Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The latest on those pirates

Yesterday, the EU placed an armada of military ships off Somalia to combat the pirates--so the pirates have moved their operations further south, expanding their base of operations, and giving the armada a nearly impossible amount of sea to protect.

One of the biggest ironies of this whole piracy thing is that there's an environmental angle: Many of the pirates are former tuna fishermen who say they had to find another line of work because all of the tuna stocks off the Somali coast have been depleted. (Nearly 90 percent of the world's big fish have disappeared over the past 50 years from overfishing. This isn't alarmism. Any honest commercial fisherman will acknowledge this. They want a sustainable solution for this problem as much as anyone.)

It's an age-old formula: a depletion of natural resources leads to war, violence, and crime. That's why the federal government believes perhaps the biggest threat to our national security in the long-run is climate change.