A Coastal View
From the Gulf of Maine to the Andaman Sea, Earth's oceans are overfished
By Christa Marie Thorpe
In the quiet of night, while I fall asleep in my host family’s house on Libong Island, home suddenly feels very close. From Thailand, halfway around the world, I see the connections between the place I have come from, this foreign land where I am, and the person who I am becoming. I close my eyes and imagine the coast of Maine, my home, until it slowly blends with images of my new environment, the waters and shores of Thailand.
The portrait drawn in my mind proves to me that regardless of the differences in flora, fauna, and geological landscapes, the world’s diverse coasts share the same spirit. With my persistent desire to taste, smell, and hear the ocean, I have learned that my responsibility to care for the environment applies on every coast. The marine ecosystems of the world harbor the same inherent values, the same vulnerabilities, and the same social, economic, and environmental issues.
Studying abroad in Thailand with the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI) connected me with people who are inextricably bound to my own fate. I learned from rural communities about the links between human rights and the environment and about the ecological consequences of current Thai government policies that too often neglect local participation. I could have read about these facts in books back home, but only through the experiential learning and cross-cultural relationships did the knowledge change my life.
During my days on Koh Libong, the connection I share with Thai fishermen and their families deepens as reflections about my coastal home sweep through my thoughts. I remember how on summer evenings in Maine my older brother would come home from his shift at Muscongus Bay Lobster Co-op trailing the strong scent of ocean fish. He would spend his days sorting the fishermen’s bait, earning himself the nickname “Bait Boy Ben.” On occasion I visited him in the little shed where he stood with several barrels overflowing with silver wide-eyed fish, caught and delivered every day to one of the countless lobster docks.
The bait species used to trap our delicious Maine lobster are bigger than most of the fish I have seen caught and eaten by traditional fisherman in Thailand’s coastal communities. The full schools of baiting fish in Maine are drawn from their marine ecosystems, along with countless tons of by-catch, then cut up and thrown back to a hurting sea. Lobster consumers in U.S. cities and towns, and many fishermen, give hardly a passing thought to the impacts of gradually depleting the coastal waters of a basic bait species. What are the consequences for marine species throughout the food chain—including the ones which do not grace our dinner plates? How will unsustainable fishing affect people’s livelihoods and our planet? From the Gulf of Maine to the Andaman Sea, Earth’s oceans are over-fished. We are losing biodiversity before we even understand the full importance of diverse ecosystems.
Days spent in Thailand exploring diverse marine environments like coral reefs and mangroves taught me that an array of interdependent organisms comprise an ecosystem. I had never before thought of an ecosystem as a symphony of interdependent biological communities living in a single geographical area. The fishing of a single species, from blue fin tuna to bait, became a much weightier subject for me when I realized that we fish ecosystems, not just independent species.
Throughout my life, I have watched lobstermen haul up colorful buoys from the Atlantic with the highly skewed notion that the traps are being set on substrates where only lobsters crawl and dwell. I have failed to imagine that at the bottom of the buoyed line the lobster traps are surrounded by organisms that are essential to the life and productivity of the target species.
This disastrous assumption is repeated by commercial shrimp fleets dragging trawlers across coral reefs, and by the Thai government, among others, subsidizing projects that uproot entire mangrove forests for unsustainable aquaculture.
Policy makers in both Maine and Thailand often argue their priority is maintaining the welfare of human beings, which I do not doubt. But the devastating irony is that when fisheries collapse, coastal villages like Koh Libong are left with no alternative sustainable economic options. People will suffer when the environment suffers.
A village headman in northern Thailand shared a brilliant piece of wisdom when he said, “Mi paw lao,” “We have enough already.” Enough is all you need. Rural Thais do not have an abundance of resources, as the country’s wealthy and powerful have consistently won battles for the land’s riches. By caring for the small amount that has been tilled by their village through generations, the people have managed to preserve the indispensable biodiversity of the forests. Today, the subsistence farmers know their children will have enough to live comfortably, as will their grandchildren. Sustainable patterns are repeated, using valuable traditional ecological knowledge. Such knowledge of place is what many of us from modern industrialized societies are lacking. These misunderstandings are what will cripple us in the future.
I am not knowledgeable about how the ecosystems off the Maine coast function. I do know that, due to overfishing, I do not see the same large fish of the higher trophic levels that my father and grandfather saw when they were young. My experience is mirrored by my peers in Koh Libong who have only had rare glimpses of the endangered dugong, a once abundant sea mammal that is being destroyed by trawlers that damage the sea grass on which the dugong feeds. Along with the lamenting communities, the oceans groan under the weight of human carelessness.
We do not yet know the role of every link and component of Earth’s marine ecosystems, but what is known is that ecosystems harbor biodiversity. Diversity is necessary to preserve fish for a village’s protein needs and economic welfare. Dynamic ecosystems protect our trees and ocean plankton, both of which guard against climate change. If we are to protect humans, whether in coastal Maine or Koh Libong, we must first protect the environments that ultimately sustain our communities.
Christa Thorpe grew up in Bangladesh and Maine. She is now a junior studying Anthropology and Music at Wheaton College. She studied abroad with the International Sustainable Development Studies Institution in Thailand last year and spent the summer in Chiang Mai interning with an exiled news publication from Burma.