It was in the 1990s that fisheries emerged from their sectoral backwaters, and became one of the environmental concerns of the public at large – at least in the developed countries of the world. This transition in public perception, similar to that involving forestry in the 1980s, was probably due to long established trends suddenly generating media events. For example, the revelation of the enormous quantity of ‘by-catch’ that is discarded by industrial fisheries – around 30 MT/yr, or one quarter of the world marine catch [1], the demonstration that fisheries are “fishing-down marine food-webs” [2] (Figure 1), the reporting of the collapse of Northern cod in Canada [3], and the presentation of first estimates of the subsidies that contribute to maintaining the global fishing effort at three or more times the optimal level [4,5]. These reports were only the tip of a gigantic iceberg: fisheries, an industry that had long operated beyond public scrutiny, emerged, to an amazed public, as worse for ocean health than pollution about which so much is written [6], and fishers, whose daring and ingenuity had for centuries justified the public’s romantic view of their profession [7], have become cogs in the high-tech machine that reduces any stock it touches, almost instantly to a shadow of its former self.
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