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Usually ships in 1 business days | | Only 2 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | Recent decades have been marked by the decline or collapse of one fishery after another around the world, from swordfish in the North Atlantic to orange roughy in the South Pacific. While the effects of a collapse on local economies and fishing-dependent communities have generated much discussion, little attention has been paid to its impacts on the overall health of the ocean's ecosystems. In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean presents the first empirical assessment of the status of ecosystems in the North Atlantic ocean. Drawing on a wide range of studies including original research conducted for this volume, the authors analyze 14 large marine ecosystems to provide an indisputable picture of an ocean whose ecology has been dramatically altered, resulting in a phenomenon described by the authors as "fishing down the food web." The book: - provides a snapshot of the past health of the North Atlantic and compares it to its present status
- presents a rigorous scientific assessment based on the key criteria of fisheries catches, biomass, and trophic level
- considers the factors that have led to the current situation
- describes the policy options available for halting the decline
- offers recommendations for restoring the North Atlantic
An original and powerful series of maps and charts illustrate where the effects of overfishing are the most pronounced and highlight the interactions among various factors contributing to the overall decline of the North Atlantic's ecosystems.This is the first in a series of assessments by the world's leading marine scientists, entitled "The State of the World's Oceans." In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean is a landmark study, the first of its kind to make a comprehensive, ecosystem-based assessment of the North Atlantic Ocean, and will be essential reading for policymakers at the state, national, and international level concerned with fisheries management, as well for scientists, researchers, and activists concerned with marine issues or fishing and the fisheries industry. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Daniel Pauly | | Paperback: | 208 pages | | Publisher: | Island Press | | Publication Date: | March 01, 2003 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1559633247 | | Product Length: | 8.98 inches | | Product Width: | 6.1 inches | | Product Height: | 0.53 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.75 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.98 inches | | Package Width: | 6.1 inches | | Package Height: | 0.53 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.75 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 2 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 2 customer reviews )
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5 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Comprehensive Report on the Sad Condition of the No. Atlantic Fisheries Jan 29, 2007
By Bugs
"Patrick"
This is a Pew Foundation funded comprehensive, scientific, data based report on the state of the North Atlantic Ocean fisheries. It takes in not only a consensus on the various fish types and their depleted numbers, but also ocean ecology damage effecting spawning areas, over-fishing by type methods and too many boats, disparities in derived fish protein gained vs energy spent to harvest, pollution, negative effects of government subsidies, boat buy-back and destruction schemes to reduce the size and numbers of fleets, fishing rules enforcement or lack there of , etc.
There are many graphs, references, and notes for further research- in a nutshell, this is bible for fisheries research.
This study concludes with several recommendations for reviving the health and productivity of the oceans with a caveat that there is little time left to implement them. As abundantly described, the oceans are in a dismal state affairs and the time to act was yesterday. A call for a new ethic in ocean conservancy and resource management is in order.
Daniel Pauly coined the popular concept of "Shifting Base-lines" to describe historical and current trends in ocean health and this term has now been embraced and spread throughout just about all disciplines to measure and describe change over time. Indeed, everything from fish numbers over time, availability of resources to one's waste-line changes. A very useful tool in describing the vagaries and impact of change over time!
UPDATE: In the April, 2007 National Geographic Magazine, there is an alarming and lengthy series on the dismal state of the World's ocean fisheries "The Global Fish Crisis". Complete with good text, research data and those famous NGM photos.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
If Farley Mowat had been a scientist... Jan 18, 2011
By Neil Frazer
...he'd have written this book. Instead, Farley wrote "Sea of Slaughter" (1984) which should be read in conjunction with this fine book by Daniel Pauly and Jay MacLean about the fisheries of the North Atlantic, and by extension the world ocean. Governments ignored Mowat, but they have had to pay attention to Pauly because he is smart and fearless and publishes in the top journals.
"In a Perfect Ocean" is a great place to start if you want to understand fisheries and their problems, along with some likely solutions. For example, one thing Pauly and MacLean understand, which many other writers on fisheries do not, is the importance of non-governmental organizations (NGO) in ocean governance. NGOs fund the best scientists, expose the worst abuses and inform consumers. In other words, they do what governments ought to do, but don't.
What governments actually do is subsidize favored industries, which leads to inefficient allocation of resources in the short run and thus to depletion in the long run. In other words, the oceans are running out of fish because governments subsidize the fishing industry instead of taxing it, and we are running out of petroleum because governments subsidize petroleum instead of taxing it. Americans, especially, have been brainwashed to believe that all taxes are bad, not understanding that the tax, i.e., the socialized cost, is always paid somehow, if not by us then by future generations. Fisheries economists have been trying to tell us this for fifty years, without success.
If you want more after reading "A Perfect Ocean," an easy-to-read, and slightly more quantitative introduction to the effects of subsidies can be found in "Fish, Markets, and Fishermen" (1999) by Suzanne Iudicello, Michael Weber and Robert Wieland. Colin Clark's "The Worldwide Crisis in Fisheries" (2006) is more authoritative than Iudicello et al., but you have to know calculus to read it.
The next fun story, which has not been written yet, is that governments are now repeating the mistakes they made in capture fisheries by uncritically subsidizing aquaculture, including the culture of carnivores such as salmon. Carnivorous fish can't live without fish oil obtained from forage fish such as anchovies, herring and menhaden. Thus 3-5 pounds of forage fish, an an important dietary item in third world countries, are sacrificed to culture one pound of farmed salmon. An external cost, to be paid by future generations, is that in places where these planktivorous forage fish are over-harvested, jellyfish are released from competition and "ocean jellification" occurs. Fortunately, the same NGOs that funded Daniel Pauly's great work on capture fisheries are now beginning to examine subsidies to aquaculture. Stay tuned.
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