This week on What Doesn’t Kill You, Katy Keiffer talks with Paul Greenberg about the state of fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Paul is the author of the James Beard Award winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and a regular contributor to The New York Times. He is currently a fellow with The Blue Ocean Institute and in April became the writer-in-residence at New York’s The South Street Seaport Museum. His next book American Catch — a book about how we lost and how we might regain American local seafood, will be published by The Penguin Press. Katy and Paul discuss his recent article published in American Prospect and FERN entitled “A River Runs Through It” about ‘the dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico. How are fertilizers causing algae blooms in the Mississippi that monopolize oxygen? Find out how corn production lends itself to agricultural runoff. Find out if it’s possible to regulate nutrient-runoff along the entire length of the Mississippi. How is nutrient loading affecting the fishing industry in the United States? Find out all of this and more on this week’s episode of What Doesn’t Kill You! Thanks to our sponsor, Heritage Foods USA. Music provided by Dead Stars.

“So much agriculture is running on auto-pilot. You don’t need as many people to run a farm anymore. If you were to put switching on your tiling, it would take too much time or money, and it wouldn’t be worth it.” [10:50]

“Any time you see a lot of soil without a cover crop, that soil can be carried by rainwater into a watershed.” [11:25]

— Paul Greenberg on What Doesn’t Kill You