I’m speaking to you this week from the shores of the Gulf of California. Being here is one of the few graces of unemployment. The water of the gulf is a deep blue-green. Shrimp boats from Puerto Penasco trawl along the horizon. Closer to shore, pelicans glide and dive, working the surf. Given the setting, it’s no surprise that I’ve got fishing on my mind, but my thoughts are taken by more distant water. I’ve been thinking about the fishing grounds of the Georges Bank, off New England. If there is one place where America’s fishing tradition was born and raised, it was on the Georges Bank. These are the waters fished by Discobolus Troop in Captains Courageous.
The New England fishery reliably produced cod, herring, hake and haddock for three hundred years, surviving everything until huge factory fishing trawlers arrived in the 1960s. One of the worst tragedies of the commons ever visited on this planet followed. The fishery became a free-for-all, and it didn’t stop when the foreign factory boats were kicked out in 1976. It didn’t stop when the cod, haddock and hake stocks plummeted. Fishermen turned to species that had been previously considered “junk fish” – dogfish, bluefish, monkfish – and soon those stocks were exhausted as well. By the early 1980s, in both New England and Maritime Canada, it was like waking up to find the nightmare was true. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost, fishing ports became ghost towns and many people tried to recreate, for the sake of tourists, an imitation of what just a few years before had been a reality.
Now move ahead 15 years to the late 1990s. Although the collapse of the fishery was devastating, years of inactivity have allowed the fish stocks to recover. Herring are showing signs of abundance for the first time since that fishery was shut down in 1977. Of course, as soon as the good news about the herring was announced, a locally-owned subsidiary of a Dutch fishing company proposed bringing a factory fishing trawler to take them back out. New England fishermen, not to be fooled a second time, raised hell from the Jersey shore to the down east coast of Maine. After lobbying by the fishermen, senators and congressional representatives from New England introduced legislation to put a moratorium on factory trawlers on the east coast until local communities can take action to protect their fisheries.
Not to be outdone, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who is sick of factory trawlers rampaging through the North Pacific, has introduced legislation that, if passed, will probably result in the phase out of factory trawlers from all US waters over a 20-year period.
Down here in Sonora, the boats are small and the fishermen sell their catch at the docks to gringos from across the border in Arizona or send it off to the markets and restaurants in Hermosillo. That’s the way it should be.
It Takes an Ecosystem to Raise a Fish
I’m speaking to you this week from the shores of the Gulf of California. Being here is one of the few graces of unemployment. The water of the gulf is a deep blue-green. Shrimp boats from Puerto Penasco trawl along the horizon. Closer to shore, pelicans glide and dive, working the surf. Given the setting, it’s no surprise that I’ve got fishing on my mind, but my thoughts are taken by more distant water. I’ve been thinking about the fishing grounds of the Georges Bank, off New England. If there is one place where America’s fishing tradition was born and raised, it was on the Georges Bank. These are the waters fished by Discobolus Troop in Captains Courageous.
The New England fishery reliably produced cod, herring, hake and haddock for three hundred years, surviving everything until huge factory fishing trawlers arrived in the 1960s. One of the worst tragedies of the commons ever visited on this planet followed. The fishery became a free-for-all, and it didn’t stop when the foreign factory boats were kicked out in 1976. It didn’t stop when the cod, haddock and hake stocks plummeted. Fishermen turned to species that had been previously considered “junk fish” – dogfish, bluefish, monkfish – and soon those stocks were exhausted as well. By the early 1980s, in both New England and Maritime Canada, it was like waking up to find the nightmare was true. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost, fishing ports became ghost towns and many people tried to recreate, for the sake of tourists, an imitation of what just a few years before had been a reality.
Now move ahead 15 years to the late 1990s. Although the collapse of the fishery was devastating, years of inactivity have allowed the fish stocks to recover. Herring are showing signs of abundance for the first time since that fishery was shut down in 1977. Of course, as soon as the good news about the herring was announced, a locally-owned subsidiary of a Dutch fishing company proposed bringing a factory fishing trawler to take them back out. New England fishermen, not to be fooled a second time, raised hell from the Jersey shore to the down east coast of Maine. After lobbying by the fishermen, senators and congressional representatives from New England introduced legislation to put a moratorium on factory trawlers on the east coast until local communities can take action to protect their fisheries.
Not to be outdone, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who is sick of factory trawlers rampaging through the North Pacific, has introduced legislation that, if passed, will probably result in the phase out of factory trawlers from all US waters over a 20-year period.
Down here in Sonora, the boats are small and the fishermen sell their catch at the docks to gringos from across the border in Arizona or send it off to the markets and restaurants in Hermosillo. That’s the way it should be.