Earthjustice: When the Environment Meets the Law

During the interview, she reiterated that global warming was still the environment’s biggest threat, but then there were the oceans. I told Cedestav about a night I camped on the beach in a fishing village in Michoacán, Mexico. The anglers shared how little they were catching, and how they felt the effect of Japanese fishing boats poaching their territory.

“What we did to the Bison in the West is what we are now doing to the ocean,” Cederstav acknowledged. “If we suggested that the entire population could sustain themselves on hunting land animals, we can’t sustain ourselves with wild fish in the ocean. [A fisherman] used to be able to fill up a boat in a couple of hours, now it’s a three-day tour.”

So how could I, a self-appointed pescatarian, keep up my protein intake without participating in the depletion of our oceans? According to Cedarstav, I couldn’t.

“The idea is to incorporate solutions from different countries, then present them in the countries. With greater awareness of problems, you can find solutions. Use the Monterey Bay Aquarium card. When you go to the fish market, choose the fish that they are buying.”

And what about farmed fish, which I hated the taste of, but figured was better than taking away more of the Grizzlies’ Coho salmon. Within moments, Cederstav took sushi off my menu.

“As countries’ fishery resources are disappearing, there is an incredible increase in agriculture. Tuna farming is resource intensive and incredibly harmful because we’re running out of tuna. With agriculture of tuna, they eat many times their rate and strip mine the oceans by bringing in every small fish they can find so they can feed their tuna, then they sell to Japan and the U.S. for sushi. So they just caught all the small fish for the tuna and depleted the oceans.”

Cederstav and Earthjustice are trying to get foreign governments to create better controls on these harmful activities and then to enforce those controls, but she said that it’s in the education of consumers, and enforcing the American law which states that markets are supposed to label where fish come from, that a difference can be made.