'Sustainable' sounds more interesting if you say it with a French accent.

So on Friday I was asked a million dollar question by a not-inconsequential person in the UK fishing and seafood industry. Sweat dripped onto my keyboard as a I typed furiously (as in frenziedly, not angrily) to produce an extensive email essay in response to Dr Harman's little question: what do I regard as sustainable?

Call me crazy, but I'd say that Dr Jon Harman, the Business Development Director at Seafish (the authority on seafood in the UK), was not asking the Wild Oceans Project Officer (the authority on babbled radio interviews and laminating pictures of fish) about sustainable fish because he doesn't know and was hoping I could clear it up a bit for him. Nope, nosiree, I'm being tested. I'm also being made to look directly at the elephant in the room which I was enjoying ignoring. In fact, Dr Harman is sitting astride the elephant, waving and flapping its ears up and down, shouting 'look at me on this elephant in this room'. With 25 years of experience on the subject, I'm also pretty sure that Dr Harman has a built-in waffle-ometer which will deftly block my usual escape route. So here I am, manning up to deal with this 'sustainable' elephant head on, and I expect to be a greyer shade of brunette when I come out the other end. (I might also be alone, because unfortunately, unless you are a fish nerd like me, 'sustainable' is actually one of those 'go to sleep immediately' words. Sustaina... zzzzzzzzzzzzzz).


I know that I use 'sustainable-seafood' to describe the project all the time, but sometimes we say things we don't precisely mean and it's ok because it is close enough to the truth and is much simpler than using the full complex description which would bore people to death everytime you talk about fish, and then I'd be wanted for homicide.

Average Joe: 'Hi Lindsay, really quick question - is this fish sustainable?'
Me: 'Hi Joe, great question. I could just answer yes or no, but I fear that to be accurate I must tell you that the literal sustainability of any individual fish is not enough to say whether or not it is ethical to ....Joe, are you ok? Joe?!'
Average Joe: 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....*silence*' 
Joe's friend, Ordinary Eric: 'You bored Joe to death! Boring Lindsay you're the worst.'


Right, just like pulling off a plaster, here we go, Boring Lindsay's definition of sustainable:
A fishery is sustainable if the biomass of the stock lost to fishing plus natural mortality is not greater than the biomass recruited to the stock through reproduction and growth.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

So don't take too much of the target fish and you can keep fishing indefinitely, right? Sustainability in a nutshell and I'm sure the Oxford Dictionary people would be happy with that.
Knock knock.
'Who's there?'
'A conservationist'
'A conservationist who?'
'A conservationist who says that we should consider more than only the target species before saying a fish is ok to eat'.
'It's Boring Lindsay, don't let her in!'

So there's also non-target fish, caught unintentionally when fishing for the target species. You're sustainably fishing for John and you accidentally catch Dave. These are, thanks to Hughie FW, well-known firstly as by-catch, secondly as discards if and when they are well, discarded. By definition alone, a fishery wouldn't have to give a rat's bottom about these 'by-catch' Daves, it could still be 'sustainably' fishing the target Johns. A bit wrong, eh.

Ha I'm not quite done. Then what about damage to the marine habitat? I won't go into this now, but surely we should consider whether or not a fishing method is mean to the sea floor before we make it our friend? Not really, according solely to the literal definition of sustainability.

Ultimately here is my confession: I call Wild Oceans 'a sustainable seafood project' but rather than saying:
'go and eat fish that are reproducing at a greater rate than they are being caught' (for which I would probably get punched for being an idiot, and deserve it)
I say:
'go and eat locally-sourced fish, line-caught fish and a wide variety of fish'
because it is easy to go out there and actually do, plus it considers a few of the wider impacts that 'sustainability' alone doesn't, including the Cumbrian fishing economy. (For this I expect to be hugged for being practical. Still waiting though...)
 
So Wild Oceans is not exactly a sustainable-seafood project, but its close enough....
Hel-loooo? Anyone still out there?
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
*Embarrassed cough. Lindsay goes home by herself*

Boring Lindsay would like to apologise to any Joes, Daves, Johns, Erics and elephants who may have been offended in the making of this post.