Tilapia have often been represented as the aquatic chicken, and it's perfectly justified.

Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff-like callousness by the world's fisheries.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.

While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people - even those who profess great environmental consciousness - continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice.

There is no need for an end to fish, or to fishing for that matter. But there is an urgent need for governments to free themselves from the fishing-industrial complex and its Ponzi scheme, to stop subsidizing the fishing-industrial complex and awarding it fishing rights, when it should in fact pay for the privilege to fish.

In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families.