Yesterday's gospel lesson was a series of the parables of Jesus, including one which says God's reign is like a fish net, cast out over the waters and hauling in fish worth keeping and others to through back. We call the ones which don't have commercial use "by-catch" these days, and because of indiscriminate fishing around the world there aren't many "good" or "bad" fish left.
So, we set up fish farms, and a lot of people don't like it.
A recent issue of Time magazine has an article on the future of fishing and it does look at the impact of aquaculture. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2081796,00.html We still don't know definitively whether fish farms lead to greater disease in wild populations or if we lose the benefits attributed to eating fish when they are commercially raised. Chances are though that the fish you eat have been grown in pens rather than, well, "swimmin' with da fishes" in a natural habitat.
When we were in Nova Scotia we were staying close to a proposed fish farm site near Shelburne. Some lawn signs warned against the project and others said "We support sustainable aquaculture." Fish farms mean jobs and tax revenue, but others worry about the environmental impact.
Does it matter to you one way or another if your fish come from a pen? Is this just one more sign that we are messing up Creation, or a creative alternative to declining fish stocks? Should we care?
4 comments:
It does seem harder to find fish that are not from fish farms. I have heard some horror stories about some of the fish farms in other parts of the world.
I buy fish that says it is "wild caught from the Arctic Ocean". I hope that is the case...but who knows if they are from fish farms in the Arctic Ocean!
I'm not someone who enjoys fish (it's the smell that does me in) but certainly the more we mess with nature, the more concerned we should be, I'd say.
It's the old 2 sided coin problem. Demand for commercial fishing brought the Cod population to near extinction. So what is the solution? Aquaculture.
Now we have a problem with fishfarms.
It's like clean energy. We don't want more nukes or incinerators, but we don't want wind turbines, or unsitely solar panels around us either??
Come on people! Do we need solutions to our solutions?
I'm with Ian. Fish stinks anyway.
I have no problem eating a cow that was not raised in the wild. I'm OK if she was given some antibiotics when she was sick too.
Don't forget articles are written to sell papers, and magazines.
Last Thursday had a feed of fresh bass caught in northern Ontario, in the wild. They were very good, even our daughter who doesn't really like fish said that it wasn't that bad, not too fishy! The fish population in the wild is also dropping because we have introduced species of birds to our area that eat their weight in fish a day, and yet there is no predator for that bird in this climate, sooo nature can't do it's thing. All very complicated and yet, all our doing.
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