Four Fish Read online

  Just as seeing my stream entering the Byram River had given me the idea to pursue the wider world of the ocean, seeing this peculiarly consistent flow of four fish from the different waters of the globe into the fish markets of America drew me again beyond the familiar to find out what had happened. I spent the next few years, sometimes on my own recognizance, sometimes for the New York Times, traveling to places I had previously only read about in the pages of Field & Stream and Salt Water Sportsman.

  The more I examined the life cycles and the human exploitation of salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna, the more I realized that my fishing history and the fishing history of humankind followed a similar pattern. Just as I had started out inland in a freshwater pond and then made my way down a river to coastal salt water when my grounds had gone bad, so, too, had early human fishers first overexploited their freshwater fish and then moved down the streams to their coasts to find more game. And just as I later turned to the resources of my father to take me far offshore to catch codfish beyond sight of land, so, too, had humans marshaled the resources of industry into building offshore fishing fleets when they found their near-shore waters incapable of bearing humankind’s growing burden.

  The more I thought of it, the more I realized that the four fish that are coming to dominate the modern seafood market are visible footprints, marking four discrete steps humanity has taken in its attempts to master the sea. Each fish is an archive of a particular, epochal shift. Salmon, a beautiful silvery animal with succulent pink flesh, is dependent upon clean, free-flowing freshwater rivers. It is representative of the first wave of human exploitation, the species that marks the point at which humans and fish first had large-scale environmental problems and where domestication had to be launched to head off extinction. Sea bass, a name applied to many fish but which increasingly refers to a single white, meaty-fleshed animal called the European sea bass, represents the near-shore shallow waters of our coasts, the place where Europeans first learned how to fish in the sea and where we also found ourselves outstripping the resources of nature and turning to an even more sophisticated form of domestication to maintain fish supplies. Cod, a white, flaky-fleshed animal that once congregated in astronomical numbers around the slopes of the continental shelves many miles offshore, heralded the era of industrial fishing, an era where mammoth factory ships were created to match cod’s seemingly irrepressible abundance and turn its easily processed flesh into a cheap commoner’s staple. And finally tuna, a family of lightning-fast, sometimes thousand-pound animals with red, steaklike flesh that frequent the distant deepwater zones beyond the continental slope. Some tuna cross the breadth of the oceans, and nearly all tuna species range across waters that belong to multiple nations or no nation at all. Tuna are thus stateless fish, difficult to regulate and subject to the last great gold rush of wild food—a sushi binge that is now pushing us into a realm of science-fiction-level fish-farming research and challenging us to reevaluate whether fish are at their root expendable seafood or wildlife desperately in need of our compassion.

  Four fish, then. Or rather four archetypes of fish flesh, which humanity is trying to master in one way or another, either through the management of a wild system, through the domestication and farming of individual species, or through the outright substitution of one species for another.

  This is not the first time humanity has glanced across the disorderly range of untamed nature and selected a handful of species to exploit and propagate. Out of all of the many mammals that roamed the earth before the last ice age, our forebears selected four—cows, pigs, sheep, and goats—to be their principal meats. Out of all the many birds that darkened the primeval skies, humans chose four—chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese—to be their poultry. But today, as we evaluate and parse fish in this next great selection and try to figure out which ones will be our principals, we find ourselves with a more complex set of decisions before us. Early man put very little thought into preserving his wild food. He was in the minority in nature, and the creatures he chose to domesticate for his table were a subset of a much greater, wilder whole. He had no idea of his destructive potential or of his abilities to remake the world.

  Modern man is a different animal, one who is fully aware of his capability to skew the rules of nature in his favor. Up until the mid-twentieth century, humans tended to see their transformative abilities as not only positive but inevitable. Francis Galton, a leading Victorian intellectual, infamously known as the founder of eugenics but also a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects including animal domestication, wrote at the dawn of the industrialization of the world’s food system, “It would appear that every wild animal has had its chance of being domesticated.” Of the undomesticated animals left behind, Galton had this depressing prediction: “As civilization extends they are doomed to be gradually destroyed off the face of the earth as useless consumers of cultivated produce.”

  And that brings us to the present day, the crucial point at which we stand in our current relationship with the ocean. Must we eliminate all wildness from the sea and replace it with some kind of human controlled system, or can wildness be understood and managed well enough to keep humanity and the marine world in balance?

  In spite of the impression given by numerous reports in the news media, wild fish still exist in great numbers. The wild harvest from the ocean is now around 90 million tons a year. The many cycles and subcycles that spin and generate food are still spinning, sometimes with great vigor, and they require absolutely no input from us in order to continue, other than restraint. In cases where grounds have been seemingly tapped out, ten years’ rest has sometimes been enough to restore them to at least some of their former glory. World War II, while one of the most devastating periods in history for humans, might be called “The Great Reprieve” if history were written by fish. With mines and submarines ready to blow up any unsuspecting fishing vessel, much of the North Atlantic’s depleted fishing grounds were left fallow and fish increased their numbers significantly.

