photo: John Haslam/Creative Commons via flickr
DCL
The men and women of Sea Shepherd have been spending the past six weeks or so in the Mediterranean attempting to stop bluefin tuna poaching, and getting into some near scuffles with Libyan and Maltese industrial fishermen in the process. In one incident, highlighted in Fish2Fork some 800 tuna were released from a cage, where they were being fattened for market past the legal date for the bluefin hunt. The official response from industry was of condemnation, with the usual epithets of 'terrorists' and the like being bandied about.
But an alternative view was expressed by Malta's traditional fishermen, who just like the bluefin tuna which used to provide their livelihood, have been pushed to the brink of extinction by fishing methods which utterly ignore all the ecological signs that something's amiss.
Charles Bugeja's family boasts four generations of fishermen. Today his father's vessel has been on land since May and the quota he was allocated was so low that it was reached within a few weeks. Bugeja said: "The Sea Shepherd people are doing what the government should have done to protect the tuna and the livelihood of traditional fishermen who have lived off the sea for generations. " While he understood the decline in tuna populations now requires such measures, he was bitter that his family was suffering the consequences of a big commercial industry controlled by a few.
Thousands of traditional fishermen currently have no work, he said, as others around him nodded in agreement. Those who speak up against the industry are alone, because most fishermen now depend on the industry to survive. Families who had made a living out of traditional fishing now have at least one family member who works for the industry, or depend on the industry to buy their catch. The Sunday market in the village now only sells what the industry refuses to take for export to the lucrative Japanese market.
Read the original article (Malta's traditional fishermen salute Sea Shepherd) for more on this, but here's the point I want to make:
Avoiding Pain Now Often Means More Pain Later
All of this speaks to a greater truth, beyond this specific instant or even fishing in general, that applies to our use of fossil fuels, our clearance of forests for farmland, the practice of industrial farming replacing crop rotation with more and more fertilizer, over-irrigation of fields drawing down the water table, et cetera etc. When you continue to draw down the resources of an ecosystem, the natural capital, beyond the capability for all the parts of the system to regenerate it eventually collapses, taking down the people dependent upon it for their lives and livelihoods.
Seen coming in advance—and more and more today, unlike with many past generations we see these things coming—you can curtail activities now to prevent future collapse, or at least delay it to ease the blow, or you can prioritize short term gains at the expense of future devastation.
More often than not it seems we choose the latter. We try to forestall pain now for pain later, not recognizing that the pain is likely inevitable and greater if you forestall it. That's what the Maltese traditional fishermen wisely have seen, but to which both this industry and other extractive industries are willfully blind.
Among all the evolutionary changes in consciousness, psychology and philosophy that need to occur for humanity to preserve itself on this planet, recognizing the truth that we ignore ecological limits at our immediate peril is near the top of the list.
Kudos to these fishermen recognizing this.
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