The most convincing misinformation doesn’t look like misinformation—it looks like science. It often starts with a scientific paper getting misinterpreted by journalists and other influencers who skip over the methodology section (or don’t know how to interpret it). Misinformed influencers misinform the public. This eventually leads to dysfunctional politics and maladaptive policy—e.g. the shuttering of safe nuclear power plants that would’ve helped reduce climate change.
Something similar is happening in fisheries and food policy today.
In June 2026, a writer and friend of ours, Paul Greenberg, published an op-ed in The New York Times advocating to ban bottom trawling. It’s full of misinformation. Greenberg even consulted with Ray and references him throughout the piece but ultimately belittles and dismisses his science-based perspective.
Much of Greenberg’s argument rests on a flawed scientific paper that he misinterprets. Flawed science alone doesn’t upset me—when it originally gets published, I trust academic, educated scientists to critically read it, understand the methodology (and its limitations), and work on an updated, stronger version. The entire institution of science is a beautiful, self-correcting machine: bad science gets replaced by better science which gets replaced by even better science, getting us closer to truth. What upsets me is when flawed science gets laundered into policy advocacy in mainstream media and misleads the public.
You may think that me publishing this response means I am taking the opposite position, that I am advocating for bottom trawling—but I am not. I am defending science as a whole and supporting science-based conservation and decision-making. Science should inform policy by clarifying what is known, what remains uncertain, and the likely consequences and tradeoffs of different choices.
What that means in a bottom trawling context is that, before anyone is pro or anti- bottom trawling, they should understand what purpose bottom trawling performs for society, ways it can be replaced by alternatives, and the positive and negative consequences of those alternatives.
An inspiring professor once told me that when we look at fisheries or food policy, we must always ask, “What is the counterfactual?” or what is the alternative series of events that would occur with some kind of policy change? Thinking through a counterfactual is emblematic of a science-based decision-making process and is often where advocacy like Greenberg’s is short-sighted. The counterfactual to ending nuclear power development was obviously more fossil-fuel, but the anti-nuclear perception was too strong. The alternative to bottom trawling is worse for the planet too, yet op-eds like Greenberg’s fuel misperceptions.
Below is our breakdown and response to his piece:
All human needs have some kind of environmental cost. Calling it “devastation” is certainly appropriate sometimes, but we shouldn’t forget the other side of natural resource use: human well-being. Whale oil was the first large-scale economic light source that allowed everyday people to stay up past sunset. Many scholars point to this as a turning point in human history that kickstarted the industrial revolution (it lubricated machinery before petroleum products) and improved living conditions for everyone on Earth. Whaling should have been curtailed earlier than it was, perhaps once electricity was invented and widespread, so calling it devastation when whales were used for pet food is still appropriate, though I can’t find any evidence that pet food was ever a driver of whale hunting.
DDT is a similar story with tradeoffs. DDT ended endemic malaria in the U.S. and has saved millions of lives from insect-borne disease. The World Health Organization still recommends its use in Malaria-stricken regions (although it recommends indoor spraying to curb its environmental harms).
The point I’m making is that there are multiple outcomes of a policy, often both good and bad: Commercial whaling led to the industrial revolution, DDT killed many birds but saved millions of human lives. Science plays a role by clarifying those tradeoffs and then finding ways to improve the good/bad policy outcomes, e.g. the invention of electricity and better pesticides.
The “marine life” referenced is food, and unless you’re eating cotton candy, food has weight and mass. Cotton candy, an airy cloud that looks impressive but lacks nutrition, is a great analogy for that statistic. Did you know that livestock produced on land weighs about the same as the combined weight of all people on Earth? There isn’t anything useful about that statistic either.
One that Greenberg might find interesting: over 5 million hectares of forest have been cleared for agriculture every year over the past two decades. The life destroyed every year weighs over 800 million metric tons.
