The more you learn about your carbon-footprint, the more you’ll realize that it’s weighed down as much by food choices as by what car you drive and your home energy program.  Food production comes with a cornucopia of green issues, from pesticide use to deforestation to global shipping.

No food issue, though, is more important than choosing the right fish to eat. Seafood merits special attention, because the fish varieties that we’re consuming could be on the brink of survival.  Ocean ecosystems are being wrenched apart by the overfishing of certain species and the destructive fishing techniques used to harvest others.

Fortunately, there’s help out there to assist you in sorting out what you can responsibly buy and what you should avoid.

Seafood Watch is a current, easy-to-use table of contents to the marine menu. It breaks down your seafood options into three categories, “Best Choices”, “Good Alternatives” and “Avoid.” These lists are kept and updated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, an authority on marine health. You can download a pocket guide to use while shopping or use the iPhone application, handy for dining out.

For those who want to know why and how their favorite menu pescatarian choices have been graded, click through on any given species and find out more. Haddock, for instance, is considered either a “Good Alternative” or a fish to “Avoid” depending on the fishing technique used to catch it. Haddock caught the old-fashioned way, with a hook and line, are considered to have been reasonably harvested. Trawled Haddock, however, represent a destructive practice that’s harmful to coral and the ocean’s floor.

Now this gets to be a deep subject, so a new fish selector service has launched. FishChoice.com aims to help commercial buyers like restaurants and retailers hook up with sustainable fishing enterprises, so that the seafood industry can steer a new course. FishChoice.com is starting as a non-profit, funded by foundations and donors, but expects to earn some operating money from subscriber fees at a later date.

“It’s been difficult to find sustainable seafood at the right commercial quantities,” said Richard Boot, Founder & President of FishChoice.com, in a news release announcing the new service today.

“FishChoice.com provides a business solution to an environmental problem by creating a crucial link in the supply chain to connect buyers and sellers of sustainable seafood,” said Boot, a former chef who previously worked with a fishery advocacy group.

Soon maybe you won’t need that pocket guide.

(Image credits: Haddock, Monterey Bay Aquarium; FishChoice.com logo)

Who is Christopher Swain and why is he swimming through 1,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean muck?

Freestyling around the net looking for answers, we found the YouTube video, “Dirty for Swain” about how Swain supporters are bathing in sewage…moisturizing with crude oil…and drinking curdled milk (not makin’ it up) to support this eco-activist’s latest aquatic statement, which is taking him from Marblehead, Mass., to Washington D.C.

It might seem like a lot of toxic exposure just to make a point…except that Swain is leading a new wave of interest in cleaner water. With the oceans acidifying under global warming and fisheries collapsing due to excessive commercial fishing, there’s no time to waste, excuse the pun.

Swain’s bio page explains that he swims for “fishable, swimmable, drinkable waterways for future generations,” because — well, that is what he does. Over the last several years, this self-described “not a rich man and not a scientist” with degrees in French Lit, film and a master’s in Acupuncture, has braved all types of pollution, trash and mysterious toxic goo to swim the Charles, Hudson and Columbia rivers and Lake Champlain. These were long, dedicated, arduous swims — the length of the rivers — which have raised awareness about our polluted waterways and won Swain many accolades.

“Some of my motivation is selfish. I want my daughters to be able to swim in these waters themselves someday–without having to wade through a broth of heavy metals and sewage to do it. And I want them to know that I tried,” Swain writes on his bio page, which also tells about his childhood spent sailing.

“But some other part of me feels that these swims are my patriotic duty. Pleading the case for waterways has come to feel like my own twisted form of national service.”

Like the climber who confronted the mountain because it was there, Swain explains that he makes these swims because he has the will and wherewithal to “dive in when others might not.”

And so Swain is mid-swim on his latest adventure. And you can check up on him at ToxTour.org, which opens with the title: “An ordinary guy seeks healthy world.”

Ordinary, naw. Inspiring, yes! So if you want, you can get “Dirty for Swain.”

Or you can stay clean, wish him the best, perhaps donate to help classrooms launch projects to protect the oceans, or adopt-a-mile of Swain’s swim. The options are listed at ToxTour.org, and there’s more on the journey at Changents.com, which is carrying his blog and a chronicle of each swim day (he’s dipping in and out after a few miles each day, and the water temps are warming).

(Photo of Swain by Carrie Branovan.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Related video:

Remember the global food crisis of earlier this year? Unfortunately, the intervening mortgage, energy and banking crises have not solved it.

The next food shortages are headed our way in waves – from the oceans, where overfishing has led to the steep decline of shark populations worldwide, the closing of West Coast salmon fisheries and now, the potential slide of the Alaskan Pollock.

This latest fish-in-trouble was once so prolific that it became the world’s most omnipresent, affordable everyman’s seafood, sliced into faux crab, minced and pressed into fish sticks and filleted into fast food McFishwiches.

Now, the workhorse Pollock, once vastly abundant, is experiencing a sudden unanticipated population decline of about 50 percent, jeopardizing the world’s supply of fish sticks (which may or may not alarm you), the survival of the Stellar Sea Lions of and countless Alaskan fishing jobs, according to a survey by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The findings have conservationists calling for a reassessment fishing limits in the seas along the Bering Strait. They want the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to set new reasonable catch limits on the Pollock that consider sustainability when the council meets in December.

Without a reassessment, they say, the entire Bering Strait ecosystem, where seals and whales also depend on the Pollock for food, could collapse.

Ocean and marine life experts say that the focus on single species management – with catch quotas based on estimates of what the fish can “sustain” – are missing the mark. More sophisticated models that look at the entire ecosystem, which includes the Pollock’s natural predators, are needed.

“Economic pressures to keep on fishing at such high levels have overwhelmed common sense,” said Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a press release.

“With the huge uncertainties inherent in fisheries models, a far more precautionary, ecosystem-based approach is required. Otherwise, fisheries managers are gambling with the health of our oceans and coastal communities,” Jackson said.

A report by Greenpeace, the Alaska Oceans Program, the Center for Biological Diversity and Trustees for Alaska concluded that urgent action is needed to ensure adequate Pollock, which are largely caught off Alaska’s vast coastline. Marine managers must rebuild fish stocks at higher levels to “preserve the ecological relationships between the exploited, dependent, and related species in the food web” and establish a network of marine reserves to conserve fish and wildlife habitats, according to the report called Rethinking Sustainability: A New Paradigm for Fisheries Management.

The extensive continental shelf in the eastern Bering Sea accounts for about half of the marine fish and shellfish caught in the entire United States annually, the report said.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media