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Transcript

How to Choose Sustainable Seafood · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  Eating seafood the right way is a journey.
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  I'm gonna tell you that.
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  It is not easy to be able to choose seafood that is sustainable in
• 0:10
  an easy fashion, especially with a lot of confusion that's been
• 0:13
  put out in the world these days.
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  You have documentaries like Seaspiracy, which is, full of misinformation,
• 0:19
  and extreme kinda looks at saying we have to stop eating fish altogether.
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  And so it's very difficult to kinda, like, go to the grocery store or the
• 0:27
  supermarket and be like, "Hey, like, what fish should I eat?" When the person
• 0:30
  behind the counter doesn't even know, or sometimes often doesn't know, 'cause
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  they're just, like, maybe a teenager working behind the counter earning
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  minimum wage just trying to get through their day and, earn some extra cash,
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  to, be able to buy stuff that they want.
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  So it becomes a difficult process and a very confusing process.
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  And it's confusing because there are so many different takes on, what you
• 0:49
  should eat, what you shouldn't eat, and then what you should follow.
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  Because there are systems in place.
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  There are apps that make things easier.
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  There are certification programs which make things easier.
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  The solutions are out there, but then it gets kinda cluttered with, this
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  certification does this, and this certification takes payments, And it's
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  very confusing to say what's right and what's wrong, especially if all you're
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  trying to do is eat seafood the right way.
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  It's very easy to say, "You know what?
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  Screw all this.
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  I'm just gonna eat it the way I wanna eat it," and that's what I,
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  do, and I get it. I totally get it. But there hasn't really been, like,
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  a consistent, information that's come out that said, "Hey, you know what?
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  Here's the issue, and here's the solution for this issue," until now.
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  there is a book called "Why Sustainable Seafood Matters"
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  that's coming out in November.
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  it's up for presale.
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  It's by my good friend, Dr. David Shiffman.
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  he's decided to put out a book on this based of his, last book tour of "Why
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  Sharks Matter," because people kept talking about, "Hey, you know what?
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  Like, if sharks are being overfished, how do we know?
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  How can we help in terms of overfishing?" And that question just kept coming up
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  and coming up and coming up, and this book is essentially the answers to those
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  questions, not only for sharks, but also for other different types of fisheries.
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  He goes into history.
• 2:00
  He goes into the politics.
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  He goes into, looking at a specific issue and what's right, what's wrong,
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  and also, like, the nuances about it, because it's never a simple
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  answer when it comes to fisheries.
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  There's always more that you can talk about.
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  And today, I have David on the podcast to talk about this subject, sustainable
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  seafood, why you should get it, how you can get it, and what to look out
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  for when you're getting it and what to believe and what not to believe.
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  He backs it up with data.
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  So he has his opinions.
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  He has his statements.
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  They're backed by evidence, and he tells you where you can get that evidence
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  if you wanna take a look for yourself.
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  And I just think it's the manual that you need to get.
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  I just purchased my own book just before this interview.
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  it's pre-ordered, so you can get that pre-order.
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  The link is in the show notes.
• 2:42
  Here's the interview with Dr. David Shiffman talking about
• 2:45
  why sustainable seafood matters.
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  Enjoy, and I'll talk to you after.
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  Welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, David.
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  I am so excited to have you on.
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  Are you ready to talk about sustainable seafood?
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  I am always ready to talk about sustainable seafood, Andrew,
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  and thanks for having me.
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  Excited to be back.
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  It's so much fun to have you on, Dave.
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  It's always fun, like, you have a new book out.
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  This is what we're gonna be talking about.
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  Yeah.
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  It's all about sustainable seafood.
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  And, when you texted me, like, "Hey, do you wanna talk about sustainable
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  seafood?" I'm like- Yeah … "I've been waiting for this." Perfect.
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  I've been waiting for you to be ready to do this, 'cause I know you've been
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  writing this, for quite some time.
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  This is your second book.
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  And the first one was called Why Sharks Matter, and this is called
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  Why Sustainable Seafood Matters.
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  And this conversation's gonna be really on, the basics of what people
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  should know about sustainable seafood.
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  'Cause I'll be honest, Dave, it's confusing, right?
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  It gets confusing.
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  When you go to the
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  supermarket.
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  Yes.
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  So confusing.
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  So I'm super excited.
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  before we get started with all this, I would just like you to remind…
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  You've been on a number of times.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  Uh, but some people are new to the podcast, they might
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  be new to, who you are.
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  So why don't you just let us know who you are and what you do?
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  Sure.
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  So I'm Dr. David Shiffman.
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  I am an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist
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  and policy specialist.
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  I live and work in the Washington, D.C. area.
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  I'm probably best known for my work with sharks and my
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  first book, Why Sharks Matter.
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  Folks can also follow me on social media @why sharksmatter, where I'm
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  always happy to answer questions.
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  And yeah, as you said, this new book is called Why Sustainable Seafood Matters.
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  I love this.
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  So the first book was about, your first love, sharks.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  Right?
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  And it was all about, you've grown up, wanting to be a shark scientist
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  and shark ecologist, through that time, you've been a part of the
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  shark ecosystem for quite some time.
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  you've talked about sustainable seafood through sharks, but also,
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  elsewhere, and you've worked in the sustainable seafood area as well.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  But where did this idea come from for this book?
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  that's what I'm curious when you started to say, "This is gonna be about seafood."
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  Yeah.
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  So the idea for my second book actually came from the book tour for the first
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  book, and I have traveled all around the world, talking about sharks and
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  ocean conservation and marine biology as part of the book tour for Why Sharks
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  Matter, which I organized, by myself.
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  It's been to seven countries so far.
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  I gave a talk in Antarctica.
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  I got to do a dramatic reading for penguins, as well as to talk to some
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  of the scientists and tourists there.
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  but I always include in my talks plenty of time for audience Q&A.
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  Mmm.
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  And one of the most common questions that came up was, "You said that
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  the biggest threat to sharks is unsustainable fishing practices.
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  what do I do about that as a consumer?" And I started talking about sustainable
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  seafood and Seafood Watch and the Marine Stewardship Council and all of that, and
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  this question just kept happening over and over and over and over again, and
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  people kept saying, "Can you recommend an easy-to-understand source that
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  will explain more of the complicated world of sustainable seafood to me?
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  Because I would like to know more." And the answer was there really isn't one.
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  There's some very, very, very basic stuff that doesn't really tell you that
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  much, and then there's some very, very complicated stuff that requires a PhD
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  in fishery science to understand, and there was sort of nothing in the middle.
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  So I thought that I would try to fill that space, and that is the goal of
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  Why Sustainable Seafood Matters, is it's to take the complicated world of,
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  science-based fisheries management and bycatch reduction technology and where
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  does a marine protected area go and stock assessment and all of that stuff,
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  and turn it into, a way that someone who cares about the ocean but is a
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  little confused by all the 15 syllable words, to be able to make informed
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  choices when they're trying to figure out what's for dinner for their family.
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  First of all, thank you for doing that and here's why I'm saying this.
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  This is not just to kind of pander because we're promoting your book.
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  I'm having you on because I trust the information that's in the book.
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  I've read parts of the book.
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  I've watched you talk about this for a long time.
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  and you bring a very, not only scientific approach to it in your
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  regular dealings, but you also bring a very, pragmatic approach to it.
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  and I think there's a lot of material out there, whether it be in books, but also
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  in documentaries, who are, taking one side or another, and the extremes can really
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  flip-flop back and forth, which makes people question, is this actually working?
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  Or it gives them like a false sense of what they need to do-
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  to move forward.
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  Like I, you know, thinking Seaspiracy, uh, we're not- Oh, my God.
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  Yes … I don't wanna talk about it because we've talked about it so many
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  times, both you and I, on social media and on podcasts and stuff like that.
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  But, you know, that's like- I do, I
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  do rant about Seaspiracy in the book several times.
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  Right.
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  Um.
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  Uh, deservingly so.
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  But yeah, there's,
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  this is a confusing topic even without extremists promoting,
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  in misinformation, like what happened- Right … in Seaspiracy.
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  Right.
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  Um, so I tried to cut through the noise and give people, not only explain to
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  people, what the data says, but also how do we know, and how you can find
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  out for yourself, and how you can use these tools that are out there.
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  Yeah, no, completely agree.
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  And even like, going from that to watching sort of like a documentary
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  that it has a lot of misinformation, but then you go to the store and you
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  try and do something, you're like, "I wanna buy something sustainable.
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  Like, I don't wanna buy something where I'm contributing, so if I'm trying to
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  make that effort, let's go do that."
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  But then, you kinda mention in your book, like, you go to say a, supermarket
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  or wherever you get your seafood, in the sign it says, like, " We support,"
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  "sustainable fishing practices." But then if you know more- And
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  they have horrific products for sale.
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  Like- Right
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  the, the equivalent of, like, baby white rhino is for sale there right under a sign
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  that says, uh- … "We support sustainable practices." So yeah, you gotta be careful.
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  Unlike in the US, the word organic has a legal definition, and there's
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  regulatory processes behind it, but the word sustainable does not.
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  Yeah.
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  Um, so you can say a lot of things, and it may not correspond
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  to anything on the water.
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  If you say it's wild caught and it's not, then you're breaking rules.
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  But if you say- Yeah … it's sustainable and leading sources disagree with
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  you, you can just say, "Well, I think it's sustainable." So I wanted
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  to empower people to make informed choices and to introduce them to some
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  of the key players in this space and some of the key issues in this space.
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  and throughout, it's, not just my own rants, but there's plenty of those if
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  you'd like that in Why Sharks Matter.
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  but also, I interview, some of the leading players, including a celebrity chef,
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  who works on sustainable seafood issues, Chef Gregory Gourdet, if any of you are
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  Top Chef super fans like we are- Right
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  in my family.
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  I quote reports and show you how to find them.
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  I quote nonprofits and show you how to learn more.
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  My goal is to convince you not only that you can trust me, but here's how we
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  know that- Yeah … and here's how you can find out the same information for
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  yourself and come to the same conclusion.
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  and I like that not only did you do interviews, but you've also worked for one
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  of those certification- the, nonprofits, which is the Marine Stewardship Council.
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  You spent two years there.
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  What did you learn from, like, kind of working inside that?
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  'Cause, like, MSC's a great program.
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  I think it's something that people can trust in, in terms, like, when
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  I go to Costco, I look for that, blue sticker, Or that blue label.