Bycatch, or unwanted catch that is thrown back overboard is one of the worst parts of fishing. Bottom trawling does have higher bycatch rates than other forms of fishing, but gear improvements, i.e. inventing new trawl nets that avoid nontarget species, have worked well. For example, sea turtle excluding nets, mandated in the U.S. have allowed sea turtle populations to recover over the past few decades.
I completely agree with Greenberg’s point about the Amazon. If people saw the devastation of meat production, they would eat less meat. But the way he writes that passage makes me think he doesn’t know that meat production does produce the mangled pulp of jungle creatures. The largest driver of deforestation worldwide is food production, especially livestock production. I’m also not sure if Greenberg is aware of what a combine tractor looks like after harvesting crops (there are a lot of mice, rabbits, and deer that live amongst the crops).
Food production takes up half the land on Earth—all of which used to be native forests and grasslands. That land is cleared in devastating ways and is the planet’s largest contributor to biodiversity loss.
We never see it at the meat counter either. Nor in the produce section. All food production has unseen environmental costs. Seafood is not an outlier or special case.
The paper Greenberg is referring to is Foster et al. 2026 and he cited its data incorrectly—the New York Times fact checkers missed this. Foster et al. 2026 looked through catch history, not annual catch. There are not 3000 different species caught in bottom trawls every year and the paper does not say that. The paper looked through records going back as far as 1955 to try to document every species that has ever been caught in a trawl net.
Of all the species that have ever been caught in a trawl net, one in ten are currently listed as threatened by the IUCN, not one in seven. The authors clearly state that one in seven species are threatened or near threatened—Greenberg combines those and misinterprets the IUCN definitions.
Foster et al. 2026 is a cotton candy paper because nothing it says has much meaning. Documenting every species ever caught by a trawl net over the past 75 years without the context of how many of each species were caught doesn’t make any reasonable connection to current conservation status.
Foster et al. 2026 is also clearly advocacy. The study was funded and performed by Project Seahorse, a conservation NGO who explicitly advocates banning bottom trawling. I have no problem with NGOs employing scientists and doing their own science to find answers. I have no problem with them publishing that science in peer-reviewed journals. Scientists like us can read the methodology, understand what they did, and judge the validity and salience of their results.
What I have a problem with is scientists and NGOs misrepresenting their science to dupe journalists who don’t have the skills or experience to evaluate methodologies properly (this is exactly the story of the “vaccines cause autism” myth, for example). The paper made for a great headline (3,000 species!), but was empty of any scientific nutrition.
The northern cod collapse was because of overfishing (poor management), not because of bottom trawling. Bottom trawling certainly increased the efficiency of catching fish versus hand-lines, but the cod collapsed due to harvest controls, not harvest method. A return to hand-line fishing would not be economically feasible.
Bottom trawling is one of the more carbon-intensive forms of fishing, but it has a much lower carbon footprint than most other animal protein:
For the chart above, I reproduced data from Poore and Nemecek 2018 (the standardized database for food comparison) reported by Our World in Data here. I added data from Parker & Tyedmers (2015) who report fuel use emissions of 4.65 kg CO2eq per kg wet landed weight for bottom trawl fish. Poore and Nemecek (2018) use edible weight (230g protein/kg in fish) as their functional unit, so landed weight is first converted to edible weight using their capture-fisheries retail/landed ratio (~40% yield, Table S14), then to protein terms:
4.65 / 0.40 / 2.30 = 5.05 kg CO2eq per 100g protein.
Poore and Nemecek (2018) include final packaging and transportation to retail shelves in their data so I took the average for wild-caught seafood and included it; their capture-fisheries data (Table S17) shows farm/vessel stage = 86.4% of total.
5.05 / 0.864 ≈ 5.8 kg CO2eq per 100g protein, about the same as chicken.
This seems like a good place to point out that bottom trawl nets do not constantly dig into the seafloor as Greenberg has been implying. Dredges for clams and scallops do (they live in sand and mud), but bottom trawl nets skip and skim along the bottom. Fishing vessels want their nets to be close to the bottom, but not touching, as that significantly increases drag and fuel use, reducing profit. Vibrant, hard coral reefs are not trawled, for example, but softer, deep-sea corals and sponges need active protection from bottom trawls. An important part of bottom trawl management is knowing where deep-sea corals and sponges are and protecting those areas from seafloor contact. Alaska is a great example of this kind of area-based management where fishing is allowed in the water column above deep-water reefs, but bottom trawling is banned.
