June 18, 2013 — Oceana, based in Washington, D.C., believes the world’s oceans “are in crisis from overfishing, acidification, and habitat destruction [and] works internationally to alleviate these and other problems through policy-oriented campaigns.” The nonprofit group has a $20-million annual budget, about 130 employees, a team in Chile, and eight other overseas offices. (In addition to Sharpless, three other alumni are also involved: president Jim Simon, J.D. ’83, assistant general counsel Eric Bilsky, J.D. ’91, and board member María Eugenia Girón, M.B.A. ’92.) Its goals extend from banning the shark-fin trade and requiring seafood traceability in the United States to overhauling the European Union’s fisheries policy, preventing offshore oil drilling in Belize (and elsewhere), and saving specific endangered marine species and habitats, such as the Steller sea lion in Alaska. Earlier this year, Oceana publicized its “seafood fraud” investigation, which found that one-third of the seafood sold to American consumers was mislabeled. The results, Sharpless wryly notes, got more media attention than Oceana’s fight against oil drilling during the year that “BP was ruining the Gulf of Mexico, proving that people care more about what goes in their stomachs.”
The fraud investigation supports Oceana’s push for a national system that tracks fish from “boat to plate”; Sharpless says that would reduce illegal fishing significantly. Bills to require such a system are pending in both the House and the Senate, and the American fishing fleet, he reports, agrees, for a change, with Oceana’s efforts “because they see themselves as more law-abiding than the foreign fleets.” (“More often,” he adds, “we are fighting with them.”)
Oceana focuses on influencing the laws of the nine countries, plus the European Union, that together control two-thirds of the world’s marine fish production. Seven out of eight fish are caught within 200 nautical miles of the coast in an “exclusive economic zone” controlled by the closest country; Peru, China, the United States, Russia, and Indonesia lead the pack. Sharpless outlines the workings of the global fishing industry as part of his first book, The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World (Rodale), published in May. The rest are nabbed in the “high seas” controlled by committees such as the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (ICCAT)—which Sharpless says is more commonly known in the industry as the commission “to Catch All Tuna.” It is much harder to change fishing operations at that level, he adds, because committees “tend to make decisions by consensus, which means they arrive at the lowest common denominator—and very often do not even enforce that.” By contrast, the top fishing countries, he says, “generally have the capability, if they choose to do it, to manage their fisheries well and to make them abundant forever.”
The Perfect Protein promotes eating more fish because Sharpless believes, along with many others, that it’s healthy for the brain, the body, and the world. Choosing meat or poultry instead, he argues, directly affects the demand for grain, which leads in turn to further deforestation and loss of biodiversity; the oceans, which cover 71 percent of the planet, can still recover, despite current pollution and overfishing. The concise book, with a foreword by former president Bill Clinton, gives a general audience guidance on “eating responsibly,” along with 21 “sustainable” recipes from renowned chefs, and a fine selection of further readings.
Read the full story at Harvard Magazine