Yeah, fish populations are screwed. UBC professor Daniel Pauly summarizes some of those reasons why in his recent essay, Aquacalypse Now but I was particularly struck by this excerpt because I’ve been carrying around one of these consumer fish population awareness cards. Maybe because it gives me a subconscious feeling of goodness (maybe unfortunately it is something synonymous with a feeling of purity/superiority).

The other market-based initiative, prevalent in the United States, distributes wallet-size cards designed to steer consumers toward fish that the group issuing the cards deems to have been caught sustainably. Their success is considerable if measured by the millions of cards given away, for example, by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but assessing the impact on the fisheries is difficult. For one thing, the multitude of such cards leads to contradictions and confusion, as the same fish are assessed differently by different organizations. For example, ahi tuna is rated as “safe,” “questionable,” and “avoid” on the wallet cards issued by three U.S. nonprofits. A bigger issue, however, is that these cards generate only “horizontal” pressure–that is, a group of restaurant-goers might chide each other for ordering the cod filet or might ask the overworked student who served them where the fish came from, but this pressure does not reach wholesalers, fleet operators, or supermarket chains. “Vertical” pressure exerted by environmental NGOs on such decision-makers is far more effective. But, if that’s true, why not directly pressure the government and legislators, since they are the ones who regulate the fisheries?