Science and management have important roles to play through technology as well. New bottom trawl gear technology and advancements can help make trawling more fuel-efficient and selective. Pulse trawling is a great example; an electric current is “pulsed” to scare fish off the seafloor, so the net has minimal contact and the harvest is much more fuel-efficient. Flying doors are another; instead of dragging along the bottom to hold the net open, newer trawl net doors are shaped like underwater wings and “fly” above the bottom, reducing seafloor contact and fuel use at the same time. Other examples include minimal-contact footropes and species-excluding devices (like turtle excluder devices mentioned earlier).
Dr. Hilborn’s point is that when land is cleared for farming, the entire ecosystem is wiped out and the only thing living there is the crop. With bottom trawling, fish are removed, but the primary productivity remains. The base of the food web, trophic levels 1 and 2, are untouched by trawls. On land, all trophic levels are destroyed. Greenberg is trying to refute Dr. Hilborn’s point by saying, ‘well the first step is removing animals…’ but it’s a false analogy because he doesn’t appear to understand how marine ecology and food production differs from terrestrial.
This is a hollow-man fallacy where Greenberg is willfully misinterpreting Hilborn’s point about trawling on continental shelves. To be clear: Hilborn is not advocating for more bottom trawling on continental shelves.
Also, in well-managed bottom trawl areas, trophic levels 1 and 2 are completely intact, the bottom is almost completely intact, and there are a healthy number of fish every year (trophic levels 3-5). It seems like Greenberg is trying to make “de-wilding” an equivalent to “deforestation.” But there is just no comparison!
A 10 to 1 bycatch to target species trawl is awful but also not representative of trawl bycatch overall. Earlier, Greenberg cites (correctly) a 1 to 4 bycatch to target species rate, however bycatch is extremely fishery dependent. Shrimp fisheries do have much higher bycatch rates than other bottom trawl fisheries.
Scientists have worked tirelessly for decades to improve environmental management in the face of human development. Environmental laws around the world are the strongest they have ever been. Extinction rates peaked over 100 years ago. The rate of biodiversity decline has slowed dramatically. The largest short-term threats to biodiversity are terrestrial habitat loss and over harvest. Both are well-addressed by developed countries around the world and improving almost everywhere else.
Bottom trawling is food production and its environmental and climate impact must be evaluated in that context. Climate change is, by far, the largest long-term threat to biodiversity. Food production is, by far, the most challenging major industry to decarbonize. Eating more low-carbon food is one of the best things you can do for the planet (i.e. seafood).
The above is a figure from Halpern et al. 2019. The bottom row shows different ocean ecosystems and the cumulative impact of various threats (left column) on each of them. You can see that sea surface temperature (sst) ocean acidification (oa), and sea level rise (slr) —all caused by carbon emissions—are the most impactful, followed by shipping and pollution. All commercial fishing is blue across all ecosystems.
This is the paragraph that sent me over the edge, I am shocked The New York Times printed it. Greenberg is discrediting Dr. Hilborn by comparing him to a 100-year-old, unnamed Norwegian scientist who was wrong (or right?) about whale populations. This is insulting to Dr. Hilborn and the century of scientific progress since then.
Hilborn literally wrote the book on stock assessment—the way that marine populations are measured. If stock assessments (and effective management) had existed in the early 1900s, whale population recovery would have happened much faster than it did.
I would also point out that whaling did not ever stop and still occurs today (sustainably, thanks to good scientific understanding of whale populations and ecology). With appropriate scientific management, nearly any type of harvest can be sustainable, including whaling. Science won’t tell you if whaling is right or wrong, but it can determine how many organisms can be harvested to maintain a population.
