I agree. The more you learn about trawling the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.
Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep. They were also nurseries for a large number of fish species we commonly fish for.
We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.
> We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.
Our fish industry is really well connected politically and the large players exactly know how to play the fiddle, and any attempt to hold the foreign ones accountable with actually working and appropriate measures (it's highly likely that it will take live ammunition or an intentional collision, at least in legally "open" seas) would likely result in WW3.
To add to that, the extent of slavery taking place on fishing vessels operating in international waters is enormous. The laws to board and free captive slaves have been in the books going back to the 1800s in the case of Britain, yet nothing is done about it globally. The media and researchers who detail it are hesitant to even use the term “slavery”.
the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.
Financial "incentives" from fishing industry and political ramifications of raising food prices (seafood is a large portion in some places).
It's absolutely an existential threat to the ecology of the entire Earth yet those are the reasons why. "Close to 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."
Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep. They were also nurseries for a large number of fish species we commonly fish for.
We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.