Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (88 page)

contractors, and architectural firms that don't deal directly with the public
and are not very visible to consumers, but that nevertheless choose to buy
FSC-labeled products because they benefit from decreased taxes and in
creased access to bidding on projects. I should make clear, in connection
both with LEED standards and with buyers' groups, that both are driven ul
timately by environmental concerns of individual consumers, and by the
desire of companies to have their corporate brand become associated with
environmental responsibility by consumers. What LEED standards and
buyers' groups do is to provide a mechanism whereby individual consumers
can influence the behavior of companies that would otherwise not be di
rectly responsive to individual consumers.

The forest certification movement has spread rapidly around the world
since the FSC's launching in 1993, to the point where at present there
are certified forests and chains of custody in about 64 countries. The area of
certified forests now totals 156,000 square miles, of which 33,000 are in North America. Nine countries each contain at least 4,000 square miles of
certified forests, led by Sweden with 38,000 square miles (representing more
than half of that country's total forested area), and followed in descending
order by Poland, the U.S., Canada, Croatia, Latvia, Brazil, the United King
dom, and Russia. The countries in which the highest percentages of forest products sold are FSC-labeled are the United Kingdom, where about 20%
of all wood sold is FSC-certified, and the Netherlands. Sixteen countries
have individual certified forests exceeding 400 square miles in area, of which
the largest in North America is the 7,800-square-mile Gordon Cosens For
est in Ontario, managed by the Canadian timber and paper giant Tembec.
By the near future, Tembec intends to certify all of the 50,000 square miles
of forest that it manages in Canada. Certified forests include both publicly
and privately owned ones: for instance, the largest single owner of certified
forest in the U.S. is the State of Pennsylvania, with about 3,000 square miles.

Initially after the formation of the FSC, the area of forests certified was doubling each year. More recently, the rate of growth has slowed to "only"
40% per year. That's because the first forest companies and managers that became certified were ones that had already espoused FSC standards. The
companies whose forests have become accredited more recently tend to be
ones that must change their operations in order to achieve FSC standards.
That is, the FSC initially served mainly to recognize companies with environmentally sound practices, and is now increasingly serving to change the
practices of other companies that were initially less sound environmentally.

The effectiveness of the Forest Stewardship Council has received the ul-

timate compliment from logging companies opposed to it: they have set up
their own competing certification organizations with weaker standards.
These include the Sustainable Forestry Initiative in the U.S., set up by the
American Forest and Paper Association; the Canadian Standards Association; and the Pan-European Forest Council. The effect (and presumably the
purpose) is to confuse the public with competing claims: for instance, the
Sustainable Forestry Initiative initially proposed six different labels making
six different claims. All of these "knockoffs" differ from the FSC in that they
do not require independent third-party certification, but they permit com
panies to certify themselves (I'm not joking). They do not ask companies to
judge themselves by uniform standards and quantifiable results (e.g., "width
of the strips of riparian vegetation flanking streams"), but instead by un
quantifiable processes ("we have a policy," "our managers participate in dis
cussions"). They lack chain-of-custody certification, so that any product of
a sawmill that receives both certified and uncertified timber becomes certi
fied. The Pan-European Forest Council practices regional automatic certifi
cation, by which for instance the entire country of Austria became certified
quickly. It remains to be seen whether, in the future, these competing indus
try attempts at self-certification will be outcompeted by the FSC through
losing credibility in the eyes of consumers, or will instead converge on FSC
standards in order to gain credibility.

The last industry that I shall discuss is the seafood industry (marine fish
eries), which faces the same fundamental problem as do the oil, mining, and
timber industries: rising world population and affluence leading to increas
ing demand for decreasing supplies. While seafood consumption is high
and rising in the First World, it is even higher and rising faster elsewhere, e.g., having doubled in China within the last decade. Fish now account for 40% of all protein (of both plant and animal origin) consumed in the Third
World and are the main animal protein source for over a billion Asians.
Worldwide population shifts from the interior towards the coast within countries will increase the demand for seafood, because three-quarters of
the world's population will be living within 50 miles of the seacoast by the year 2010. As a result of our dependence on seafood, the sea provides jobs
and income for 200,000,000 people around the world, and fishing is the
most important basis of the economies of Iceland, Chile, and some other
countries.

While any renewable biological resource poses difficult management

problems, marine fisheries are especially hard to manage. Even fisheries
confined to waters controlled by a single nation pose difficulties, but fish
eries extending over water controlled by multiple nations pose greater problems and have tended to be the earliest to collapse, because no single nation can impose its will. Fisheries in the open ocean outside the 200-mile marine
limit lie beyond the control of any national government. Studies suggest
that, with proper management, the world's seafood catch could be sustained
at a level even higher than its present level. Sadly, though, the majority of
the world's commercially important marine fisheries have already either
collapsed to the point of being commercially extinct, have been severely de
pleted, are currently overfished or fished to the limit, are recovering only slowly from past overfishing, or are otherwise in urgent need of management. Among the most important fisheries that have already collapsed are Atlantic halibut, Atlantic bluefin tuna, Atlantic swordfish, North Sea her
ring, Grand Banks cod, Argentinian hake, and Australian Murray River cod.
In overfished areas of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, peak catches were at
tained in the year 1989 and have declined since then. The main reasons be
hind all these failures are the tragedy of the commons, discussed in the
preceding chapter, which makes it difficult for consumers exploiting a
shared renewable resource to reach agreement despite their shared interest in doing so; the widespread lack of effective management and regulation;
and so-called perverse subsidies, i.e., the economically senseless subsidies that many governments pay for political reasons to support fishing
fleets that are too large in relation to their fish stocks, that lead almost inevi
tably to overfishing, and that yield too low profits to survive without the
subsidies.

