Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Let's start with this one.
Image from Gary Stokes, a conservation photographer who is also the coordinator for
the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in Hong Kong. You can see more of
them here here at his blog. Also see the Green Blog's A Vorcacious Demand For Shark Fins.
Commentary
I am going to take a hard line today. There is no reason to whitewash the situation.
The human population of the Earth is somewhere north of 7 billion (7,000,000,000). Practically speaking, a population that large means that an awful lot of people must find a way to make a living. They must find a means by which they can feed themselves, shelter themselves, clothe themselves, and so on. Given what we know or can infer about Human Nature, it is guaranteed that some of those people will make a living by finning sharks, and then selling the fins to those who sell them to restaurants, whose cooks use them to make Shark Fin Soup. This pattern of behavior was cast in stone when somebody discovered that Shark Fin Soup was good to eat.
No one could make a living from killing sharks for their fins unless there was a voracious demand for those fins for use in that soup. As humans are wont to do, some of them associated eating Shark Fin Soup with social status and various rituals, or attributed magical properties to it which it does not have. Once this occurred, combined with the established fact that some humans found the soup good to eat, it was guaranteed that there would always be a robust demand for Shark Fin Soup, a guarantee which becomes stronger and stronger the more people there are.
These sober considerations have the ring of unalterable Destiny. Given Human Nature, and the discovery of the goodness (for some) of Shark Fin Soup, a pattern was established which can not be abolished. This pattern of predation & consumption has consequences—
Researchers estimate that 100 million sharks are killed each year, some 73 million of them for the lucrative trade in shark fins. As demand, mainly from China, has soared, many shark populations have plummeted by as much as 90 percent in recent decades.
“If sharks continue to be overfished at the current rate, it’s only a matter of a few years before the targeted species are extinct,” according to Richard Thomas, communications director at Traffic, which monitors wildlife trade.
The fins are not cheap. Retailers in Hong Kong charge more than 2,000 Hong Kong dollars, or $260, per “catty,” a traditional weight measure commonly used in markets here and equal to a bit more than 600 grams, or 21 ounces. One catty makes about 10 portions of shark’s fin soup.
The soup is losing some of its status — slowly...
Shark Fin Soup may be slowly losing some of its "status" for some humans, but, necessarily, there will always be many, many others standing in line to fin the sharks and eat the soup. Indeed, the remarks above are so general that we could substitute a thousand other things for "Shark Fin Soup" and still not exhaust those "commodities" which are subject to this general human pattern of predation & consumption.
Sometime in the mid to late 2020s, if current population trends continue, which seems assured, there will 8 billion humans living on the Earth. We can readily see, then, that the tragic fate of various shark species is all but assured. Modern shark families have been extant for about 150 million years, but these lineages are now in the process of being killed off by humans. According to Richard Thomas, who is quoted above, if sharks continue to be overfished at the current rate, it’s only a matter of a few years before the targeted species are extinct. Thomas may be wrong about "a few years." Extinction is usually a long, draw-out process, but the time frame is actually irrelevant here—it is happening fast enough and it is inevitable.
Sharks will be killed off for soup and for other reasons (general eating, by-catch, destruction of marine ecosystems, etc.). However, as I said, the remarks above apply to a plenitude of other species. Given what humans are, these extinction problems are fundamentally unsolvable, and indeed, would not even be viewed as "problems" by the 7 billion humans who are simply acting according to their Nature. Only a few enlightened oddballs see this pattern of predation & consumption as problematic. It is these people who are the odd men out.
Have a nice weekend.
Human beings will do what they want to do until...
a) they are physically or economically no longer able to do it, or
b) they decide they want to do something else.
Generally, (b) only happens when silly societal norms change, which, in turn, happens rarely and takes many years (generations?). So, practically speaking, (a) rules. This is the depressing reality for most other non-human species on this planet. Until human behavior results in them being physically or economically unable to destroy other beings, they will continue to destroy those beings out of lust for money, ignorance or pleasure.
The enlightened odd men out will continue whistling in the wind.
Posted by: Brian | 01/04/2013 at 09:51 AM