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  They have had some controversies in some of the things that
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  they've supported in the past.
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  What did you learn about working in a place like that?
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  'Cause I find that sometimes when I'll be like, "Oh yeah, I like Marine
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  Stewardship Council," but, like, somebody will bring up, "Oh, but then
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  they support this, so how could you…" Again, it get, becomes complicated,
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  but what did you learn about working at MSC in those- Yeah … two years?
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  So for those of you who don't know what this is, it is one of the leading
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  players in the sustainable seafood space.
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  It is an eco label, that can go on products.
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  It's a little blue check mark that looks like a fish that says,
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  "MSC certified sustainable." You have almost certainly seen this,
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  even if you didn't recognize it.
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  Costco almost exclusively sells MSC certified products or Seafood
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  Watch green, or yellow products.
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  the McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich, the most commonly sold seafood
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  item in the world, is MSC certified and has that on the packaging.
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  Walmart has a lot of MSC things.
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  you've almost certainly seen this.
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  Yeah.
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  Um, and they have this very rigorous science-based process that was
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  co-generated with hundreds of experts from around the world,
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  that is the fishery standard.
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  And if a fishery is assessed against that standard and found that it
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  meets the criteria, then that fishery gets to put the label on its
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  product and sell it as sustainable.
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  When I worked there, I worked for part of the research team, my project
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  was specifically looking at what they call ETP bycatch, which is endangered,
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  threatened, and protected species.
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  So a fisherman are trying to catch a tuna, and they accidentally
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  catch a sea turtle or a shark or an albatross that was near the tuna.
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  And they were looking at what have fisheries that used to have
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  a problem with this done to reduce it, and what can we learn from that?
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  and that was really cool because
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  What I learned is it's a very practical and data-driven place.
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  They know that not everything will work for everyone, but they also are very
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  big on, sharing successes that, "Hey, this was a problem and we fixed it.
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  Everyone should know about this.
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  You should try some version of this.
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  Here's what we did.
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  Here's how we did it." they are not trying to gatekeep information.
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  Every single Marine Stewardship Council certified fishery has a
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  public certification report that anyone can download and read for free.
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  I walk you through in the book how to interpret those, 'cause
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  they can be a little technical.
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  But a typical one is hundreds of pages, and it includes background about the
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  biology of the species, about how the fishery is managed, about local
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  conservation issues, about local laws.
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  as well as the specific criteria, scores for how that fishery did.
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  So it's even more rigorous and data-driven than I thought.
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  there's a lot of misunderstanding about how MSC works, that it's just
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  some people's opinion, and if you don't, like your certification score,
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  you can just hire someone else and they'll give you a better score.
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  that's not how it works.
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  It can't work that way.
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  There are safeguards in place to stop that
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  I'm glad you mentioned that.
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  I think people make it complicated when they just put out an opinion and just
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  be like, "Well, this isn't right, and they just did this." And, you and I
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  know there's always safeguards in place.
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  All these certifications, Seafood Watch, MSC, they take the Ocean Wise, they take
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  these certifications very, very seriously.
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  the, the amount of detail and how meticulous, the research is, the people
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  working on it, they have to be… It's almost like working with a government
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  entity in terms of the messaging, in terms of things, 'cause everybody has
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  to be so careful because they don't want anything to be out of place.
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  And when they take a stance- Yeah … on a fishery, when they say avoid, or,
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  yes, this is good, or even, like, here's an alternative, they have to mean it.
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  They have to have the data to back it up, and I think that's really important.
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  and we don't need to have the data.
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  We just wanna be able to trust as consumers- Yeah
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  just to be able to trust in it because of all the amount of information and
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  processing and everything, it's kinda crazy with the… Like, I'm always
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  f- so surprised and surprised and not surprised- Oh, it gets overwhelming really
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  fast
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  … but, it's like… Oh, yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  it's insane.
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  Now, I wanna kinda get to a little bit more of, like, your first part of the
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  book is talking about, like, the harms of overfishing and what's happened.
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  And
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  So this is something that a lot of my students are surprised about, that the
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  biggest threat to marine biodiversity, not only to sharks, but to fish, to
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  seabirds, to sea turtles, to marine mammals, it's not climate change, it's not
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  plastic pollution, it's not oil spills.
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  Those things are all bad, but the biggest threat by far is harms caused
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  by unsustainable fishing practices, and that includes overfishing, habitat
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  destruction, bycatch, things like that.
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  Before I get into the how do we fix it in the book, I really tried to
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  hammer home this is a real problem that we really do need to fix.
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  It is bad.
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  If you care about the environment and you care about the environmental
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  impacts of your day-to-day choices, you have to care about this.
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  but I also stress- And, and- … that that doesn't mean we all have to
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  be, give up seafood and become vegan, 'cause there are solutions.
• 14:28
  Yeah, no, for sure.
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  And I think there's one story too that you talk about, which is the collapse
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  of the Grand Banks cod, population, which, is still in recovery mode now.
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  And I mean, this is, a special story for me as a Canadian because
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  that's where it happened- Yeah
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  in Newfoundland.
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  I was actually just speaking to somebody who's from Newfoundland just
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  this past week, and she mentioned that story, and it wasn't just
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  the fact that the cod collapsed.
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  It was the fact that the entire industry collapsed.
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  Like, people were out of work for generations, and they're still not
• 14:59
  back to fishing cod because we're still never gonna be at the levels,
• 15:03
  well, maybe not in my lifetime.
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  Hopefully we will one day.
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  But, they're just starting to kinda think about it, and they're starting
• 15:08
  to put a little more pressure on fishing 'cause we're starting to see
• 15:10
  a little bit more recovery, but it's not even close to where it's being.
• 15:13
  Mm-hmm.
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  So I guess, like, you covered this story in the book, please feel free
• 15:17
  to kinda elaborate on this story.
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  I've talked a lot about it, but I'd love to hear, you say it.
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  But one question is, like, what lessons that we learned from the
• 15:25
  collapse that maybe people are still ignoring today, with this whole story?
• 15:29
  Oh, yeah.
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  So if you can just kinda, like, let people know what happened,
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  and then just, like, talk about, have we really learned our lesson?
• 15:35
  Yeah.
• 15:36
  So people don't usually think of it in these terms, but the cod stocks off
• 15:41
  the Canadian Grand Banks are actually one of the big reasons why European
• 15:45
  powers colonized North America.
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  it was seen as evidence of wealth of the New World.
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  and for centuries of Western colonization, as well as for time
• 15:54
  immemorial before that for indigenous communities and First Nations,
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  those stocks provided a ton of food.
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  and then ev-even not only food for local communities, but jobs
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  for those communities as they would export the cod elsewhere.
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  and there were so many cod back in the day that people said you
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  didn't even need bait and a hook.
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  You could just lower a basket with rocks in it into the water and lift
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  it up, and it would be full of cod.
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  And no fish stocks are like that anymore.
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  I don't know if those were really that big back in the day, but This was one
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  of the first examples of a famous and fishery collapsing due to overharvest.
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  And that was because of new technologies that made it easier to
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  catch more and more and more of them.
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  People used to think that the ocean was so vast that we could take whatever we wanted
• 16:42
  out of it and dump whatever we wanted into it without really making an impact.
• 16:46
  And sadly, now we know that that's not really true.
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  And this is one of the reasons why we know it's not true.
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  When the Canadian cod fishery was shut down in the 1990s, there was disbelief,
• 16:57
  that, this was an iconic industry.
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  This was who we were as a people.
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  there were warning signs that were ignored.
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  It's not like no one knew that anything bad was happening, but people thought
• 17:08
  that sort of this was something that only environmentalists worried
• 17:11
  about, and everything would be fine, and maybe we'll take slightly too
• 17:14
  much, and it'll recover eventually.
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  The population collapsed.
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  There were so many cod taken out that there weren't enough left that their
• 17:22
  babies would replenish the population.
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  And it's been, 30 years, and we're only starting to see initial
• 17:27
  signs of recovery, like this year.
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  Mm-hmm.
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  And it's really bad.
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  So there's a few lessons from this.
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  One is listen to the data and listen to the experts and don't
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  let emotions get in the way.
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  One is things that hurt the ocean don't just hurt whales, they also hurt people
• 17:44
  who depend on them it can take a really long time to recover if we screw this up.
• 17:49
  So let's be careful and do it right the first time.
• 17:52
  Yeah.
• 17:52
  completely agree.
• 17:53
  And I think you kinda mentioned something in that that is a difficult thing to
• 17:58
  kinda sift through as we, learn and see things on… We get so much information
• 18:02
  from social media and so many opinions.
• 18:05
  Sometimes it's difficult to understand, what's considered, like, overfished,
• 18:11
  what's considered depleted, and what's, like, maximum fished.
• 18:14
  There's a lot of, nuance in the language that maybe scientists use
• 18:18
  and that different media outlets use that can confuse people to understand,
• 18:22
  like, should I be eating this stock?
• 18:24
  Should I not?
• 18:25
  can you talk about, like, the difference between overfishing,
• 18:27
  overfished, and depleted to start off?
• 18:30
  Yes.
• 18:30
  So part of the reason why this gets so complicated is there's a lot of math
• 18:34
  and law that goes into a lot of this.
• 18:36
  Mm-hmm.
• 18:36
  Uh, so I try to explain in sort of plain language what those terms mean.
• 18:40
  A key thing here is that overfishing is an action and overfished is a state.
• 18:46
  So- Gotcha … a fishery can be experiencing overfishing,
• 18:49
  but not overfished.
• 18:50
  That means we are taking too many fish, but the population is
• 18:53
  still relatively strong, so if we stop, it'll recover quickly.
• 18:57
  A population can be overfished without overfishing occurring.
• 19:01
  That means things are pretty bad, but the threat has been removed, so
• 19:04
  it's probably starting to recover.
• 19:06
  A stock can be overfished with overfishing occurring.
• 19:10
  That's really bad, that there's a bad problem in place and
• 19:14
  the problem is continuing.
• 19:16
  Or it can be neither, and that's sort of the goal.
• 19:18
  depleted is a term that means different things in different contexts, but
• 19:22
  generally pretty similar to overfished or well on your way to overfished.
• 19:26
  One of the things that I talk about in the book is the United Nations
• 19:29
  Food and Agriculture Organization's, State of Fisheries and Aquaculture
• 19:33
  Report, which is sort of the bible of global fishery statistics.
• 19:37
  And I see, sometimes well-intentioned people and sometimes extremists like
• 19:42
  the Seaspiracy people intentionally misstate statistics from this report.
