Go Fish

I'm a vegetarian. I do not eat pigs, cows, birds, fish, or any other meat, because in our age of supermarkets, it is absolutely unnecessary to kill animals in order to have a complete, nutritious, delicious diet.

Many people on some level understand my compunction with killing animals that walk or fly, but it's often harder for them to conceive why I don't eat seafood. Swordfish or lobster don't scream or squeel when you kill them, so their suffering is more of an abstraction. And come on - to give up eating meat AND fish I must be some kind of kook!

But occasionally, science comes along and vindicates erstwhile kooks, making them look like the only reasonable people in the room. And it's now becoming clear that eating fish is no longer a reasonable dietary choice.

Only Fifty Years Left for Sea Fish (BBC)
There will be virtually no fish or other seafood from the oceans by the middle of the century, scientists conclude.
"The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one," said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada.
Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project, added: "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood."

Now, this really shouldn't come as a surprise. It's simple arithmetic. There are now over six billion people on the planet, and although the oceans are vast, they aren't infinite. Fishing used to be sustainable when they're weren't so many people and the fishing itself wasn't so industrial. Now, if people keep glutting themselves on cod and tuna, there just won't be any left.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution, albeit one that's unsatisfying for our self-centered society: STOP EATING FISH. You don't need to eat fish to have a complete diet; it is unnecessary, it is a luxury, and now an ethically indefensible one. There are plenty of other sources for the protein and nutrients found in fish. If petty selfishness overrides your moral compass and you choose to keep contributing to the disappearance of sea life as we know it, at least consider eating less seafood. We can't have our oceans and devour them too.