5 Easy Pieces: How Fishing Impacts Marine Ecosystems

"5 Easy Pieces "features five contributions, originally published in "Nature" and "Science," demonstrating the massive impacts of modern industrial fisheries on marine ecosystems. Initially published over an eight-year period, from 1995 to 2003, these articles illustrate a transition in scientific thought--from the initially-contested realization that the crisis of fisheries and their underlying ocean ecosystems was, in fact, global to its broad acceptance by mainstream scientific and public opinion. Daniel Pauly, a well-known fisheries expert who was a co-author of all five articles, presents each original article here and surrounds it with a rich array of contemporary comments, many of which led Pauly and his colleagues to further study. This wonderfully reflective structure dramatically illustrates how science and society influence one another, sometimes to the betterment of both.