Let’s play out the counterfactual: what happens if we ban bottom trawling? The millions of tons of animal protein currently supplied by bottom trawl fish would still be demanded by humans who need to eat. Hardly any bottom trawl fisheries would be economically viable via other methods like pots or traps (this would also dramatically increase the carbon footprint as pots and traps require much more fuel). Where would that protein come from?
The answer is that replacement animal protein would come from terrestrial sources like chicken, beef or pork. Not only would farming more livestock dramatically increase our dietary carbon emissions, it would require roughly 5 million square kilometers of land to be cleared, roughly the size of India and Mexico put together, or about the size of the remaining intact Amazon rainforest. Would global biodiversity be better off? Absolutely not. I wrote a deep-dive into the science behind this counterfactual here, including why trawl-caught fish can’t be replaced by plant-based protein.
The comparison to plastic and gasoline doesn’t make much sense either. There are emerging alternatives to plastic and gasoline that are better for the planet. There is no alternative to seafood that would be. One day, centuries from now, we may be able to mass produce lab-grown meat fed by the sun, but that technology is decades away; we have plastic alternatives and green energy today.
This is not true. Roughly 62-65% of seafood in the U.S. is produced abroad and imported, and not much seafood consumed in the U.S. (either imported or produced domestically) comes from bottom-trawl fisheries. Using NOAA seafood consumption statistics, I estimate roughly 8-12% of seafood consumed in the U.S. comes from bottom trawl fisheries. The vast majority of that is wild-caught shrimp, both foreign and domestically produced.
Roughly 26% of the world’s wild-caught seafood is produced via bottom trawling, but in the U.S., that number is just ~11-13%, most of which comes from Alaska groundfish, Pacific cod, and West Coast groundfish—all well-managed and certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as sustainable. A decade ago, The New York Times profiled the West Coast groundfish fishery as an example of U.S. fishery sustainability!
Much of the world’s bottom trawling happens abroad in developing countries where it’s too important a food source to ban. Advocating against sustainable domestic producers does not seem like a good idea to me and neither does lecturing less-fortunate foreigners on how to manage their food sovereignty.
Labels on seafood do a great job telling you what you are eating and if it is sustainable or not. The Marine Stewardship Council, an independent certifying body has certified many bottom trawl fisheries as sustainable. The Monterey Bay Seafood Watch program, an alternative rating system that several grocery stores and restaurants use for their sourcing decisions, also has several bottom trawl fisheries rated as “Best Choice” or “Good Alternative.”
MSC and Monterey Bay don’t judge fisheries based on vibes—the work of thousands of scientists goes into data collection, projection, management, and ultimately, a determination of sustainability. Greenberg’s op-ed directly advocates against these scientists.
Greenberg and the anti-bottom trawl advocates should take an objective look at the data and consider the counterfactuals to their advocacy. Bottom-trawling supplies billions of servings of protein to people around the world. Eliminating those meals would not eliminate the need for protein—instead, the impacts would be transferred to land, almost certainly tropical rainforests around the world. Earlier this year I wrote up the entire counterfactual to banning fishing and bottom trawling based on a recent scientific publication. I cited it in various places above, but you can read the whole thing here. All food production has environmental costs; bottom trawling’s costs are lower than the alternatives—it really is that simple.
To reiterate, none of what I have written above makes me an advocate for bottom trawling. I love science and its self-correcting search for truth; as such, I am an advocate for science-based decision-making. Science can’t tell us whether to ban bottom trawling, but it can tell us a likely outcome: tropical deforestation would accelerate and global biodiversity would decline. Banning trawling would repeat an old pattern in misguided environmentalism: trading one harm for a worse one.
Misguided advocacy is especially exasperating when it comes dressed up as science in The New York Times. But, unlike the formal scientific process, there is no self-correcting mechanism for The New York Times. Instead, I have to write blogs like this. Sorry, Paul—consider this a peer review from a friend.