The damage caused by overfishing extends beyond the future prospects
of all of us to eat seafood, and beyond the survival of the particular fish or
seafood stocks that we harvest. Most seafood is captured by netting and
other methods that result in our hauling in unwanted animals besides those actually sought. Those other animals, referred to as by-catch, constitute a
proportion varying between one-quarter and two-thirds
of
the total catch.
In most cases the by-catch dies and is thrown back overboard. Included in
the by-catch are unwanted fish species, juveniles of the targeted fish species,
seals, dolphins and whales, sharks, and sea turtles. Yet by-catch mortality is not inevitable: for example, recent changes in fishing gear and practices reduced dolphin mortality in the eastern Pacific tuna fishery by a factor of 50.
There is also heavy damage to marine habitats, notably to the seabed by trawlers and to coral reefs by dynamite and cyanide fishing. Finally, over-

fishing damages fishermen, by ultimately eliminating the basis of their livelihood and costing them their jobs.

All of these problems troubled not only economists and environmental
ists but also some leaders of the seafood industry itself. Among the latter
were executives of Unilever, one of the world's largest buyers of frozen fish,
whose products were familiar to consumers under the brand names of Gorton in the U.S. (subsequently sold by Unilever), Birdseye Walls and Iglo in
Britain, and Findus and Frudsa in Europe. The executives became con
cerned that fish, the commodities that they bought and sold, were in steep decline throughout the world, just as the timber company executives who
launched the Forest Stewardship Council became concerned about the
steep decline of forest. Hence in 1997, four years after the establishment of the FSC, Unilever teamed up with World Wildlife Fund to found a similar
organization termed the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). Its goal was
to offer credible eco-labeling to consumers, and to encourage fishermen to solve their own tragedies of the commons by the positive incentive of mar
ket appeal rather than the negative incentive of threatened boycotts. Other companies and foundations, plus international agencies, have now joined
Unilever and World Wildlife Fund in funding the MSC.

In Britain the companies besides Unilever that support the MSC or buy
its certified seafood products include Young's Bluecrest Seafood Company,
Britain's largest seafood company; Sainsbury's, Britain's largest fresh food supplier; the supermarket chains Marks and Spencer, and Safeway; and the
Boyd Line, which operates a fleet of fishing trawlers. U.S. supporters include
Whole Foods, the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods, plus
Shaw's supermarkets and Trader Joe's markets. Among supporters else
where are Migros, which is Switzerland's largest food retailer, and Kailis and
France Foods, a large operator of fishing boats, factories, markets, and ex
ports in Australia.

The criteria that the MSC applies to fisheries were developed in consul
tation between fishermen, fisheries managers, seafood processors, retailers,
fishery scientists, and environmental groups. The principal criteria are that
the fishery should maintain its fish stock's health (including the stock's sex
and age distribution and genetic diversity) for the indefinite future, should yield a sustainable harvest, should maintain ecosystem integrity, should minimize impacts on marine habitats and on non-targeted species (the by-
catch), should have rules and procedures for managing stocks and minimiz
ing impacts, and should comply with prevailing laws.

Seafood companies bombard the consuming public with widely differing

claims, some of them deceptive or confusing, about the supposed environ
mental benignness of their fishing practices. Hence the essence of the MSC,
as of the FSC, is independent third-party certification. Again as with the
FSC, the MSC accredits several certifying organizations, rather than carry
ing out certifying audits itself. Application for certification is completely
voluntary: it's up to a company to decide if it thinks that the benefits of certification would warrant the cost. For the smaller fisheries seeking assess
ment, a foundation called the David and Lucille Packard Foundation now contributes to paying those costs through the Sustainable Fisheries Fund.
The process begins with a confidential pre-assessment of the applying com
pany by the certifying organization, then (if the company still wants to be
audited) comes a full assessment typically requiring one or two years (up to three years for big complicated fisheries) and specifying issues that must be addressed. If the audit is favorable and the specified issues are resolved, the company receives certification for five years but is subject each year to an
audit without prior notification. Those annual audit results are posted on a public website and get scrutinized and often challenged by interested par
ties. Experience shows that most companies, once they have received MSC
certification, are anxious not to lose it and want to do whatever is required to pass the annual audit. As with the FSC, there are also chain-of-custody
audits to trace fish caught by a certified fishery from the fishing boat to the
dock where the catch is landed, then to wholesale markets, processors
(freezers and canners), wholesale dealers, and distributors, to the retail mar
ket. Only products of a certified fishery that can be traced through this
whole chain are permitted to carry the MSC logo when offered for sale to a
consumer in a shop or restaurant.

What gets certified is a fishery or a fish stock,
and
the fishing method,
practice, or gear used to harvest that stock. The entities seeking certification
are collectives of fishermen, government fisheries departments acting on
behalf of a national or local fishery, and intermediate processors and dis
tributors. Applications are considered from "fisheries" not only of fish, but also of molluscs and Crustacea. Of the seven fisheries certified to date, the
largest is the wild salmon fishery of the U.S. state of Alaska, represented by
the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The next largest are Western Aus
tralian rock lobster (Australia's most valuable single-species fishery, accounting for 20% of the value of all Australian fisheries) and New Zealand hoki (New Zealand's most valuable export fishery). The other four fisheries
already certified are smaller ones in Britain: Thames herring, Cornwall
mackerel caught by handline, Burry Inlet cockles, and Loch Torridon