South Park Slams Bottom Trawling
November 18th, 2006 | by MadHacktress |The characters of South Park have gone on record as being against bottom trawling.
The video, not credited to Matt Stone or Trey Parker in the news article, but done in a similar style, was released by Greenpeace and is aimed at Ottawa and the Spanish governments. The character sing a song to the tune of Blame Canada, but with customized lyrics.
Like the seal hunt, Canada has a bad reputation with regard to bottom trawling because we don’t outright ban the process.
Canada has long worked to protect vulnerable coral reef ecosystems from bottom trawling off of Nova Scotia. An area known as the Gully has been protected since 2004 as a Marine Protected Area.
The current debate in the chambers of the United Nations involves a proposed global ban on bottom trawling in unregulated (so-called International) waters. The Canadian stance is that this isn’t an all-or-nothing issue. Our delegates are supporting an alternative whereby regions are individually managed and regulated as necessary.
Some areas of the world’s oceans are not in need of protection, delegates claim, and bottom trawling in these areas yields beneficial resources like cod, hake and scallops.
Canada’s stance has some people confused due to the fact that our fisheries do not take advantage of bottom trawling in areas outside of Canada’s direct control. The concern amongst lawmakers, however, is that this moratorium is only the first step in a more broad move to ban bottom trawling even within the territorial waters of sovereign nations.
Canada’s internal fisheries bottom trawling practices produce approximately 1$ billion dollars annually.
Canada is not alone in calling for caution with the bottom trawling ban, Japan, Russia and South Korea are also strongly opposed. The European Commission, another opponent, and Canada “are the two big worries” according to one delegate.
According to one set of statistics, an area twice the size the contiguous United States (the “lower 48″) is trawled each year. That seems like a large area, some 15,768,510 km2 in size. However, given that the worldwide oceans are more than 361 million km2 that scales that area down to a mere 4.3% of the ocean floor.
Less than 5% of the world’s oceans are trawled each year. This regulation, as written, is not going to affect internal waters, the 24 nautical mile “border” around the nations of the world over which there is no international jurisdiction. About 13,670,400km2 of ocean is made up of internal waters; only 2.1 million km2 less than the area trawled annually.
I don’t know, definitively, where most of the bottom trawling takes place, but if it is within internal waters, then this motion is going to do little to solve the problem. It seems unlikely that this proposal, no matter how well intentioned, is going to make a vast difference in the world’s ocean landscape.
To summarize: I like fish and chips.
Entry Filed under: In The News, Pure Opinion
I love that video, I blogged it myself.
As a scuba diver I would love to see bottom trawling gotten rid of. Do not think if i was south park that I would want to be associated with the idiots from green peace. Hopefully there will be a change here in Canada and around the world but then we have to look at more then just that pollution in our seas and access.I just hope the that the alternative to bottom trawling is practical.