Fact-checking Paul Greenberg’s op-ed in the New York Times
The most convincing misinformation doesn’t look like misinformation—it looks like science. It often starts with a scientific paper getting misinterpreted by journalists and other influencers who skip over the methodology section (or don’t know how to interpret it). Misinformed influencers misinform the public. This eventually leads to dysfunctional politics and maladaptive policy—e.g. the shuttering of safe nuclear power plants that would’ve helped reduce climate change.
Something similar is happening in fisheries and food policy today.
In June 2026, a writer and friend of ours, Paul Greenberg, published an op-ed in The New York Times advocating to ban bottom trawling. It’s full of misinformation. Greenberg even consulted with Ray and references him throughout the piece but ultimately belittles and dismisses his science-based perspective.
Much of Greenberg’s argument rests on a flawed scientific paper that he misinterprets. Flawed science alone doesn’t upset me—when it originally gets published, I trust academic, educated scientists to critically read it, understand the methodology (and its limitations), and work on an updated, stronger version. The entire institution of science is a beautiful, self-correcting machine: bad science gets replaced by better science which gets replaced by even better science, getting us closer to truth. What upsets me is when flawed science gets laundered into policy advocacy in mainstream media and misleads the public.
You may think that me publishing this response means I am taking the opposite position, that I am advocating for bottom trawling—but I am not. I am defending science as a whole and supporting science-based conservation and decision-making. Science should inform policy by clarifying what is known, what remains uncertain, and the likely consequences and tradeoffs of different choices.
What that means in a bottom trawling context is that, before anyone is pro or anti- bottom trawling, they should understand what purpose bottom trawling performs for society, ways it can be replaced by alternatives, and the positive and negative consequences of those alternatives.
An inspiring professor once told me that when we look at fisheries or food policy, we must always ask, “What is the counterfactual?” or what is the alternative series of events that would occur with some kind of policy change? Thinking through a counterfactual is emblematic of a science-based decision-making process and is often where advocacy like Greenberg’s is short-sighted. The counterfactual to ending nuclear power development was obviously more fossil-fuel, but the anti-nuclear perception was too strong. The alternative to bottom trawling is worse for the planet too, yet op-eds like Greenberg’s fuel misperceptions.
Below is our breakdown and response to his piece:
All human needs have some kind of environmental cost. Calling it “devastation” is certainly appropriate sometimes, but we shouldn’t forget the other side of natural resource use: human well-being. Whale oil was the first large-scale economic light source that allowed everyday people to stay up past sunset. Many scholars point to this as a turning point in human history that kickstarted the industrial revolution (it lubricated machinery before petroleum products) and improved living conditions for everyone on Earth. Whaling should have been curtailed earlier than it was, perhaps once electricity was invented and widespread, so calling it devastation when whales were used for pet food is still appropriate, though I can’t find any evidence that pet food was ever a driver of whale hunting.
DDT is a similar story with tradeoffs. DDT ended endemic malaria in the U.S. and has saved millions of lives from insect-borne disease. The World Health Organization still recommends its use in Malaria-stricken regions (although it recommends indoor spraying to curb its environmental harms).
The point I’m making is that there are multiple outcomes of a policy, often both good and bad: Commercial whaling led to the industrial revolution, DDT killed many birds but saved millions of human lives. Science plays a role by clarifying those tradeoffs and then finding ways to improve the good/bad policy outcomes, e.g. the invention of electricity and better pesticides.
Bottom trawling has destructive potential, but it is not inherently destructive. Well-managed bottom trawling over sand or mud (as most bottom trawling is done) leaves benthic ecosystems largely intact.
The “marine life” referenced is food, and unless you’re eating cotton candy, food has weight and mass. Cotton candy, an airy cloud that looks impressive but lacks nutrition, is a great analogy for that statistic. Did you know that livestock produced on land weighs about the same as the combined weight of all people on Earth? There isn’t anything useful about that statistic either.
One that Greenberg might find interesting: over 5 million hectares of forest have been cleared for agriculture every year over the past two decades. The life destroyed every year weighs over 800 million metric tons.
