Master Kung (Confucius) said, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." But another proverb says, "Give a man enough rope and he will hang himself." The lesson of End of the Line, a documentary to be released next week, may be, "Give humanity enough trawling nets and they will starve themselves."

Johann Hari of the Independent writes:

The story begins in the sleepy Canadian resort of Newfoundland. It was the global capital of cod, a fishing town where the scaly creatures of the sea were so abundant they could be caught with your hands. But in the 1980s, something strange happened. The catches started to wane. The fish grew smaller. And then, in 1991, they disappeared.

It turned out the cod had been hoovered out of the sea at such a rapid rate that they couldn't reproduce themselves. But the postscript is spookier still. The Canadian government banned any attempts at fishing there, on the assumption that the few remaining fish would slowly repopulate the waters. But 15 years on, they haven't. The population was so destroyed that it could never recover.

...

Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10% shadow of its former self.

Who's next? Charlie the Tuna:

The species in the frontline is bluefin tuna, the pinnacle of the evolutionary chain for fish. This little creature can swim at 50mph, and accelerate faster than the swishest sports car. It has even developed warm blood. Yet every year, a third of the remaining population is ripped from the seas and slapped onto our plates. Soon, it will be gone.

...

But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14bn of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?

A small number of people are making a lot of short-term profit out of this destruction - and they are using this cash to ensure they can carry on hunting, down to the last fish. In 1992, an attempt to get the bluefin tuna listed as an endangered species was scuppered by the US and Japanese governments at the urging of the tuna lobby - who happen to give large campaign donations to all parties. A similar corruption has eaten into European politics.

Add to this the fact that fishermen are a determined and demanding constituency with an equally short-term agenda. They demand the maximum quotas today - even if that means no quotas tomorrow.

Our societies are structured to put these short-term cries for money for a few ahead of the long-term needs of us all. A small determined group with hard cash almost always beats a diffuse group with good intentions - until they get angry and fight back.

Now here's where Hari's article gets interesting:

At the moment, many good people get anxious about environmental issues, and hear the message that The Response is to scrub their own lifestyle clean. Yet individual voluntary action by a minority of nice people will not save the bluefin tuna, never mind the ecosystem. But if all these honourable people act together - by volunteering for, and donating to, organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Plane Stupid - they can change the law, so everybody will be required to change their behaviour, not just a benevolent 10 per cent. It was just such determined minorities armed with the facts that spurred the fights against slavery, colonialism and fascism. When you respond as a consumer, you are weak; when you respond as a citizen, you are strong.

Progressive attempts to save the world always run into Jevon's Paradox. We have two children while the Duggars have eighteen. We walk or bike to work and watch Hummers roll by. Hari's solution is ecoactivism, which will almost certainly be attacked as treehugging econazism, but may be the only alternative to watching the world collapse around us.

Key to the company's success was the quality of its soft-baked cookies. These were much less common in the cookie market, but at the same time were perceived to be closer to homemade than other cookies. Soft-baked cookies had higher moisture content than ones that were dry and relatively hard, and thus had a much shorter shelf life. To compensate for this, the company developed a system of baking cookies only after orders for them were received, allowing it to keep store stocks fresh and minimize waste. Archway's goal was for stores to sell half of the cookies on display each week, ensuring that the vast majority would be purchased well before the six-week "sell-by" date was reached.

I used to eat more than my fair share of Archway Double Dutch Chocolate, Ruth's Golden Oatmeal and Rocky Road cookies. But around 2001, I noticed they weren't quite as good - less moist, if not stale. A few years later, other brands, Petri for instance, that also weren't very moist, began taking their place on the shelves. Now I know why. After years of being a family-held company, Archway was being passed from holding company to holding company, each one sucking out profits before dumping it off to the next corporate vampire.

Media talking heads have blamed consumers for relying too heavily on credit, yet here we see blase' executives falsifying sales figures to get loans to carry the company through lean times:

Oh, No! What Happened to Archway?

Mr. Roberts said he confronted Mr. Multer in his office in mid-May. "I thought I would go in there and tell him that what was happening wasn't kosher and that we would have to restate the financials," Mr. Roberts recalled. "I wanted him to raise his hand and say: 'Oh boy, we have some big accounting errors. I don't know how it happened, but let's fix it.' "

Instead, Mr. Roberts said Mr. Multer dismissed his concerns, saying that was how sales were going to have to be accounted for in order for Archway to get through a crucial time.

and

At one point last summer, Mr. Roberts said, George Knobloch, then president of Archway, held a meeting with supervisors and managers in which he said the company had been pushing product onto its distributors to "make it look like we were doing O.K.," and that the "virtual" sales were designed to help secure bank loans. Mr. Roberts's recollection of the meeting was confirmed by another Archway employee who also attended the meeting but requested anonymity because of legal concerns.