The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

Hunting and Herding Sea Life / 101
the fish being grown require large quantities of other fish in their feed.
For example, it takes three to five pounds of wild ocean fish to produce
one pound of farmed saltwater fish or shrimp. 14 In addition to all this,
fish farming fosters disease that can easily spread to wild salmon or
other fish and wipe out whole stocks. This is what has happened with
chronic wasting disease in wild elk and deer herds infected by cattle
operations. As but one example, parasitic sea lice are rampant in the
unnaturally concentrated populations of farmed salmon. The industry
uses toxic pesticides and antibiotics in its vain struggle to control the
lice, who spread in clouds in the surrounding water, stretching up to
nineteen miles around the farms, infesting wild salmon populations in
the area and decimating them. 15 Another practice that is wreaking
havoc with wild populations is the introduction of non-native farmed
fish species that escape into local ecosystems. Commercial shrimp
farms are another particularly well-known and egregious ecological
disaster, causing pollution that is killing precious coral reefs and
coastal mangrove forests worldwide. The fish flesh obtained from commercial
aquaculture factory farms is intensified misery, toxicity, and
environmental devastation.
Floating Death Ships
The story behind the living beings pulled out of our earth’s oceans is just
as tragic, though in a different way. The world’s marine ecosystems are
being ruthlessly plundered. Long gone are the days when the first
Europeans arrived on North American shores and wrote how the
schools of fish were so vast and thick that they thought their ships
would run aground on them before they reached the land. 16 These oncefecund
waters have been, and continue to be, strip-mined for fish, using
fishing trawlers with nets many thousands of feet in length, to meet the
relentless demand of humans, fish farms, and enslaved food animals.
(An amazing fifty percent of the world fish catch is fed to the needlessly
imprisoned food animals, and not to people. 17 ) All of the seventeen
major global fisheries are depleted or in serious decline.
In most parts of the world, because of overfishing and near-shore
water pollution, it is no longer possible to run profitable fishing opera-