By Andi McDaniel

It would be ironic, given the well-earned success of the organic food movement in the last decade, if it was the oceans’ collapse that did us in. It was our concern for the Earth as a whole, after all, that caused us to rally for a more sustainable food system in the first place. And yet, while we’ve been “voting with our forks” for a healthier landscape, our shining seas — the other 70 percent of the planet — are sounding urgent alarms.

Consider an article in Wired, for instance, citing the chilling statistic that 96 percent of all seafood considered edible is endangered. Or the report in Science, published last November, which predicted the world’s seafood supply could collapse by 2048. Add to that coral bleaching, acidification, global warming and pollution, and there’s no shortage of proof that our oceans are in peril. As documentarian Julia Whitty writes in Mother Jones, “[T]he ocean, for which our planet should be named, is changing in every parameter, in all dimensions, in every way we know how to measure it.”

But you sure wouldn’t know that by standing on the shore. Unlike environmental problems on land, which manifest in unmistakably visible ways — from clear-cut forests to paved-over paradises — ocean issues aren’t easy to fathom. From above, an ocean in crisis looks a lot like a healthy ocean: beautiful, blue and impenetrably vast.

What’s more, as terra-bound beings, we can’t help but identify more closely with mammals than with our finned, scaled and shelled brethren under the sea. Put a cute cartoon cow on an organic milk carton, and we’ll happily pay the high premium. It’s slightly more difficult, however, to wax sentimental over swordfish. As Fen Montaigne put it, writing in National Geographic on the plight of tuna, “If the giant bluefin lived on land, its size, speed and epic migrations would ensure its legendary status…. But because it lives in the sea, its majesty — comparable to that of a lion — lies largely beyond comprehension.”

Beyond any other environmental hazard, it is our voracious appetite for seafood — and the industry that has risen to sate it — that poses the largest threat to the oceans. Comprehensible or not, it’s time to start making the same personal connections with what’s in our sushi as we’ve made with what comes from our CSA.