Eat more fish. While you can get them. And get the right sort. Michael Wigan, in a recent article in the Financial Times paints a gloomy picture. "There is a vague idea that we can outsmart Nature by replacing natural management with the fish farm and the battery trout. We have domesticated the salmon as we did the cow, with ruthlessly intensive farming, and so the words `wild salmon' are a marketing novelty on the plastic pack." He goes on to give the prediction that there may never be a mad salmon disease, but tells us that until a decade ago pigs' blood was on their diet and that the salmon "are still tossed a blend of fish meal that they would be unlikely to ingest in their natural habitat."
But mostly he deals with the at-sea fisheries. Fish, he tells us, is no longer synonymous with cod, herring and mackerel - the largest catches are now of low-grade species: anchovies, pollack and jack mackerel. And as stocks shrink, more sophisticated ways of seeking out fish are devised. "Deepwater species, alien creatures of gothic strangeness are being jerked into unfamiliar light from hitherto inconceivable depths." In some cases a third of the catch is jettisoned as being of wrong species or size. A cavalier disregard for scarce resources. And "the chances of a North Sea cod dying a natural death are almost non-existent." And the demand goes on rising.
He hasn't a good word for seals. They often destroy a fish by taking one bite out of it. "But seals have an important role as cuddly fundraisers for environmental groups . . . " He says that aquaculture, as practised now, with its benefit to governments in giving regional employment has boom and bust cycles "that have cost bankers and local environments dear." In Norway, a leader in this, a third of the rivers have lost their native stocks, "in part because of parasite proliferation on the farms."
What does he propose? "Estuaries and accessible brackish waters are critical areas for wild fish, which seek protection to breed and leave their eggs. The challenge is to farm fish in an environmentally neutral way, and to enhance wild stocks to see at what point we can hand the lead back to nature. But aquaculture's potential is Lilliputian compared with Nature's abundance and workable policies will not be achieved without the fellows in oilskins."
It's not easy. Fisheries management must be marshalled; markets should be allowed to sell discarded fish; wasteful discarding should be penalised. Migration routes must be respected. If you want more, Michael Wigan has a book The Last of the Hunter Gatherers, Swan Hill, £19.95 stg.