Michael L Weber. From Abundance to Scarcity: A History of US Marine Fisheries Policy, Island Press, Washington DC: 2002
The munificent fisheries of the western Atlantic were instrumental in securing for North America the attention of the colonial European powers. To the teeming ecosystems of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where the warm Gulf Stream with its heavy nutrient load meets the cold Labrador Current surging close to shore, came sailing ships from England, Spain, France and the Netherlands, all eager to exploit the untapped potential of the New World. For centuries the Banks had been a source of international competition and conflict; indeed, Michael Weber tells us in this informative history that “access to these fish remained a bone of contention between Great Britain and the young United States well after the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the American War of Independence in 1783.” Competition from foreign fishing fleets continues to provide a source of irritation to American commercial fishermen, as does the increasing presence of recreational anglers in prime hunting grounds. But since the early 1970s the chief magnet for hostility among fishing communities has been the US government, particularly the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), an outgrowth of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, itself a misplaced branch of the Department of Commerce.
NMFS was created to manage the coastal fisheries in such a way as to provide the American industry with the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) that any targeted marine species could tolerate and remain viable over time. MSY had been developed during the “Americanizing” of the multinational offshore fisheries in the early 1950s and was defined as “the largest annual catch or yield in terms of weight of fish caught by both commercial and recreational fishermen that could be taken continuously from a population of fish under existing environmental conditions.” This sounds logical enough, until we learn that the science underlying this objective as used to tabulate fish populations was tenuous at best and frequently nonexistent. Furthermore, any population biologist with the vaguest understanding of the stochastic character of natural events will tell you that one cannot count on “existing environmental conditions” to remain in place for any predictable period of time; with human intervention in the biosphere playing an escalating role in offsetting the ecological balance, changes in biotic distribution and population are increasingly erratic.
But NMFS was created solely as “industry’s partner” and proved reluctant to utilize its biological findings in any way that would hinder the full development of the US fishing fleet, its dependent canneries and processing plants, and its nationwide distribution system. Immediately prior to the rapidly declining catches of the late 1960s, the federal government felt confident enough in the presumed boundlessness of the sea’s riches for the Interior Department to opine as follows in 1964: “Many marine experts believe that about 90 to 95 percent of the ocean’s productivity presently is unused and that utilization can be increased at least tenfold without endangered aquatic stocks.” And in fact world (though not US) seafood production did burgeon to a tremendous degree before most Eurasian coastal fisheries collapsed in the 1970s, which led to the construction of titanic factory trawlers that could stay out on the high seas for months, like the old whalers, by processing their catch directly on board. It is the growth of fishing technology, from sonar and satellite imagery to monofilament drift nets and million-hooked long lines, that coupled with the reluctance of government agencies to enforce protective regulations turned the time-honored pursuit of fishing into an industrial exercise of mass slaughter, this to the extent that fisheries are now destroying their own livelihood by completely eradicating the desired resource. When a fishing fleet can set 25,000 miles of 3-inch mesh drift net that for days snares everything in its path from mackerel to jellyfish to albatrosses and sharks, a continued lack of regulation will inevitably result in the total destruction of the marine environment.[1] Only when it has been too late have effective measures—necessarily severe by that point—been put into place to save the industry from devouring itself.
With their allies in the regional fisheries management counsels, in NMFS, and in Congress, the industry has done everything possible to stymie localized measures to protect the stocks upon which future profits depend. This is an important aspect of From Abundance to Scarcity, one that bears repeating: the commercial fishing business, like any other extractive industry from ranching to mining and timber, will profess the health and viability of the resource it economically depends upon until the bottom drops out, and damn any attempt at regulatory control as socialistic interference. (Another similarity between these industries is a history with the federal government characterized by political support, tax breaks and outright welfare when the “resource” becomes depleted through ineptitude and waste.) The scientists eventually recruited into NMFS to enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act were met with a stonewalling bureaucracy whose worldview was based on the assumption that the less known about marine wildlife the better, because proactive biological assessments could only lead to calls for a reduced catch of those piscine families which even the industry was admitting seemed to be in trouble: tunas, billfish, salmons, and groundfish. It was the last grouping, which includes flounder, cod, haddock and sole, that forever shattered for US administrators the cornucopian myth of the sea’s eternal abundance.
The great New England fisheries, constant providers of nourishment and community income since before the country’s founding, were at last broken and undone by the collapse of the stocks they needed for financial survival. As always, one may debate the particular forces that pushed that massive ecosystem over the edge, but overzealous fishing technology, pollution and the destruction of coastal estuaries clearly played decisive roles. What most fishermen will never admit is the idea that it was their own well-organized political rebuffs of any and all regulation of their catch that postponed the enforced retention of adequate breeding numbers until the final ruin was upon them. With the aid of our machines and organized societies we have clearly become too efficient at plundering the seas not to accept some reasonable restraints, if only for our own economic preservation.
The “health of the fisheries,” a consistent refrain among NMFS number-grinders, must ultimately include the well-being of ecosystems and habitat as well as the fishing industry and its commercial capital. For the long-term survival of any business that depends upon utilization of natural resources (and what kind of undertaking worth being involved with isn’t in it for the long haul?), an active consideration for the wellbeing of the components of the ecosystem at hand must play a crucial part in daily deliberations.
[1] While large-scale drift-netting has been outlawed, other fishing tactics such as long-lining—whereby hundreds of thousands of baited hooks are set on heavy lines that stretches for miles between buoys—and bottom trawling, necessitating the destruction of the entire benthic environment, are tremendously wasteful of the majority of animals killed. Discarded dead or dying, the squid, crabs, sea turtles, dolphins and oceanic birds are simply regarded by the industry as “bycatch”, a word with all the self-incriminating significance of the mining term “overburden”.
