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Seafood sustainability

(article, Culinate staff)

The marine biologist Callum Roberts has a new book out about our endangered seas, titled [%amazonProductLink asin=067002354X "The Ocean of Life"]. As Tom Philpott recently reported on Mother Jones, Roberts sounds the familiar calls to stop overfishing and eat lower on the marine food chain, but he also reminds readers that eating more sustainably can only go so far:

bq. Overfishing is "only one small piece in a much larger puzzle of interacting impacts," Roberts writes. To put it in another way, consumer choices about which sea creatures to devour and which to shun, while important, only exert so much influence over the fate of the oceans.

And what we do on land is even more important than what we do on the water. Philpott noted that our fossil-fuel consumption is the biggest threat to the oceans, both directly (oil spills) and indirectly: agricultural runoff, ocean acidification from all the carbon dioxide we emit, mercury accumulation in fish from coal-burning power plants, and the like.

Want more? Read the compelling Daily Beast excerpt of Roberts' book.