David Dobbs

Island Press/Shearwater Books, October 2000

Of the time I spent gathering stories for this book, two experiences return to mind most readily and cleanly, like distillations.

One was watching northern gannets from the bow of the Albatross IV, the 187-foot, gleaming white trawler that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, pronounced like nymphs) uses to track fish populations off coastal New England. Despite its name evoking the damning burden of the Coleridge poem, I find the Albatross a graceful craft, long of line and blessed with plenty of clean, well-lighted spaces. The cleanest and best lit of these was the foredeck. While the boat's rear deck, on which the fishing crew landed its hauls and the scientific crew sorted and counted them, was cluttered with gear, the broad, open foredeck was almost featureless, a gently upcurving expanse of pale gray metal. Steel Beach, the scientific crew called it, for its sunbathing qualities in warm weather. In April, however, when I was on the boat, the 10-knot breeze created by our movement across the water kept things chilly, and I usually had the deck to myself. I could lean on the rail at the very tip of the bow, a good three stories above the water, and in solitude look for birds and sea mammals. Sometimes I took my laptop out there and typed up notes, but more often I just stood at the rail with my binoculars and scanned for gannets. I'd not been this far at sea before (we crossed the entire Gulf of Maine, passing over Georges Bank to within sight of Nova Scotia) and had never seen these soaring pelagic birds. I found them entrancing. Like many birds that spend long periods at sea, gannets have evolved light bodies and broad wingspans that allow them to glide for hours searching for fish. I loved to watch them cruise with their long, canted wings 30 or 40 or even 70 feet up, floating calmly but alertly as they eyed the waves below, and then suddenly tuck their wings and drop and spear into the water. They'd pop to the surface a moment later, swallowing, then lift again, their vibrant white bodies framed by black wingtips. They never seemed sullied or ruffled or even particularly wet. Unlike the bickering gulls, they never seemed anxious - as if they knew that the sea held what they needed and that sooner or later they would find it and effortlessly claim it. I watched them for hours during my weeks on the Albatross, slipping off to the bow for at least part of all but the roughest and busiest days. Afterwards I always felt a heightened sense of order, even grace. 

With similar clarity I recall vomiting off the stern of a much smaller boat. The 44-foot Ellen Diane belonged to the fisherman I came to know best, David Goethel. Goethel was in the cabin at the time and kindly took no apparent notice of my Daniel Boone moment (when you go out and shoot your breakfast). I don't generally get seasick, and the seas weren't bad that day, maybe 5 or 6 feet, but they rocked the boat just enough that with too little sleep, too much coffee, and not enough time on small boats, I saw after about an hour on that dank, gray, rolling morning that I would soon be sick. I left the cabin, went back onto the fish deck, clutched the strut of the net transom so I wouldn't get tossed overboard, and leaned over the rail. Each roll of the boat brought the water almost within arm's reach. I stared at the sliding sea, intentionally letting its swinging, surging passage accelerate the inevitable. Finally I surrendered to my stomach's insistence. Emphatically. I hadn't vomited that violently since, oh, college. I'd forgotten how the muscles that lace the abdomen can clench so hard around your stomach. I was rattled by how much it hurt and relieved when it stopped. That experience too left me feeling better and more ordered, though well short of grace. It was a different kind of order, a return to a tired but whole state in which I figured I could get through the day after all. I felt no sense of elevation, just as there was no sense of elevation above the water in Goethel's boat. I stood a while holding the transom and watching the sky and horizon in hopes of seeing birds or whales or dolphins, something to divert my attention, but they had fled elsewhere on this scouring day. 

I went back inside, my face damp with sea mist, and talked some more with Dave Goethel about how he and so many other fishermen could see this piece of water so differently than the National Marine Fisheries Service saw it.  

