If we continue, at our present rate, to strip-mine the sea of its living resources, 25 years from now we'll be lucky to find a seafood menu that offers a rock sandwich with a side order of kelp. Consider the swordfish: angler's prize, gourmet's delight, fisherman's livelihood. In the mid-'60s, when I was in my mid-20s, I caught a swordfish off Long Island. I wasn't trying to; it took bait meant for sharks. The fish was weirdly, atypically lethargic. It didn't struggle much, didn't leap at all, just tugged for a while, then gave up.

It died quietly, and I watched (with some, but not enough, regret) its gleaming gun-metal skin fade swiftly to death's dull gray. It wasn't a particularly big swordfish; it weighed only 247 lbs. A big swordfish would weigh more than half a ton.

Had I been able to know back then that what I had just caught was one of the last stragglers of a vanishing species--that within 35 years a 247-lb. Atlantic broadbill swordfish would be as rare as a tyrannosaur--I would have set it free, administered CPR or, if all attempts at resuscitation had failed, I would at least have had the carcass of the mighty fish gilded and sent to the Smithsonian.

Today the average Atlantic swordfish caught weighs 90 lbs., and the figure drops by a pound or two every year. Because swordfish don't breed until the female is five years old and weighs 150 lbs., we're killing and eating the teenagers before they can reproduce. And though the U.S. is trying, at last, to lead a campaign to stop the slaughter, the effort is too little, too late. Swordfish, like tuna and the other pelagic (open-ocean) fish, roam far from American jurisdiction. There have been reliable reports of commercial fishermen in the Mediterranean routinely landing swordfish weighing between 10 and 15 lbs.--the babies, less than a year old.

Granted, swordfish are an especially vulnerable target, being prized as both game fish and food fish. But they're hardly the only victims of the current global lunacy, of which the motto seems to be: if it swims, hook it, stab it, poison it or blow it up. MORE>>

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