Song for the Blue Ocean by Carl Safina, Henry Holt and Company, $30, 458 pages.




The News & Observer


April 5, 1998.


A blue, empty ocean?


By Phillip Manning

Some years ago, four of us set out at dawn on a charter boat from Oregon Inlet. During one golden day, we caught (and released) thirteen white marlin, each weighing about 75 to 125 pounds. We also hooked and lost a blue marlin, whose weight the captain estimated at 700 pounds, and a wahoo of close to 100 pounds. Those heady days of fishing are gone, probably forever. The chance of duplicating such a catch today is about the same as the odds of hooking Moby Dick in Walden Pond.

Of course, declining catches are not unique to North Carolina; virtually every oceanic fishery in the world is in trouble. In this well-written, important book, Dr. Carl Safina, the director of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans program, tells us how we got to this sorry state of affairs -- and what some determined people are trying to do about it.

Safina focuses on three especially troubled fisheries: the bluefin tuna of the North Atlantic, the salmon of the Pacific Northwest, and the reef fishes of the South Pacific. He starts with the tuna. After a long day of unsuccessful fishing, he attends a meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, where the fate of these magnificent fish is decided. Scientists and conservationists, whose data show that overfishing has reduced bluefin populations by 90 percent since the 1970s, plead for a 50 percent reduction in catch quotas. "Impossible," says Carmen Blondin, the U.S. representative on the committee, citing the need for even more research. Later, as the proposal dies a slow bureaucratic death, one disgusted delegate tells Safina: "I've been coming here since 1983, and nothing -- ever -- happens. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing!"

The principal opponents of reducing bluefin catch quotas are the Japanese, who prize these fish above all others for sushi, and American commercial fisherman, to whom the Japanese pay top dollar for fresh-frozen tuna. To complete his research, Safina visits Tsukiji, the great Tokyo fish market, where most North Atlantic bluefins end up. He is stunned by the size of the place, which is so immense he "cannot see to the end of it." In one section of the market, rock-hard tuna and marlin are kept frozen at -76 degrees Fahrenheit and are moved about by front-end loaders like so many logs. On this spot, a single bluefin tuna of exceptional quality recently sold for $83,500, over $100 a pound.

Safina's exploration of the problems facing the salmon is equally thorough. He flies over clear-cuts in Oregon, where rainfall washes soil into remote streams and ruins the gravel beds where salmon once spawned. He inspects the dams that block the passage of spawning salmon and trolls for salmon with Dick Good, a commercial fisherman, who is almost bankrupt because of poor catches in recent years. In a boat designed to hold 15 tons of fish, they fish hard all day in rough seas to catch three salmon. When they return to port, Safina asks Good if he can buy one fish to take home and eat. No, says the nearly broke salmon fisherman, then, "In an act of incomprehensible generosity, he gives me one of the salmon."

Safina's last stop is the South Pacific. He joins other scientists in a scuba-diving trip off the coast of Palau to investigate some of the least-disturbed reefs in the Pacific. Then, he visits the Philippines, where poorly paid native divers use quart bottles to squirt sodium cyanide on the coral reefs to stun fish for the tropical-aquarium trade. The cyanide kills the corals that create the reef and eventually destroys the entire ecosystem, including the fish. Safina then sums up the situation: "Day by day, quart bottle by quart bottle, hundreds of tons of cyanide are poisoning reef systems."

Fortunately, the news from the world's oceans isn't all bad. The U.S. has recently overhauled its fishing laws. The new laws require fisheries' managers to end overfishing for most species (unfortunately, bluefin tuna are one exception). In California, a grassroots group of ranchers and environmentally sensitive loggers is fighting to save the Deer Creek watershed -- and its endangered salmon run. Another group, this one in the Philippines, is weaning native fishermen from cyanide to net fishing. And all over the world, biologists and others are emphasizing sustainable yields, a practical approach to conservation that benefits fish and fisherman.

Safina is no antifishing, monkey-wrenching ecofreak. He is a down-to-earth scientist, who loves to eat sushi, when he can afford it, and enjoys fishing for striped bass in his home waters of Long Island Sound. Most of the time, his writing is equally down to earth, but he sometimes misses the mark when he tries for lyricism. Sentences like, "Dawn begins pushing back the covers of night and the sun rolls out of bed" or "I step out and the sun leans forward to plant a kiss on my forehead" dilute the book's otherwise muscular prose. However, these are only quiddities in an otherwise excellent book.

In the epilogue, Dr. Safina ends with a passionate plea for all nations to respect the world's oceans and fisheries. "It is said," he writes, "that where there's life there's hope, and so no place can inspire us with more hopefulness than the great life-making sea -- that singular, wondrous ocean covering the blue planet."
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