I had become fascinated with a squabble that took its most visible form in a disagreement, by orders of magnitude, over how many fish were in this piece of ocean. The argument could seem astonishing or even ludicrous when you first encountered it. How could two groups of people who spent so much time on the same stretch of water differ so profoundly on the population count of its major species? Granted, the sea is opaque. Counting fish is considerably more challenging than taking census of caribou or bears or coyotes or even songbirds. Still, I at first found it incredible, in every sense of that word, that two well-informed parties could not agree on the status of some of the system's biggest, most dominant species. Yet that was the case. The fishermen and NMFS scientists of the New England fishery, our country's oldest, most important, and most thoroughly studied, argued about the health of the cod and haddock stocks of Georges Bank until those stocks collapsed in 1992, and ever since then they had been arguing about the cod population of the inner Gulf of Maine, which was, depending on whom you asked, either in immediate danger of complete collapse or doing fairly well.

These cod composed the heart of the New England groundfishery, which had for centuries been one of the world's most productive and significant fisheries. It was the fish, as described in Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, that altered history by so enriching the colonists they quickly became major players in international trade.1 When European settlers first came to New England, these cod gave themselves up in an "abundance," wrote one Salem minister in 1629, "almost beyond believing." They surged along the coast by the tens of thousands, some as big as grown men. They readily took the hook. Worldwide demand for their flesh, which tastes as clean as its snowy white appearance suggests, soon made the colonies an increasingly self-sufficient, self-confident political power and gave them the financial means to seek and win political independence. 

Over the decades that followed, Americans would find more astonishingly abundant resources - timber, coal, farmland, oil. Yet it was with the New England cod that this young nation devised what a biologist might call its life strategy: Find nature's richness, then exploit and defend it with ferocious independence. In a country where seemingly endless natural blessings created unprecedented wealth and a singularly individualistic optimism, the cod of New England had been the first such blessing. 

Now we had decimated this richness, overfishing it so badly that some scientists worried we'd broken some vital part of it, and amid the ensuing disbelief, pain, and anger raged this strange battle between fishermen and scientists.* In its most simplistic and, unfortunately, most common expression, this dispute took the form of a "It's your fault!" - "No, it's yours!" shouting match that made almost everyone appear foolish, callous, or both. The whole thing made you suspect that one of the sides was deluding themselves. The gigabytes of scientific evidence marshaled by NMFS, of course, suggested that it was the fishermen.

What was going on here? Part of the answer lies within the two memories I described above: one of an apparently effortless, relatively detached observation from a high platform that sees far and wide (with an occasional dip to the surface); the other of an engagement with the ocean that, if it lacks the high perspective of the first, is far more direct, visceral, and intimate. As quite a few fishermen and scientists have noted (they can agree at least on this), NMFS, dropping its sampling nets all over the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank twice yearly, had a better view of the big picture than most fishermen did, while the fishermen, out on the ocean every day, knew any given piece of water in far more detail and under many more conditions and circumstances.

In an ideal world these two views would merge into something richer. But they had not, and the more I looked at the New England fishery, the more I believed the failure to reconcile these two perspectives had played a major role in the fishery's collapse and was crippling the effort to revive it.

I don't mean to be coy or to substitute the obscure for the obvious: Overfishing caused the fishery's collapse, and overfishing threatens its recovery. Nor do I mean to imply that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to generate the scientific knowledge necessary to warn of and correct that overfishing. The service had provided such information starting in the mid-1980s, and had the New England Fishery Management Council (the federally authorized regulatory body, composed of state fishery regulators and fishermen appointed by the region's governors, that was supposed to regulate the fishery) responded to that information by imposing reasonable restraints, they could have prevented the whole mess with much less sacrifice by those who fished. Today we'd still have plenty of fish and happy fishermen alike.

Yet as I hope this book makes clear, the rift between fishermen and NMFS scientists over how to look at the ocean and think about fish not only fostered discord, doubt, and mistrust that made it difficult to convince fishermen and regulators to curb overfishing; it also impoverished our understanding of the ocean, including NMFS's assessments of fish populations, by hindering the exchange of information and perspective that might have created a fuller, more informed, and more informative science that respected and included the vast knowledge held by the fishing community. Such a science certainly would have stood a better chance of convincing fishermen to restrain their fishing. And today it would provide additional insight we need to revive the fishery.