• 19:46
  So as of the most recent numbers, about a third of all global
• 19:51
  fish stocks are overfished.
• 19:52
  That's bad.
• 19:54
  But more than half, less than two-thirds are not overfished.
• 19:59
  They are fully fished, which means we are fishing them at appropriate levels.
• 20:04
  Fully fished is the goal.
• 20:05
  Right.
• 20:06
  That means that a fishery is doing well.
• 20:08
  It is not hurting the environment, and it's providing as much food
• 20:11
  and protein and jobs as it can.
• 20:13
  But you see some of these extremists combine those two statistics and
• 20:17
  say that 95% of all fisheries are overfished or fully fished.
• 20:21
  Well, fully fished is the goal, and overfished is bad.
• 20:24
  So combining those two is at the very least a little bit misleading
• 20:28
  I can see where it comes from 'cause fully fished sounds like, yeah-
• 20:31
  It sounds- … we're fully, like, taking advantage- Yep … of this.
• 20:33
  But it's almost like, it almost should be, like, appropriately fished.
• 20:36
  Yes.
• 20:36
  You know what I mean?
• 20:37
  Like, we're following- Yep, we are reaching- … the rules
• 20:39
  We are following the rules and reaching goals that are set by both sides.
• 20:42
  Yeah.
• 20:43
  Uh, so there's a lot of those statistics and how to- Yeah … interpret
• 20:47
  them, and those sort of reports and databases, and how to access them
• 20:50
  yourself that I talk about in the book.
• 20:52
  You can trust me, you can trust the many experts I talk about in the book, but
• 20:55
  I also show you how to independently find that data for yourself and
• 20:59
  convince yourself that it's true.
• 21:01
  And this is what I love about what you've done and, to be honest, this is
• 21:03
  what I expected, the fact that, like, here is what's happening, like, here
• 21:07
  could be, like, a point of confusion for the reader or for the person who
• 21:11
  wants to get sustainable seafood.
• 21:13
  And then here's what's the reality of it, and then not only am I, " don't
• 21:16
  just trust me, but you can go look at the data which is freely available,
• 21:20
  which could take a little bit more time to come to the same conclusion.
• 21:23
  So if you wanna trust me, that's fine.
• 21:24
  If you wanna go through the data, go through the data." But identifying
• 21:28
  the issue that could be confusing, where someone's taken something and,
• 21:32
  misused the stats, is very important.
• 21:34
  It's why you and I have gone through so many statistical courses during
• 21:38
  our training as scientists, and why we continue to read up on literature
• 21:42
  to understand what it means to misuse science, Or to misuse- Yeah … data.
• 21:48
  And it's so easy to do so, whether you wanna do it on purpose or not, it really
• 21:53
  truly matters whether you know what you're talking about in this kind of state,
• 21:57
  yes.
• 21:57
  it is easier to be persuaded of harmful nonsense if you don't
• 22:02
  understand how anything works.
• 22:04
  Yeah.
• 22:04
  so it is, you are empowering yourself and your family if you learn some
• 22:08
  basic facts about science and the environment and relevant laws.
• 22:12
  Because if you do not do those things, you are, more likely to be
• 22:17
  taken advantage of by extremists who are peddling an agenda that does not
• 22:20
  benefit you or, frankly, the ocean.
• 22:23
  Right.
• 22:23
  Yeah.
• 22:24
  No, 100%.
• 22:25
  Now, one thing you mentioned in the book, you kinda covered the,
• 22:28
  right whale and Maine lobster.
• 22:31
  Yep.
• 22:31
  I'm not gonna say a controversy, but, like, it was, it was-
• 22:33
  No, controversy is fair.
• 22:34
  Yeah.
• 22:34
  you could say controversy.
• 22:36
  can you explain what happened, and what ensued after this happened?
• 22:40
  Yeah, so this is very much an ongoing issue, with some
• 22:43
  news even a couple weeks ago.
• 22:45
  but this is a bycatch issue.
• 22:47
  This is you're trying to catch something and you accidentally catch
• 22:49
  something else that's swimming near it.
• 22:52
  And in this case, you're trying to catch lobster, which is the most valuable
• 22:55
  fishery in the United States and one of the most valuable fisheries in
• 22:57
  Canada, and you're accidentally catching critically endangered North Atlantic
• 23:01
  right whales, of which there are only a few hundred left in the world And
• 23:06
  people say, "That doesn't make any sense.
• 23:08
  The lobsters are caught in traps.
• 23:10
  how can a giant whale be caught in a little trap?" Well, it's
• 23:12
  not the trap, it's the line that connects the trap to the surface.
• 23:15
  And in a place like the Gulf of Maine, which is a huge lobster fishing area,
• 23:19
  there's over a million of those lines, which means it is a minefield for
• 23:23
  these whales, which don't have great eyesight, can't turn super quick.
• 23:28
  they get tangled, and then they will either drown or badly injured, or they'll
• 23:31
  drag the heavy chain of traps behind them.
• 23:34
  this is really bad.
• 23:35
  This is why lobster is on Seafood Watch's no-no list, the red list.
• 23:40
  It is why MSC has removed their certifications from
• 23:43
  lobster fisheries in the area
• 23:45
  We're not worrying about overfishing of lobster.
• 23:46
  That part's well-managed.
• 23:48
  But the way the gear is used kills North Atlantic right whales, and
• 23:51
  that's a critically endangered species.
• 23:53
  They are circling the conservation drain.
• 23:55
  And they're-
• 23:56
  70 breeding females left.
• 23:58
  They've had a good year this year, but it's the first good year in a
• 24:01
  long time, and we'll talk about it in a second, of what's kinda upcoming
• 24:06
  that could, harm that even further.
• 24:08
  Yes.
• 24:09
  so there are some solutions to this, and, most bycatch issues
• 24:11
  have solutions often in the form of required gear modifications.
• 24:16
  So in this case, there are two main ways that you can make
• 24:19
  lobster traps not kill whales.
• 24:21
  One is the- have the lines that are connected to a float
• 24:25
  on the surface not as strong.
• 24:27
  So if you, are trying to haul in your line, it's not gonna break.
• 24:31
  It's strong enough for that.
• 24:32
  But if a huge whale swims into it, it will snap.
• 24:35
  that is, to me, a no-brainer because either way, if a whale hits your gear,
• 24:40
  you're not getting that gear back.
• 24:42
  So, if the line snaps, those traps are just down there and you can't get
• 24:45
  them, but that's already happened.
• 24:47
  They're already lost.
• 24:49
  Yeah.
• 24:49
  Another is, a little more high-tech of a solution, and that is
• 24:53
  called on-demand ropeless gear.
• 24:55
  So the lobster trap, instead of being connected to a buoy float on the surface,
• 25:00
  has a little compressed air cartridge and little gas bag with a radio receiver.
• 25:05
  And when the boat goes over its trap, it sends a radio signal
• 25:08
  that said, I am this boat.
• 25:09
  I am here.
• 25:10
  Come to the surface." The compressed air cartridge goes off, the bag inflates,
• 25:15
  and the trap floats to the surface with no possibility of encountering whales.
• 25:19
  And fishermen hate this, despise this.
• 25:24
  It's different.
• 25:24
  It's different than how they've done it for centuries.
• 25:26
  I get that, but it works fine.
• 25:28
  It's not that expensive.
• 25:29
  There are grants to help you do it, and it removes the problem so that you can
• 25:33
  be not on the no-no list anymore I am one of the relatively few scientists
• 25:40
  and conservation professionals who sort of works both in the fisheries
• 25:43
  space and the ocean conservation space.
• 25:45
  So for our ocean conservation friends, I'm probably one of the
• 25:48
  most pro-fisheries people they know.
• 25:51
  Mm-hmm.
• 25:51
  And as some people have explicitly told me that, and I think the lobstermen are
• 25:55
  just making absolute buffoons of themself with how they're handling this, and it's
• 25:59
  making it real hard to support them.
• 26:01
  it is.
• 26:01
  you've spoken to a lot of lobster fishermen over your time.
• 26:04
  You've spoken to a lot of fishermen over the time.
• 26:06
  Their goal is to continue to fish over time.
• 26:08
  There's a lot of stuff that's going against them.
• 26:10
  Obviously, things are happening in the environment that are
• 26:12
  changing things for them.
• 26:14
  and now this doesn't help them, but I think the thing is, is like by going
• 26:19
  in with a collaborative approach and being like, "Look, we wanna help you
• 26:22
  do this, but we don't want you to like kill whales or do anything harm,
• 26:27
  but we want you to fish as well." and it's always a difficult thing to line
• 26:31
  up because everybody's defensive.
• 26:33
  Everybody wants, to do what they wanna do.
• 26:35
  but there's other, external circumstances that come into this.
• 26:39
  and like, there's a lot at play.
• 26:40
  Like, the certification, sites like MSC and Seafood Watch have their job
• 26:44
  to do, that they're like, "Look, this is not sustainable because of this.
• 26:46
  We are fully transparent in terms of why we're doing this." And I think one of the
• 26:50
  responses that happened after this was there was a congressman, that tried to
• 26:55
  cut funding to the Monterey Bay, Aquarium- Yes … as like their federal funding,
• 26:59
  This is a Democrat.
• 27:00
  This is a Democrat- A Democrat … from Maine who tried to- Right … use
• 27:04
  this scandal to say that the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a
• 27:07
  eco-terrorist organization, and they shouldn't get any federal funding.
• 27:11
  no, they use science-based standards to accurately point
• 27:14
  out that some of his constituents are causing environmental harm.
• 27:17
  this is Jared Golden, for any US politics nerds, widely
• 27:19
  regarded as the worst Democrat.
• 27:21
  but I hated him before you guys did because of this instance.
• 27:25
  I think this is an important concept because you deal a lot with public policy.
• 27:29
  when a congressperson comes out and speaks against a program like
• 27:32
  this that you know full and well, we all know that they do the work.
• 27:36
  We've talked about it just, in this interview in itself.
• 27:39
  There's a lot of scientists that listen to this, like science
• 27:41
  communication and so forth.
• 27:42
  How can we come back out in support of good science to say, "Hey,
• 27:49
  look, like this is the situation.
• 27:50
  Yes, we feel bad for the lobster fishermen.
• 27:53
  We want them to fish.
• 27:54
  But we also understand what the Seafood Watch and MSC are trying to do." How can
• 27:59
  we do that without anybody coming out and being like, "Hey, you're biased to
• 28:01
  this because you're being paid off by whoever pays off people for environment"?
