⚓️ Save the sea. Eat an oyster.
Debunking Netflix's Seaspiracy conspiracy
Simple climate action // I S S U E # 5 1 // S E A F O O D
From the Editor
Seafood is not an obvious pick for a climate action newsletter. Yet the oceans are ground zero in the fight against climate change. For every 100 tons of greenhouse gases humans have emitted into the atmosphere, around 25 tons have been absorbed by the oceans.
Oceans are our lifeline. They are cooling our planet, buying us time as we work to drive down emissions.
But we don’t have much more time. Where I live on the cliffs of Land’s End, a wild, ragged edge of San Francisco cloaked in fog and battered by waves, change is afoot. I feel it when I step into the clear blue waters to swim or surf. Temperatures have risen perceptibly. I see it in the absence of starfish that once clung to seawalls along Fisherman’s Wharf. I’ve noticed the arrival of visitors from tropical seas, species like Asian kelp and Black Sea jellyfish, in the once frigid upwelling from below.
Before the century is up, scientists say, average ocean temperatures off San Francisco will resemble those off the coast of San Diego, 459 miles to the south. What that means for us, and the oceans, is still unknown.
This month we’re going to explore what can be done about it. Not by seeding the oceans with iron filings (an ill-advised carbon capture scheme). Or new federal policies (these are sorely needed too). But through what we eat. What ends up on our plate, in many ways, defines our relationship to the planet. And seafood is how many of us relate to the world’s largest ecosystem, the 70% of the globe covered by salt water.
No one is better equipped to tell this tale than Maria Finn. An ocean enthusiast, and a veteran of Alaska’s fishing grounds who grows her own (pet) oysters in the San Francisco Bay, Maria brings a different view. She’s complicating the narratives we might hold about the oceans.
Join us this week for a deep dive on how seafood might just be one element key to the ocean’s salvation, and invite a friend to share in the conversation over a good meal. We recommend oysters.
Mike Coren
Editor-in-Chief
mj@hothouse.solutions
The bivalve solution
By Maria Finn
I begrudgingly watched the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy. It was an emotional battering ram. It began with the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, and ended with a bloody whale hunt on the Faroe Islands of Denmark. The filmmaker, an impassioned, well-intentioned young man who, without much knowledge of fisheries or the oceans, dredged up the worst of sea plundering. Industrial, illegal high seas fishing? Check. Ocean plastic swallowed by sea life, and bottom trawlers destroying the seafloor? Absolutely. The horrors of slavery at sea and industrial salmon farming in Scotland? All there.
Over and over, Seaspiracy repeated the idea that commercial fishing is killing the planet. And the documentary’s solution was as simple as it was reductive: Everyone on Earth should quit eating seafood and become vegan.
The responses were passionate. On my Facebook feed, comments abounded like, “I just saw Seaspiracy and I’m only eating land animals from now on.” Another argued (falsely) that all salmon, wild and farmed, are fed industrially caught fish. The response from those involved in sustainable fisheries was equally impassioned. Men and women who make their livelihoods on small boats, fishing responsibly, along with conservation groups working to make the industry more sustainable, were horrified at being lumped in with the plunderers.
The documentary tells viewers eating a bowl of shark fin soup is the ethical and environmental equivalent of eating an oyster. One is catastrophic to the ocean, while oysters are regenerative, improving the health of bays and estuaries where they are farmed. Industrial fishing is a real problem. But as climate change transforms the seas, the real question we should ask ourselves is not, “Should I quit all seafood?” Rather, it’s whether it’s possible to love the ocean and eat seafood in ways that encourage stewardship of our waters.
Fermented salmon heads and seal-oil popsicles
My personal and professional life has been tied up with seafood my entire life. As a young child in the Midwest, my grandparents promised to take me for the first time to a Red Lobster for an all-you-can eat shrimp experience (I got so excited that I wet my pants on the way and we had to turn around). Since then, I’ve marketed community fisheries on Monterey Bay, lobbied for the Ocean Conservancy, and, as a journalist, written extensively about seafood issues. My TED Book, The Whole Fish, is about how to use every part of a salmon, including the bones and skin.
But my introduction to the Pacific Ocean really began in Alaska watching bears and bald eagles pick off bright silver sockeye salmon headed to the streams. I worked on fishing boats and then the Alaska Department of Fish & Game throughout the 1990’s monitoring salmon runs on the Yukon Delta.
That’s where I met the Yupiks, an indigenous people of Alaska. They had fish drying camps up and down the mouths of the river. For the indigenous people who live in the Bristol Bay region and out west near the Yukon Delta, the word for fish, neqa, is synonymous with food. My neighbors scored, dried, and smoked salmon fillets. They baked the eggs, fermented the heads, and the salmon milt from the male was put on a stick, dipped in seal oil, and eaten like popsicles.
For the Yupik, seafood is life. And they were not going vegan. They’re not alone. Veganism is a compassionate choice for some, but for many, it’s not a pragmatic one, at least not yet. Only 3% of the world’s population is vegan, the data suggests. Trying to get seafood lovers to give up seafood has proven to be as successful as abstinence as sex education for teenagers.
How does one navigate these waters? Choosing what seafood to eat in perilous times for the oceans is complicated. But rather than turn our backs on it, we can use seafood to be more responsible for what’s happening in our oceans and rivers. Done right, a selective diet of seafood could even have a lower environmental impact than vegetarian or vegan diets (the important term is “selective”), according to a 2018 academic review in Frontiers of the Environment and Ecology.
