Quinn GORDON
Author
Imagine standing in a field stretching out as far as you can see. Birds flitter across the horizon. You blink your eyes. In the distance, an area the size of a football pitch is turned into ash. The birds are quieter. You blink again. Another patch disappears. The birds no longer chirp. One more blink. Another square removed. The birds are gone. Before long, you are surrounded by a valley of nothingness. This is the reality of what is happening across the ocean floor every second because of the industrial fishing practice known as bottom trawling.
Bottom trawling is a commercial fishing method by which industrial-sized vessels target marine species living on the sea floor. Using nets large enough to carry jumbo jets, these ships rake the ocean bottom, ensnaring everything in their paths. They blow past what would be sufficient and consume far beyond what the natural ecosystem can handle. In the process, this fishing method rips apart deep coral communities, upends vital seagrass beds, and captures threatened and endangered species. When all is said and done, over 75% of the marine life caught in the nets will ultimately have to be discarded. It is not just the irreparable loss of biodiversity that is concerning; because of its impact on the seafloor, bottom trawling disrupts the carbon storage taking place in deep oceans. Such a practice is misaligned with the sufficient use of marine resources within planetary boundaries, yet it is still practiced and even subsidized widely across the waters of the European Union. Bottom trawling is emblematic of the broader issues with Europe's industrial fisheries policy. While Europe's Common Fisheries Policy ostensibly attempted to halt the overexploitation of marine resources, band-aids on fishing quotas will not go far enough in challenging the political and economic structures of extraction that perpetuate environmental destruction.
If there is to be a future where marine biodiversity has a chance to recover, the European Union must embrace applications of sufficiency to its industrial fisheries. It can start this process by banning bottom trawling across all European waters. In tandem, the European Commission must work with regional fisheries management organizations to introduce stronger quotas, respecting the natural population limits of these ocean creatures. Doing so will ensure that fishers are taking enough, but not too much. Perhaps most importantly, with the ongoing development of the European Ocean Act, citizens should come together to host local marine sufficiency agoras. With these agoras, people from all walks of life will be able to engage directly with each other to determine how to best manage marine resources in a way tied to the community's actual needs, not the profit motives of industrial fishing conglomerates. These society-wide gatherings have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to ensure that Europe's future marine spatial plan is focused on sufficiency first and foremost.
Without structural change, it will soon be too late to prevent marine collapse. Europe must embrace blue sufficiency or find itself cast adrift in lifeless waters.