How did this schism come to exist? More than a century before, when NMFS's predecessor, the U.S. Fish Commission, had been established, the two parties had started out committed to a single, mutual cause, a healthy fishery. But after years of bickering, discord, mounting doubt, and fading commitment they found themselves, much like an estranged couple, first in a state of alienation and then enmity, suspicion, even hatred. It had never been an easy union. Yet it had begun with promise, the two sides dedicated if not to each other then to a shared devotion to the sea and its health: the government scientists to the monitoring and care of the fishery, the fishermen to a respect for a science that so aided them. Now the two sides could scarcely speak. What went wrong? Who strayed? Who first abandoned their vows?

Seen that way, the dispute seems explainable only by attributing blindness, dishonesty, or insanity to one side or the other - which many did. "Who Says There's No Fish?" was a popular bumper sticker in fishing ports in the 1990s, and the defiant antagonism in that statement speaks volumes about how deeply some of the fishermen were willing to look at the problem - and about how much they trusted NMFS's numbers. At the other end of the spectrum, some scientists felt that most of the fishermen were either lying or willfully myopic when they said there were plenty of fish out there.

This haggling over fish numbers, however, was just the distractingly visible part of the dispute - a sort of red herring, if you will, that had been made necessary and critical only because the New England Fishery Management Council's consideration of NMFS's population assessments offered the only place that the opinions of fishermen and scientists regarding fish populations ever met. By that time, of course, it was far too late to reconcile the two perspectives; that could be accomplished only much further up the perceptual stream, as it were, and nothing in the regulatory set-up encouraged such convergence. So NMFS and the fishermen ended up arguing over numbers, and each side would say things that seemed inexplicable to the other.

Yet if you go to sea with some of the many sensible, conscientious, and attentive people on either side of this debate, you find they are not fools or boors and that their disagreement is not simply a spat between parties blinded by rage or arrogance (though it's in constant danger of deteriorating into such). Rather, it's is a disagreement among knowledgeable, honest people about fundamental definitions of fact, perception, and understanding. That two parties who know the same water so well can regard it so differently is not an absurdity; it's a Sphinxian riddle, the solution of which illuminates not only the complexities of a fascinating science and an extraordinarily fertile piece of the earth but also the difficulties we all face in trying to see the world as freshly and completely as possible. For what is a Sphinxian riddle if not a challenge to our usual habits of thought? This puzzle of how many fish were in the ocean about fish is partly an argument about fish, science, and culture and partly an argument about how to look at the world.

The dispute between fishermen and scientists draws some of its intensity from the cultural chasm between them, which mirrors a gap that regularly hinders our larger society's efforts to resolve conflicts about the natural resource extraction, that is, those battles regarding resources most of us use, such as timber, oil, and fish, that are pulled from the earth by some subset of our society to whom we hand this dirty work. Such conflicts tend to get cast in the well-worn "environmental issue" template, a loggers-versus-Sierra-Club script, one party taking another to task for "abusing the resource" or "raping the earth," the other clumsily, often righteously defending itself  - the dullest and often the least productive way to approach such problems. It stages as a tired morality play, good guys versus bad, a conflict that is more essentially about our alienation from the earth (and here I mean the dirty part of the earth and its creatures, the crumbly and itchy and slimy stuff, the soil and mud and blood and mucus and milt and roe that we wash from ourselves after we engage life especially closely) and especially from the task of yanking from it our sustenance and (so embarrassing to consider!) our wealth. I had already seen, while writing with a friend a book about people who earn their livings in and from New England's forest, how readily the softer-living among us take offense at this extractive work and how we express our anxiety and horror by blaming the people who've taken or been stuck with the roles of direct extractors. 2 We cast them as villains, projecting onto them not just the physical but also the moral and ethical responsibility for ripping up the raw materials for our seemingly endless needs and wants.