  But is modern man capable of consciously creating restraint without some outside force, like war? Is there some wiser incarnation of the hunter-gatherer that will compel us to truly conserve our wild food, or is humanity actually hardwired to eradicate the wild majority and then domesticate a tiny subset? Can we not resist the urge to remake a wild system, to redirect the energy flow of that system in a way that serves us?

  In his landmark 1968 essay in the journal Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the ecologist Garret Hardin noted that “natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.” What we have seen up until now, with both the exploitation of wild fish and the selection and propagation of domestic fish, is a wave of psychological denial of staggering scope. With wild fish we have chosen, time after time, to ignore the fundamental limits the laws of nature place on ecosystems and have consistently removed more fish than can be replaced by natural processes. When wild stocks become overexploited, we have turned to domestication. But the fish we have chosen to tame are by and large animals that satisfy whimsical gustatory predilections rather than the requirements of sound ecologically based husbandry. All these developments have gone on underwater and out of sight of the average modern seafood eater. We eat more fish every year, not just collectively but on a per capita basis, pausing only (and only briefly) when evidence surfaces of the risk of industrial contaminants in our seafood supply. Under the umbrella of these collective acts of denial, individual and corporate rights, national prejudices, and environmental activism have been cobbled together into something government officials like to call “ocean policy.” In fact, there is no “ocean policy” as such, at least none that looks at wild and domesticated fish as two components of a common future.

  But now, as wild and domesticated fish reach a point where they are nearly equal parts of the marketplace, this is just
the kind of ocean policy we need. And in telling the story of four fish, for which the collision of wildness and domestication is particularly relevant, I shall attempt to separate human wants from global needs and propose the terms for an equitable and long-lasting peace between man and fish.

  Salmon

  The Selection of a King

  If you were to go looking for a place where the problems between humans and fish first got serious, Turners Falls, Massachusetts, makes a worthy candidate. Located at a narrow pinch point halfway up the four-hundred-mile stem of the Connecticut River, Turners Falls is today the sort of hollowed-out New England former mill town that compels the traveler to move through quickly. Gloomy brick buildings line its main street, and the only encouragement to tarry is the public lot that charges just five cents for a parking spot.

  But the most noticeable thing about the village of Turners Falls is that there are no falls.

  There is only a dam several hundred feet across that metes out water in greedy spurts to the rocks below. No plaque commemorates the damming or explains why the river’s progress was impeded in the first place. And there is no evidence whatsoever that before the dam the Connecticut River was an important salmon river, one of dozens of salmon rivers throughout New England and Atlantic Canada that made salmon an abundant wild staple for natives and early colonists alike.

  Today in my native land of coastal Connecticut, there is no direct experience or memory of local wild salmon as food. The fish live in the minds of my fellow northeasterners as faceless orange slabs of supermarket product flown in from far away, eaten on bagels, and called “lox”—lox from the Indo-European lakhs and subsequently the Yiddish and Norwegian laks, meaning salmon. But salmon were once present here in significant numbers. The name Connecticut comes from the Algonquin quonehtacut, which translates as “long coastal river.” For hundreds of years before my home state was a state, it was known principally as a place where a long coastal river wended its way to the sea and nurtured great annual runs of salmon, shad, and herring, an abundance that drew Native Americans from as far away as Ohio.

  Every year perhaps as many as 100 million Connecticut River salmon larvae (no one knows exactly how many there were) would hatch out of large, bright-orange, nutrient-rich eggs. After spending one to three years in the fast currents of the river’s tributaries, salmon juveniles (known as “smolts” at this phase) would pass over Turners Falls, heading down out of the mouth of the Connecticut. They would then shoot over to the fast-moving shunt of water in Long Island Sound called “the Race”—a treacherous spot where I once nearly overturned my small aluminum boat while fishing with a friend during summer vacation. Riding the Race’s six-knot currents on an outgoing tide, the salmon would make a hundred-mile jaunt to Long Island Sound’s terminus at Orient Point before breaking northeast twenty-five hundred miles to the Labrador Sea just west of Greenland. Upon arrival in Greenland waters, they would mix with other salmon from Northern Europe as well as with those from Spain. The Spanish salmon were in fact the first salmon, the strain that birthed the entire Atlantic salmon genome, which millions of years earlier had radiated out across the Atlantic. Though one might think a Spanish provenance would imply a warmth-loving animal, salmon originally hailed from the lush, cool valleys of Asurias and Cantabria in northern Spain and evolved to thrive in cold water. The colder the water, the higher the oxygen content, and salmon, with their hard-swimming, predatory metabolism, need a lot of oxygen. In Greenland they found not only cold, oxygen-rich water but also an abundance of oily krill, capelin, and other forage, which they consumed in large amounts and stored up as rich supplies of fats—fats that humans would come to associate with the heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, compounds that have the unique capacity to keep muscle and vascular tissue pliant and vibrant even in subzero temperatures.

