Four Fish Page 14
Of course, with the advent of industrial factory fishing, a different kind of ecology was established, one where the climax community that came to dominate the continental shelf was not a fish of the order Gadiformes but rather a hominid of the order Primates. And though there is no 100 percent provable scientific correlation between the rise of man and the fall of fish, it is instructive to muse on the inversion. According to Jeff Hutchings, who studies historical cod abundance at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the total cod population of Canada’s most famous grounds was even greater than that of the American buffalo, and the decline of cod represents the greatest loss of a vertebrate in Canadian history—somewhere on the order of 2 billion individuals. “What’s the equivalent loss in human weight of two billion cod?” Hutchings wondered aloud. “That’s twenty-seven million people.” After speaking with Hutchings, I cast around for a nation that had a population of around 27 million people—fishing for a good metaphor, so to speak. Ironically, a country that has a pretty close equivalent in human biomass to the lost Canadian cod biomass is Canada.
What happens to a climax marine ecosystem, then, when the climax animal is taken from the water and turned into seafood? With fisheries the result is dependent on the extent of the removal. Hutchings’s research has found that a removal of 70 percent to 80 percent of a fish population has a certain degree of reversibility. In a case where 20 percent or 30 percent of fish are still in the water, the population may be unstable and vulnerable but still has reasonable potential for recovery. Also, the genome of the stock—that is, the sum of the genetic diversity of the population as a whole—is not likely to have been heavily depleted; there are still nearly as many genes that account for a healthy amount of variability that will enable population recovery over time.
But when removals slip upward to 90 percent or more, the chances of recovery diminish and it is possible that the genome itself may be affected. In the fifteen years since the Grand Banks were closed, where total removals exceeded 95 percent of the historical cod population, a noted decrease in the size of the average codfish has been observed. Instead of averaging twenty-odd pounds as they did when the climax community was still in place in the 1960s, the average cod is now about three pounds—“scrod” size, as fish marketers like to call cod that produce a pan-size fillet. Furthermore, even after the Canadian government instituted a total closure of the Grand Banks in 1992 followed by severely restricted fishing later in the decade, codfish abundance has not shown signs of significant increase.
What this suggests is that by catching all the big cod, fishermen have in a sense selected for small cod. The genes for small cod may now be more frequent in the overall cod genome than they were before fishing pressure was applied. Even if cod on the Grand Banks were left alone, it might take many decades for the population to recover its previous genetic potential and reclaim the average size required for dominance.
The collapse of the Grand Banks cod was, for the years preceding Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, a local problem of the Canadian Maritime Provinces. It prompted hand-wringing on the part of Canadian officials and would get coverage on occasion from the national Canadian press and from newspapers in the cod-eating countries of Northern Europe. But when the cod crisis spread to the United States, the issue became a global metaphor. The loss of abundance, when it happens in front of your face, is a shocking thing, especially when that thing is such an important food source to so many working-class people.
But cod present an interesting twist on the old model of threatened-species recovery. Both humans and codfish require extreme abundance of codfish for their continued prosperity. At the world’s present rate of consumption, humanity needs about 40 billion pounds of codlike fish annually, more or less the size of the entire Grand Banks codfish population at its highest recorded level ever, every single year. And by the late 1990s, it had already become apparent that some drastic measures had to be taken to try to restore the abundance of cod. In the period between 1962, when codfish stocks were still healthy and menu items like McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich were invented and produced at a cost of less than twenty-five cents a sandwich, and 1994, when most cod stocks were considered “collapsed” (collapsed generally being defined as a state where 90 percent or more of the historical population is gone), the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom all went from being net exporters to net importers of not just cod but all fish.
The problem then becomes much more complex than dealing with an endangered species like, say, wolves, where there is no longer any harvest pressure. There may be arguments about how many wolves we want, but there is no “wolf industry,” waiting, guns in hand, to pick them off if the population reaches harvestable size. How do you restore an ecology of abundance when even the diminished system is still being plundered by humans? And how do you do this when you must reestablish the dominance of a fish that has been not just turned into a second-stringer but genetically demoted into a fragment of its former self? A tough job indeed.
But not impossible.
To begin with, it is important to note that even though all cod populations in the world are technically a single species that can interbreed, different populations of cod have different prospects for the future, depending on how much they have been exploited and how well they are reproducing. You cannot say, “Cod are endangered because the Grand Banks cod have collapsed,” any more than you can say, “Humanity is starving because the Sudanese don’t have enough to eat.” Correspondingly, there is no “global cod solution” that will save every cod stock in the world.
There are, however, basic human mistakes, fundamental misapprehensions of the potential of natural systems that point out just how primitive and ignorant we continue to be in our relationship with wild fish. And as it happens, one of the most important places where this ignorance was brought under the bright light of rational science was Georges Bank, the place from where I had extracted two dozen codfish in 2008 and where Mark Kurlansky concluded his book about cod in 1998.
