Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [302]
What gets certified is a fishery or a fish stock, and the fishing method, practice, or gear used to harvest that stock. The entities seeking certification are collectives of fishermen, government fisheries departments acting on behalf of a national or local fishery, and intermediate processors and distributors. Applications are considered from “fisheries” not only of fish, but also of molluscs and crustacea. Of the seven fisheries certified to date, the largest is the wild salmon fishery of the U.S. state of Alaska, represented by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The next largest are Western Australian rock lobster (Australia’s most valuable single-species fishery, accounting for 20% of the value of all Australian fisheries) and New Zealand hoki (New Zealand’s most valuable export fishery). The other four fisheries already certified are smaller ones in Britain: Thames herring, Cornwall mackerel caught by handline, Burry Inlet cockles, and Loch Torridon Nephrops. Pending accreditation are Alaska pollock, the largest fishery in the U.S., accounting for half of the U.S. catch; U.S. West Coast halibut, Dungeness crab, and spotted prawn; U.S. East Coast striped bass; and Baja California lobster. Plans are also under way to extend certification from wild-caught fish to aquaculture operations (which pose their own big problems mentioned in the next chapter), beginning with shrimp and proceeding to 10 other species, including perhaps salmon. It appears at present that the most difficult problems of certification for the world’s major fisheries will arise with wild-caught shrimp (because it is caught mostly by bottom-trawling producing a large by-catch), and with fisheries extending beyond the jurisdiction of a single nation.
Overall, certification has been proving more difficult and slower for fisheries than for forests. Nevertheless, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the progress in fisheries certification achieved in the last five years: I had expected it to be even more difficult and slower than it actually has been.
In brief, environmental practices of big businesses are shaped by a fundamental fact that for many of us offends our sense of justice. Depending on the circumstances, a business really may maximize its profits, at least in the short term, by damaging the environment and hurting people. That is still the case today for fishermen in an unmanaged fishery without quotas, and for international logging companies with short-term leases on tropical rainforest land in countries with corrupt government officials and unsophisticated landowners. It was also the case for oil companies before the Santa Barbara Channel oil spill disaster of 1969, and for Montana mining companies before recent cleanup laws. When government regulation is effective, and when the public is environmentally aware, environmentally clean big businesses may outcompete dirty ones, but the reverse is likely to be true if government regulation is ineffective and if the public doesn’t care.
It is easy and cheap for the rest of us to blame a business for helping itself by hurting other people. But that blaming alone is unlikely to produce change. It ignores the fact that businesses are not non-profit charities but profit-making companies, and that publicly owned companies with shareholders are under obligation to those shareholders to maximize profits, provided that they do so by legal means. Our laws make a company’s directors legally liable for something termed “breach of fiduciary responsibility” if they