The global fish-farming and pulp-and-paper industries, both growing rapidly, are using unsustainable and destructive practices in efforts to increase volume. Yet, for both industries, there are proven techniques for sustaining robust production without such risks, say the authors.

Fish farming is growing at an explosive rate worldwide, but at huge cost to local communities and coastal ecosystems and sometimes to the health of wild oceanic fish, reports author Anne Platt McGinn in "Blue Revolution."

In Asia and South America, an international shrimp-farming "mafia"- at times armed with machine guns and using strong-arm tactics implicitly supported by export-hungry governments-is operating "the fish-farming equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture," writes McGinn.

The rapid growth of commercial aquaculture is being driven by rising human population in a world where the productivity of both conventional farming and oceanic fishing has flattened. Yet, the rise of aquaculture has produced an absurd result.

Many farmed fish are raised on feed that is produced from ocean fish. And under present production methods, it takes five pounds of ocean fish to produce one pound of "high-end" farmed fish, resulting in a net protein loss. Many of today's fish farms also require-and waste-exorbitant amounts of fresh water.

McGinn notes, however, that in some operations, fish farmers have developed techniques that enable their industry to produce food in a highly efficient manner-much more so than in either ocean fishing or conventional agriculture.

One improvement involves replacing "flow-through" systems with new water-recirculation technologies; another positive change is the integration of aquaculture with other industries, such as hydroponic farming and fertilizer production, so that the byproducts of one industry become the inputs to another. Her article offers examples of businesses that are using such integrated systems profitably, with substantial benefits for local people and ecology.

In "Paper Forests," Ashley Mattoon reveals that the soaring global demand for forest products-especially for the pulp used to make paper-has given rise to a juggernaut of tree plantation development. Tree plantations are rapidly expanding worldwide and in some cases displacing natural forests. Between 1980 and 1995, the area of global tree plantations roughly doubled in size.

Timber production, like fish production and most conventional agriculture, has become a spreading monoculture that puts severe stresses on natural systems. Contrary to timber industry claims, plantations do not "reforest" the planet.

Industrial plantations do not provide many of the essential benefits natural forests provide-such as the formation of soil, provision of habitat for pollinators, and protection of planetary biodiversity.

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