Reddit reviews Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know®

Fuck agriculture too? http://i.imgur.com/kQf6JCq.jpg

Thankfully not a lot occurs on cold water coral in the UK nowadays- even the fishing industry themselves recognise the need to protect sensitive habitats http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/marine/marine-environment/mpanetwork/MPAMGT/Voluntary and there's a wider official network of marine protected areas to try and ensure damaging activities don't occur in damaging places.

But often the most consistently productive habitats for our fisheries are higher energy environments that can recover more quickly from the disturbance of bottom trawls (lots of quick growing food)- which is why they are repetitively productive fishing grounds. Of course, it's often in modified state, but can you really expect it not to be? Humans can't use it to produce food without any consequence. It's a question of protecting what we can and should, whilst recognising that some habitat has to be used for food production.

It's not is black and white. If a balanced and more nuanced assessment interests you then I can highly recommend this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Overfishing-What-Everyone-Needs-Know/dp/0199798141 probably the best and easiest to digest book I've read on the subject.