Photo by Josefa Holland-Merten

Before reading, this assignment was done on paper but was never put on this blog until now. The date in which this was written was on November 6.

    Balance is essential to sustain a limited resource. In today's world, such a concept is difficult to grasp; and this is especially true for the life on Earth's waters. Due to a heavy amount of demand from people all across the globe, populations of the most popular fish people eat are depleting. The scarcity of marine life is becoming more apparent than ever, and it's taking a harsh toll not only to the fish themselves, but also to the environment and the people. Overfishing is a severe issue that has led to the struggling sustainability between people's demand and the environment.
    Satisfying the increasing demand in the short term is certainly going to mean a problem in the long term, especially with fishing. Stephen Columbia, a Stanford University marine biologist, lays out that long term concept, that "None of us regular folk are going to be able to afford seafood". This is the problem that the average consumer of seafood is going to face, given the current overfishing practices. It's clear that scarcity of a resource--fish--will lead to the price of it increasing. Not only this, but places such as Hawaii, where the reliance on seafood is strong, can suffer consequences. Molokai activist Walter Ritte, whose island is being faced with the introduction of Oahu fishers, explained that "...people are coming to Molokai because their resources are depleted on their island...where we've been working really hard to...managing the resource..." This conflict affects fishers too through situations like this. It is comparable to that of homeless sweeping; taking them out of the community will only make it a problem for another (except in this case, the environment suffers.
    However, no other group apart of this problem suffers more than the fish and the environment itself. According to a study, "at least 29% of fish species have collapsed, and the trend is accelerating." The way in which they collapsed stems from overfishing. By losing the biological diversity of an ecosystem, that ecosystem becomes more susceptible to collapse. Due to that reason, destructive overfishing has caused "about 90% of the ocean's big predators--like cod and tuna--have been fished out of existence." This is huge, especially due to how much bigger the fish export trade has become. The deprecation of marine life can be traced to overfishing since it causes such an imbalance to the marine ecosystems.
    Thus far, all of the sustainability and environmental issues that marine life currently face are direct consequences of overfishing's destructive force. Overfishing has in turn created those issues that both the environment and people struggle to face. A continuation of such practices would mean a lot of problems in the future of fishing.

Photo by Josefa Holland-Merten