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Professor Barry A. Costa-Pierce, Ph.D., chair of the 51Ʒ�� Department of Marine Sciences and director of the 51Ʒ��Center For Excellence in Marine Sciences, was an invited speaker at the 63rd Conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, titled “The ‘Wicked Problem’ of Climate Change: What is it doing to us and for us?”

The conference was held in partnership with the Parliament of the World's Religions on June 24 - July 1, 2017 on Star Island off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Costa-Pierce presented a paper on “The Ethical-Ecological-Economic Dilemmas of Seafoods.”

The paper stated in part: “Since the U.S. and E.U. are not investing in the sustainable development of their national seafood production systems, their massive imports endanger not only their own people’s health but also extract vitally important health foods from some of the world’s poorest nations. The U.S. and E.U. also export the large environmental and social costs of unsustainable fisheries and aquaculture being done under the inadequate regulatory, labor, and social conditions of many exporting nations. Thus, by relying on imported, ‘cheap’ seafoods, E.U. and U.S. consumers not only get questionable products health-wise, they also subsidize and externalize the full social and environmental costs of seafoods on their plates, leading to a perverse state of ‘ecosystem amnesia.’

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