Professor Ray Hilborn has a question for the marine conservation lobby: If eating most fish is bad, is it better to eat beef, chicken or pork?
It’s a rhetorical question.
“I think the answer is pretty clearly no,” he says.
The American fisheries scientist — he teaches resource management and conservation at the University of Washington — became interested in the wider environmental cost of food production two years ago.
“A friend in Africa who’s the head of conservation programs for the Frankfurt zoo asked me ‘should I stop eating fish?,’ and I’d never really thought about the tradeoffs before.
“Almost everybody focuses on rainforest or marine and doesn’t look at the connections.”
Those connections form part of a report Hilborn is presenting at seminars in New Zealand this week.
Titled “The Environmental Cost of New Zealand Food Production,” it assembles information on various factors such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, erosion, loss of biodiversity and eutrophication — the amount of nutrients released into the air, water or soil.
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