What Ray Hilborn has become known for saying, “go ahead and eat fish,” runs counter to what many well-funded ocean activists often tell us. Professor Hilborn, one of the world’s best-known and most respected fisheries scientists, was the man who brought much-needed sense to the global panic brought on by the infamous “2048” collapsing-global-fisheries study by German scientist Boris Worm, published in the journal Science in 2006. When the two men and their dissimilar scientific approaches eventually collaborated, they came to more sober, realistic conclusions. Their resulting 2009 study, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” was widely praised.
The Palo Alto, Calif., native and Seattle resident since 1987 says his third book (“Overfishing,” co-written by his wife, Ulrike) is sure to upset groups that contend the oceans’ fisheries are in deep crisis from industrial exploitation. In it, Hilborn takes that often-misunderstood word, overfishing, and lays out its many definitions and dispels some of the myths about man’s marine pursuits.
Wright: The U.S. government says all federally managed fisheries are sustainable. Do you agree with that assessment?
Hilborn: Yup. We have a system that essentially assures sustainability. Even when you have stocks that are overfished, the law requires they be rebuilt. People tend to look at the status of a stock and ask, “Is it sustainable or isn’t it?” But sustainability doesn’t have anything to do with how many fish are there; it has to do with the management system. So you can have lots of fish, but if you have an unregulated fishery, it may not be sustainable. You can have very few fish, but if you’ve got a legal framework that requires rebuilding, that stock is going to be sustainably managed.
Was Alaska salmon’s move away from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) a good move?
I don’t know. I’ve read some critiques about why the standards from the FAO guidelines are lower than the MSC’s and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true because the MSC standards are very high. As I’m fond of saying, no form of agriculture would meet those standards. Tell me a form of agriculture that doesn’t modify the structure and function of the ecosystem. It just doesn’t happen. The MSC standards are quite high and they’re much more than sustainability. They include a whole bunch of things about environmental impact, bycatch, as do other seafood classifications, like Monterey Bay, which isn’t about sustainability, it’s about what they feel are acceptable levels of environmental impact.
How important are catch shares as a tool in rebuilding fisheries?
In the project I did with Boris Worm and the group of 21 where we looked at the status of stocks, we could find no evidence of a silver bullet that some groups advocate — marine protected areas or catch shares — as either necessary or sufficient. The U.S. has done a fine job rebuilding stocks in systems without catch shares.
What are catch shares? They basically say that some people can catch the fish, other people can’t. The most successful fisheries management action undertaken in the last 100 years was a catch share program and it was called the 200-mile limit: Foreigners can’t catch fish and Americans can. That’s a form of a quota. The next stage in evolution was limited entry: Not every American can catch fish, only people who have a license can catch fish. That’s a catch-share system. There’s a lot of misperceptions about catch shares and people often equate them with [individual transferable quotas, or ITQs], which are falling out of favor. Other forms, where you let the fishing industry self organize like sector systems in New England, avoid some of the issues of ITQs. But there’s no question in my mind, if you want to have fisheries that are economically successful you have to do something to eliminate the race to fish. You have to eliminate the competitive nature of a fishery.
Your response to Worm’s “2048” study was critical, in that it got the media to step off the ledge a bit.
“Mind-bogglingly” stupid was the word I used.
How would you characterize your relationship with him, first initially and then as you collaborated?
I’d never met him until after that paper came out and we were on a [National Public Radio] show together and he seemed like a reasonable person that one could talk to. We had and have quite a good relationship. We have different perspectives; we will take the same information and we will talk about it in different ways. He’s more interested in seeing marine ecosystems protected and conserved. And my inclination is more to have sustainable exploitation. But we had no trouble writing our paper together in 2009. And we were recently on another NPR show where they asked me about the status of world fisheries and then they asked Boris and he said, “I agree with everything Ray said.” When it comes to the facts, I don’t think we have any significant differences.
How difficult is it to get the “best science” out there?
You need to distinguish between science and policy. I don’t think that getting the best science is much of an issue, we know how to do it. When it comes to policy, we might have major differences. But when it comes to what scientific data say, I don’t think there’s much trouble in getting there. But people get confused — you can manage your fisheries based on science, but you have to have social objectives and that’s where the real differences are. Sylvia Earle wants to completely protect the oceans, not catch anything. U.S. law is built around the idea of maximum sustainable yield, that you use the oceans to produce food. You can’t separate politics and fisheries if you think of politics as citing what you ultimately want to do.
We need to make very clear distinctions between what is science and what is politics. I like to think of it as a two stages: That we make political decisions about what we want to achieve and then we use science to achieve that. Then you get the politicians out of it. The last thing you want is politicians tinkering with quotas once the science has done its job. But the scientists can’t determine what the quota should be until we know what the objective is. If the objective is maximum sustainable yield, I know to set the quotas. If the objective is to protect the marine mammals, and then all of a sudden we have to decide how much we are willing to trade off — lower marine mammal abundance for the production of food from the ocean. That’s a social objective, that’s not a science question.
There are a lot of politics involved with the Common Fisheries Policy in Europe.
That’s a classic case of where they haven’t successfully distinguished between the science and the politics. They set very vague political objectives then they have the scientists do their work and then the politicians come back in and start tinkering with what the quotas should be. That’s exactly how it shouldn’t work.
There are numerous NGOs involved with fisheries and aquaculture. Does one in particular have the right or the wrong approach?
I would choose Greenpeace as having the wrong approach. I mean, they’re just so out there with distortions of science. They need to make clear what their objective really is, which as near as I can tell is to stop all industrial fishing. And they just seem to get almost every issue wrong. This business of pole-and-line-caught tuna is totally silly. You can’t catch anything near the total world tuna production with pole and line. And pole and line has enormous environmental impacts because you have to catch bait to fish. In my experience, the big American NGOs — World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense and Ocean Conservancy — they all are positive forces for improving marine conservation. I don’t see them as anti-fishing; I think they’re concerned about the effects of fishing. With most of them I have some kind of working relationship. ED has really gone on a catch share campaign that has annoyed a lot of people. But I certainly have no trouble talking to them and working with them. All of those groups are doing a lot of good work.
As a scientist who promotes fish consumption when many do not or urge caution, are you worried about being labeled “pro industry” or “pro fishing”?
I’m not worried about it; it certainly happens all of the time. I’ve had Greenpeace request all of my grant and contract records and in fact I’ve received, over the years, probably well over $1 million in research funding from various industry groups and I’ve received a lot more than that from various environmental foundations. There’s no question that, on the scale of things, I’m a fishing-friendly scientist.
You’ve said “Overfishing” may be a bit bland, but not contentious. Do you feel the discussion about marine resources has trended in the opposite direction, and if so, has that harmed our understanding of fishing and its impacts?
Yes to both questions. The majority of books about the oceans will basically be litanies of horror stories. As I say in the introduction to “Overfishing,” I could do that too. But I could also give a litany of success stories and what I tried to do was be balanced and say look, “We’ve got good examples and we’ve got bad examples. Let’s learn from good examples, let’s do more of that.”
The emphasis on the disasters of fishing has really dominated the conversation and has led lots of people to believe that fisheries are simply not sustainable. Essentially what they’re trying to do is throw the baby out with the bath water. They’re saying, “Fisheries management has failed. We need to get rid of our current management system and bring in something new.” And that something new might be a large-scale marine protected area, which is the most common NGO kind of solution. Or “ban trawling,” that’s a real common thing they say and what they don’t look at is the empirical record of fisheries that have been sustainable and contribute to world food security.
