other examples that I held up here,
some of them are badly mismanaged over the course of
20, 30 years and, yet, they were able to recover.
It's probably that there was some other phenomenon that
people don't fully understand, like I said, that something
moved in there and was able to take root.
It's also possible that the heavy trawling in that area,
bottom trawling, had a really serious effect.
Nobody really knows, because it is a unusual
counterexample.
AUDIENCE: So in your discussion here, you're
talking about trying to feed the global population.
And you talk a lot about fish.
Is there a role for things like algae and kelp and things
like that in your vision of feeding the global population
over the next century?
ANDY SHARPLESS: Short answer would be yes.
But the long answer is, I don't know a lot about that.
I mean, from what little I know, I think that they can be
sustainably and usefully, you know, managed in a way that's
sensible and doesn't create huge problems.
You may know more about that than I do.
But we have to learn to like to eat algae, which I expect
would be a difficult challenge.
I don't know about kelp.
So, short answer is yes.
I would be an optimist on that.
But that's not based on an informed study of it.
So the question is-- just for the microphone--
can I talk more about what people should be eating and
changes that are required there?
So you anticipated the answer.
Eat lower down on the food chain where you can, so
smaller species fish, anchovies,
sardines would be great.
I talked about farmed mussels, oysters, clams.
Eat all those you can.
Don't eat big predator fish, if you want a
simple rule of thumb.
If you really have an appetite for information, you can use
these food guides.
And the Monterey Aquarium and the Blue Ocean Institute have
food guides which are quite helpful.
There's applications you can get for your remote device
that'll tell you, in the grocery store, what to choose.
Many people don't have the patience or
the time to do that.
But if you're one of them, more power to you.
That's a good thing to do.
Part of the idea of "The Perfect Protein" was to give
people these simple rules that they could kind of apply in a
busy life, like eat small fish, eat wild fish, eat
farmed shellfish if you can.
Don't eat shrimp.
We have 21 recipes in the book that show you how to prepare
something you might not think would be tasty.
And I encourage you to try them and learn, I hope, that
you like these things that you might not have
thought you'd like.
Sardines might be an example of that.
Most people might not think a sardine would be
tasty, but it can be.
When I was on this show--
I mentioned "CBS This Morning"--
Eric Ripert, the famous chef of Le Bernardin, which is one
of the most prestigious French restaurants in the country,
Manhattan, was on with me.
He has a recipe in the book.
And he was the poissonnier at the Tour D'Argent, maybe the
most famous French restaurant in the world, in Paris.
He knows a hell of a lot about fish.
And I said to him, Eric, I cooked your recipe on Friday
night, which I had done.
I had gotten the clams and andouille sausage recipe out
of it, which is also served today.
And I prepared it at home, much to my wife's and my
daughters' amazement, because I'm really not very much of a
cooking kind of guy.
And except for the fact that I hadn't really scrubbed the
clams to get all of the sand out, it was quite good.
So the last thing on this point is we live at a moment
in time when there's a lot of foodieism abroad.
Chefs have become kind of heroes of the day.
They are celebrities on television.
People are interested in food preparation.
The is an ongoing incentive in that world for marketing
innovation, for bringing to people tastes that they
haven't had before, things to eat that they
haven't tried before.
And so, I think we have the wind at our back in terms of
encouraging people to eat lower down on the food chain.
Because the food industry likes to innovate.
So, when we come to them and say, try out some of these
unusual creatures that are listed in the
book, they say, great.
And so we have 21 famous chefs, each offering a
different recipe for things that you might not have
thought would taste good.
AUDIENCE: This is sort of a personal challenge that I feel
might get reflected globally.
So, I'll tell my friends, hey, bluefin tuna, you should
really not be eating that, you know, running
out, endangered, etc.
And their response is, yeah, so it's all going to be gone.
We better eat it while it's still here, right?
And I hear rumors about overfished quotas, in, say,
Asia, where you have fishermen stockpiling so that they can
sell it when it's not available, literally, anymore.
How do we deal with that?
ANDY SHARPLESS: The problem of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is a
counterexample to everything I've said here.
It's a top predator fish.
It has the misjudgment to swim across national boundaries all
of the time.
Maybe we could teach it, you know, to, like, live its life
inside national territory.
It is a high-value fish.
And financial incentives to go catch it and sell it, as you
mentioned in your question, are huge.
Individual, high-quality specimens can sell for the
cost of a house, not a house in Palo Alto, but a house
somewhere else.
They are very vulnerable.
They are in a tough spot.
And I'm worried about them.
But I don't want the exception, which they are--
on a basis of the oceans by weight, the oceans as a source
of animal protein by weight-- they are an exception to the
general rule.
And so the problems that we see with Atlantic bluefin tuna
management and overfishing do not apply to most species.
And so, be optimistic about so many other species.
Meanwhile, if you want to help on Atlantic bluefin tuna,
there is an international committee that has all of the
weaknesses that you suspect it would have, called ICCAT--
the acronym, which sets the quotas for
Atlantic bluefin catches--
the International Commission for the Conservation of
Atlantic Tuna.
The United States is a member of that body, along with about
more than 20 other countries.
And they tend to do a terrible job.
They tend to have lowest common denominator outcomes
that they don't vigorously enforce.
And they have allowed this fishery to be badly managed.
And the Atlantic is at about a 15% of an unfished ocean
number in terms of population of Atlantic bluefin.
So they're at a dangerous point.
I hope they come back.
We, like many other conservation groups, press the
governments who are on ICCAT to lower quotas, to allow
rebuilding.
If you're a responsible person, you should be
contacting your government and getting them to do that.
And I hope they will.
But that's a creature in a tough spot.
Jennifer is suggesting that the US could ban imports of
Atlantic bluefin tuna as a contribution.
There might be trade, WTO, implications to that decision
that would get the United States in
trouble with the WTO.
I don't know.
There would be complexity there.
AUDIENCE: We'd picket.
ANDY SHARPLESS: Yeah.
Since that's a globally-eaten commodity, that might not be
enough, even that, because the quota that we didn't take
would go somewhere else.
Thank you very much for your attention.
I hope this was interesting.
And I hope you'll buy my book, our book, promote it.
We would like lots of people to get the message.
And I hope you'll enjoy some of the recipes in the back.
Thanks very much.
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