Читать книгу Captain Paul Watson Interview - Paul Watson, Michele Sciurba - Страница 16

In the film Seaspiracy you mention that it is not possible to create sustainable fishing. Do you think this is the way to move forward in protecting maritime areas?

Well, there is sustainable fishing but it’s artisanal and indigenous fishing. If we’re talking about fishing communities in Africa, or India or Latin America, that is sustainable. But they are not the problem. The problem is corporate, industrialized fishing operations. Giant super trawlers, hundred-mile-long gillnets, hundred-mile-long longlines, giant purse seiners and bottom trawling, that is the problem. Industrialized commercial fishing is not sustainable anywhere in the world and never will be. It just doesn’t exist, and that makes sense. There is simply no place for eight billion fish-eating, meat-eating primates on the planet. When you take a look at the numbers it’s just mindboggling. The livestock industry accounts for 65 billion animals and that is not counting fish; it is the leading cause of ground water pollution, the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions, and the leading cause of “dead zones” in the oceans. About 30% of all the fish caught aren’t eaten by people, but is rendered into fish meal and fed to chickens, pigs and domesticated salmon. We now live in a world where chickens eat more fish than all the albatrosses and dolphins in the world put together. Ecologically, that’s insane. Domestic house cats eat more fish than all the seals in the North Atlantic Ocean. 2,8 million tons of fish gets turned into cat food alone and that’s hardly the natural prey of a domestic house cat.

There is also the myths about aqua culture. Many people turn to aqua culture fish and think this is sustainable, but as we learn from Seaspiracy, it is not sustainable, and it is a source of pollution.

It’s a major pollutant because of the intensive use of antibiotics and chemicals. They take these fish and put them in a chemical bath every year to destroy the sea lice. Sea lice are like crustaceans. So, this chemical brew gets into the natural ecosystem and kills crabs and other animals. Not only are antibiotics released into the ecosystem but more importantly, viruses created from this concentration of fish get into indigenous populations. So, zoonotic transmissions of viruses into wild salmon populations have become a major, major problem and wild salmon don’t have the antibiotics that are fed to the domesticated salmon. People don’t realize also that when you raise a salmon at a fish farm and you cut that fish open, you’re not getting that pinkish, orangish color. It’s a dirty white. Nobody’s going to buy that. So, they put dye in the food palettes because wild salmon get that color from eating krill in the open sea and the only way to duplicate this is to artificially color them.

It’s horrible to see the fish confined, stressed and in pain, to see how they get eaten alive by sea lice.

It’s extremely unhealthy for the fish and for the people who eat them. Fecal pollution in the ecosystem is high. In addition, it takes about 70 fish from the ocean to raise one fish on the farm. And there’s the number of predators that are killed every year on fish farms, everything from eagles to bears to otters to seals to sea lions because they are considered a threat to the “stock” as they call it. Nevertheless, we’re making headway. We shut down 17 fish farms on Vancouver Island and British Columbia. There is a new book by Richard Flanagan entitled Toxic which goes after the harvesting of salmon on Tasmanian fish farms. Don Staniford is working to stop fish farms in Scotland. An invasive species, like the Atlantic salmon, simply doesn’t belong in the Pacific. If you take a piranha and put it into a pond in Germany or in the U.S., it’s a crime. You cannot introduce an invasive predator into an ecosystem. And yet, here they’re doing that, they get away with it and the government supports and even subsidizes it. It simply doesn’t belong there. It’s an invasive species.

There are a lot of examples of the introduction of predatory species in native ecosystems, like the imported poisoned frog that has destroyed entire parts of the ecosystem in Australia.

The cane toads. Every time humans try to interfere to manage nature, it backfires. Take Hawaii for instance: rats came off the ship to eat the birds. So, how are we going to solve it? Oh, let’s bring in mongoose, they’ll eat the rats. Well, the problem is the mongoose were operating at day and the rats operate at night, so now both the mongoose and the rats were eating the birds. Everything points to one conclusion: ecological collapse. As I said at the 2015 UN Climate Conference in Paris, if we are going to address climate change, we need to leave the oceans intact. The oceans help regulate the climate and we must allow them to repair the damage we have done. The laws of ecology will kick in.