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.
W
ith 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.
H
ow 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.
This model, however, has one basic, gargantuan flaw: it assumes that it is scientists who find fish first, make recommendations, and then model the methods of a would-be fishing fleet on those recommendations. In the entire history of fishing, this has probably never occurred. In real life it is fishermen, knowledgeable hunters who know their prey most fully, who find fish first. And when fishermen find a new stock of fish that has never been measured, they fish it and fish it damn hard before regulation can be put in place. The baseline disappears down the open end of a net trawl. As the scientists Boris Worm and Ransom Myers concluded in an oft-cited 2003
Nature
paper on fish abundance, “Management schemes are usually implemented well after industrialized fishing has begun and only serve to stabilize fish biomass at low levels.” In starker words, they tend to manage to preserve a status quo of scarcity, rather than to reestablish a historically correct abundance.
By conducting a series of interviews with seventy-, eighty-, and even ninety-year-old commercial fishermen whose early fishing days predate the advent of large-scale fishing technology, Ted Ames addressed this problem by establishing a different, more profound historical baseline. In his interviews he sought to identify extinct populations of cod. And what he has found through these interviews is that the population that is now called the Gulf of Maine stock is in fact the remnants of perhaps dozens of cod subpopulations that had at one time spawned up and down the Maine coast, often within sight of land. I’d always thought of cod as an offshore fish, pursuable only by a long trip in heavy seas. But what Ames found is that some cod even rushed up into the mouths of rivers, pursuing river herring in their runs from the open ocean.
Ames’s research also highlighted another important element of the entire equation: it is not just overfishing that decimated cod. The destruction of cod’s prey also played a crucial part. At one time runs of alewives, blueback, shad, and other fish in the herring family existed in rivers throughout coastal New England. Herring, like salmon, seek home rivers and must have unimpeded access to gravel beds in fresh water to spawn. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, low-level dams were erected all over the Northeast to power local textile mills. These days, in the tiny state of Connecticut alone, there are as many as five thousand dams (nobody actually knows the exact number). Even though mills are largely defunct and the dams no longer serve any practical purpose, they are still in place and herring populations are severely depressed. Cod cannot return to their former range in part because of a simple lack of food. Cod abundance, it turns out, is inherently linked to access to multiple sources of food over a long range. Take away the herring and you take away a key support beam for the cod kingdom. Cod’s major food source becomes, by necessity, the prey on the distant coastal shelves; their food is plentiful only far out at sea, and therefore that is where cod survive best.
Ames concluded that “cod have complex population structures in the Northwest Atlantic with multiple subpopulations, and that managers have often failed to prevent the collapse and loss of spawning components in these heavily exploited fisheries.” In other words, you must recognize that the relationship between large-scale offshore cod populations and small-scale coastal subpopulations is limited before you set rebuilding goals for the stock as a whole.
In light of these findings, Ames strongly asserts that the abandoned cod grounds that no longer support schools of codfish
must
once again become populated if the Gulf of Maine stock of cod is to be considered truly rebuilt and truly abundant. When I told him that fisheries managers I’d interviewed already consider Gulf of Maine cod 50 percent rebuilt, he laughed. “In that area many of the three thousand-odd full-time fishermen used to go fishing for cod and other groundfish during part of the year. Today there is one permit holder for cod, and he is the last active ground fisherman in a hundred and fifty miles of coastline. Is that a fishery that’s fifty percent recovered?”