Earth Beat, 10 June 2011. We’ve gone fishing, and we fall hook line and sinker. From who owns the fish in the seas to why the solution may be to widen the net – and start fishing from home. We’ll have you listening with 'baited' breath.

Tweet

Listen here

Download as MP3 (right-click and "save as")

Subscribe to podcast feed Subscribe in iTunes Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter
 
Fighting the fish farms
Guy Linley-Adams has taken on the fish farming industry in a bid to get it to clean up its act. He tells host Marnie Chesterton how sea lice on salmon bred in huge floating nets are causing wild fish stocks to drop dramatically.

Multi-tiered aquaculture
A different sort of fish farm – integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, or IMTA, has been modernised off the east coast of Canada, and has been producing fish, mussels and seaweed symbiotically. Dr. Thierry Chopin of the University of New Brunswick, and Nell Halse of Cooke Aquaculture join Marnie to discuss how it all works.

Aquaponics
While the fish farming industry may be under pressure to clean up its act, some enterprising gardeners have found an ingenious way to literally make it green. Aquaponics is a closed system which allows people to breed fish in tanks and use the waste water to grow vegetables. Because there’s no soil involved, the excess water from the plant beds goes back into the tanks, providing them with a constant source of clean water. Sylvia Bernstein tells Marnie why it’s so great.
Links - The Aquaponics Source
Aquaponics Community

Four Fish
There may be plenty of fish in the sea, but one man thinks we need to radically change the way we farm these creatures. Paul Greenberg’s the author of Four Fish: A journey from the ocean to your plate and says our fixation with just four types of fish – salmon, cod, bass and tuna – could help us encourage the industry to evolve.

Self-propelled fish farms
There’s more than one vision for the future of fish farming, though. This one is a bit more hi-tech. A few years ago, Cliff Goudey, then the director of MIT Sea Grant’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, helped develop fish cages that can be moved with electrically-powered propellers, bypassing the usual downsides of anchored cages, and getting fish closer to market.

Slow Fish
The ‘slow cooking’ movement is beginning to catch on. The more environmentally-conscious consumer is starting to look for more locally-grown produce and that includes the fish on their plate. Reporter Dany Mitzman went to a Slow Fish convention in Italy to learn more about how best to preserve the sea's precious stocks.  

Salmon fishing in Ireland
For many of us salmon fishing is something we will never do, for others it’s a special event. But for a very lucky few it’s a way of life. Earth Beat producer Louise Stoddard travels to County Cork in Ireland to meet salmon ghilli Stephen Glaves and to fish for her supper.

Louise spent a day with Stephen on the Blackwater River, where locals say salmon stocks have declined recently. Read more here and listen to an extended version of the interview.

Click image for slideshow