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Courtesy of SeafoodSource.com:

By Sean Murphy, SeafoodSource online editor

In just three short decades, aquaculture has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s impossible for such growth to occur without drawing fire from critics.

There are all manner of reasons for the criticisms — sometimes it’s politics, sometimes it’s the aversion to the very concept of capitalism and sometimes it’s legitimate critiques of the industry’s own mistakes.

Despite that, and despite the clear need for the world to depend upon its fisheries, I’ve always felt that aquaculture is another key to feeding the world, both now and in the years to come, and it’s nice to see signs that I’m not alone in this opinion.

The Northeast Aquaculture Conference and Exposition 2015, held last week here in the United States from 14 to 16 January in Portland, Maine, where SeafoodSource is based, was such a sign.

Christopher Davis, of the Maine Aquaculture Innovation Center, who organized the annual event, estimated that 500 to 600 people attended the event.

“It’s the largest by far,” he said.

The event, focusing on ocean and land-based aquaculture throughout New England, has been happening since 1999. Attendees included students, industry leaders, vendors and representatives from NGOs. Topics, workshops and presentations ran the gamut, from shellfish dissection to advice on physical therapy for aquaculture workers. A total of 33 exhibitors showed off everything from motors to feed to safety equipment.

John Ewart, aquaculture and fisheries specialist at the Delaware Aquaculture Resource Center at the University of Delaware, gave a talk on shellfish aquaculture in Delaware’s coastal bays. He told me the event has been growing steadily from year to year.

“It’s evidence of the growth of the industry,” he said.

For many attendees, the highlight was the lunchtime presentation on the final day from Barton Seaver. His business cards list him as a National Geographic fellow and director of the healthy and sustainable food program at the Harvard School of Public Health, but that doesn’t do justice to his experiences. He is an accomplished chef and restaurateur, working to incorporate sustainable seafood into his culinary offerings. He also spent the last five years working as an explorer for National Geographic.

In his talk, he described himself as something of an amateur historian, too. He noted most civilizations, including our own, are anxious and averse to change, and when talking about pressing to educate a hesitant public about the benefits of seafood in a healthy diet, “We’re currently in such a situation” of resistance.

“Americans desperately need to eat more seafood,” he said.

Much to the delight of the attendees, Seaver cited aquaculture as absolutely crucial to that mission. He mentioned two major experiences that informed his opinion. First, about 10 years ago, he started a restaurant. Like any good chef, he wanted the food to be a reflection of what he loved in life, and he recalled fishing in the Patuxent River while growing up in Washington, D.C.

When he first began calling seafood suppliers, looking to fill his kitchen with bluefish, oysters, blue crab, striped bass and other species he remembered catching as a youth, he got his first wake-up call about sustainable fishing. His suppliers, he recalled, said, “Kid, what are you talking about? We ate all of those. What else do you want?”

The other experience, he said, came from visiting the far corners of the world for National Geographic, where he witnessed what he called “the confluence of human and ecological health,” or how human activity sometimes clashed with the environment.

“I really began to doubt this simplified version of our world and the consequences of our actions,” he said.

For Seaver, it is obvious that the mentality of all the seafood we will ever need coming to us wild from the sea is simply not valid anymore. No one, not even Seaver, was suggesting we simply stop fishing, but we need to consider how and where we fish, and we must consider supplementing the world’s fisheries with farmed seafood.

Seaver repeated an oft-cited argument: We learned to farm animals for food on land, so why shouldn’t we seek the best way to do it with seafood? At this conference, Seaver was preaching to the choir, but there’s a reason these arguments get repeated over and over again.

Because they’re right.