Daniel Pauly Quotes

We transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.

Tilapia have often been represented as the aquatic chicken, and it's perfectly justified.

I personally like the idea of shellfish aquaculture. These are animals that stay quiet, they stay where you put them, and they clean up the water.

If we don't manage this resource, we will be left with a diet of jellyfish and plankton stew.

An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. Therefore, they're not perceived as a big loss.

The crisis of the fisheries is similar to our economy. This is not one fishery failing, but the whole system.

We suggest that in the next decades fisheries management will have to emphasize the rebuilding of fish populations embedded within functional food webs, within large 'no-take' marine protected areas.

Small-scale fisheries should not be favoured over large-scale operations ebcause of romantic notions of rugged small operators battling both the elements and anonymous corporations. [They ought to be supported] because of the scientific evidence available to confirm the common-sense inference that local fishers, if given privileged access, will tend to avoid trashing their local stocks, while foreign fishers do not have such motivation.

If you think of having a family as being loved as a child, cared for - I did not experience that.

People don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.

While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people - even those who profess great environmental consciousness - continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice.

In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families.