• 28:05
  And by the way, if anybody does do that, I would love some money
• 28:07
  from that- Yeah, I'm, I'm so-
• 28:08
  because we're not getting any … I take
• 28:09
  PayPal.
• 28:11
  Um, yeah.
• 28:13
  it's really hard because people, they see certain keywords, and that
• 28:17
  immediately triggers for them, "You are the other side. I automatically
• 28:20
  assume these things about you. One of those things is you're lying." And-
• 28:24
  Mm-hmm
• 28:24
  … I am not trying to persuade.
• 28:26
  At this point, most of the time I'm not trying to persuade the lobstermen,
• 28:29
  because I've tried that, and other groups are in that area and are, have perhaps
• 28:33
  more productive relationships than I do.
• 28:35
  But I'm trying to persuade people who maybe didn't know about this
• 28:38
  issue, that if you care about- Yeah
• 28:40
  the environment, eat something else for a while until they get their act together.
• 28:43
  it's really hard to convince someone who has made their entire identity,
• 28:49
  "I am not going to be convinced or persuaded on this issue."
• 28:52
  And, One of the reasons I live and work in the Washington, DC area is
• 28:55
  because I'm a policy and process guy.
• 28:57
  the US used to have all of these really, rigorous and clear processes
• 29:02
  explaining how rules and regulations and laws get made, with clear input
• 29:07
  from the environmental nonprofit sector, clear inputs from academic
• 29:10
  experts and scientific evidence.
• 29:11
  I'm hopeful we'll go back to that at some point.
• 29:14
  When someone like Jared Golden says, "This is not based on any science,
• 29:18
  it's just biased extremist nonsense," he's lying and he knows that.
• 29:21
  And he has- Yeah … established to me that he is not someone I
• 29:25
  can trust or work with or support.
• 29:27
  And I think you have to almost look at some of maybe their motivations,
• 29:31
  like the politicians' motivations of, like, that's a key supporter for his
• 29:34
  campaign, and, they don't wanna go against that and they're coming out.
• 29:37
  Unfortunately, they're not doing it- in the right way.
• 29:39
  And let's be honest, like there are a lot of fishermen and fisheries
• 29:42
  communities who are out there, experimenting and using ropeless gear.
• 29:46
  So it's not as if- Yeah … it's not happening.
• 29:49
  Like they are trying to- Yeah, people are trying it
• 29:50
  do their best to change.
• 29:51
  And it works.
• 29:51
  Right.
• 29:52
  And it works.
• 29:52
  Yeah.
• 29:53
  Yeah.
• 29:53
  and it's getting better and better every time these studies come out.
• 29:56
  I remember at the beginning it was very difficult and it was
• 29:58
  hard, and nobody likes change.
• 30:00
  like we all hate change.
• 30:01
  But, unfortunately, like we have to do this when we have a response like
• 30:05
  this, and that's what science is all about, it's what conservation- Mm-hmm
• 30:07
  is all about.
• 30:08
  And I'm glad that there are people out there and communities out there, fishing
• 30:11
  communities, who are trying to work this.
• 30:13
  As frustrating as that could be, and working through the kinks
• 30:16
  for like us to be able to have, sustainable lobster again, and crabs
• 30:20
  and things like that, and not harm whales, which I think is wonderful.
• 30:22
  A couple of other things I wanna kinda go on, that you talk about in the book.
• 30:27
  If I go to the grocery store I want protein, I'm a big guy, I like to
• 30:31
  work out, I want protein, and people like, "Tuna's the best kind of
• 30:34
  protein you can get." You look on the label, it says, "Dolphin safe."
• 30:37
  What does it actually mean and what does it leave out?
• 30:40
  Yes.
• 30:41
  So dolphin safe does not mean what people think it means, and it does not
• 30:44
  mean what Seaspiracy claimed it means.
• 30:46
  Okay.
• 30:47
  so that is the most tuna is caught via a net called a purse seine, which
• 30:54
  is a large net that is dragged around a school of tuna, and then the purse
• 30:58
  strings are drawn and it catches that.
• 31:00
  That also catches anything that was near the tuna the problem is how do
• 31:04
  you know when to deploy that net?
• 31:06
  Mm-hmm.
• 31:06
  Because you can't see tuna from the surface.
• 31:08
  So what people used to do is they would look for dolphins and say, "Oh, there are
• 31:15
  dolphins feeding here. There's probably tuna feeding here underneath them."
• 31:19
  And they would set the net around the dolphins, and that
• 31:22
  would kill those dolphins.
• 31:23
  They can jump over the net, but they didn't.
• 31:25
  And dolphin safe tuna just means we didn't do that.
• 31:29
  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
• 31:29
  You shouldn't do that.
• 31:30
  That's bad.
• 31:31
  But it does not mean no dolphins could possibly have been hurt
• 31:34
  as a result of this fishing.
• 31:36
  It was never meant to mean that.
• 31:37
  No one ever said that it means that.
• 31:39
  And Sea Spear Sea said, like, "Well, we found, a dead dolphin in this dolphin
• 31:43
  safe tuna fishery, so the whole term is meaningless." No, you not knowing what
• 31:47
  it means doesn't mean it's meaningless.
• 31:49
  Yeah.
• 31:50
  That makes sense.
• 31:50
  And all, tuna caught in, sold in the US is required to have that label.
• 31:54
  something that if you want no dolphins were caught at all during this,
• 31:58
  look for wild pole and line caught.
• 32:00
  Mm-hmm.
• 32:01
  Um, that is one of the few fisheries in the world where individuals are still
• 32:04
  caught with a rod and reel rather than some of this giant industrial-sized
• 32:07
  fishing gear that can be miles long and have thousands of hooks.
• 32:10
  Mm-hmm.
• 32:10
  Uh, there's also videos of the how that works, on the Marine Stewardship
• 32:13
  Council website, which is really cool.
• 32:15
  it's a bunch of people, with rods and reels standing on the back of the deck
• 32:19
  all going, "Got one. Bloop." Yeah.
• 32:21
  "Got one. Bloop." And it's just chaos on the deck.
• 32:24
  that means they're actually catching just the tuna, and-
• 32:26
  Yeah
• 32:27
  … pretty much nothing else means that.
• 32:29
  Yeah.
• 32:29
  No, that's great.
• 32:30
  And I liked having the video 'cause it kinda show what
• 32:31
  actually rod and reels means.
• 32:33
  And I remember looking on the Seafood Watch app, and it actually tells
• 32:36
  you it's caught by line and pole,
• 32:38
  which I think is really great.
• 32:38
  So it- it's really easy- Yeah … to do that.
• 32:40
  it's kind of an interesting, that you ha- like a, I guess a take, but it's,
• 32:43
  you have reasonings for this take.
• 32:45
  there was a movie, I think it was last two years ago that came out, narrated
• 32:50
  by Sir David Attenborough called Oceans.
• 32:53
  Yes.
• 32:53
  And, or Ocean.
• 32:54
  And one of the big things there, and it's still happening now, is
• 32:57
  the call for a ban on trawling.
• 33:01
  Uh- Yes … so can you explain for those who don't know what trawling is, and
• 33:05
  then, your position on this global ban is?
• 33:08
  'Cause I think it's a really interesting position, and probably not something that
• 33:11
  I think people would expect from you.
• 33:13
  Yes.
• 33:14
  So if you haven't seen that David Attenborough movie, you should.
• 33:16
  It's great.
• 33:17
  it's on Disney Plus, at least here in the US.
• 33:19
  but yet the sort of the big bad guy in that movie was trawl fishing.
• 33:23
  Mm-hmm.
• 33:23
  And they had some really amazing footage of what that looks like.
• 33:26
  They were really showing a specific subset of trawl fishing and using it
• 33:29
  to interpolate all trawl fishing, and that's where the problem comes in.
• 33:33
  So they were talking about bottom trawl fishing, which is dragging a
• 33:36
  net that has a heavy chain in front of it over the seabed that causes
• 33:40
  things hiding in the sand to jump up, and they get caught in the net.
• 33:44
  that can be, in the wrong place, that can be extremely destructive.
• 33:47
  it causes scars on the seafloor that are visible from space.
• 33:51
  it has been compared to, burning down a whole forest to catch
• 33:55
  rabbits, because it also destroys the sensitive seafloor habitat.
• 33:59
  but yeah, we shouldn't do it in places that have sensitive seafloor habitat.
• 34:03
  I am all for that.
• 34:04
  But that is not the same thing as we shouldn't trawl at all because, among
• 34:08
  other things, trawling provides about a quarter of the world's seafood.
• 34:11
  so not doing it anymore would leave a pretty big hole Mm-hmm … in, coastal
• 34:15
  economies as well as, the dinner table.
• 34:19
  Right.
• 34:19
  And so there are places that are, sandy or muddy bottom and don't have sponges
• 34:24
  or corals or kelp or sensitive habitats.
• 34:28
  We can trawl there without, damaging sensitive habitat.
• 34:31
  There's also non-bottom trawling.
• 34:32
  There's midwater trawls, which is just a big net dragged through the water,
• 34:37
  that doesn't even touch the seafloor.
• 34:38
  that's not the same thing there are places we should not do this.
• 34:42
  Yeah … it can cause very real harms in some places, but I think ban all of it
• 34:47
  everywhere is not realistic or necessary.
• 34:50
  Interesting.
• 34:50
  Yeah.
• 34:51
  I think also there should be a requirement, wherever this is happening,
• 34:55
  to prove that the bottom is trawlable.
• 35:00
  'Cause there's a lot of places where we may not know, like deep sea trawling.
• 35:03
  There may be some place where it could be a seamount that could
• 35:06
  have a lot of habitat on there, and if you're trawling it, we have no
• 35:10
  idea what habitat we're destroying.
• 35:12
  So obviously there's a lot of caveats within that.
• 35:14
  but I think you're right.
• 35:15
  I think it can be sustainable certain places and unsustainable other places.
• 35:19
  I think it's just- Yeah.
• 35:19
  There, there- … a matter of, like, what they're doing, right?
• 35:21
  There are Marine Stewardship Council certified bottom trawl fisheries.
• 35:25
  I explain how that works, with a few examples in the book.
• 35:28
  There are- Yeah … Seafood Watch rated green bottom trawl fisheries.
• 35:31
  Interesting.
• 35:32
  It just depends on where you do it, how you do it, all of
• 35:34
  that- Yeah … kind of stuff.
