U.S. Seafood, Goodbye

U.S. Seafood, Goodbye

   Perhaps that is a bit harsh, for seafood around our vast shores is indeed plentiful...but little of it stays in the country.  We harvest it along our 94,000 miles of coastland and our 3.5 million miles of rivers...and then export nearly a third of that catch (our seafood exports have jumped 400% since 1985).  Consequently, we now import 91% of our seafood (and that includes exporting nearly 80% of wild-caught Alaskan salmon), a figure that has increased nearly 1500%.  And why?  It's probably better explained by author Paul Greenberg, himself asking that question in his book, American Catch (recently interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR).

   We did not know that when we drained our salt marshes and turned them into fields for soy and corn and other commodity crops that we were destroying the spawning and rearing grounds of 70 percent of our wild seafood.  We didn't realize that by removing our natural oyster beds we were cutting the fish-carrying capacity of our estuaries in half.  We failed to notice that when we threw up over eighty-thousand large dams and millions of other smaller obstructions on rivers and streams all over the country we were eradicating the runs of salmon, sturgeon, shad, and herring that provided real food for the nation.  We were in denial that when we dumped trillions of gallons of sewage and industrial effluent into our waters we were lacing our seafood with harmful bacteria and persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.  And we didn't quite believe that if we increased our coastal population, as we have by a whopping 39 percent over the course of the last forty years, we would overrun working fishing communities, degrade water quality, and hobble our coasts' ability to feed us.

   Yes, nearly half of our population is expected to be moving to or already residing at or near our coasts in just five more years.  And yes, we basically export our wild-caught fish and import processed and farmed fish.  And yes, oysters can filter between 20 and 50 gallons of water daily; and yes, our estuaries were crystal clear ages ago when we harvested  nearly 700 million oysters annually in the New York area alone back in 1880;  that was all before we began dumping 50 million gallons of sewage into their beds 35 years later.  And now the Animas River.

   If you haven't heard of it (I hadn't), it's a tiny river that runs through the town of Silverton and Durango in Colorado.  It part of the San Juan River, one that eventually feeds into the Colorado River itself.  And recently, there was an accident at one of the old mining holding ponds near the area (in a twist of fate, the Environmental Protection Agency was investigating what was contained in some of the holding ponds and accidentally bumped the gravel berm which caused the leak)...3 million gallons are anticipated to have leaked.  And if you haven't seen the photos, imagine a pristine river running through your town, and then the next day, you see this (photo taken by Jerry McBride of the Associated Press):

   To date, the mineral levels downstream have soared...300 times the amount of arsenic, 3500 times the amount of lead, unmeasured amounts of aluminum, copper, zinc, and cadmium. This all pales, of course, with other spills from tailings ponds, some that pour billions of gallons of toxic wastes into rivers and streams, such as the Mount Polley mine in Canada (think 6,000 Olympic-sized pools of toxic waste being released into the rivers).  The Animas River is just one of what is believed to be some 3500 such ponds abandoned after mining operations (the majority of the filtering of gold ore still uses cyanide), although this figure is somewhat disputed by the EPA which had this report in their reference notebook from 2004...the 1997 EPA “National Hardrock Mining Framework” estimates over 200,000 inactive and abandoned mines nationwide, although a 1993 estimate by the Mineral Policy Center puts the number of hardrock abandoned mines at 557,650 nationwide. 

   The overall point of author Greenberg's book, however, is to rethink how we're losing and abandoning our ocean stock.  He profiles some local once-American seafood (the eastern oyster, the sockeye salmon and the Louisiana brown shrimp) and questions why the U.S. public is so favoring farm-raised imports of such seafood.  One quick answer?...imports are cheap.  But, he asks, as with many things, at what cost?  And how are those farmed fish stocks being raised?

   Here's just one example from Consumers Reports in April 2015: Nearly all (94 percent) of the raw shrimp available in the U.S. are farmed in Asian countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, India and Indonesia.  Because of the crowded and polluted conditions that typically exist in fish-farming ponds or tanks, the shrimp are often given antibiotics such as tetracyclines, which is illegal in shrimp imported to the U.S...A new Consumer Reports (CR) study released Friday found that 60 percent of 342 samples of frozen shrimp it tested contained Salmonella, Vibrio, Listeria, or E. coli, and 2 percent tested positive for the superbug MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)...FDA examined 3.7 percent of foreign shrimp shipments in 2014 and tested 0.7 percent.

   In case you missed it, that's less than 1% of imported shrimp being tested...but the shrimp are cheap, or at least cheaper than American shrimp.  And more importantly, like oysters, they are massive filtering machines, taking in waters that may or may not be filled with pollutants and toxic minerals or chemicals.  What we're losing, notes Greenberg, is far more than our edible ocean stocks, but also an entire ecosystem that worked together, primarily as we shifted to land-based stocks (as one comparison, the USDA notes that as of 2014, the average American eats 80 pounds of beef per person annually, but has dropped its seafood consumption to just over 14 pounds per person).

   The Animas River spill might bring attention to our defunding of cleaning such sites (the government cleanup fund, the so-named Superfund, struggles each year to obtain funding, this from Wikipedia: Approximately 70 percent of Superfund cleanup activities historically have been paid for by parties responsible (PRPs) for the cleanup of contamination.  The only time cleanup costs are not borne by the responsible party is when that party either cannot be found or is unable to pay for the cleanup.  For those sites, the Superfund law originally paid for toxic waste cleanups through a tax on petroleum and chemical industries.  The chemical and petroleum fees were intended to provide incentives to use less toxic substances.  Over five years, $1.6 billion was collected, and the tax went to a trust fund for cleaning up abandoned or uncontrolled hazardous waste sites. The last full fiscal year (FY) in which the Department of the Treasury collected the tax was 1995.  At the end of FY 1996 the invested trust fund balance was $6.0 billion.  This fund was exhausted by the end of FY 2003...getting Congress to approve new funding has been difficult at best (the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, which now funds Superfund, has dropped the Superfund budget to the lowest level in 25 years and bills to reinstate the "tax on those responsible" have consistently failed in Congress).

   "Before it's too late" is a common cry, especially when a disaster such as a toxic spill occurs.  But as author Greenberg notes, we should perhaps look at our coastal waters as well, for a full-on disaster has happened there as well...but only if we want to look.