Bycatch, or unwanted catch that is thrown back overboard is one of the worst parts of fishing. Bottom trawling does have higher bycatch rates than other forms of fishing, but gear improvements, i.e. inventing new trawl nets that avoid nontarget species, have worked well. For example, sea turtle excluding nets, mandated in the U.S. have allowed sea turtle populations to recover over the past few decades.
I completely agree with Greenberg’s point about the Amazon. If people saw the devastation of meat production, they would eat less meat. But the way he writes that passage makes me think he doesn’t know that meat production does produce the mangled pulp of jungle creatures. The largest driver of deforestation worldwide is food production, especially livestock production. I’m also not sure if Greenberg is aware of what a combine tractor looks like after harvesting crops (there are a lot of mice, rabbits, and deer that live amongst the crops).
Food production takes up half the land on Earth—all of which used to be native forests and grasslands. That land is cleared in devastating ways and is the planet’s largest contributor to biodiversity loss.
We never see it at the meat counter either. Nor in the produce section. All food production has unseen environmental costs. Seafood is not an outlier or special case.
The paper Greenberg is referring to is Foster et al. 2026 and he cited its data incorrectly—the New York Times fact checkers missed this. Foster et al. 2026 looked through catch history, not annual catch. There are not 3000 different species caught in bottom trawls every year and the paper does not say that. The paper looked through records going back as far as 1955 to try to document every species that has ever been caught in a trawl net.
Of all the species that have ever been caught in a trawl net, one in ten are currently listed as threatened by the IUCN, not one in seven. The authors clearly state that one in seven species are threatened or near threatened—Greenberg combines those and misinterprets the IUCN definitions.
Foster et al. 2026 is a cotton candy paper because nothing it says has much meaning. Documenting every species ever caught by a trawl net over the past 75 years without the context of how many of each species were caught doesn’t make any reasonable connection to current conservation status.
Foster et al. 2026 is also clearly advocacy. The study was funded and performed by Project Seahorse, a conservation NGO who explicitly advocates banning bottom trawling. I have no problem with NGOs employing scientists and doing their own science to find answers. I have no problem with them publishing that science in peer-reviewed journals. Scientists like us can read the methodology, understand what they did, and judge the validity and salience of their results.
What I have a problem with is scientists and NGOs misrepresenting their science to dupe journalists who don’t have the skills or experience to evaluate methodologies properly (this is exactly the story of the “vaccines cause autism” myth, for example). The paper made for a great headline (3,000 species!), but was empty of any scientific nutrition.
The northern cod collapse was because of overfishing (poor management), not because of bottom trawling. Bottom trawling certainly increased the efficiency of catching fish versus hand-lines, but the cod collapsed due to harvest controls, not harvest method. A return to hand-line fishing would not be economically feasible.
Bottom trawling is one of the more carbon-intensive forms of fishing, but it has a much lower carbon footprint than most other animal protein:
For the chart above, I reproduced data from Poore and Nemecek 2018 (the standardized database for food comparison) reported by Our World in Data here. I added data from Parker & Tyedmers (2015) who report fuel use emissions of 4.65 kg CO2eq per kg wet landed weight for bottom trawl fish. Poore and Nemecek (2018) use edible weight (230g protein/kg in fish) as their functional unit, so landed weight is first converted to edible weight using their capture-fisheries retail/landed ratio (~40% yield, Table S14), then to protein terms:
4.65 / 0.40 / 2.30 = 5.05 kg CO2eq per 100g protein.
Poore and Nemecek (2018) include final packaging and transportation to retail shelves in their data so I took the average for wild-caught seafood and included it; their capture-fisheries data (Table S17) shows farm/vessel stage = 86.4% of total.
5.05 / 0.864 ≈ 5.8 kg CO2eq per 100g protein, about the same as chicken.
