Increasing Population and Wealth Are Death to Fish

Fish represent an important source of food for humans and historically have had the economic advantage of needing only to be harvested. Yet in a nearly classical Malthusian situation, the fish stock has not been keeping up with population growth, especially as the world's increased wealth has created new technologies for tracking and harvesting fish. A new study has raised the alarm about numerous fish species in the Mediterranean that may be on the verge of extinction.

The study released Tuesday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature says almost half of the species of sharks and rays in the Mediterranean and at least 12 species of bony fish are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, pollution and the loss of habitat.

Commercial catches of bluefin tuna, sea bass, hake and dusky grouper are particularly threatened, said the study by the Swiss-based IUCN, an environmental network of 1,000 groups in 160 nations.

"The Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic population of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is of particular concern," said Kent Carpenter, IUCN's global marine species assessment coordinator.

He cited a steep drop in the giant fish's reproductive capacity due to four decades of intensive overfishing. Japanese diners consume 80 percent of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefins caught and the two tuna species are especially prized by sushi lovers.

Given the radiation pollution of the ocean near Japan, it is likely that the demand for Mediterranean fish will go up, not down, in the near future.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says fish stocks continue to dwindle globally despite increasing efforts to regulate catches and stop overfishing.

As I have noted before, the long-term consequence of over-fishing will be an ever-increasing dependence on farmed fish, but there are relatively few species that are known to be well-adapted to current fish farming methods.

Would Immigration Reform Have Occurred in the US Had There Not Been John Tanton?

Efforts to limit immigration, especially undocumented immigration from Mexico, are widespread in the United States. However, a lengthy story in the New York Times suggests that the movement can trace its origins back to the 1970s to a small-town doctor in Michigan--John Tanton.

Time and again, Dr. Tanton urged liberal colleagues in groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club to seek immigration restraints, only to meet blank looks and awkward silences.

“I finally concluded that if anything was going to happen, I would have to do it myself,” he said.

Improbably, he did. From the resort town of Petoskey, Mich., Dr. Tanton helped start all three major national groups fighting to reduce immigration, legal and illegal, and molded one of the most powerful grass-roots forces in politics. The immigration-control movement surged to new influence in last fall’s elections and now holds near veto power over efforts to legalize any of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

One group that Dr. Tanton nurtured, Numbers USA, doomed President George W. Bush’s legalization plan four years ago by overwhelming Congress with protest calls. Another, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, helped draft the Arizona law last year to give the police new power to identify and detain illegal immigrants.

A third organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, joined the others in December in defeating the Dream Act, which sought to legalize some people brought to the United States illegally as children.

“He is the most influential unknown man in America,” said Linda Chavez, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan who once led a Tanton group that promoted English-only laws.

Over time, it appears that Dr. Tanton evolved from simply being worried about the impact of immigration on population growth and resources in the United States to being worried about cultural change in the US as a result of foreigners flooding in. The latter perspective is not a new one, of course, and led in the 1920s to the very restrictive and blatantly racist immigration laws that were finally dismantled in 1965.

World's Oldest Man Dies at Age 114

The oldest man in the world, Walter Breuning, has died at age 114 in the state of Montana. His "secrets" for a long life have been a big hit on the internet:

• Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. ("Every change is good.")
• Eat two meals a day ("That's all you need.")
• Work as long as you can ("That money's going to come in handy.")
• Help others ("The more you do for others, the better shape you're in.")
Then there's the hardest part. It's a lesson Breuning said he learned from his grandfather: Accept death.
"We're going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you're born to die," he said.

Arizona Anti-immigration Law Blocked by Appeals Court

The highly controversial anti-immigration bill passed by the state of Arizona last year has hit another roadblock in its implementation. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to lift the stay on its implementation that had been imposed by a lower court. 

A federal appeals court on Monday refused to lift a stay blocking major parts of Arizona's immigration law from taking effect and said the federal government is likely to be able to prove the controversial law is unconstitutional.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down an appeal filed by Gov. Jan Brewer. She had asked the appeals court to lift an injunction imposed by a federal judge in Phoenix the day before the law was to take effect on July 29, 2010.

The U.S Justice Department sued to block the law, saying it violates the U.S. Constitution because enforcing immigration law is a federal issue.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued an injunction preventing four major parts of the law from going into effect pending a trial. Monday's ruling by the three-judge appeals court panel upheld that injunction.

The panel's opinion said the government is likely to succeed in its arguments that Congress has given the federal government sole authority to enforce immigration laws, and that Arizona's law violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. One judge dissented.

Brewer's lawyers said the federal government hasn't effectively enforced immigration law and that the state law will assist federal authorities.

 The ruling made it clear that the Court of Appeals saw the law as stepping over the line in its conflict with federal government. In other words, just because a state government objects to what the federal government is doing (or is not doing, in the view of Arizona) it does not have the legislative authority to override the federal government. There is obviously a great deal of frustration with the government's lack of willingness to come up with a "comprehensive" immigration reform plan, but as my son (Greg Weeks) and I have argued elsewhere, this is a true conundrum--there is probably no immigration reform plan that is going to please a majority of members of Congress and, of course, that is why no such plan has been forthcoming.

Trimming the Budget, One Waistline at a Time

Mark Bittman has a opinion piece in today's New York Times that reminds us of the fiscal cost of poor diets in a country such as the United States.

For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones [in the US]. Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.
But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more. 

Over time we have gone from providing more and better food to make us healthier, to providing more and more and not necessarily better food that undermines our health--the essence of Barry Popkin's Nutrition Transition theory. Changing our dietary patterns is unlikely to be easy.

Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. Some other billions of dollars must go to public health. Again: we built sewage systems; we built water supplies; we showed that we could get people to eat anything we marketed. Now all we have to do is build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that.