PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — IN November, regulators from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shut down recreational and commercial cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, that enchanting arm of the coastal sea stretching east-northeast from Cape Cod. They did not have much choice: Federal law requires action to rebuild fish stocks when they are depleted, and recent surveys revealed cod populations to be at record lows, despite decades of regulations intended to restore them.
It’s easy to imagine this recent drop in the cod population as a new phenomenon — a result, perhaps, of global warming, or some combination of climate change and overfishing by giant steel ships armed with electronic fish-finders and precise GPS navigation systems. And it’s just as easy to imagine that, after a season or two of belt-tightening, fish populations will rebound — it is, after all, a strategy that state and federal regulators have pursued for decades.
In fact, humans have been affecting the Atlantic’s fish stocks for centuries, beginning with technology so simple that people today would not even consider it “technology.” Forgetting that history, we opt for short-term fixes, which only compound the problem.
The fishery resources of the western Atlantic once seemed virtually limitless, with fish supposedly as numerous as grains of sand in the Sahara. And yet the current emergency effort to restore cod populations is simply the latest chapter in a 150-year saga in which fishermen, scientists, industrialists and politicians have consistently confronted emptier nets and fewer fish.
• Guardian: Radical new economic system will emerge from collapse of capitalism Political adviser and author Jeremy Rifkin believes that the creation of a super internet heralds new economic system that could solve society’s sustainability challenges … At the very moment of its ultimate triumph, capitalism will experience the most exquisite of deaths. This is the belief of political adviser and author Jeremy Rifkin, who argues the current economic system has become so successful at lowering the costs of production that it has created the very conditions for the destruction of the traditional vertically integrated corporation. Rifkin, who has advised the European Commission, the European Parliament and heads of state, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, says: “No one in their wildest imagination, including economists and business people, ever imagined the possibility of a technology revolution so extreme in its productivity that it could actually reduce marginal costs to near zero, making products nearly free, abundant and absolutely no longer subject to market forces. With many manufacturing companies surviving only on razor thin margins, they will buckle under competition from small operators with virtually no fixed costs. We are seeing the final triumph of capitalism followed by its exit off the world stage and the entrance of the collaborative commons,” Rifkin predicts.
