How to Save a Dying Ocean

Ted Balaker: What’s the best way to save the whales, the dolphins or mostly any kind of animal for that matter? During an elaborate sting operation filmmakers exposed Japan’s illegal dolphin hunters. The result, a documentary called “The Cove”. It took home the Oscar for Best Documentary. But days later direct Louis Psihoyos was back stirring things up. Louis Psihoyos: We used the Oscars as an opportunity to get the team back together to bust the restaurant. Ted Balaker: The Hump restaurant in Santa Monica, California was busted after his team’s hidden cameras exposed chefs serving sushi made from the endangered Sei Whale. The protesters want the place shutdown. Male: No whale should be eaten here especially not endangered species. Louis Psihoyos: Everything in the ocean from the great whales to dolphins to plankton is being jeopardized. We are raping and harvesting the ocean unsustainably. Male: Absolutely. It could easily mean the end of certain species, species to go extinct. Ted Balaker: Christopher Costello is a professor of Natural Resource Economics at UC Santa Barbara. He points out that about a third of the world’s fisheries have already collapsed and many more are quickly heading toward the same fate. Christopher Costello: The fish stock themselves are collapsing so they're either gone or they're so few of them it’s not even worth anybody’s time to go try and catch them. Male: The bottom line is there is huge profit. Ted Balaker: Whether it’s over fishing or serving endangered whale sushi, the protester seem to agree that greed is to blame. Male: Whenever anything immoral is done there is usually a profit behind it. Ted Balaker: Do we need more government control to reign in all that greed? Christopher Costello: I think there is this really interesting paradox, the more control the government retains for these resources the less well they're managed. Ted Balaker: Costello notes that for the past 50 years we've relied on lawsuits and regulations to try and prevent over fishing, but it hasn’t work why not? Christopher Costello: First of all you’ve got to think about human behavior. Humans are pretty clever and any regulation you put in they're going to think of a way to get around it. Ted Balaker: Take the fishing season. Government regulators try to preserve fish populations by limiting the fishing season maybe to a couple of months or a couple of weeks. Christopher Costello: The problem is it doesn’t limit the cash, it limits the time. So what I do is I go buy a bigger, faster boat and I can double my catch in that period. Ted Balaker: You see it on the TV show The Deadliest Catch where fisherman use everything from faster boats to better navigation equipment to catch as much as crab as quickly as possible. Christopher Costello: And almost all scientist now agree that wide spread collapse of fisheries around the world is due to mismanagement. Ted Balaker: Why is the ocean in such bad shape? Christopher Costello: I love the analogy of public bathroom. Ted Balaker: Same reason public bathrooms are in such bad shape. Christopher Costello: Nobody owns them. Nobody has the incentive to keep them up and the user’s don’t have the incentive to keep them clean. Ted Balaker: The public bathroom is a common area owned by no one, but hotel bathrooms are clean because someone owns them. Christopher Costello: In fisheries it’s really the same thing. If no one owns it, it becomes mismanage. Ted Balaker: Scientists call it the tragedy of the commons. Christopher Costello: Think of the ocean full of fish and we’re all out there trying to exploit it. The tragedy is that we’re all going to race to try to get a bigger share of that resource than the next guy. Ted Balaker: How can we fix this tragedy? Give fisherman an incentive to make fish populations grow. It’s the only thing that seems to work according to worldwide study conducted by Costello and his colleagues. Christopher Costello: So instead of just having what we call a race to fish what they do is they allocate the total catch among all the fishermen. Ted Balaker: It’s called Catch Shares because fishermen get a share of the total catch. Let’s say 200 tons of fish is the total catch allowed by government officials. Fisherman Bob is allowed to catch say 1% of the total catch year after year, now Bob has an incentive to make sure the fish population grows. Why? Well if there is more fish in the future, the government official can set a higher total catch. And next year Bob’s 1% will mean more fish for him. Christopher Costello: The poster child of this the Alaskan halibut. Ted Balaker: Over fishing was ravaging the halibut population until the mid 1990s when officials switch to the catch share method. Since then the halibut stock has grown dramatically. Christopher Costello: The fishermen are doing quite well financially so it’s economically a very profitable fishery. Ted Balaker: So many of us are suspicious of the profit motive. However, now it’s being harness not for plunder but for preservation. It’s happening all over the world from Alaska’s halibut to shrimp in Japan and abalone in New Zealand. Even these guys switched. Christopher Costello: The environmental groups like it because it is environmentally sound. Ted Balaker: And the Obama administration is thinking about expanding the system. So maybe the catch share system could save the whales? Costello points out that unlike fish, whales swim all over the globe and since they're higher up on the food chain the ethical issues are more complicated. Male: Our ethical value says that no mammary mammal, no whale should be eaten here. Ted Balaker: That view prevailed here because soon after this protest, the Hump shut its doors for good. Louis Psihoyos: This is more exciting to me than winning an Oscar because it’s like real concrete results. Ted Balaker: Saving the whales maybe trickier, but at least we know that expanding the catch share system could save the fish. Christopher Costello: So if we think about the incentives, we think about the incentives, we think about the design carefully we can get this jointly beneficial thing of the economy and the environment. Ted Balaker: And what if we don’t change course? Well most of the world’s fisheries could collapse within a matter of decades. For reason.tv I'm Ted Balaker.