Undersea vertical farms could be the future of sustainable seafood

But on a global scale, the problem is really industrialization. It's fishing as mining, not farming or harvesting. Any fleet can overfish. Extracting huge amounts of one species from the ocean, or even large-scale monoculture ocean farms, decimates biodiversity, triggering a cascade of environmental and social problems. See (some) shrimp ponds in Thailand and salmon farms in Chile. But the opposite is also true. When done right, farms, and fisheries, can restore ecosystems (see RARE's Fish Forever program allowing millions of small fishers to boost catches by managing their own marine reserves). And nobody wants fisheries to thrive more than the families that have subsisted on them for generations, whether they live in Kodiak, Alaska, or ??Puntas de Choros, Chile. 

Just as there's a small but growing movement of regenerative farming on land, there's now a burgeoning movement at sea.

Today, the world's oceans and lakes give us 17 percent (and growing) of the world's protein supply while serving as the primary sustenance for at least 3 billion people. But they aren't infinite. As global catches began to stagnate in the early 1990s, global consumption skyrocketed. Farms met almost all that demand. Over the last two decades, reports the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, fish farming has risen 50-fold. It shows no signs of slowing. 

Aquaculture has edged past fisheries in global production.

We can choose to eat in a way that supports our coastal ecosystems, or destroys them. If they (and we) are going to thrive, it will mean reinventing farms to regenerate the ocean during an era of extreme climate change. 

For that, we need to reintroduce ourselves to the bivalve.

In the 1800s, America's oyster carts were as ubiquitous as today's hot dog stands. It was America's most common and beloved source of protein. Oyster houses and saloons proliferated. High-end restaurants in New York City featured dishes like scalloped oysters and oyster-stuffed chickens. They were cheap, plentiful, delicious and nutritious. 

The story of America could be told by the homely bivalve. Massive middens, or oyster shell and clam shell mounds along the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bay are evidence of indigenous people's fondness for these and other shellfish of the intertidal zone, like clams, mussels, and scallops. New York Harbor and San Francisco Bay were rich with shellfish and reefs. In 1609, when Henry Hudson arrived in New York City, there were about 350 square miles of oyster reefs. This natural bounty meant deeply contoured intertidal zones that provided habitat for numerous sea creatures. Waters teemed with fish. 

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Photo by Peter Secan on Unsplash

Source: msn news