• 35:35
  Yeah.
• 35:36
  That's-
• 35:36
  There are places we should not do it.
• 35:37
  there's been a lot of stuff in the news lately about how particularly
• 35:40
  European marine protected areas allow bottom trawling, and I
• 35:44
  don't think we should do that.
• 35:46
  I think there are places we should not bottom trawl, and even if the habitat in
• 35:49
  those places is not especially sensitive, we should not allow industrial scale
• 35:54
  fishing in a marine protected area.
• 35:55
  That's the whole point of them.
• 35:57
  Yeah.
• 35:58
  Yeah.
• 35:58
  Yeah, no, I completely agree.
• 36:00
  We found that out, a while ago where I think it was in the UK,
• 36:03
  they were allowing that to happen.
• 36:04
  And to be honest, that's not, just a thing in the UK.
• 36:07
  It's happens in a lot of places- and just becomes a paper park after
• 36:10
  that because- Mm-hmm … it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.
• 36:12
  that's a good point.
• 36:14
  I wanna talk one more thing about- Mm-hmm … the harms, and we're gonna
• 36:16
  move to solutions, and that's- Great
• 36:18
  another part in your book.
• 36:19
  which it has to do, and I have to talk about this, is, is
• 36:21
  aquaculture and fish farming.
• 36:23
  Mm-hmm.
• 36:23
  And, when I approach people about aquaculture, like, I think there's
• 36:26
  more aquaculture seafood now than there is, wild fish caught in a lot of
• 36:30
  places, especially here in Canada, too.
• 36:32
  There's a big, extremes on both sides.
• 36:35
  There's a big gap of whether people want aquaculture or don't want aquaculture.
• 36:39
  Yeah.
• 36:39
  and I think you come out the same way with trawling, I think you come out
• 36:42
  with a kind of a perspective as like not all aquaculture is the same, and
• 36:46
  there's some good and there's some bad.
• 36:47
  So how do people know how to detect what's good and what's bad?
• 36:51
  Yeah, so this is another place where something like Seafood Watch
• 36:54
  recommendations can be really helpful, or Ocean Wise recommendations, as
• 36:58
  well as the Marine Stewardship Council has an aquaculture equivalent called
• 37:01
  the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, where a fish farm has to follow these
• 37:06
  rigorous science-based, provided via environmentalist input guidelines in
• 37:10
  order to be able to use the label.
• 37:12
  there's also a few competing ones.
• 37:14
  One of the ones that, I just started using, HelloFresh meal kits here,
• 37:19
  and, I, got a shrimp dish and it had a best aquaculture practices
• 37:23
  or BAP label on it, which is not quite as rigorous as Aquaculture-
• 37:27
  Right … Stewardship Council, but it's still, a lot better than nothing.
• 37:30
  Right.
• 37:30
  So look for these eco labels, look for these, independent
• 37:33
  experts who are recommending or not recommending something.
• 37:36
  And as a general rule that I teach my students for anything related to
• 37:39
  this, doing this right, doing this in a way that's less environmentally
• 37:42
  harmful costs more, which means they can sell it for more, which means they
• 37:47
  will say, "We did this the right way.
• 37:49
  Please give us more money." And if they're not doing that and it's sort of not clear
• 37:52
  where it came from, it's probably not the more environmentally friendly one.
• 37:57
  Yeah.
• 37:57
  no doubt.
• 37:58
  I'm glad you mentioned that.
• 37:59
  There are a lot of more harms that I think people should look at in the book to get
• 38:03
  a good perspective, and Dave's perspective of sort of what's good and what's bad.
• 38:08
  Because it's not all… And they're all complex you take a very good
• 38:12
  approach in it in, naming those complexities and then also, like,
• 38:16
  some of the, takes that people have.
• 38:18
  It seems like everybody has a take these days, but not grounded
• 38:21
  in any kind of information.
• 38:22
  So, that's a great part of the book to kind of put it together.
• 38:25
  But, like, I love this part.
• 38:27
  Like, part two is all about solutions.
• 38:29
  And, a good friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, Angelo Villagomez,
• 38:32
  has the line, "If you kill fewer fish, more fish will be alive."
• 38:36
  Yep.
• 38:37
  A lot of science really isn't that complicated-
• 38:39
  if you try to explain it like you're 10.
• 38:42
  Yeah.
• 38:42
  Uh, and yeah, that's an interesting one that always gets a few chuckles.
• 38:46
  And people think about it and they went, "Oh, I just- Yeah … I just read a
• 38:49
  500-page fishery science textbook, and you just summarized it in one sentence
• 38:52
  of elementary school vocabulary."
• 38:54
  the school of Angelo Villagomez is a great school to go to.
• 38:57
  I, I highly recommend it.
• 38:58
  Yeah.
• 38:58
  Not everything needs to be
• 38:59
  complicated.
• 39:00
  with that said, like, what does good fisheries management
• 39:03
  look like in practice?
• 39:04
  Because yeah, the fewer fish we kill, the, more fish will be alive.
• 39:09
  But that, fisheries management takes a lot into place.
• 39:11
  Without going into, like, too much detail-
• 39:14
  Yeah, this gets- How do
• 39:14
  we
• 39:14
  know?
• 39:14
  … this gets mathy really fast.
• 39:16
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  Mathy fast.
• 39:17
  Yeah.
• 39:17
  Uh, but, uh, one of the, one of the, the big goals of the book is to convince
• 39:20
  people that there is data and evidence and expertise that goes into this at,
• 39:24
  but also make it so you don't need to read a 300-page stock assessment every
• 39:28
  time you decide what's for dinner.
• 39:30
  But I also show you how to read one of those if you want to.
• 39:32
  so a well-managed fishery is one that has rules in place to limit the total
• 39:39
  catch to prevent overfishing, limits bycatch, especially for endangered
• 39:43
  species, usually via gear requirements or sometimes via you're not allowed
• 39:46
  to fish during this time of year when these animals are migrating through,
• 39:50
  has rules in place to limit the impact of the fishing gear on the habitat,
• 39:56
  and has data that informs all of that.
• 39:58
  So how do you know how many fish are too many fish?
• 40:00
  You have to have a sense of the population of the fish.
• 40:03
  You have to know how long they live, how big they get, how many
• 40:06
  babies they have, and how often.
• 40:08
  And once you have all that- It goes into a science-based fisheries management plan.
• 40:12
  And I'll note that not everywhere in the world has the resources
• 40:15
  to do something like that.
• 40:17
  Yeah.
• 40:17
  Uh, Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, these places all have the science-based,
• 40:22
  data-driven fisheries management plan to varying degrees of success.
• 40:25
  There's also data-limited and data-zero fisheries, management, which is a
• 40:30
  newer concept that I introduce very briefly in the book because frankly,
• 40:33
  I don't know that much about it.
• 40:35
  but there are ways of doing this even if you don't have a multi-hundred million
• 40:39
  dollar research infrastructure in place.
• 40:41
  Right.
• 40:42
  Yeah.
• 40:42
  And like when talking about fisheries management, I think one of the most
• 40:44
  important, and we've, kinda talked about it here and there in this
• 40:47
  interview, but it really comes down to the people fishing, and that's a
• 40:51
  complicated relationship, especially when it deals with government
• 40:55
  and fishers in the first place.
• 40:58
  they are the ones who follow the rules, but there's something that kinda has
• 41:01
  to happen for them to do that, and that's to have that dialogue with them.
• 41:04
  So why is it that when, like fishermen will actually follow the rules when
• 41:09
  they feel that they have that say and they have that empowerment?
• 41:13
  Yeah.
• 41:13
  This is a really interesting element of human behavior, that people are more
• 41:18
  willing to listen to decisions made at a proverbial table if they felt that
• 41:23
  they had a seat at that table, even if the decisions are not good for them.
• 41:28
  if you just have the proverbial faraway elitist bureaucrats telling me what
• 41:33
  to do without understanding anything about what the actual conditions
• 41:36
  and my way of life, of course it's easy to ignore those people.
• 41:39
  But when we make the process open to the public, when we give the industry a seat
• 41:44
  at the table, they see how the decisions are made, and they see, "Oh yeah, maybe
• 41:48
  we should cut back on fishing a little, to help allow the stock to recover so we
• 41:52
  can continue to fish for years to come."
• 41:54
  there's crazy examples of this, that we've just let people see.
• 41:58
  This is why a big, theme of all of my work is not only here's what
• 42:02
  we found, but how do we know that?
• 42:04
  convince yourself.
• 42:05
  here's access to the same information, convince yourself that this is the case.
• 42:09
  I think that's a really important thing, and it's true of climate change stuff too.
• 42:14
  a lot of people, think that it's just sort of liberal dogma, but you say,
• 42:17
  "No, no, here's how we know," and that can help persuade some people.
• 42:20
  Again, not the people whose whole identity is, "I've decided I can't be persuaded."
• 42:24
  Right.
• 42:25
  Of course, yeah.
• 42:26
  Now, another solution that you talk about is marine protected areas, MPAs.
• 42:29
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:29
  I did my master's on MPA design.
• 42:31
  It is complex.
• 42:32
  It is a tool in the conservation tool belt.
• 42:34
  But it's not everything.
• 42:36
  And you kinda talk about that a little bit.
• 42:38
  And sometimes people oversell them, like in Oceans, in the- Yes,
• 42:41
  that was- … in the movie, right?
• 42:42
  That was the other criticism I had of that otherwise wonderful David
• 42:45
  Attenborough movie, is they present these marine protected areas, which you
• 42:48
  can think of as a no-fishing zone or an underwater national park, that there
• 42:52
  are varying degrees of rules, with them, just as there are with parks on land.
• 42:56
  it was presented as an obvious solution that will always work and always
• 43:00
  work quickly, and that's not true.
• 43:03
  a well-managed, well-designed, well-implemented marine protected area
• 43:08
  is going to have more fish, bigger fish, and more species of fish in it
• 43:12
  than an otherwise ecologically similar unprotected area where fishing is allowed.
• 43:17
  But lots of marine protected areas are not especially well-designed,
• 43:21
  well-managed, or well-implemented.
• 43:22
  like the ones we mentioned earlier, that these European marine protected
• 43:25
  areas that allow bottom trawling.
• 43:27
  But also there's sometimes examples that are way dumber than that.
• 43:31
  Mm-hmm.
