Daniel Pauly

"The three decades following World War II were a period of rapidly increasing fishing effort and landings, but also of spectacular collapses, particularly in small pelagic fish stocks. This is also the period in which a toxic triad of catch underreporting, ignoring scientific advice and blaming the environment emerged as standard response to ongoing fisheries collapses, which became increasingly more frequent, finally engulfing major North Atlantic fisheries. The response to the depletion of traditional fishing grounds was an expansion of North Atlantic (and generally of northern hemisphere) fisheries in three dimensions: southward, into deeper waters and into new taxa, i.e. catching and marketing species of fish and invertebrates previously spurned, and usually lower in the food web."

"Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers."