Ocean Bankruptcy: World Fisheries on the Brink of Disaster

Fisherman extraordinaire and editor of Fly Fishing Is Spoken Here Sloan speaks from the pulpits of his most recent positions on the advisory panel to the National Marine Fisheries Services, the agency charged with negotiating and enforcing treaty management of open-seas fish populations, and the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tunas. There's""indiscriminate killing"" in commercial ocean fishing, Sloan says, and""our oceans are being stripped of their very life."" Despite the tabloid sweep of the title, his book is focused on three Atlantic tuna families most stressed by international commercial fishing industry and other billfish that have high-ticket sportfishing value; yellowfin, bluefin, and skipjack tunas are Sloan's version of the canaries in the mine, and he focuses much attention on them in these terse chapters styled as reports, memos, briefs and legal testimonies. Japan is cast as arch-villain of tuna conservation: in January 2001, a 400-pound bluefin sold for $172,000 at wholesale; the Japanese declared it was caught in home waters. Sloan's re-formatting of what is essentially deadly committee-report content into a compelling conservation brief is accomplished journalism in itself. Even at legislative junctures where a conservation jeremiad might erupt, Sloan remains a model rational gladiator-lobbyist (a few internal scores are settled among peer organizations) in this arena of globalized corporate fishing. His argument and even its failures are accessible to an interested lay audience as well as to the choir of sportfishing conservation interests opposing commercial overfishing.