Daniel Pauly: The Ocean’s Shifting Baseline

The ocean has degraded within our lifetimes, as shown in the decreasing average size of fish. And yet, as Daniel Pauly shows us onstage at Mission Blue, each time the baseline drops, we call it the new “normal.” At what point do we stop readjusting downward?

Daniel Pauly is the principal investigator at the Sea Around Us Project, which studies the impact of the world’s fisheries on marine ecosystems. The software he’s helped develop is used around the world to model and track the ocean.