This communal alienation and discomfort seems distinctly at play in this fish fight, both in the rift between fishermen and scientists and in the larger public's readiness to accept the easy answer that the fishermen just got too greedy. At play as well, and helping to explain the apparently contradictory nostalgia and guarded respect people feel for "good" fishermen, is the subdued, largely unconscious regret that most of us feel about our own lack of deep physical engagement with the natural world. It was and is the play of these interwoven currents and tensions, rather than the more audible uproar over fish numbers or the battle between the catch-'em-all and save-'em-all camps, that caught me up in this story and that I attempt to follow in these pages.

Resolving these tensions and divisions is not easy, and it strikes me that it almost has to be done more on the water than in meeting rooms. That was certainly the approach taken by  the scientist who merged the perspectives of fishermen and scientist most successfully, an avid angler, sailor, zoologist, and oceanographer named Henry Bryant Bigelow. The most accomplished oceanographer and fishery scientist of his generation, Bigelow pioneered the scientific exploration of the Gulf of Maine in the early twentieth century. He came to know the Gulf perhaps as well as anyone has ever known any large natural system, and he did so largely by blending the mental habits and knowledge of the scientist and the fisherman. This integration made his work, particularly his comprehensive field guide Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, so informative and inspiring that even today he is admired unreservedly by both sides. No individual today could command the sort of comprehensive knowledge that Bigelow possessed. There's simply too much to know. Yet there's no reason Bigelow's determinedly inclusive, synthesizing approach can't be more common. This book is, among other things, a call to let the Henry Bigelow in scientists and fishermen come out and run things. 

Beyond that I don't pretend to offer some precise lesson about how to rescue the fishery or live better or save our souls through closer connections to the earth. We can't all go into fishing or farming or logging (though I believe we might live and behave more decently if we understood those who do).

And I certainly don't want to make this rather exciting dispute over fish and fishery science seem too somber. The story of this schism and its effects clearly has sobering aspects. Yet it's marvelously and inspiringly full of life - the vitality of an uncontrollable, ultimately unknowable sea and its strange, frightening, and beautiful creatures on one hand, and on the other the energy and spirit of smart, irrepressible, unpredictable people who work there with great joy and humor and refuse to surrender to the many reasons for despair or cynicism. I found here some of the funniest, most generous, and most fascinating people I've ever met - the more so, strangely, for being caught in the "god-awful time," as one of them put it, of today's fisheries crisis. 

It's a mess these angry, confused, and determined people are still trying to sort out (aided, or not, rather clumsily by the rest of us), and it's far from clear how it will end. Despite the considerable damage to the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, I don't worry in any essential, absolute sense about how those biological systems will fare in the long term. My own guess is that by means either ugly (see Part Four) or more graceful (see the remainder of the book), we'll restrain our fishing enough to let these fecund waters recover. I do worry, however, whether in trying to save this and other fisheries we will leave intact any working relationship between the people of our coastal towns and our ocean - something more vital and profoundly cultural than aesthetic or recreational connections. I wonder too whether fishermen and scientists (and the rest of us, for that matter) can reconcile the various ways in which we see the natural world to produce a more nuanced, inclusive, and dynamic perspective - a view that takes fuller account of nature human and otherwise.

In my most optimistic moments, I think these things can happen. You can make a strong argument that all of it - the fish, the fishermen, the ocean, the effort to see better and to enrich our communal and individual relations to the outdoors - will tank. When you consider everything pushing us that way, it's easy to succumb to despair or apathy. But if you come to know a few people who see things otherwise, you tend to take heart at the good acts they are capable of. Next thing you know, you feel hope.

Whether such hope is well founded, who knows? Yet each day we rise.

* Unfortunately, the New England fishery, while one of the worst cases, is far from unique in its failure to curb overfishing over the past few decades. As the twenty-first century opened, 11 of the world's 15 most important marine fishing areas were in decline, and 60% of commercial fish species were being fished at or beyond capacity. In the United States alone, mismanagement and overfishing, often aggravated by disputes over science similar to that in New England, had badly depleted major fisheries on all three shores - the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, and most of the Atlantic coast. Similar problems affected at least one if not most major fisheries on every continent, causing incalculable ecological, social, and economic disruption. 

1 Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker and Co., 1997).