Information is Beautiful, but can also be scary. In a recent project from David McCandless at The Guardian, he takes a look at fish stock data from 1900 to present, seeing the slow but staggering depletion of stocks worldwide. Why have we never noticed this before? It’s all due to the narrow span of human existence:
They also help counter the phenomenon of “shifting environment baselines”. This is when each generation views the environment they remember from their youth as “natural” and normal. Today that means our fishing policies and environmental activism is geared to restoring the oceans to the state we remember they were. That’s considered the environmental baseline.
The problem is, the sea was already heavily exploited when we were young.
The charts do tell an incredible story, but as is the case so often with these types of data the inevitable question arises: How accurate is data from 1900? Also, how much of the missing stock has been replaced by in-land Fish Farms?
I have to admit I don’t know the answer to these questions, but read his article and see the visualizations over at The Guardian.
via Information is Beautiful: Plenty More Fish In The Sea? | News | guardian.co.uk.
The US currently imports 90 percent of its fish, so some of these fish might actually be returning. What would be more interesting to see, is a where US fish actually come from and how it has changed.
If one examines why buffalo almost went extinct and cows never came close, then one can easily understand how private property rights can easily fix this problem. People have accepted this principle with land but water is still stuck in the hunter-gatherer stages.