Humanity is at an inflection point in our relationship with the oceans. Our past isn’t prelude. For decades, we used technology to catch too many fish, ever more efficiently. Now GPS trackers and artificial intelligence collects data ensuring we don’t overfish remaining stocks. Entrepreneurs are developing new ways to farm fish and shellfish to complement ecosystems, rather than degrade them. Federal laws, such as the Magnuson Stevens Act, are being reauthorized to create healthy oceans and resilient fishing communities as climate change brings new challenges.
Like the Yupik, we can start to see ourselves as part of these ecosystems, and care for them, as we enter a new climate era unlike any before it.
Not eating like an apex predator
From an ecological point of view, we are presented with a false choice about our relationship with the marine world: leave the oceans entirely, or serve as willing accomplices in their demise. In Seaspiracy, the filmmakers interviewed Richard Oppenlander, an activist for cruelty-free food systems who objects to the idea that eating a sustainably-produced salmon is better than killing a bluefin tuna. “That’s like essentially saying that it’s more sustainable to shoot a polar bear than shooting a panda,” he says. “When in reality, neither one is sustainable, and neither one is right to do.”
The truth is a bit more complicated, and points to a more hopeful answer. Robust fisheries, like wild salmon in Alaska, still exist. With the right stewardship, they can indefinitely if we can keep the worst of climate change at bay. In the summer of 2021, over 65 million sockeye salmon arrived in western Alaska’s Bristol Bay. There are no hatcheries in the region, and the natural population is thriving. They are fished every year, caught before they enter the streams, so have about two weeks left to live their natural lives. These fish have been sustainable sustenance for humans for millennia. The first monitoring of salmon there for commercial use began in 1893. This fecund fishery, operated by small independently owned boats, is primarily responsible for blocking the Pebble Mine—a massive open-pit gold and copper mine in the headwaters of Bristol Bay that would have catastrophic effects on the entire region.
Fisheries like Bristol Bay’s salmon challenge us to become more integrated into our ecosystem. How do we support biodiversity in the water and economic diversity in our communities? We can even do it in our own lives.
Here in California, I live in a floating home in a cove off Sausalito. Richardson Bay is part of San Francisco Bay, the largest estuary of the Pacific Ocean. It is also where I tend to a small garden of native oysters—pets, not food. In early spring, sea lions roar outside my window as they chase the schools of silver herring. I grab my throw net and catch some to eat.
Downtown Sausalito. People gathered, waiting for the herring to arrive. Richardson Bay, California. Via Maria Finn’s Instagram.
In the summertime, I go out with neighbors who have boats and try to catch a King salmon or halibut in the bay. Come autumn, I join the people who stand shoulder-to-shoulder to drop crab pots off piers jutting out over the Pacific in hopes of catching Dungeness Crabs. I don’t like killing the creatures. I view it as facing the truth about my food.It helps me to see myself as part of the surrounding ocean ecosystem. I appreciate the vast variety of seafood, from sea urchin to seaweed from my local coasts, the sensuous nature of it, and the pleasure it brings me. Wild food connects me viscerally to nature.
And you don’t need to live on Richardson Bay to have this relationship. Right now, most people eat like apex predators. Large fillets of industrially farmed salmon are served at the center of the plate. Shrimp cultivated from cleared mangrove forests weigh down all-you-can-eat buffets.
There’s an entirely different culinary world out there, lower on the food chain yet no less delectable. Rich, smoked black cod, plentiful in the Pacific, makes great chowder. Fresh anchovies can be cured in salt and lemon. For wild salmon, grill salmon bellies and collars. Brine salmon eggs and put them in a rice bowl. Eating seafood this way is a luxury I indulge in on occasion, a type of intimacy with the waters around me, the waters that are changing faster than anyone imagined possible a few years ago.
Boiling the oceans
We think of overfishing as the oceans’ greatest threat. But when it comes to seafood, climate change tells overfishing, “Hold my beer.” It’s full of ecological surprises, as the scientists say. Entire ecosystems and food webs in the ocean are being pushed northward or wiped out. And it’s happening as we watch. In 2015, the Dungeness crab fishery in California was closed due to dangerous levels of domoic acid from a marine “heat wave.” Rising summer temperatures are believed to have caused a near-collapse of the salmon run on the Yukon River in Alaska, stranding nearly 50 indigenous communities who rely on salmon. Recreational abalone in California has been closed indefinitely. Since the marine snails feed on bull kelp forests—97% of which have been wiped out along the Sonoma and Mendocino Coasts due to warmer waters—it’s a catastrophic loss. The forests (which capture up to 20 times more carbon per acre than terrestrial forests) are vital ecosystems for thousands of species including rockfish, lingcod and young salmon.
What’s next amid all these rapid changes? Speaspiracy does give us one very true resounding message: We need fish and plants to thrive in our oceans if we are going to thrive as well. For some, that may mean abstaining. For many more, it will mean reestablishing a regenerative, not an extractive, relationship with our seas. Ultimately, we need local, sustainable fisheries, and we need biodiverse and healthy oceans. That might seem paradoxical, but it’s a paradox we’ll have to master.
Over the next month, we’ll dive deep into the potential solutions. Mom-and-pop kelp and shellfish farms off the New England Coast. Pioneering mussel ranches taking shape in the Pacific Ocean. Even “cellular” seafood growing in labs. We’ll explore the wild fisheries that promise to sustain their ecosystems, and a way of life we may be able to rediscover.
Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Jemima Kiss, Mike Coren, and Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read.
