13
telling fish tales
Tagged Under : AAAS, conference, fish, oceans
Hey, lookit, I blogged. I mean, somewhere other than here. It’s over at ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of Science magazine. The topic: fisheries. Not *all* of the world’s fish are completely doomed. Fisheries scientists have decided that if everyone in the world thinks that all the fish news is totally bad, nobody is ever going to want to do anything about it. (Hey, they’re doomed – let’s just kill ‘em all and have the world’s biggest fish fry.) So they’re embarking on a campaign to tell the good news stories.
You could tell this was kind of a struggle sometimes. I went to part of the scientific session (the blog post was written after the press conference) and Greenpeace guy John Hocevar said, “I’ve been trying to stick to good news but I can’t quite do it.” He hung in there for a while, but then he got to tuna: “Truthfully, the tuna news is mostly bad.” Oh well. He still wrung some good news out of it. And there really are fish success stories.
I cover tuna in my Intro to International Relations course every single year. It’s during the WTO section when I talk about free trade folks butting heads with environmental folks. That’s not what my students remember, though. They only remember the story about me learning that tuna, when they’re in the ocean, are actually much bigger than those little cans. “If you remember nothing else from this course,” I tell them, “remember this – tuna are bigger than you.”
[...] was a good news day at the AAAS conference, with the fisheries scientists putting on a happy face. Today was bad news day for climate change. Chris Field, a very smart guy who I worked for briefly [...]
It’s true – tuna are big! It was a long time before I realized that.