Overfishing” is a term that is used widely in the press today. Those who follow fish have the impression that it is a stable and accepted concept within the scientific community. But even though the ocean clearly has some kind of limit to the total amount of fish that can be removed, until relatively recently no government agency was willing to go on record as defining what overfishing meant in general and which fish specifically were overfished. It was only in the 1990s, while scientists and policy makers were hashing over the question of Georges Bank codfish, that the concept of overfishing finally stepped into the ring to fight against the forces of ignorance.
Professor Andy Rosenberg, an ecologist at the University of New Hampshire, had a ringside seat to the fight. Though he started out as someone destined for a place up in the bleachers of academia, he got his Ph.D. in Nova Scotia just as the Grand Banks crisis was unfolding. The lessons he learned there prompted him to apply to be part of the American fisheries management system just as the American cod crisis was coming to a head. Fisheries in the United States are regulated by a series of regional management councils (FMCs, in fisheries parlance) that are by law a mix of representatives of the fishing industry and qualified scientists. Historically, it is the fishermen who have decided what is and isn’t “sustainable,” and science generally served as a means of supporting fishermen’s claims. But in 1994, when Rosenberg applied for (and to his surprise was given) the directorship of the FMC that oversaw New England cod just as New England cod were about to plummet into extirpation, the rules of the game had begun to change.
“By the beginning of the 1990s, it was pretty clear there had been some good codfish reproduction in 1989. And to a lot of people it looked like the Georges Bank codfish’s last gasp,” Rosenberg told me. “The advice from the scientific community was that you really had an opportunity with this last good burst of fish to take some strong management action and put the fishery on stable ground.” Action, however, wasn’t taken. Not until a nonp
rofit organization called the Conservation Wildlife Fund sued the federal government for not fulfilling its duty to protect fish stocks. “And at this point the government did something extraordinary,” Rosenberg recalls. “They said, ‘You’re right, we haven’t met our responsibility. Our own science agrees.’”
Leading this leap into rationality was a surprisingly progressive director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, named Bill Fox. He would later be vilified by the fishing community for taking the side of science rather than the side of fishermen. But his act would eventually improve things for fish and fishermen alike. In 1993, for the first time in perhaps the entire history of the world, Fox required fisheries managers to define overfishing and to stick to that definition in planning fishing for the future. By the time Andy Rosenberg took up his position in 1994, it had been concluded by the newly science-driven Northeastern FMC that the only way to stop overfishing on Georges Bank was to stop fishing altogether. And in 1994 this is exactly what happened. Two huge swaths of the banks, areas that were considered the best places to fish in the whole Northeast, were closed. The measure was considered temporary at the time, and many are still waiting for the closures to end.
But think about it. What happened in 1994 in Georges Bank was something completely new in the history of man and fish: the United States had created a de facto marine reserve in the middle of one of the most exploited fishing grounds in the world. This would eventually have much broader implications. The New England cod crisis would prove to be just the inciting incident of a larger movement, a movement that led to a landmark piece of fisheries legislation known as the Sustainable Fisheries Act.
Before the Sustainable Fisheries Act, the default assumption about the ocean had been that it was inherently abundant. While today the total harvestable catch of the oceans is put at about 90 million tons, as recently as the 1970s some in the scientific community suggested that humans could potentially harvest 450 million tons of seafood every year—or about the entire weight of the current human population of the world. This was reflected in fisheries legislation. As Michael Weber reported in his excellent book From Abundance to Scarcity, prior to the Sustainable Fisheries Act the burden of proof was put on conservationists to prove that a given stock of fish wasn’t abundant enough to support a commercial fishery. The act, which was pushed through by an unusual coalition of environmentalists and sportfishermen large enough to dislodge the long-entrenched commercial-fishing lobby in Congress, shifted the burden of proof from scientists to fishermen; the equation had been inverted. After the SFA was passed in 1996, fish were to be assumed to be inherently scarce unless proven otherwise.
But what made the Sustainable Fisheries Act most significant is that for the first time since the era of industrial fishing began, it essentially required that overfishing be ended for every single American fish or shellfish. To this day neither the European Common Fisheries Policy nor the Canadian National Fisheries Policy has ever done such a thing. What the act said is that overfishing is a valid scientific concept. It does occur and has occurred, and it is our job to stop it. Indeed, for each individual stock of commercial fish that exists in American waters, the Sustainable Fisheries Act created specific goals and timelines for complete rebuilding of the population. It is now U.S. law that all commercial fish populations in the United States must be fully rebuilt by the year 2014.
The Sustainable Fisheries Act has actually changed things for the better, at least for fish. It has helped managers imagine the possibility of progress, particularly with gadiforms. When the act was passed, Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod stocks were at 12 percent of what fisheries scientists thought of as “rebuilt.” Haddock, another gadiform, were even worse off. The result of the act and its unusual deadlines are impressive: it gave regulators the ability to impose the drastic measure of closing fishing grounds entirely should the rebuilding targets not be met on an annual basis. Ten years after the act’s passage, Gulf of Maine codfish are now at 50 percent of their rebuilding goal and seem likely to achieve their goal by 2014. Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank haddock are now considered fully rebuilt. Unfortunately, Georges Bank cod, the stock I was fishing this past December, is not rebuilding with anywhere near that speed, and its target has been moved to 2026.