This seems like a good place to point out that bottom trawl nets do not constantly dig into the seafloor as Greenberg has been implying. Dredges for clams and scallops do (they live in sand and mud), but bottom trawl nets skip and skim along the bottom. Fishing vessels want their nets to be close to the bottom, but not touching, as that significantly increases drag and fuel use, reducing profit. Vibrant, hard coral reefs are not trawled, for example, but softer, deep-sea corals and sponges need active protection from bottom trawls. An important part of bottom trawl management is knowing where deep-sea corals and sponges are and protecting those areas from seafloor contact. Alaska is a great example of this kind of area-based management where fishing is allowed in the water column above deep-water reefs, but bottom trawling is banned.
Science and management have important roles to play through technology as well. New bottom trawl gear technology and advancements can help make trawling more fuel-efficient and selective. Pulse trawling is a great example; an electric current is “pulsed” to scare fish off the seafloor, so the net has minimal contact and the harvest is much more fuel-efficient. Flying doors are another; instead of dragging along the bottom to hold the net open, newer trawl net doors are shaped like underwater wings and “fly” above the bottom, reducing seafloor contact and fuel use at the same time. Other examples include minimal-contact footropes and species-excluding devices (like turtle excluder devices mentioned earlier).
Dr. Hilborn’s point is that when land is cleared for farming, the entire ecosystem is wiped out and the only thing living there is the crop. With bottom trawling, fish are removed, but the primary productivity remains. The base of the food web, trophic levels 1 and 2, are untouched by trawls. On land, all trophic levels are destroyed. Greenberg is trying to refute Dr. Hilborn’s point by saying, ‘well the first step is removing animals…’ but it’s a false analogy because he doesn’t appear to understand how marine ecology and food production differs from terrestrial.
This is a hollow-man fallacy where Greenberg is willfully misinterpreting Hilborn’s point about trawling on continental shelves. To be clear: Hilborn is not advocating for more bottom trawling on continental shelves.
Also, in well-managed bottom trawl areas, trophic levels 1 and 2 are completely intact, the bottom is almost completely intact, and there are a healthy number of fish every year (trophic levels 3-5). It seems like Greenberg is trying to make “de-wilding” an equivalent to “deforestation.” But there is just no comparison!
A 10 to 1 bycatch to target species trawl is awful but also not representative of trawl bycatch overall. Earlier, Greenberg cites (correctly) a 1 to 4 bycatch to target species rate, however bycatch is extremely fishery dependent. Shrimp fisheries do have much higher bycatch rates than other bottom trawl fisheries.
Scientists have worked tirelessly for decades to improve environmental management in the face of human development. Environmental laws around the world are the strongest they have ever been. Extinction rates peaked over 100 years ago. The rate of biodiversity decline has slowed dramatically. The largest short-term threats to biodiversity are terrestrial habitat loss and over harvest. Both are well-addressed by developed countries around the world and improving almost everywhere else.
Bottom trawling is food production and its environmental and climate impact must be evaluated in that context. Climate change is, by far, the largest long-term threat to biodiversity. Food production is, by far, the most challenging major industry to decarbonize. Eating more low-carbon food is one of the best things you can do for the planet (i.e. seafood).
The above is a figure from Halpern et al. 2019. The bottom row shows different ocean ecosystems and the cumulative impact of various threats (left column) on each of them. You can see that sea surface temperature (sst) ocean acidification (oa), and sea level rise (slr) —all caused by carbon emissions—are the most impactful, followed by shipping and pollution. All commercial fishing is blue across all ecosystems.
This is the paragraph that sent me over the edge, I am shocked The New York Times printed it. Greenberg is discrediting Dr. Hilborn by comparing him to a 100-year-old, unnamed Norwegian scientist who was wrong (or right?) about whale populations. This is insulting to Dr. Hilborn and the century of scientific progress since then.
Hilborn literally wrote the book on stock assessment—the way that marine populations are measured. If stock assessments (and effective management) had existed in the early 1900s, whale population recovery would have happened much faster than it did.
I would also point out that whaling did not ever stop and still occurs today (sustainably, thanks to good scientific understanding of whale populations and ecology). With appropriate scientific management, nearly any type of harvest can be sustainable, including whaling. Science won’t tell you if whaling is right or wrong, but it can determine how many organisms can be harvested to maintain a population.
