Beyond Fishing

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People don’t only influence the oceans when they eat seafood. Years ago, that became clear to a Japanese oyster farmer named Shigeatsu Hatkeyama, who lives along Kesennuma Bay on the northeastern coast of Japan’s largest island, Honshu. He noticed that as more of the forests near his fishing ground were cut down, the shellfish beds he depended on were beginning to suffer. When it rained, instead of the intact forest holding down the soil and allowing the water to percolate slowly to the sea, the water rushed towards the ocean, carrying with it a soup of agricultural chemicals and roadway runoff. To tackle the problem, Hatkeyama organized a group called “Friends of the Oyster-Nurturing Forest” and initiated tree-planting activity...