Daily Downer

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At least every other day I can rely on the morning New York Times to alert me to a dispiriting problem I wasn’t already worried about. Today it is illegal fishing: industrial-size trawlers that lay miles of mesh nets in international waters totally ignoring the various international conventions – unsatisfactory as they are – intended to preserve the population of fishes so much of the world depends on for their livelihood and their protein. It’s bad enough that we can’t get the Japanese to agree to stop killing whales; at least we can talk to them about it. But here is a $10 billion business that is thriving as fish-finding technology improves, beholden to no one, reporting nothing, limited only by human greed – or need, as the case may be. The principal target of the trawlers written about by the Times is toothfish, a/k/a Chilean sea bass, which adds relevance to the issue and makes that trip to the Manhattan fish restaurant slightly less enjoyable.

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