Let’s play out the counterfactual: what happens if we ban bottom trawling? The millions of tons of animal protein currently supplied by bottom trawl fish would still be demanded by humans who need to eat. Hardly any bottom trawl fisheries would be economically viable via other methods like pots or traps (this would also dramatically increase the carbon footprint as pots and traps require much more fuel). Where would that protein come from?
The answer is that replacement animal protein would come from terrestrial sources like chicken, beef or pork. Not only would farming more livestock dramatically increase our dietary carbon emissions, it would require roughly 5 million square kilometers of land to be cleared, roughly the size of India and Mexico put together, or about the size of the remaining intact Amazon rainforest. Would global biodiversity be better off? Absolutely not. I wrote a deep-dive into the science behind this counterfactual here, including why trawl-caught fish can’t be replaced by plant-based protein.
The comparison to plastic and gasoline doesn’t make much sense either. There are emerging alternatives to plastic and gasoline that are better for the planet. There is no alternative to seafood that would be. One day, centuries from now, we may be able to mass produce lab-grown meat fed by the sun, but that technology is decades away; we have plastic alternatives and green energy today.
This is not true. Roughly 62-65% of seafood in the U.S. is produced abroad and imported, and not much seafood consumed in the U.S. (either imported or produced domestically) comes from bottom-trawl fisheries. Using NOAA seafood consumption statistics, I estimate roughly 8-12% of seafood consumed in the U.S. comes from bottom trawl fisheries. The vast majority of that is wild-caught shrimp, both foreign and domestically produced.
Roughly 26% of the world’s wild-caught seafood is produced via bottom trawling, but in the U.S., that number is just ~11-13%, most of which comes from Alaska groundfish, Pacific cod, and West Coast groundfish—all well-managed and certified by the Marine Stewardship Council as sustainable. A decade ago, The New York Times profiled the West Coast groundfish fishery as an example of U.S. fishery sustainability!
Much of the world’s bottom trawling happens abroad in developing countries where it’s too important a food source to ban. Advocating against sustainable domestic producers does not seem like a good idea to me and neither does lecturing less-fortunate foreigners on how to manage their food sovereignty.
Labels on seafood do a great job telling you what you are eating and if it is sustainable or not. The Marine Stewardship Council, an independent certifying body has certified many bottom trawl fisheries as sustainable. The Monterey Bay Seafood Watch program, an alternative rating system that several grocery stores and restaurants use for their sourcing decisions, also has several bottom trawl fisheries rated as “Best Choice” or “Good Alternative.”
MSC and Monterey Bay don’t judge fisheries based on vibes—the work of thousands of scientists goes into data collection, projection, management, and ultimately, a determination of sustainability. Greenberg’s op-ed directly advocates against these scientists.
Greenberg and the anti-bottom trawl advocates should take an objective look at the data and consider the counterfactuals to their advocacy. Bottom-trawling supplies billions of servings of protein to people around the world. Eliminating those meals would not eliminate the need for protein—instead, the impacts would be transferred to land, almost certainly tropical rainforests around the world. Earlier this year I wrote up the entire counterfactual to banning fishing and bottom trawling based on a recent scientific publication. I cited it in various places above, but you can read the whole thing here. All food production has environmental costs; bottom trawling’s costs are lower than the alternatives—it really is that simple.
To reiterate, none of what I have written above makes me an advocate for bottom trawling. I love science and its self-correcting search for truth; as such, I am an advocate for science-based decision-making. Science can’t tell us whether to ban bottom trawling, but it can tell us a likely outcome: tropical deforestation would accelerate and global biodiversity would decline. Banning trawling would repeat an old pattern in misguided environmentalism: trading one harm for a worse one.
Misguided advocacy is especially exasperating when it comes dressed up as science in The New York Times. But, unlike the formal scientific process, there is no self-correcting mechanism for The New York Times. Instead, I have to write blogs like this. Sorry, Paul—consider this a peer review from a friend.
Max Mossler
Max is the managing editor at Sustainable Fisheries UW.
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