  Selection pressure in the form of seals, whales, disease, and accidents of various kinds culled away salmon throughout their journey, leaving less than 1 percent of the original hatchlings to complete their life cycle. After a sojourn of usually two years in Greenland, the survivors would go their separate ways, the American fish to the Connecticut’s mouth at Old Saybrook and to many other rivers in New England and Canada, the Europeans to the rivers Tyne and Thames in England as well as rivers in Spain, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and Scanadinavia on east into Russia. By the time they reached their home rivers, the salmon were big fish—broad-shouldered fifteen-to thirty-pounders with olive-silver backs and shimmering white bellies. Their flesh was thick and orange from the reddish pigment in the krill they ate and zebra-striped with enough energy-storing fat to propel them head-on against ten-knot currents. For reasons not completely understood, salmon do not eat upon return to fresh water and so must store great amounts of fat in advance of their spawning runs. These reserves made them great battlers on the line, so much so that when the seventeenth-century cleric-turned-fishing writer Izaak Walton was looking for a metaphor to hide his monarchical sympathies during the repressive Cromwell years, he called salmon “The King of Fish.” This kingly impression extended to the table; special mention of salmon as royal table fare has been made by Roman and Scottish lords alike.

  There were no lords waiting for the Connecticut River salmon when they returned to precolonial North America, though. Just native spearfishermen and netters, none of whom had any devastating effect on salmon numbers. The fish were more or less free to complete their genetic missions. Some had evolved to stop early on and spawn in the tributaries near the mouth of the river. Others were designed to sprint up Turners Falls and spawn all the way in the tiny rivulets that feed into the Connecticut from the Green Mountains and the White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. The genome, the sum of the genetic components of the Connecticut salmon, was so broad that sub- and sub-subpopulations were able to make use of radically different tributaries, spawning throughout almost the entirety of the Connecticut’s four-hundred-mile length.

  During the colonial era, different chunks of the Connecticut salmon run were wiped out as millers dammed tributary after tributary for local power generation. But in 1798 a final death blow was struck. That year at Turners Falls, Massachusetts, entrepreneurs put a much larger dam across the main stem of the Connecticut. The salmon that had left for Greenland before the Turners Falls dam was constructed returned to find that they could not reach their spawning grounds. By the turn of the century, those old breeders had died off without ever getting a chance to reproduce. The broad, complex genetic potential of the Connecticut River salmon had vanished from the face of the earth.

  Many salmon extirpations are more recent. It is possible that my generation (I am forty-two as of this writing) may be the last one to have a direct memory of wild Atlantic salmon at all. As recently as my early childhood in the late 1960s, Nova Scotia salmon, often called “Nova lox” by New Yorkers, were wild fish, harvested from several wild runs that spawned in the rivers of Atlantic Canada. But in the 1950s, after a handful of Danish and Faroe Islands fishermen found the patch of water off Greenland where all the world’s wild Atlantic salmon congregated, they began catching tons of them. When Norwegian and Swedish fishermen joined the Danes and the Farose in the 1960s, wild Atlantic salmon went into perilous decline. Today a mere wisp of the wild Nova Scotia salmon population remains, and none of it is commercially fished. In fact, every appearance of the species Salmo salar, or “Atlantic salmon,” in supermarkets today, be they labeled Canadian, Irish, Scotch, Chilean, or Norwegian, is farmed. Except for isolated pockets in far northern latitudes, there is no longer a popular memory of “wild Atlantic salmon” as food.

  The Pacific species of salmon—the kings, cohos, sockeyes, pinks, and chums of the separate scientific genus Oncorhynchus—are another story. Those fish migrate from Russian and Pacific Northwest rivers and use the Bering Sea as their Greenland and still reach the supermarket mostly from wild sources. But those wild salmon have also been winking out steadily in the course of my lifetime. There
are diminished runs of them still remaining in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, but their viability is in question. California closed its salmon fishery completely in 2008 for the first time in history, and the famed Columbia River that divides Washington State from Oregon now hosts less than a tenth of its historical run of 10 million to 16 million fish.

  So when it comes to salmon, the modern experience is a paradoxical mix of two phenomena. At one pole is the contemporary seafood counter, blooming like some kind of irrepressible orange rose, overflowing with fresh farmed Atlantic salmon fillets. These salmon are grown in monocultures as uniform and calculated as any animal feedlot and are the product of some of the earliest experiments in modern aquaculture. Because they lay large, oily eggs, visible to the naked eye, salmon are far easier to spawn and raise in captivity than many other common food fish, which lay small, nearly microscopic eggs. The first recorded experience of human-controlled reproduction of Atlantic salmon occurred in France around the year 1400, and since then salmon domestication has carried this single species clear across the equator to Chile, New Zealand, and South Africa—an entire hemisphere where, prior to the introductions of mankind, they had been entirely absent. The aquaculture companies operating in the frigid fjords of southern Chile now produce almost as much salmon per year as all the world’s wild salmon rivers combined.

  At the other pole of the salmon experience is the vanishing tail of wildness. In their Atlantic range, salmon have declined drastically throughout most of Europe, New England, and Atlantic Canada. In the Pacific the half dozen species and hundreds of genetically distinct strains of wild salmon are slipping away, river by river. What is left to us now are the two last primeval salmon territories: the wilds of eastern Russia and the forty-ninth American state of Alaska.