The munificent fisheries of the western Atlantic were instrumental in securing for North America the attention of the colonial European powers. To the teeming ecosystems of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where the warm Gulf Stream with its heavy nutrient load meets the cold Labrador Current surging close to shore, came sailing ships from England, Spain, France and the Netherlands, all eager to exploit the untapped potential of the New World. For centuries the Banks had been a source of international competition and conflict; indeed, Michael Weber tells us in this informative history that “access to these fish remained a bone of contention between Great Britain and the young United States well after the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the American War of Independence in 1783.” Competition from foreign fishing fleets continues to provide a source of irritation to American commercial fishermen, as does the increasing presence of recreational anglers in prime hunting grounds. But since the early 1970s the chief magnet for hostility among fishing communities has been the US government, particularly the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), an outgrowth of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, itself a misplaced branch of the Department of Commerce.
NMFS was created to manage the coastal fisheries in such a way as to provide the American industry with the Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) that any targeted marine species could tolerate and remain viable over time. MSY had been developed during the “Americanizing” of the multinational offshore fisheries in the early 1950s and was defined as “the largest annual catch or yield in terms of weight of fish caught by both commercial and recreational fishermen that could be taken continuously from a population of fish under existing environmental conditions.” This sounds logical enough, until we learn that the science underlying this objective as used to tabulate fish populations was tenuous at best and frequently nonexistent. Furthermore, any population biologist with the vaguest understanding of the stochastic character of natural events will tell you that one cannot count on “existing environmental conditions” to remain in place for any predictable period of time; with human intervention in the biosphere playing an escalating role in offsetting the ecological balance, changes in biotic distribution and population are increasingly erratic.
But NMFS was created solely as “industry’s partner” and proved reluctant to utilize its biological findings in any way that would hinder the full development of the US fishing fleet, its dependent canneries and processing plants, and its nationwide distribution system. Immediately prior to the rapidly declining catches of the late 1960s, the federal government felt confident enough in the presumed boundlessness of the sea’s riches for the Interior Department to opine as follows in 1964: “Many marine experts believe that about 90 to 95 percent of the ocean’s productivity presently is unused and that utilization can be increased at least tenfold without endangered aquatic stocks.” And in fact world (though not US) seafood production did burgeon to a tremendous degree before most Eurasian coastal fisheries collapsed in the 1970s, which led to the construction of titanic factory trawlers that could stay out on the high seas for months, like the old whalers, by processing their catch directly on board. It is the growth of fishing technology, from sonar and satellite imagery to monofilament drift nets and million-hooked long lines, that coupled with the reluctance of government agencies to enforce protective regulations turned the time-honored pursuit of fishing into an industrial exercise of mass slaughter, this to the extent that fisheries are now destroying their own livelihood by completely eradicating the desired resource. When a fishing fleet can set 25,000 miles of 3-inch mesh drift net that for days snares everything in its path from mackerel to jellyfish to albatrosses and sharks, a continued lack of regulation will inevitably result in the total destruction of the marine environment.[1] Only when it has been too late have effective measures—necessarily severe by that point—been put into place to save the industry from devouring itself.
With their allies in the regional fisheries management counsels, in NMFS, and in Congress, the industry has done everything possible to stymie localized measures to protect the stocks upon which future profits depend. This is an important aspect of From Abundance to Scarcity, one that bears repeating: the commercial fishing business, like any other extractive industry from ranching to mining and timber, will profess the health and viability of the resource it economically depends upon until the bottom drops out, and damn any attempt at regulatory control as socialistic interference. (Another similarity between these industries is a history with the federal government characterized by political support, tax breaks and outright welfare when the “resource” becomes depleted through ineptitude and waste.) The scientists eventually recruited into NMFS to enforce the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act were met with a stonewalling bureaucracy whose worldview was based on the assumption that the less known about marine wildlife the better, because proactive biological assessments could only lead to calls for a reduced catch of those piscine families which even the industry was admitting seemed to be in trouble: tunas, billfish, salmons, and groundfish. It was the last grouping, which includes flounder, cod, haddock and sole, that forever shattered for US administrators the cornucopian myth of the sea’s eternal abundance.
The great New England fisheries, constant providers of nourishment and community income since before the country’s founding, were at last broken and undone by the collapse of the stocks they needed for financial survival. As always, one may debate the particular forces that pushed that massive ecosystem over the edge, but overzealous fishing technology, pollution and the destruction of coastal estuaries clearly played decisive roles. What most fishermen will never admit is the idea that it was their own well-organized political rebuffs of any and all regulation of their catch that postponed the enforced retention of adequate breeding numbers until the final ruin was upon them. With the aid of our machines and organized societies we have clearly become too efficient at plundering the seas not to accept some reasonable restraints, if only for our own economic preservation.
The “health of the fisheries,” a consistent refrain among NMFS number-grinders, must ultimately include the well-being of ecosystems and habitat as well as the fishing industry and its commercial capital. For the long-term survival of any business that depends upon utilization of natural resources (and what kind of undertaking worth being involved with isn’t in it for the long haul?), an active consideration for the wellbeing of the components of the ecosystem at hand must play a crucial part in daily deliberations.
[1] While large-scale drift-netting has been outlawed, other fishing tactics such as long-lining—whereby hundreds of thousands of baited hooks are set on heavy lines that stretches for miles between buoys—and bottom trawling, necessitating the destruction of the entire benthic environment, are tremendously wasteful of the majority of animals killed. Discarded dead or dying, the squid, crabs, sea turtles, dolphins and oceanic birds are simply regarded by the industry as “bycatch”, a word with all the self-incriminating significance of the mining term “overburden”.
