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Venture down to Pike Place Market, just beyond the brass pig sculpture, and you’ll see them: the crowds, with their videocameras and cell phones, aimed at a certain fishmonger’s stand. They’ve come to see — and film — the mongers, in their orange rubber aprons, haul a huge salmon off the display tables of ice and toss it, with a “Whhoooo,” to a woman with her hands open, palms up, a human cradle for a piscine wonder. Between the crowd and the mongers, massive amounts of seafood — Copper River salmon, Alaskan king crab legs, jumbo pink shrimp, tails of rock lobster and more — glisten like manna from the sea. The seafood looks so bounteous — not just here, but in practically every fish stand and seafood section of a supermarket you cross — you can tell yourself there’s a lot more out there, in the oceans and streams, for our dining pleasure.

But deep down, we know that’s not true: overfishing and advances in fishing have changed the oceanscape. Forever, you wonder? Maybe not, not if things change now. That’s what Paul Greenberg has come to believe.

A fisher who grew up on the East Coast trying to catch largemouth bass with Gaines-Burgers, a dog food shaped like a burger — it didn’t work — Greenberg the adult set out on an expedition a while back to answer a question: How are fish doing these days? This quest took him to the ancestral rivers of the Yupik Eskimos and to a farm-fishing facility in Norway, and on many boats hither and yon. What he discovered can be found in “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,” [Penguin Press, $25.95], a troubling, though ultimately hopeful, account of how we’ve reached a critical point in the viability of the fishing industry. By focusing on four finned wonders — salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna — he describes, with a narrative flair, the state of wild fisheries, the rise in farmed fish, and how mercury, and even human-made chemicals such as PCBs, find their ways into the fish we eat. And that we can find a sustainable balance.

The book has gotten some good play — it spawned a New York Times Magazine cover article, “The End of Tuna” — and sent him on a jam packed book tour. In Seattle for a reading at University Books in mid-July, he made time for us to have a little chat. Ensconced in a small room of the bookstore’s third floor, we spoke, right before his reading, about the narrative of overfishing, salmon in the streets and a seafood dinner.

When’s the last time you’ve been fishing?
The last time was in June with a very interesting guy named Bruce Franklin. Bruce was a professor at Stanford and very anti-Vietnam War and eventually was fired from Stanford and he ended up working at Rutgers [University]. He wrote a book called “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” about menhaden [a nearly extinct Atlantic Ocean fish]. He invited me to go fluke fishing.

What is a fluke?
Fluke is a flatfish, more similar to halibut than, say, to a flounder in the sense that it has teeth. Fluke can get up to about 10 or 15 pounds, or up to 20, but they recently raised the size limit in New Jersey and throughout New England. We caught, like, 40 fluke, but they were all undersized, by about half an inch, so we had to put them all back. But at the same time, I’ve never caught so many fluke in all my life. In a way it’s a small, little lesson on fishery regulation: There might not be as many keepers, but there are more overall fish, which is cheering in the end.

Cheering in the end, but the general tenor about our oceans is — Well, I told someone I was coming to speak to you and told him what the book was about, and he said, “Just one more example of how we’re screwed.” So. Are we screwed?
I don’t actually think we’re screwed. I actually think that the narrative of overfishing has been a little bit overplayed. While I talk a lot about overfishing and how we’ve lost certain species — commercially, at least — there are still quite a lot of fish out there. We take between 80 and 90 million tons out of the oceans of wild seafood, and that’s equivalent to the human weight of China, taken out every year. On the one hand, you could say, “That’s horrible devastation of the seas.” On the other hand, you could say, “It’s kind of amazing, that in this day of extremely compromised nature, we’re still able to take that much.” Are we taking too much? Yes. Most people on the conservation side of marine biology would like to see the world catch be half of what it is today: 45 million tons or something like that. This is backed up to some degree: The World Bank, the United Nations did a joint report called “The Sunken Billions,” where they found that fishing is overcapacity. A lot of that is because of subsidies: Governments can continue to pump money into fishing, even though it’s not profitable. So I think, in a way, if we were to let the market dictate and take away fishery subsidies, we’d actually see a lot fewer fishing efforts going on and maybe bring it back into scale with what is sustainable.

Your book’s called “Four Fish,” so let’s break ’em down. Let’s start with salmon.
Well, the fish that I profile go from closest to humans to furthest away, in terms of where they exist. So salmon literally swim up into our back doors. When I was working in Eugene, in Oregon, back in the ’80s, counting salmon for the Bureau of Land Management, I remember people telling me stories that sometimes when the Willamette slipped its banks, it wasn’t uncommon to see salmon swimming up the streets and trying to spawn in the streets. But because salmon are closest to us, we’ve done the most damage to them. People in the Northwest are very conscious of how we’re physically losing our salmon before our eyes.

The Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct. There are no more really viable Atlantic salmon fisheries anymore. And if you plotted it on a graph, you’d see wild Atlantic salmon going like this [his finger goes diagonally from upper left to lower right], starting like this is 1940 going down to the present, and then if you graphed, in 1940, farmed Atlantic salmon, they go in the opposite direction. And where they cross is about the mid-’60s.

How about the situation for sea bass?
There are of course many, many fish called sea bass. I’ve counted seven or eight taxonomic families that have fish in them called bass or sea bass and the situation for each of them is a little different. But the word “bass” turns out to be a kind of useful way to look at what’s happened to coastal waters in the last 30 years. In the eastern and western U.S. and in Europe three different fish called “bass” became expensive “white tablecloth” menu items in the ’70s and ’80s when fisherman started catching them with greater frequency. The American striped bass on the East Coast, the California white sea bass, and the European sea bass all hit the skids nearly simultaneously and then we found ourselves looking for other basses. That’s when the Chilean sea bass comes along (formerly called the Patagonian toothfish). But what interested me the most was the move to try to domesticate one particular sea bass — the European sea bass, AKA “branzino” or “loup de mer” [“sea wolf”]. This starts in the ’70s but then really gets going in the ’80s, and now the fish, as a farmed fish, is everywhere. In fact the taming of the European sea bass opened up a whole new wave of domestication — after we tamed that fish we had the building blocks to tame anything.