• 43:32
  Uh, that my students are always shocked when I share examples of marine protected
• 43:36
  areas that got a lot of positive publicity in some small island developing states or
• 43:41
  some- Australia did this for a while too, that they got a lot of positive publicity
• 43:46
  because we're making this plan to save this beloved endangered species, we're
• 43:49
  making a marine protected area, but that species doesn't live there, never did,
• 43:53
  and never will And like, duh, obviously that's not gonna help that species.
• 43:58
  It's not there.
• 44:00
  Right.
• 44:01
  So it also can take a really long time for past environmental damage to recover,
• 44:06
  especially if there are other stressors.
• 44:08
  Marine protected areas don't do anything to help against oil spills or
• 44:11
  climate change or ocean acidification.
• 44:13
  they're a very powerful tool.
• 44:15
  They work really well- Yeah … if they're done right.
• 44:17
  They're often not done right, and they can't do everything.
• 44:19
  Exactly.
• 44:19
  There are certain goals.
• 44:20
  Usually it's protecting biodiversity and helping with fisheries, for
• 44:24
  spillover effect, and they're usually quite good at that.
• 44:26
  Like you said, if that's the goal and that's what the reach
• 44:29
  is, you have to go with that.
• 44:30
  They're not an all-in-one tool.
• 44:31
  They can't do everything with imaginary borders, it's just,
• 44:34
  physically impossible to do everything.
• 44:35
  So that's a great, explanation of that.
• 44:37
  there was an interesting, ruling in Louisiana recently in the US where, I
• 44:43
  believe they're called, skimmer trawlers, who never had a sea turtle exclusion
• 44:48
  device on, but they're now mandated.
• 44:50
  I think it says- Yeah … ships over 40 feet.
• 44:52
  That was new.
• 44:52
  I covered it on our YouTube channel.
• 44:54
  Mm-hmm.
• 44:54
  and I think it's interesting when we talk about, turtle excluder devices,
• 44:58
  like they call them TEDs essentially.
• 45:01
  can you talk a little bit about them?
• 45:02
  'Cause they are a good solution to help with sea turtle bycatch.
• 45:05
  Can you talk a little- Yes … a little bit about them?
• 45:07
  So the leading threat to sea turtles in the '70s, '80s, '90s used to be bycatch,
• 45:13
  that they were caught in these shrimp trawl nets, and then they drowned.
• 45:18
  Mm-hmm.
• 45:18
  Uh, because sea turtles are not fish.
• 45:19
  They need to breathe air at the surface.
• 45:21
  They don't have gills.
• 45:22
  And then this solution is, a gear modification that gets sewn
• 45:26
  into the net itself, and it's basically a weighted trapdoor.
• 45:30
  And a shrimp is not heavy enough to trigger the trapdoor,
• 45:33
  so it still gets caught.
• 45:35
  And a sea turtle is heavy enough to trigger the trapdoor, so it
• 45:38
  gets shunted out of the net and is fine, yet may have minor bruises.
• 45:42
  And this works unbelievably well because it, not only saves tens of thousands of
• 45:48
  sea turtles a year, but it also doesn't reduce your shrimp catch that much.
• 45:53
  Like, if I were to tell you of a solution that would save all the sea
• 45:56
  turtles, but it would mean you're not gonna catch any shrimp, shrimpers aren't
• 45:59
  gonna use that This doesn't do that.
• 46:01
  They are kind of annoying to use.
• 46:03
  It's a heavy piece of metal that goes in a net.
• 46:05
  but it's, no, it works.
• 46:07
  And it's not that expensive, you get used to it, and it, totally solves the
• 46:11
  problem without reducing shrimp catch.
• 46:13
  this loophole was that relatively small boats were not required to use these.
• 46:19
  And the reasoning for that is, "Eh, they're small, who cares?" Mm-hmm.
• 46:23
  "It, it's the big guys we need to worry about." But when there's a lot of
• 46:26
  small boats, it's still a big problem
• 46:28
  Yeah.
• 46:29
  and in that story it was interesting because there was a very big discrepancy
• 46:32
  between the state collected data and the federally collected data in terms of how
• 46:35
  many sea turtles were being caught in a order of magnitude or even a couple
• 46:39
  of orders of magnitude of difference.
• 46:41
  So it's, kinda interesting to see that court ruling, especially in
• 46:43
  these days of policymaking in the US.
• 46:45
  But it was, nice to see that, these sea turtles are being looked out for.
• 46:48
  The last solution I wanna talk quickly about, as one of the ways
• 46:51
  that we can monitor what's happening on boats is fisheries observers.
• 46:55
  You know- Yeah … I've worked as a marine mammal observer in the past.
• 46:57
  I've had friends who work for fisheries observer.
• 47:00
  It's always a great job when you first come out of university to go out and
• 47:03
  get experience, learn, the building relationships with fishers and stuff.
• 47:07
  But it's not always easy, and there have been some very, sad stories
• 47:12
  of people disappearing, on boats in the past, internationally, feeling
• 47:16
  threatened, and for a variety of reasons, but especially for, like,
• 47:19
  we-- as observers, you're reporting.
• 47:22
  You know, you're- Yes … reporting on what's being caught, how those fish are
• 47:24
  being treated, all that kind of stuff.
• 47:26
  can you talk about their role in, like, that conservation or that fisheries
• 47:30
  management and why it's so important?
• 47:32
  Yeah.
• 47:32
  So for any data-driven, evidence-based conservation
• 47:35
  plan, you need to have the data.
• 47:37
  And how do we know how many sea turtles are being caught in shrimp trawl nets?
• 47:42
  How do we know how many dolphins are caught in tuna nets?
• 47:44
  someone needs to check.
• 47:46
  And relying on the fishermen themselves to check and accurately
• 47:50
  report it is a problem, because they have the perverse incentive to
• 47:53
  say, "Nope, we did nothing wrong.
• 47:55
  We don't need to change anything." So the solution has been these fisheries
• 47:58
  observers, which are independent third-party observers, whose job it is
• 48:02
  to just document everything, and it gets sent to a central clearing house and
• 48:05
  eventually to governments, to just track.
• 48:08
  Mm-hmm.
• 48:08
  And as you said, this can be a wonderful job.
• 48:11
  it's probably the highest paying job that you can get with right out
• 48:14
  of undergraduate marine biology.
• 48:16
  Absolutely.
• 48:17
  and you'll get tons of time on the water.
• 48:19
  You'll get tons of experience.
• 48:21
  but it can be dangerous, especially for women.
• 48:24
  Mm-hmm … for anyone.
• 48:26
  you might be the only human being for miles who does not work for
• 48:29
  that fishing boat, and some of those people do not want you there.
• 48:33
  Right.
• 48:34
  there have been people disappeared, there have been people threatened,
• 48:37
  there have been people bribed, it's not common in the US or Canada.
• 48:40
  No.
• 48:40
  It does happen a lot more in, the Global South.
• 48:42
  Yeah.
• 48:42
  There are issues with it.
• 48:43
  So one emerging solution to this is electronic fisheries monitoring.
• 48:48
  Mm-hmm.
• 48:48
  Which is basically, cameras set up on the back deck that are, precise
• 48:51
  enough and clear enough and HD enough that you can see exactly what's being
• 48:54
  caught, and then someone gets emailed those files and they- Mm-hmm … sit
• 48:58
  in an office somewhere where they can't be threatened, and monitor it.
• 49:02
  Yeah … fishermen like these.
• 49:04
  Right.
• 49:04
  in my experience, they think that, most fishermen who I've worked with love
• 49:07
  gadgets, and this is a really cool gadget.
• 49:10
  They're expensive at first.
• 49:11
  Mm-hmm.
• 49:11
  But you don't need to feed them.
• 49:13
  You don't need to- Yeah
• 49:14
  provide a bunk for them.
• 49:15
  Like weirdly this must have happened either a lot of times or,
• 49:20
  was so annoying that it's become legend in the fishing community.
• 49:23
  But several of the fishing captains who I've spoken with have said,
• 49:26
  "Every fishing observer has some sort of goofy dietary restriction."
• 49:29
  And like, "We've, we've been cooking the same food for years, and now
• 49:32
  I have to cook this separate meal just for them. It's annoying." You
• 49:35
  don't have to do that for, a camera.
• 49:37
  Exactly.
• 49:37
  Like, just to kinda give, a heads-up, for those of you who are thinking
• 49:41
  of doing fisheries observers, it's a great opportunity, but also talk
• 49:44
  to people who have done it before.
• 49:46
  It is not an easy life.
• 49:47
  You're six months on, six months off a lot of the times, or
• 49:50
  two months on, two months off.
• 49:51
  But talk about safety, talk about what to expect, talk about what you need
• 49:55
  in terms of, safety certifications and things like that, just to make
• 49:58
  sure that you enjoy your time on there, and you get on the right boat,
• 50:01
  and you work with the right company.
• 50:02
  As Dave said, like, US, and Canada they have a lot of regulations around that,
• 50:06
  and the boats are usually pretty good, and the people on the boats are pretty good.
• 50:08
  But also just keep an eye out that, there can be some major problems.
• 50:11
  Now, Dave, we've talked a lot about the labels, which is part three of
• 50:14
  your book, which I, first of all, I love the way you're going through
• 50:17
  and doing the parts in the book.
• 50:19
  Mm-hmm.
• 50:19
  Going from like, "Here are the harms, here's the solutions- Yeah, so
• 50:21
  I- … here are the labels" … I like to build a persuasive argument step by step.
• 50:24
  Yeah.
• 50:24
  And that's something that I spend a lot of time on social media,
• 50:27
  a lot of time on social media.
• 50:29
  And I find that people are not good at this important skill anymore.
• 50:32
  It's just like I say a slogan, and you quibble about it, or you just
• 50:36
  tell me I'm a fascist 'cause I don't agree with your alternative slogan.
• 50:40
  And, that's not how you win hearts and minds.
• 50:43
  Right.
• 50:44
  Yeah.
• 50:44
  No, that makes sense.
• 50:45
  that makes complete sense.
• 50:46
  And so I love this.
• 50:47
  Now we're at the part, like we've talked about the labels, and I think
• 50:50
  there's a lot of guides in there, and there's a lot of stuff- Mm-hmm … that
• 50:52
  you can look in from worldwide.
• 50:53
  it seems like every country- Mm-hmm … seems to have their own kind of way.
• 50:57
  And,
• 50:57
  um- Yes, to, to varying degrees of, data-drivennes.
• 51:01
  but yes- Right … there are, there are sustainable seafood guides to a lot of,
• 51:05
  coastal countries all over the world.
