tuna

I wanted to share an interesting NY Times piece about Somali pirates who hijacked a Ukrainian freighter and are asking for a multi-million dollar ransom to release the ship and its crew. It's odd to think that piracy still exists in this day and age, but people are driven to commit crime for all sorts of reasons: greed, lust, insanity, necessity and so forth.

The twist here? The pirates claim that they were driven to piracy because of illegal tuna fishing. Since Somalia has essentially been without a government since the early '90s, there was no one patrolling the shore. Enter the pirates. Somali diplomat Mohamed Osman Aden is quoted as saying, "It’s true that the pirates started to defend the fishing business...and illegal fishing is a real problem for us."

By no means are the pirates justified because of Somalia's struggle with illegal fishing off its coast, but this article demonstrates how precious the sea's protein is -- in the absence of a legitimate coast patrol, criminals took it upon themselves to protect the plundered resource.

At last, sustainable sushi cards are on the way!

In the May issue of Harper's, Jonathan Rowe argues that the Gross Domestic Product is a poor measure of an economy's health because it only tallies spending, and doesn't take into account whether the spending actually adds anything to our quality of life. According to the GDP, he writes, "a terminal-cancer patient going through a costly divorce" is "the nation's economic hero." Likewise, the GDP measures increased fossil fuel use as a positive, since it burns dollars; in actuality, the nation is poorer because its irreplaceable natural resources are diminished.

Where am I going with this? I think I've come across a real-world example of Rowe's thesis: according to an industry group, high fuel costs could take up to one-third of the world's longline tuna fleet off the oceans. This is great for the yellowfin and bigeye tuna usually targeted by these boats, but of course the industry group and the article posit that this "bad" for the economy.

Our natural resources aren't considered in the GDP, and so most talk of "stimulating" the economy doesn't paint a full picture of what's really going on. As we burn fuel, cut down trees, scoop out tuna and lop off mountaintops, we irrevocably give up parts of the planet, parts of ourselves even, for the sake of positive statistics.

As Rowe concludes, "The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process." Leaving some tuna fish in the sea, I think, moves us closer to this ideal.