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The world's fisheries are doomed or at least in serious trouble, according to a 1996 award-winning series of articles in The Times-Picayune titled Oceans of Trouble. The series was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for public service by Columbia University and also an award for excellence in journalism for public service by the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi.
The Pulitzer Prizes are annual awards for achievements in American journalism, letters, drama and music. The prizes have been awarded by Columbia University since 1917, on the recommendation of a Pulitzer Prize Board. Fourteen prizes are given in journalism. The Times-Picayune set out to explore fishing issues in the Gulf of Mexico and ended up half-way round the world in Southeast Asia. The series "SHOWED the impact on lives, economies, the environment and the future," wrote the Sigma Delta Chi judges. According to Times Picayune staff writer John McQuaid, "...a flood of cheap seafood imports and gill net bans...threaten millions of livelihoods and the Gulf's unique fishing culture"; for an example, he describes, in "Are the World's Fisheries Doomed?," the situation of a 44-year-old ex-shrimper who lost his 72-foot shrimp boat long ago when he couldn't afford insurance and then couldn't pay for repairs after being rammed. The ex-shrimper now uses "a boat too small to name" to farm oysters on 2,000 leased marsh acres by hand. In addition, this ex-shrimper-turned-oyster-gatherer is threatened by regulations, low prices and coastal erosion. Despite the ex-shrimper's bad luck, sport and commercial fishing in the Gulf support 200,000 workers and pour more than $5 billion into the regional economy. Observes McQuaid, "Three intertwined trends have turned the Gulf into an arena of bitter conflict, economic pain and ecological destruction": overfishing, economics and habitat destruction. Staff writer Mark Schleifstein's "The Dead Sea," the second in the series, states that ecological destruction is perhaps most evident in a 7,000 square mile dead zone that stretches "from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Texas border" and which "becomes so devoid of oxygen each summer that it kills clams, crabs, worms and other organisms that live on and in the sediment, destroying the food chain from the bottom up." This dead zone kills young fish emerging from marshy breeding grounds and traps others or forces them to "flee or starve." As a result of farming in Iowa, Kansas and elsewhere upriver, it contains nitrogen and phosphorous. Too much of these chemicals causes algae blooms which, when they die, use up the oxygen in the water--no oxygen; no fish. Schleifstein says that four other dead zones elsewhere in the world are also on the verge of collapse. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Oceans of Trouble, Award-Winning Journalism in Environment is owned by Kenneth Friedman. Permission to republish Oceans of Trouble, Award-Winning Journalism in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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