Daniel Pauly is a professor of marine biology at the University of British Columbia and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project, which seeks to understand the impact that fisheries have on the world’s oceans. His new book, “Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries”, is a kind of greatest hits of his essays over the years.
He is perhaps most famous for an essay he penned in 1995, in which he coined the term “shifting baselines”. The phrase describes our shifting perception, from generation to generation, about the normal state of Nature. The essay is widely-cited and the concept has now been applied to other generational paradigm shifts.
In this wide-ranging interview, Pauly talks about the origin of the shifting baselines concept, the current state of the world’s ocean, why overfishing is a problem and what we as individuals can do about it.