One Shark Fin Soup, with a Side of Extinction
I feel like I’ve had sharks on the mind a lot lately. Discovery Channel’s Shark Week wrapped up recently. The students of a co-worker just did a presentation on sharks and the left-over poster has been sitting around the office. A basking shark was beached on Long Island earlier this summer, while another one washed up on the shores of Plymouth, Massachusetts just a few days ago. Once rare, great white sightings in the waters off Cape Cod have been numerous these past months, resulting in a number of closed beaches, and just last week a shark attacked and killed a surfer in Australia.
Image via Discovery Channel
I have to admit that whenever sharks come across the wire, my ears perk up. I had a fascination with sharks as a kid and to this day a significant portion of my brain is still devoted to the random shark trivia I learned when I was eight. While my professional life has moved well beyond my elementary school shark fascination, I still pay attention to the world’s shark happenings. Which is what brings me to today’s topic of discussion: shark finning.
Shark finning is a fairly barbaric fishing practice in which a shark is caught, its fins are cut off, and its body is thrown back alive to die in the water. Last Saturday, the award-winning documentary Sharkwater by filmmaker Rob Stewart premiered on the Discovery Channel. The documentary sheds light on the practice of shark finning and multiple social media outlets such as Gothamist and the NRDC blog have jumped on board to spread the message about the practice’s devastating effects.
Sharks have evolved over millions of years to be the ocean’s top predators. This includes a very slow reproductive process that for millennia has enabled an equilibrium between the populations of sharks and their prey. Today, tens of millions of sharks are being pulled from the water for their fins every year. Shark populations can’t recover fast enough, and some species are nearing extinction. This in turn has destabilized marine populations all the way down the food chain.
So what, you ask, does this have to do with cities? A great deal actually. This multi-billion dollar shark-finning industry is fueled by primarily urban consumption of the delicacy shark fin soup. The demand comes mostly from China, where this soup has been consumed for centuries. However, the recent rise of China’s affluent middle class has sent demand through the roof. It isn’t just China though. Restaurants in cities around the world are now selling shark fin soup. It is even on a few menus right here in New York City.
Even though sharks aren’t walking around 5th Ave, shark finning is still very much an urban issue, and is intimately intertwined with the sustainability of the world’s cities. We can construct as many eco-villages or green buildings as we want, but until we face the impacts of urban living that extend well beyond the borders of our cities (in this case, deep into ocean waters), the concept of sustainable cities will remain just that: an idea.
While public sympathy for sharks can be a bit difficult to drum up (they aren’t exactly the ocean’s most cuddly creatures), the reality is that they hold a vitally important place in the ocean’s ecosystem that is being threatened by trends in urban consumption. Some countries have taken steps to protect sharks from the practice of finning, and many restaurant owners have pledged to keep shark fin soup off their menus. Yet much more still needs to be done. A global commitment is needed to protect sharks (and ultimately the ocean) from the devastation embodied in a seemingly innocuous bowl of soup.
Image Via Discovery Channel
