Those of you who love sushi and love the planet face a gustatory challenge. The oceans are in trouble. Big trouble. Overfishing and habitat degradation have decimated populations of marine species, from whales to sea urchins, from the Arctic to the tropical reefs. When one who is informed about marine conservation issues decides to splurge (it is increasingly expensive) and partake of sushi, one has to navigate a complex set of personal limits of guilt and indirect consequences to marine ecosystems and human societies. For those of you who wish to minimize your impact on threatened marine biodiversity and ecosystems, here are some guidelines to follow, best practices, rules to live by, or suggestions (whatever you are most comfortable with) that may help.

If you are not a particularly avid consumer of organic products, but still lean towards greener products or at least agree with the sentiment, then there are at least three items where you should not hesitate to purchase organic products whenever possible―bananas, rice, and cotton. These are the toxic big three. Each of these agricultural products is notorious for the huge amounts and diversity of fungicides, nematocides, molluscicides, pesticides, and herbicides that are used in their industrialized production and in the associated damaging impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and local people in and near the production zones.

Domestic cats kill millions of wild birds each year. This predation represents a significant source of mortality for birds around the world, and is a major threat to a number of declining species. Indeed, cat predation has been implicated as a major cause of extinction of numerous species of bird, small mammal, and reptiles. Over 1.4 billion birds in the United States alone are estimated to be killed or injured by domestic and feral cats each year, and 75 million in the United Kingdom.