World Aquaculture Magazine -December 2021

20 DECEMBER 2021 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WA S .ORG and hype in aquaculture. Zajicek et al. (2021) have added and clarified more of these in their recent review countering with facts on a “…variety of longstanding and inaccurate myths and assumptions directed at offshore aquaculture farming and its regulation…foisted on the public.” Among the most interesting new debates have been those stirred by Belton et al. (2020) who concluded “… that marine finfish aquaculture in offshore environments will confront economic, biophysical, and technological limitations that hinder its growth and prevent it from contributing significantly to global food and nutrition security.” They argued that land-based freshwater aquaculture is a much more favorable production strategy than ocean/ marine aquaculture; disagreed with government and non-governmental organization (NGO) spatial planning efforts that add new aquaculture operations to existing ocean uses; advocated for an open commons for small-scale capture fisheries as opposed to aquaculture; and opposed open-ocean aquaculture and other types of industrial, capital-intensive, ‘carnivorous’ fish aquaculture. An international group has responded (Costa-Pierce et al. , in press); strong debates will continue. Belton et al. (2020) opinions may have currency if high-level policymakers and financial institutions take them seriously. If so, they will weigh disproportionately the positive merits of freshwater aquaculture on their environments and societies and neglect to involve the hundreds of aquaculture scientists and industries who work in all salinities of water, at all scales of development, worldwide. If so, Belton et al. (2020) will have succeeded in breaking global aquaculture into oppositional parties, fracturing the small international aquaculture research and development community into freshwater versus marine, nearshore versus offshore, small-scale versus large-scale, fed versus extractive, and aquaculture developing nations versus aquaculture developed ones. We will again be set back in our approaches to educate decision-makers, regulators, investors, communities and consumers who are already struggling to understand aquaculture, especially in the new geographies for aquaculture of the world outside Asia. Introduction —Radical Transformation Radical transformation involves accelerated and more widespread investments in the global adoption of aquaculture innovations of systems, scales, places and behavior changes. Pereira et al. (2018) stated that “transformation is required when there is a need to create fundamentally new systems because ecological, economic Preface —Why Another Adjective in Front of ‘Aquaculture’? I could have chosen my favorite adjective— “ecological”— to put in front of aquaculture, or “sustainable” or “sustainable ecological” or given up completely into jargon that no one even in the aquaculture fraternity would understand. I could have chosen the most popular of them all “IntegratedMultitrophic Aquaculture” and honor my dear friend, Thierry Chopin, and sang loudly the IMTA song, but that would be disconcerting to one of IMTA’s most active critics, my other dear friend, Peter Edwards; but I have chosen the adjective “radical.” Not that it is going to be acquired as yet another community of practice to join the many (see Fig. 8 in Costa-Pierce and Chopin 2021). Rather, I choose this adjective to make a statement of urgency, as a global clarion call for much more active and direct engagement by our global aquaculture community, especially our new generation of leaders, to advocate more forcefully for the expansion of aquaculture systems at all scales of production. After watching the global leadership dysfunctions exhibited clearly at COP 26, one of my colleagues stated that the youth of the world want us who are in the sunset years of their careers to do everything we can do to help make the 2020s the “decade of doing.” I’ve taken the title of my upcoming book Radical Aquaculture in honor of a group of senior leaders who gathered together — they led “the do” a long time ago—and affected me as a restless youth. They published an impactful terrestrial counterpart to mine many years ago, Radical Agriculture (Merrill 1976). Radical means “roots.” Getting to the roots of aquaculture as our current food production, consumption, and value chains—at all scales—needs the radical transformations that aquaculture can provide. In this last of four articles for World Aquaculture this year, I’ll continue my polemics, which are “the art or practice of engaging in controversial debates or disputes” on the world, the future of food and aquaculture, discuss the relevance of transformation concepts, give examples of radical transformations of aquaculture that have and can change some of the alarming trajectories of our time, which, given time, may have the potential to change our ways of life on Earth Ocean. Continuing Debates onOrthodoxies andHype Costa-Pierce and Chopin (2021) questioned the new orthodoxies Radical Aquaculture: Transformational Social-Ecological Systems that Advance Sustainable Development Goals Barry Antonio Costa-Pierce Progress in incorporating ecological aquaculture and the concepts of an ecosystem approach to aquaculture will require development of education programs that promote broad awareness of the diversity of systems, species and their allied social-ecological, policy, communications and economic issues. Global centers of excellence are needed with their leaders broadly trained, collaborative and adaptive so that they listen with “big ears” and can incorporate new developments and diversity into management approaches and policies that can quickly reorder established norms.