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Sorry, We’re All Out of Chilean Sea Bass
KNECHT: Save our dwindling fish stocks.
PHOTO COURTESY MARION ETTLINGER
May I take your order? One Patagonian toothfish, please. If that doesn’t sound appetizing, how about Chilean sea bass — what the fish was renamed to appeal to gourmands. The gambit worked but not without consequences, as G. Bruce Knecht (MBA ’86) reveals in his new book, Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish (Rodale, 2006). The author, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, details an Australian patrol boat’s 4,000-mile chase of an illegal fishing vessel. He also explains how the toothfish became popular — and, in the process, depleted — telling a bracing fish story about one of the world’s scarcest resources.
What’s the status of the Patagonian toothfish?
This is a fish that doesn’t move far. So if you find where it lives, and you’re fishing with longlines that carry 15,000 baited hooks, it’s strip-mining. It doesn’t take long before entire populations are removed, and that’s what has happened.
Why don’t people seem as impassioned about protecting endangered fish as they do about, say, saving trees?
People talk about the world becoming a smaller place, but there’s a global disconnect between the places our food comes from and us the consumers. And that’s part of the problem.
Do you think it was worth spending millions of taxpayer dollars and endangering lives to pursue the fishing vessel?
The economic incentives for this kind of fishing begin to resemble the drug business. If an occasional vessel gets caught and confiscated, that’s just the cost of doing business for the illegal operators. But the countries that control the fisheries don’t have a choice. They have to enforce the regulations, or the fish will be gone from the few habitats where they still remain.
Do you have any sympathy for the fishermen on the pirate ship?
I have a great deal of sympathy for them. They don’t know any other way to make a living. And yet, if we let them have their way, the possibility of continuing to fish will disappear.
What can be done to protect their livelihood while protecting the fish?
I think the ultimate answer is what some people call ocean zoning. Just as we have zones for people and buildings and other zones for nature, I think we need to do something similar in the sea to allow fish habitats that are not subject to the ravages of industrialized fishing.
You’re an accomplished sailor. What attracts you to the sea and sea stories?
The sea is a faraway place, and I think when people read, they in some sense want to be transported from their normal lives. And writing about things that happen in faraway oceans certainly provides that.
— Lewis I. Rice
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