• 51:06
  the Europe, Canada, the US, and Australia have probably the most rigorous ones,
• 51:11
  but any of them- Right … you're better off doing that than not following it.
• 51:14
  Than not doing it, for sure.
• 51:16
  Now, well, I want to talk, to get to the part of at the counter
• 51:18
  because a lot of us, whether we're scientists or we're non-scientists,
• 51:22
  conservationists, non-conservationists, just wanna know what's gonna happen.
• 51:26
  I think a lot of us are at the approach of when we get to the counter, it can kinda
• 51:30
  get confusing and things move quickly, and the person behind the counter- Yes
• 51:34
  may not be as informed as maybe- They might not know
• 51:37
  anything … the consumer, right?
• 51:39
  'Cause it could be- Yeah … like a teenager- So- … working for minimum
• 51:41
  wage just trying to get through their day.
• 51:43
  You know what I mean?
• 51:44
  Yeah.
• 51:45
  So I actually have my students do a lab where they go to a local grocery
• 51:50
  store, pick seafood items at random, and try to use these tools to determine
• 51:55
  whether or not, they're sustainable.
• 51:57
  And an instruction that I had to add after the first year that I never
• 52:00
  would've thought I would have to explicitly say is, "If you ask a
• 52:04
  grocery store employee for help, please ask nicely." 'Cause people get so
• 52:10
  frustrated, like if they say, "Wait, is this skipjack or yellowjack tuna?
• 52:13
  Is this pole-and-line caught or, purse seine caught?"
• 52:15
  And the person doesn't know, they're not your enemy.
• 52:18
  That meant- Mm … that what I might recommend in that case is maybe don't
• 52:21
  get that tuna, but- Right … you don't yell at the grocery store employee.
• 52:25
  My God.
• 52:26
  No.
• 52:27
  Yeah, you still have to be polite.
• 52:28
  You have to understand everybody's human, everybody's trying to do their thing,
• 52:31
  and sometimes it could be up to, the employer to kind of inform the people.
• 52:35
  'Cause there are certain people that are at grocery stores that know
• 52:39
  seafood, and they are really into this.
• 52:41
  Yeah.
• 52:41
  I've, come across them.
• 52:42
  They're few and far between, but they know their seafood 'cause they care about
• 52:45
  their job and they care about seafood.
• 52:46
  But it's not always the case, and I think you're right, you have to be patient
• 52:49
  with a lot of the people, around that.
• 52:51
  Can you tell the story of the scuba diver in the Bahamas who loved eating local?
• 52:55
  Oh, my God.
• 52:56
  I
• 52:56
  like
• 52:56
  this story.
• 52:56
  Yeah, so this is, like, almost an apocryphal story, but I promise it's
• 53:00
  a thing that really happened to me.
• 53:02
  That I go- … on a lot of scuba vacations all over the world, and I remember one
• 53:07
  time I was going out on the boat in the morning, and we were excited to get out
• 53:11
  to the reef and go diving, and there was another guy who was staying at the
• 53:14
  same resort as us, and we were chatting.
• 53:17
  The whole boat ride out, he was saying, "Oh, I love to come to the islands
• 53:20
  and eat all the fresh-caught local seafood I can get." And then we went
• 53:24
  diving, and on the boat ride back, he said, Wow, there's a lot fewer fish
• 53:28
  on the reef than I remember." Like, yeah, dude, 'cause you ate them- Mm
• 53:31
  and were just talking about that.
• 53:33
  What do you think local caught means, if not, from this geographic area?
• 53:38
  Yeah, it's interesting too, especially places where there's a lot of visitors
• 53:41
  and tourism where people are going and they want locally caught because they
• 53:44
  want some fresh seafood, and, that could be taxing on a local environment that
• 53:48
  maybe not get replenished after a while.
• 53:50
  Yeah, very interesting.
• 53:52
  a lot of people are now, especially in the US, in the Caribbean,
• 53:55
  are into eating lionfish.
• 53:56
  They're an invasive species here in, the Atlantic and the Caribbean.
• 53:59
  Yeah … is that a good way?
• 54:01
  Like, there's derbies and stuff like that.
• 54:02
  Is it a good way to deal with invasive species?
• 54:05
  Should we be eating more lionfish in the Atlantic?
• 54:08
  And where I am in the Washington, DC area, blue catfish are the big
• 54:11
  invasive, And blue catfish, by the way, get way bigger than people think.
• 54:15
  my colleague Dr. Noah Bresman at Salisbury University, the
• 54:18
  biggest one that they caught, had in its stomach two whole ducks.
• 54:24
  Like this is a stream fish that is eating ducks.
• 54:28
  So yeah, from a sustainability perspective, there's really not a
• 54:32
  better option than killing something that we do not want to be there.
• 54:36
  So it would actually not be a problem if we were to overfish these species.
• 54:39
  We want to remove them.
• 54:40
  Is it effective at keeping their numbers under control?
• 54:43
  It's a lot better than doing nothing, and I don't know if there's a better-
• 54:45
  Right … solution other than prevention.
• 54:47
  Right.
• 54:47
  Exactly.
• 54:48
  And that's difficult once they've already established a population in
• 54:51
  certain spots, especially lionfish.
• 54:52
  You go diving, you and I dive, we see it probably everywhere in the Caribbean,
• 54:55
  they're beautiful fish, but they don't belong in where we're going diving.
• 54:58
  If you're in the Southeast Pacific, sure, go ahead.
• 55:01
  That's always great.
• 55:01
  But, when they're in the Atlantic Caribbean, yeah,
• 55:04
  they're kinda wreaking havoc.
• 55:06
  Wildly destructive fish.
• 55:07
  Yeah.
• 55:08
  Yeah, exactly.
• 55:09
  Now, one thing that I've noticed in the book is, like, you leave animal
• 55:12
  welfare out of your framework, including, like, octopus and fish
• 55:16
  pain, which some people study and they, bring up every once in a while.
• 55:19
  How do you explain that to people who, feel strongly about looking at the welfare
• 55:25
  of how fish and others are treated?
• 55:28
  Yeah.
• 55:28
  If you are someone for whom that's a priority, then maybe
• 55:31
  don't eat some of these things.
• 55:33
  But from- Mm-hmm … my perspective as a conservation scientist, I am worried
• 55:36
  about the extinction of whole species.
• 55:38
  I am not worried- Right … about the suffering of a few
• 55:40
  individuals of those species.
• 55:42
  Right.
• 55:42
  It just does not factor into my worldview.
• 55:45
  I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm not saying it's bad.
• 55:47
  Right.
• 55:47
  I'm saying I am agnostic on this issue.
• 55:49
  and most of the sustainable seafood guides that are out there don't discuss this.
• 55:54
  it's are we overfishing too many of them?
• 55:56
  Are we killing things- Right … as bycatch?
• 55:58
  Is it pleasant for a fish that's caught in a net with a bunch of other fish?
• 56:02
  Probably not.
• 56:03
  There are also people who strongly believe that fish obviously
• 56:06
  don't feel pain because they're lower vertebrates or whatever.
• 56:09
  I don't really care.
• 56:10
  It just doesn't factor into my value system.
• 56:13
  If fish did- Right … feel pain, it doesn't mean that we have to give
• 56:17
  them up because they're a critical protein source for billions of humans.
• 56:21
  Mm-hmm.
• 56:21
  If fish did not- Right … feel pain, it doesn't mean we could
• 56:23
  torture them for no reason.
• 56:25
  It does not factor into my- Yeah … value system as a
• 56:28
  evidence-based conservationist.
• 56:30
  Gotcha.
• 56:30
  And I think also too, it's like you, kinda mentioned it like, , a
• 56:33
  really interesting perspective.
• 56:33
  It's like we're almost at a point where it's like we just wanna
• 56:35
  make sure they're still there, so
• 56:37
  obviously at one point, hopefully we can get to the more focused on the
• 56:41
  welfare at some point, but we gotta make sure that these fish are still
• 56:44
  there and not overfished, and going the wayside and, continue to be overfished.
• 56:48
  It's a good, uh, way of putting it.
• 56:50
  It's not the fact that it's not an issue, it's the fact of like where are the
• 56:54
  priorities in terms of what we're looking at for, fisheries management and stuff.
• 56:58
  and obviously certain people care more about it than others, but I
• 57:01
  like the way you approach that.
• 57:02
  Now last thing I wanna talk about, in terms of just going
• 57:05
  over through these, like the counter, Greenpeace has a red list.
• 57:09
  Like it's, not a red list as in the IUCN Red List, but it-
• 57:11
  Mm-hmm … more of like what you should eat and what you shouldn't.
• 57:14
  Now, all sharks are on that red list.
• 57:17
  They don't think you should be- Yep
• 57:18
  eating any shark.
• 57:18
  You've talked in the past and I'm sure you continue to talk about this, but that even
• 57:22
  in the US there are specific, fisheries in, sharks, that are sustainably managed.
• 57:28
  and I think that's difficult for some people to- Yes … wrap their head
• 57:31
  around because we keep talking about how, sharks are overfished worldwide.
• 57:35
  can you talk about like why you don't agree with the Greenpeace red
• 57:38
  list to avoid all sharks, but also to this sustainably, that shark
• 57:42
  fisheries could be sustainably managed?
• 57:44
  Yes.
• 57:45
  So, the Greenpeace list of if they see a grocery store selling this
• 57:50
  species at all, that grocery store is therefore bad, I think is oversimplified
• 57:55
  to the point of being not helpful.
• 57:57
  There are certainly some species that are problematic, and if I see them,
• 58:01
  it's gonna give me, raise some doubt for me about that grocery store.
• 58:05
  But for almost everything on the Greenpeace list, sustainable sources
• 58:09
  exist according to all the other guides.
• 58:11
  That there are Marine Stewardship Council, certified fisheries for
• 58:15
  several of the things that are on there.
• 58:16
  There are Seafood Watch green or at least yellow recommendations for several of
• 58:20
  the species that Greenpeace says, "No one should ever eat this. There's not
• 58:23
  a sustainable source that exists." And I think there is simplifying stuff to
• 58:28
  make it understandable, and there is simplifying something so much that it's
• 58:31
  wrong, and it's a fine line to walk.
• 58:34
  With sharks specifically, unsustainable fishing practices are
• 58:38
  the number one threat to sharks.
• 58:39
  Among- sharks are some of the most threatened animals in the world,
• 58:43
  and among threatened species of sharks, 100% of them list overfishing
• 58:47
  among their top three threats.
