Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

It's surprising there's any life left in the seas at all, when you look at the intensity of industrial fishing. We are rightly exercised about plastic, but this is a far greater impact, that we tend to ignore.

Responses to this tweet are likely to show *why* we ignore it: the fishing industry is well-organised and vocal, and tends to go ballistic when you point to its impacts. I suspect this is why Blue Planet II conspicuously avoided the issue.

I'm constantly amazed by the way well-informed people still eat threatened fish species, and species whose capture causes massive environmental damage. There are some things we are prepared to see, and others we choose to ignore.

It would be nice to imagine that the gaps on that map are caused by conservation efforts. But mobile fishing gear is excluded from only a few tiny pockets. If trawlers aren't fishing somewhere, it's because it's too deep or there are no fish.

This UN FAO graph exemplifies the problem:
1. The concept of "Fully fished" depends entirely on what baseline you set. If you look at what existed before *any* industrial fishing, that entire category would be labelled Overfished
2. What in God's name does "Underfished" mean?

It's this kind of bogus fisheries science, setting states of severe depletion as ecological baselines and suggesting that anywhere not yet completely wrecked is "Underfished", that's a big part of the problem.

I'm being asked if there's a reliable guide to what fish you should and shouldn't eat. In my view, MSC/MCS efforts to distinguish between good and bad are becoming increasingly desperate and nonsensical. As a rule, eat small and pelagic *if at all*: eg herring, mackerel, sardines