Even the price of fish is tied to the price of oil. As one Omani fisherman on TikTok noted last year, “The main reason for the soaring cost of tuna is petrol.”
Fossil fuel also looms over the region’s fisheries in other, less apparent ways. That day on the boat, I noticed how the byproducts of the oil industry saturate the work of fishing. Our small vessel was cluttered with commodities downstream from oil—nylon lines, plastic buckets, polystyrene buoys and coolers, squid-shaped lures made from rubbery plastisol—all strewn upon the fiberglass-reinforced plastic skiff. It is perhaps because of this saturation that lost and abandoned fishing gear accounts for the majority of ocean plastic worldwide, including the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.