• 58:49
  It's a big problem, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a sustainable
• 58:52
  fishery for sharks, because there is.
• 58:55
  they exist, again, in primarily in these places that have these well-resourced
• 58:59
  natural resource management regimes.
• 59:01
  but Seafood Watch recommends some, MSC has certified some, some of these other guides
• 59:06
  that I talked about have certified some.
• 59:08
  It's not just me saying this.
• 59:09
  sustainable fisheries for sharks are real.
• 59:12
  That doesn't mean that's what we should do.
• 59:14
  you can say- Right … "I love sharks and it makes me sad to see a shark
• 59:16
  hurt, so I won't ever eat shark even if it's sustainable." That's fine,
• 59:20
  but that's different from- That's,
• 59:22
  that's
• 59:22
  their
• 59:22
  choice … there's no such thing as a sustainable shark fishery.
• 59:25
  Gotcha.
• 59:25
  Nope, that makes perfect sense.
• 59:27
  as we kinda close up here, the person listening to this interview, the
• 59:30
  person who's gonna buy your book, they want to do the best they can.
• 59:34
  Let's set expectations for them in terms- Mm-hmm … of what
• 59:37
  they can actually accomplish.
• 59:39
  Because I think a lot of the times when we talk about conservation,
• 59:41
  like it comes down to the individual.
• 59:43
  Like, we need to do this- as an individual.
• 59:45
  And one of them is buying sustainably caught seafood.
• 59:48
  Mm-hmm.
• 59:48
  What can people expect when they go to that supermarket and expect that they can
• 59:52
  do, and not get disappointed about what they may or may not, or maybe they have
• 59:56
  a bad experience or something like that.
• 59:57
  Let's prepare them- Yeah … in terms of what they can do.
• 1:00:00
  what is the role of an individual in ocean conservation is actually a
• 1:00:04
  question I just asked in my scuba diving magazine column, Ask a Marine Biologist.
• 1:00:09
  And what I said there is, yes, one person making different choices can absolutely
• 1:00:13
  make a difference, especially if there's tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands
• 1:00:17
  or millions of people all making the same choice as part of a coordinated- Mm-hmm
• 1:00:20
  campaign.
• 1:00:21
  And that's what we're seeing with these sustainable seafood choices.
• 1:00:24
  If you are the only person in the world who cares about this, you
• 1:00:27
  not eating lobster is not gonna put pressure on the lobster fishery.
• 1:00:30
  But if everyone starts following the Seafood Watch guidelines,
• 1:00:33
  that will put pressure.
• 1:00:35
  We've seen it happen with other fisheries.
• 1:00:37
  We've seen fisheries say, "We would like to be able to still operate, and
• 1:00:40
  that means we need to improve so that we meet these guidelines." In terms of
• 1:00:44
  what to expect, I think you're gonna be surprised at how much detail you need
• 1:00:48
  to know about a seafood item in order to be able to assess if it's sustainable.
• 1:00:52
  If you look at the Seafood Watch guide, it doesn't just say, "Tuna good, snapper
• 1:00:56
  bad." It has five kinds of tuna that are good and five kinds of tuna that
• 1:00:59
  are bad, from certain countries is good, from certain countries is bad.
• 1:01:03
  Certain gear is good, certain gear is bad.
• 1:01:05
  And you can't always find that information on packaging at
• 1:01:09
  a grocery store on a label.
• 1:01:11
  So you can always ask, but again, ask nicely.
• 1:01:13
  You can always visit- Yeah … the website of the grocery store or
• 1:01:16
  of the particular seafood company.
• 1:01:18
  I have found with my students doing these labs, that almost everyone is
• 1:01:23
  able to find sustainable seafood options at a grocery store near them, but lots
• 1:01:28
  of the options are not sustainable.
• 1:01:29
  So It may- Mm-hmm … require, giving up a favorite thing.
• 1:01:33
  If everyone did a little better on this, it would buy us time
• 1:01:36
  to fix the other problems.
• 1:01:37
  Yeah.
• 1:01:38
  True.
• 1:01:39
  That's a good point.
• 1:01:40
  That's a really, really good point.
• 1:01:42
  I love that.
• 1:01:42
  I love that idea.
• 1:01:44
  I kinda wanna end this interview on something that I think is really cool
• 1:01:46
  because it, like, this is a, near the end of the book, you kind of mention,
• 1:01:50
  a super fan of Costco, your dad, like, he had his proudest moment.
• 1:01:54
  can you talk a little bit about that?
• 1:01:55
  Because I think it's, it kind of- Yeah … tells, like, what
• 1:01:58
  happens when someone's successful in being able to buy sustainable.
• 1:02:01
  So, if you've ever been to Costco, and if you haven't, you should
• 1:02:04
  go right now, that it's great.
• 1:02:06
  they have this sort of internal trade publication called The Costco
• 1:02:09
  Connection that you can get for free on your way out of the store.
• 1:02:14
  And the Marine Stewardship Council, when I worked there, was featured in Costco
• 1:02:19
  Connection in the context of where Costco is improving how we buy our seafood.
• 1:02:23
  here's an interview with the Marine Stewardship Council leadership
• 1:02:25
  about how they're helping us to buy sustainably sourced things.
• 1:02:28
  I was not in this interview, but my employer was.
• 1:02:32
  And my dad reads The Costco Connection because of course he does.
• 1:02:36
  And he saw that MSC was in there, and he told, like, everyone he knew, like,
• 1:02:40
  "Oh, that's where my son works. Look how cool this is." Um, so he actually, just
• 1:02:46
  got at the, Naples, Florida, where they live, Jewish Book Festival, he got to
• 1:02:51
  introduce someone who was giving a talk a new book about Costco called The Joy of
• 1:02:55
  Costco, which is also a wonderful book.
• 1:02:58
  And my dad was wearing a shirt under it that had the photo of
• 1:03:01
  the $1.50 hotdog combo on it.
• 1:03:06
  I'm telling you, those $1.50 hot dogs, they hit right- They're great … when
• 1:03:09
  you, when you- Yeah … when you get them.
• 1:03:10
  Yeah.
• 1:03:11
  this has been great, Dave.
• 1:03:12
  I really wanna thank you for coming on the podcast, but also for writing the book.
• 1:03:15
  I think this is really helpful.
• 1:03:16
  it's very informative.
• 1:03:18
  It gives people what they need, in a very practical way and transparent way.
• 1:03:22
  I- Great … do have to say, like, with all the stuff that's come out, in
• 1:03:25
  the past, that we've talked about here today, it makes things more confusing.
• 1:03:29
  This kinda lays it all out for that.
• 1:03:31
  The book is up for presale.
• 1:03:33
  Now, I just- Yes … right before this interview, I bought
• 1:03:36
  a book, so I'm expecting it to come once it's printed out.
• 1:03:38
  It's coming out November 17th.
• 1:03:40
  It's out in November.
• 1:03:41
  Yeah, out November 17th.
• 1:03:43
  We're gonna be actually in person, hanging out in person.
• 1:03:45
  Yeah, I'm
• 1:03:46
  gonna see
• 1:03:46
  you- Uh-
• 1:03:46
  … see you in person in Scotland on its release date.
• 1:03:49
  I'll come back two boxes of books on my front step.
• 1:03:52
  It's gonna be awesome.
• 1:03:53
  I can't wait, for that to happen.
• 1:03:55
  But, I'm gonna put the link, in the show notes that people
• 1:03:58
  can go and buy this book.
• 1:04:00
  I think it's great.
• 1:04:01
  What I would recommend, too, is not only buy one, buy more and give
• 1:04:05
  it to your library, so that they can have- Yeah, that'd be great
• 1:04:08
  a copy in their book so more people can get access to it.
• 1:04:10
  Dave, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and all the work you do to
• 1:04:13
  put it, like the effort you put into this book, and all the effort you do
• 1:04:16
  for all your other stuff that you do.
• 1:04:18
  I can't wait to have you back on and talk more about, marine conservation.
• 1:04:22
  Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:04:23
  Again, the book is Why Sustainable Seafood Matters, and you can find
• 1:04:26
  me on social media @whysharksmatter.
• 1:04:29
  Awesome.
• 1:04:29
  Perfect.
• 1:04:30
  All right, thanks Dave, appreciate it.
• 1:04:31
  There are so many things that David talks about in his book and in this
• 1:04:35
  interview that even I got confused about before, and now I'm enlightened.
• 1:04:40
  It is great.
• 1:04:41
  Thank you, David, for coming on.
• 1:04:42
  Thank you for writing this book.
• 1:04:44
  As usual, the guy's always welcome to come on here, not only just for promotion, but
• 1:04:48
  just to talk about marine science, marine conservation, because he's so good at it.
• 1:04:52
  And it's fun to be able to talk to him.
• 1:04:54
  We're good friends, and I'm glad, to be able to have this
• 1:04:56
  platform just to help support him.
• 1:04:58
  So go buy the book if you wanna learn more about sustainable seafood.
• 1:05:02
  you can pre-order it.
• 1:05:03
  It's just down, in the show notes.
• 1:05:05
  There's a link.
• 1:05:05
  You can click on that link, pre-order it.
• 1:05:07
  It'll come to your house, when it is ready.
• 1:05:09
  It goes right to the publisher, too.
• 1:05:11
  So you're supporting that, publisher.
• 1:05:13
  You're supporting David in his work, and I think it's really important.
• 1:05:16
  I can't wait for, the next book when he writes it, but this is one that I
• 1:05:20
  look forward to hearing feedback on.
• 1:05:22
  So if you do get the book, and you're reading it, and you wanna let me know
• 1:05:25
  what you think, or even David know what you think, you can get ahold of
• 1:05:28
  me with my social media following, or links in the show notes as well.
• 1:05:31
  But I wanna thank you so much for listening to this, for supporting Dave,
• 1:05:35
  for supporting this podcast in what we do, because we are doing it for you to
• 1:05:39
  help you understand the ocean a little bit better and understand the work that
• 1:05:42
  we do to make that information available.
• 1:05:45
  And I think it's really great that we get to do that, and you get to
• 1:05:48
  kinda feel a little bit better about the ocean, knowing a little bit more.
• 1:05:51
  So thank you so much for the support for Dave, for myself.
• 1:05:54
  we really appreciate it, and thank you so much for listening to this episode
• 1:05:57
  of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 1:05:59
  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
• 1:06:00
  Have a great day.
• 1:06:00
  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.