Now, those little critters Sea Monkeys play a role in our desire for big, cheap sea bass. Could you talk about that?
Yes, those of us, ahem, of a certain age certainly remember ordering Sea Monkeys from the back of comic books back in the ’70s. But what sea monkeys are in fact are artemia, a kind of tiny shrimp-like thing that grows in the Great Salt Lake. They hatch out of tiny cysts that are extremely durable, which makes them a very transportable product. Artemia are one of the key bases for feeding juvenile sea bass and indeed all marine farmed fish. Juvenile sea bass are born with a very small yolk sac and must feed immediately upon birth. So scientists had to figure out how to create an entire ecosystem to feed them. Nowadays farmed sea bass start their lives eating a thing called a rotifer and then they transition to artemia and then finally they can start to eat more standardized feed pellets.

So I used to live on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, which got its name after an English captain caught a massive amount of cod in the early 1600s. But times have changed.
Cod were fished hard first in Europe and then in Newfoundland and New England for nearly a thousand years, but it was the post-WWII ramp up of fishing that really hit them hard. The world catch quintupled since WWII and this was due to new fishing technologies — sonar, new polymers for nets, etc. All this led to many cod collapses in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Portions of Georges Bank, the U.S.’s most famous codfish grounds, were closed in ‘96 and have been closed to trawling ever since.  

We are starting to see a rebuilding of codfish populations but it’s been slow going. Now what we’re faced with is a choice going forward: There are indeed other cod-like fish out there. In fact most of the “white fish” Americans eat today is Alaska pollock. But we could also choose to meet our industrial fish needs — i.e., our need for products like fish sticks and fast food fish sandwiches — with farmed fish like tilapia.  

One summer day, in the late ’90s, I was riding a bike past the pier in Provincetown [Massachusetts] and saw all this commotion. Someone had caught a bluefin tuna and it was MASSIVE: at least seven feet long and around 800 lbs. A representative from a Japanese company bought it, to flash freeze and send to Japan for sushi and sashimi. A fisherman on the pier said, “You’ll never see another fish like that again.” I thought he was being wistful, but he turned out to be a soothsayer. What can you say about tuna?
The ’70s were a time when Atlantic bluefin transitioned from being something of a trash fish to the highest-grade sushi fish. And this happened simultaneously with the related Southern bluefin off Australia. The fishing practices are much worse in Europe and that’s where the real problem is today. The boom in sport fishing had a number of influences. Actually, it was Ernest Hemingway that was one of the first people that figured how to boat the bluefin tuna and get them in the boat before the sharks got them.

But people would just dump them: They weren’t interested in eating them. And a lot of the bluefin ended up either in the dump or as cat food or were dragged out to sea. There was a big export boom of electronics from Japan and cargo planes filled with electronics would land in America and then they would leave empty and it was a huge waste of fuel. The parsimonious were trying to figure out: How can we make this profitable? So a couple of businessmen figured out there were bluefin that people were just dumping, so they bought them for quite cheap and sent them to Japan and they were instantly popular. [The] Japanese previously had preferred leaner fish: Bluefin are very fatty. In fact, the Japanese used to call them cibbi or “four days,” because you would bury them for four days to get rid of their bloody taste. But after the American occupation, the Japanese were exposed to fattier food and that taste had sort of changed. And so they started eating bluefin like crazy and it became a bigger and bigger phenomenon, until now 80 percent of the world’s bluefin go to Japan.

Atlantic bluefin, they are down around 85, 90 percent. There are two stocks, so the Western stock, which spawns in the Gulf of Mexico, were spawning when that oil spill [Deepwater Horizon] happened. Then there’s Eastern stock, that spawns in the Mediterranean. The Western stock is in really bad shape. And that was before the oil spill. I think right now we need about a five-year moratorium on bluefin tuna globally. The problem is in order for that to work, all the nations who fish tuna have to agree to it. And that’s a hard sell, so to speak.

So with all that you know and all that you’ve seen, how would you feel if I asked you to go out right now and get some fish and chips?
I don’t think we should stop eating fish. If we don’t eat fish and there’s no fishing that goes on, the ocean is going to become an oil- and mineral-extraction system, rather than a food system. So, I’ll eat fish.

I would say, “Could we find some tilapia and chips?” because I think there are some choices that can be made that are better for humanity. Tilapia is a farmed fish, it can be raised largely on vegetarian feed, it has a fairly small footprint ecologically. The same with American farm-raised catfish, which are, again, vegetarians. They actually produce a net gain in wetlands because, to create catfish ponds, you have to convert farmland into ponds, which is actually good for wildlife. So things like that are good choices all the time.

Wild fish? I would say, fish and chips is maybe not the best expression of wild fish. Maybe the best expression is a locally-caught fish, fresh off a day boat, that’s treated gently, that’s not deep fried or processed in any way, where we really kind of appreciate the rareness and subtlety of the flavor. In a way, it’s a metaphor for where we should be going with fishing: the piece of wild fish on our plate should be a little bit smaller, a little less frequent and a little bit more respected and a little bit more local. If we can get to that point. But in order for that [to happen], we have to rebuild fisheries locally and then, we have to be much more subtle and much more careful in what we take out of the sea.

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