Fish Stories   

Conventional oceanic wisdom suggests that we're gobbling up way too much seafood—that overfishing strains fish populations and contributes to their impending collapse. In American Catch (2014), Greenberg offered a novel idea: we, or at least we Americans, aren’t eating enough domestic wild-caught seafood—and that our fish-averse ways are contributing to ecological degradation, not just in the oceans that surround us, but also on land, particularly in population-dense regions like New York City and the Gulf Coast.  

Greenberg's case is powerful and elegant—and just as relevant today as it was when American Catch hit the shelves a decade ago. The United States boasts a massive ecological asset in the 3.8 billion acres of ocean it controls along its more than 94,000 miles of coastline—more than any nation. That’s because coastal waters are engines of oceanic biodiversity and dense with fish and other edible creatures. They also generate wetlands and marshes that buffer land from the sea’s caprices by absorbing energy from storm-roiled waves.  

But Americans eat very little seafood—just 18 pounds of it per capita annually, less than a tenth of the amount of meat we consume. And the great bulk of it hails not from our coastal waters but rather from faraway aquatic factory farms. The shrimp that entices you into all-you-can-eat buffets? You can likely trace it to a large aquaculture operation in Southeast Asia—quite possibly one that sits on what used to be a robustly biodiverse mangrove forest. That Atlantic salmon on sale at the supermarket? It likely comes from one of Chile’s vast pollution-spewing open-water salmon pens. Since we largely ignore U.S.-caught wild fish, we have little incentive to maintain our coasts as robust ecosystems. And so we pave over vital marshlands and foul coastal waters with agricultural runoff and the fallout of near-shore oil drilling. Meanwhile, we export the bulk of American wild seafood harvest to wealthy consumers in Europe and Asia, who have little reason to care about our beleaguered coastal ecosystems. 

As a result, we're simultaneously squandering a self-sustaining source of high-quality food; and making our coastal areas—home to 40 percent of the US population—vulnerable to the increasingly violent storms and rising sea levels triggered by climate change. The reverse is true, too: by restoring and maintaining coastal ecosystems and leaning on them more heavily for sustenance, Greenberg argues, we can improve our diets and develop a much greater stake in defending our population-dense coasts from degradation and pollution. 

To make his case, Greenberg lays out case studies of three coastal seascapes in various states of disrepair: greater New York City, a once-abundant delta ruined by human intervention; the Mississippi Delta, still robust but reeling; Alaska, nearly pristine but under constant threat from the mining and oil industries. 

All are thoroughly and evocatively reported, buoyed by Greenberg's vivid prose (he started his career as a novelist) and deep knowledge of the topic. As he revealed in his equally excellent Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (2010), Greenberg practically grew up knee-deep in the Long Island Sound, fishing pole in hand. Saltwater courses through his veins. For him, the dire state of the oceans isn't just a metaphor for industrial society's trashing of the bioregions that ultimately sustain it. It's also a personal affront. 

As recently as a century ago, he informs us, tidal beds around New York City produced more than a billion oysters per year.  In doing so, they delivered a cheap, highly nutritious, and tasty protein source for millions of people—Greenberg says that Lower Manhattan's teeming saloons offered "all the local oysters you could eat for a sixpence." 

They also provided other, less tangible services. "When a healthy oyster population filters and clears the water, sunlight is able to penetrate to the depths, in turn spurring the growth of several species of amphibious grass," Greenberg wrote. "Oysters together with a variety of marsh grasses stabilize the shoreline and create protective pockets of water—essential for the lives of juvenile fish." These "biological arrangements," Greenberg explains, are known as salt marshes, and "three quarters of all the commercial fish species we eat rely on them for all or part of their life cycles." On a per-acre basis, they generate more basic food energy and sequester more carbon than any other known ecosystem in the world—and can absorb a vast portion of tidal storm surges. 

New York's golden oyster age came into direct conflict with the practice of dumping raw sewage directly into the water—a consequence of the switch from outhouses to indoor plumbing.  The city's vaunted oysters became vectors for cholera and other pathogens. By the 1920s, municipal health authorities shut down the oyster trade. With the oysters gone, the city's waters became a "pollution free-for-all," with industrial poisons like PCB joining effluent, unchecked until passage of the Clean Air Act in 1972. And without once-powerful oystermen to defend salt marshes, wanton development of the shoreline became the rule. 

New York City's salt marshes exist only in the historic record. Nationwide, the US has lost as much as 70 percent of its historical salt marsh, "much of it in the last 50 years," Greenberg writes—leaving the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast much more vulnerable to climate change. 

American Catch's New York section demonstrates what we've sacrificed by mistreating our coasts—and how it's hard and expensive, but possible, to revive dead ecosystems. Greenberg reckons that New York's ongoing sewage problem—during storms, raw effluent still escapes municipal processing facilities and enters the open water—makes the idea of putting city-grown oysters back on New Yorkers’ plates impossible in the foreseeable future. But rebuilding their habitat—recreating the conditions for oysters to survive and thus to act as natural water filters and marsh builders—is quite doable, he shows, and would likely be considerably cheaper and more effective than the massive barrier projects now afoot to fend off future Hurricane Sandy-level events (even though the resulting oysters themselves aren’t fit for human consumption).

His sections on the Delta and Alaska focus on glittering coastal landscapes we haven't managed to ruin yet, despite our best efforts. Protecting them will require developing a taste for seasonal Gulf-caught shrimp and a rejection of much cheaper product from Asia's teeming shrimp farms—which are also causing their own ecological calamities by wiping out highly productive mangrove forests and now provide 91 percent of shrimp eaten here. And it will also mean embracing Alaska's glorious wild salmon, now mostly exported abroad as Americans tuck into often-ecologically destructive farmed salmon, source of nearly 70 percent of US consumption. 

"Whether we choose to embrace the ocean or not, it's coming to embrace us, faster than many of us can believe," he warns. "If history is any indicator of what our reaction will be, the first, knee-jerk response to the coming inundation will be to try to keep the water out." But that's futile, he adds, because "barriers break" and "saltwater is corrosive and pervasive." Greenberg calls for a "soft-edge approach" instead: the revival of marshes and wetlands and a "conjoining of the interests of seafood and the interests of humans."