But while rebuilding targets are missed or postponed, it must be underlined again that the Sustainable Fisheries Act has, against immense pressure from fishing interests, allowed regulators to keep half of Georges Bank entirely closed to fishing. These closures have allowed the banks’ ecosystem to stabilize. Trawlers no longer drag and redrag its fragile reef systems. Spawning cod no longer have to evade nets when they are at the most physiologically weak point in their life cycle. So even though the time horizon for rebuilding has been extended for Georges Bank cod to 2026, a year when my son will be twenty years old and I will be more of a burden than a helper on a fishing trip, there could still be a recovery. The stock has not slipped below a genetically defunct threshold; there exists the template for a refuge for fish in the long term. There is still hope.
With fish, though, hope must always be put in context. Around the time of the North American cod crises and the passage of the Sustainable Fisheries Act, Daniel Pauly, known as the most iconoclastic of leading contemporary marine biologists, coined the term “shifting baselines.” When I came across the concept a little while back, I was struck by both its profound significance as well as its relative invisibility in the contemporary news cycle. Ghettoized within the insular realm of fisheries science, the theory has profound implications as a sociological phenomenon as much as a biological one.
The idea of shifting baselines is this: Every generation has its own, specific expectations of what “normal” is for nature, a baseline. One generation has one baseline for abundance while the next has a reduced version and the next reduced even more, and so on and so on until expectations of abundance are pathetically low. Before Daniel Pauly expressed this generational memory loss as a scientific thesis, the fantastical catches of older fishermen could be written off as time-warped nostalgia. But Pauly has tabulated the historical catch data and shown that the good old days were in fact often much better. This is not nostalgia on the part of the old or lack of empathy on the part of the young. It is almost a willful forgetting—the means by which our species, generation by generation, finds reasonableness amid the irrational destruction of the greatest natural food system on earth.
My baseline, up until I started looking into codfish, was that codfish are fundamentally a fish that comes from far away, abundant on the slope of the continental shelf, a minimum of a two- to four-hour steam from land, and commercially pursued by distant offshore fleets. But as I started to look into codfish more closely, I was to come to realize that my baseline was considerably shifted from what nature had initially provided.
It turns out that codfish on Georges Bank and other offshore areas are populations of last resort—the head office of the cod operation with all its subsidiary franchises removed. And to a large extent the future of our codfish populations comes down to the question of whether humans can reconstruct a memory of the pattern of abundance and apply it to the future.
As Pauly’s shifting baselines show, perceptions of abundance in human experience are relative. Even I doubted the existence of a cod shortage during my fishing trip to Georges Bank, because every time I dropped a jig to the bottom, a cod seemed to come up on my line. The modern marine conservationist must work against this limited perception and persuade fishermen that their immediate concept of abundance is a diminished one. Mark Kurlansky’s Cod did this in a layman’s way, creating a benchmark for a general readership that gives some evidence of the past abundance of cod. Science, though, requires more rigor and precision to quantify memory—a census, so to speak, not of the present but of the past. It was just such a census that a Maine fisherman named Ted Ames took up in 1999.
How do you tell an imbecile from a functional person?” Ted Ames asked me recently,
his gentle Down East lilt making the word “person” come out as “puh-sin.”
“When a functional person makes a mistake, he’ll maybe try it once again, but after that he’ll do it differently. The imbecile will do it over and over and over again.”
Ames and I were talking about the management of cod in general, but we were discussing in particular the management of the cod that used to inhabit his native waters, the lovely rocky coast from Portland, Maine, on up past Boothbay Harbor to Stonington, all the way to the Canadian border. Ames is a former commercial cod fisherman, the son and grandson of cod fishermen, and it is his unique relationship to the history of cod that has allowed him to embark on a project of historical reconstruction that won him a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2005.
“After cod collapsed in 1995, I had already come ashore,” Ames explained, using the term “coming ashore” in the Maine sense of giving up fishing. “The kids of the fishermen that I used to work with asked me if I would represent them in trying to get a fishery back along the coast. The government had just come up with a federal management plan for cod, and they’d come out saying there were historically only a couple hundred miles of codfish-spawning grounds on the coastal shelf. Fishermen throughout our area knew that was not the case. So I went around and interviewed fishermen and asked them where they caught ripe cod. We collectively found a thousand square miles, most of which was heretofore-unknown spawning grounds.”
Over the last hundred years, one truth has come to emerge about fisheries management that few would dispute—you must know how many fish there were before fishing began to be able to predict how many fish there can be in the presence of fishing. If they have that historical data at their disposal, fisheries managers can get a sense of what they are striving to reclaim after fishing enters the system. Just as important, they can begin to recognize what represents a danger threshold below which a population should not be allowed to drop.