Ryan Nelson: UCLA needs to take initiative against overfishing

So we’ve officially eaten ourselves sick.

That’s according to a study published this month by Science Magazine, which posits that human beings have essentially overfished ourselves to the brink, and soon will suffer the consequences: a massive extinction of marine life that will eventually cause a decreased food supply, less biological diversity and a far more vulnerable shoreline to the eventual tidal intrusion of our rising oceans.

Despite this, there’s still hope. While we may be sitting on the precipice of disaster, we haven’t quite yet fallen off. According to Douglas McCauley, the ecologist at UC Santa Barbara who published the study, it’s the policies and responses of the next 10 years that could make or break us .

Which is where the University of California comes in. As the premier university system of a state with 1,100 miles of coastline and a self-defined vision of itself as an innovative leader, it’s time for the UC, its campuses and its people to begin spending more of its considerable capital – both in the political and financial spheres – to combat these atrocities.

And while there are initiatives in place, taking a three-tiered approach to combating the issue – on a system, school and personal level – can yield the greatest and most immediate results.

To their credit, the UC Board of Regents have partially acknowledged this reality – they pledged in September to begin moving a billion dollars from their investment portfolio into direct solutions to climate change over the next five years, some of which could directly benefit marine life.

On a more localized level, UCLA has joined the Southern California Marine Institute in an effort to spearhead additional ocean research and outreach down in the port of Los Angeles. Up the 101, UCSB has at least three active projects underway now.

Which means we’re ramping up efforts to solve global warming, which is good, but only a fraction of the problem. In the report, McCauley notes that global warming hurts, but the primary cause of this near-extinction is eating. Simply, we overfish. By a lot.

However, there are some concrete ways in which we can save us from ourselves. In September, around the same time the regents were announcing their plan, President Barack Obama created the world’s largest marine reserve in the Pacific, essentially halting damaging human activity in that place.

Given that UC President Janet Napolitano has been brought in specifically for her clout with the federal government, it’s not out of line for her to use her significant political capital to push both Sacramento and Washington D.C. to administer more conservation efforts like Obama’s.

Additionally, directing the UC to invest more than a billion, aka 1.1 percent of our overall investment portfolio, into socially conscious companies would be a huge boon. The UC can’t solve for this problem on our own, but making sure our money is at least in the places we can help is important.

So lobbying for greater marine protection, while simultaneously engaging in ethical investment would go hand in hand with UCOP’s sustainability effort, but tack on the net benefit of helping the oceans in the short term and the world in the long term.

Zooming in, UCLA can launch its own awareness campaigns to encourage its students and faculty to be good neighbors to Santa Monica, Redondo and Malibu. Small things, like encouraging beachgoers to dispose of trash properly, or disseminating information about how to eat fish responsibly, are very small actions that can yield huge results.

If UCLA could channel the same amount of effort it puts into its campus anti-smoking campaign towards these efforts saving these marine species, it could have a large impact.

On a more personal level, there are very easy tasks individual people can do. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has created an app called SeaFood Watch, which enables fish connoisseurs to type the name of whatever finned creature they’re eating and see if it’s endangered or not, allowing customers to make educated choices and effectively boycott damaged species.

The ironic part about all this, aside from some possible federal protections, is that the actions we can take are almost laughably simple. Not throwing plastic in the ocean, watching what we’re eating, making sure we’re not dumping in the wrong places – all of these are the same things California kids have been learning since we were in fifth grade.

Which means that if these extinctions– and their devastating consequences– come to pass, there’ll be even more ocean salt to rub in our wounds, because once and for all we’ll prove that maybe we’re not smarter than fifth graders.