For the past 50 years, we’ve been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It’s hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love — the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish — they’ve collapsed.

Barber frames industrial fishing as an extractive practice analogous to clear-cutting: efficient in the short term but ecologically catastrophic. By stressing “the ones we love,” he highlights a cultural and culinary bias toward large, high-trophic predators—species that are especially vulnerable to intensive harvest because they mature slowly and sit atop food webs. The “ninety percent” claim functions rhetorically to convey scale and urgency, suggesting that what diners perceive as normal abundance is actually the remnant of a much richer baseline. The quote ultimately links appetite to ecology, implying that sustainable eating requires changing both fishing practices and consumer expectations about what seafood should be.