The Mortal Sea

Until the twentieth century, it was commonly believed that the oceans, filled with vast quantities of fish, were immortal.  It was impossible for mere humans to ever make a dent in the sea’s enormous bounty.  Similarly, iron miners once believed that the Lake Superior lodes could be mined for eternity.  The white pines of the region were so numerous that it would be impossible to cut them all down.  Incredible fantasies are common among folks who are blissfully ignorant of eco-history, and don’t understand the reality of fish mining, mineral mining, forest mining, soil mining.

A society unaware of eco-history is like an elder lost in an Alzheimer’s fog.  He doesn’t recognize his wife or children, and has no memory of who he is, where he is, or what he’s done.  History turns on floodlights, sharply illuminating the path of our journey, making the boo-boos stand out like sore thumbs.  It’s more than a little embarrassing, but if we can see the pitfalls, we’re less likely to leap into them.  In theory, we are capable of learning from our mistakes.

Jeffrey Bolster is a history professor who once loved to fish.  He realized that the Hall of History desperately needed more illumination on humankind’s abusive relationship with the oceans, because it was a tragicomedy of endlessly repeated self-defeating mistakes.  He wrote The Mortal Sea, which focused on the rape of the North Atlantic — and he quit fishing.

In prehistoric Western Europe, many folks congregated along the water’s edge.  They harvested shellfish from the sea, but most of their fish came from rivers and estuaries.  Following the transition to agriculture and metal tools, their population grew and grew.  Forests were cut, fields were plowed, and streams were loaded with eroded soil, livestock wastes, human sewage, and industrial discharges.  Hungry mobs got too good at catching too many fish with too many traps.  England passed the Salmon Preservation Act in 1285, but it was little enforced and generally ignored.

Meanwhile, Viking innovations resulted in boat designs that were excellent for travelling the open seas.  They made it possible to aggressively pursue saltwater seafood, which was incredibly abundant.  Vikings learned to air-dry cod, which could be stored for years, and provide sustenance for long voyages of walrus hunting, auk killing, raping, and pillaging.  Before long, all coastal communities started building seaworthy boats, and hauling in the cod, mackerel, herring, and so on.  The human population grew, and marine life diminished.

In the sixteenth century, when Europeans explored the American shoreline, they were astonished by the abundance of sea life.  They observed hundreds of thousands of walruses, which could grow up to 2,600 pounds (1,180 kg), critters that were nearly extinct at home.  In those days, the oil industry was based on whales, walruses, and seals.

Halibut could grow to 700 pounds (317 kg).  There were sturgeons more than 600 pounds (272 kg), and cod five feet long (1.5 m).  One lad caught 250 cod in an hour, with just four hooks.  They killed seabirds like there was no tomorrow, using many for fish bait.  Lobsters were huge and plentiful, but their flesh spoiled quickly, so they were fed to hogs, used for bait, and spread on fields for fertilizer.

Maine and northward was home to the Mi’kmaqs and Malecites, who got 90 percent of their calories from sea life.  Their population was not supersized by agriculture.  They had no metal tools or high tech boats, nor a spirituality in which humans were the masters of the universe.  For some reason, they had failed to destroy their ecosystem.  Then, they were discovered, and the whites went crazy with astonishing greed.  “By 1800 the northwest Atlantic was beginning to resemble European seas.”  Where’s the fish?

Between America and Europe, the boreal North Atlantic had been among the world’s most productive fishing grounds.  The bulk of the book discusses how clever white folks skillfully transformed unimaginable abundance into an aquatic disaster area.  In the waters off Maine, Peak Cod occurred around the Civil War, long before industrial fish mining.  By 1875, writers were speculating about the extinction of menhaden, lobster, halibut, eider, shad, salmon, mackerel, and cod.

The fish mining industry was driven by a desperate arms race.  Hand-line fishing had been the norm since the Middle Ages.  Each fisherman set four to twenty-eight baited hooks.  Then, geniuses invented long-line fishing, which used 4,000 hooks.  More fish were caught, and more money was made.  By 1870, some fishers were setting 63 miles of lines with 96,000 baited hooks.

By 1880, geniuses were delighted to discover that gill nets could triple the haul — and they eliminated the need for bait, which was getting scarce and expensive.  For mackerel mining, the new purse seines were fabulous.  They used nets to surround an entire school of fish, and could land 150,000 per day.  In 1905 came steam-powered otter trawls — huge nets dragged across the sea floor that caught everything.  Only 45 percent of the fish landed were kept.  Unmarketable fish were tossed back dead, including juveniles of marketable species.  Millions of dead juveniles did not grow into mature fish, reproduce, and maintain the viability of the species.

Throughout the long gang rape of the North Atlantic, there were always voices urging caution and conservation, but they never ran the show.  As more and more capital poured into fish mining enterprises, resistance to regulation increased.  The one and only objective for fat cats was maximizing short-term profits.  Government bureaucrats who monitored the industry experimented with many interesting programs for increasing fish stocks — everything except for reducing fishing pressure.

New technology expanded the market for seafood.  Salting and drying were replaced by keeping fish on ice, and shipping them to market by rail.  Later, canneries created even bigger demand for fish.  The first floating fish factory was launched in 1954, and was followed by many more.  These boats had assembly lines for gutting, cleaning, and filleting the fish.  The fillets were quick frozen, for indefinite storage.  Waste was turned to fishmeal, another source of profit.

In 1992, the cod landings in Canada vanished, and the fishery was closed.  The U.S. closed fishing on Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine.  “The impossible had occurred.  People had killed most of the fish in the ocean.”  Folks had been overfishing since Viking days, but industrial fishing put the process into overdrive.  The cod show no signs of recovery.

Bolster concluded that the way to avoid unsustainable harvests was to adopt the precautionary approach, which meant always selecting the least destructive option.  This was an excellent idea, for a world ruled by pure reason.  Maybe we should contemplate phasing out all commercial fishing, because history is clear: any enterprise having to do with the accumulation of personal property, wealth, and social status tends to turn ambitious folks into insatiable parasites with no respect for the future.  Actually, the industry is working hard to terminate itself — before oceanic acidification beats it.

One more thing before I go.  Some folks have dreams of replacing today’s maritime fleet with zero emission sailing ships, but they don’t remember the downside.  Bolster warns us, “Fishing made coal mining look safe.  No other occupation in America came close to the deep-sea fisheries for workplace mortality.”  In just Gloucester, from 1866 to 1890, more than 380 schooners and 2,450 men were lost at sea.  When powerful squalls race in, sailboats are hard to control, and very dangerous.

Over the centuries, interregional commerce has made many fat cats fatter, but it’s also led to many catastrophes, like the spread of bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, influenza, measles, smallpox, rinderpest, potato blight, chestnut blight, assorted empires, and on and on.  Countless millions have died as an unintended consequence of long-distance travel.  It isn’t necessary for a sustainable future.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey, The Mortal Sea — Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, The Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012.

The End of the Line

Charles Clover’s book, The End of the Line, is a heartbreaking story about the seafood industry’s War on Fish.  The poor fish don’t have much of a chance anymore, because there’s nowhere to hide from the latest technology.  The eventual outcome of this systematic massacre is already obvious — both sides are going to lose.  When the nets finally come up empty, the unemployed fishers will shape-shift into burger flippers, security guards, and homeless panhandlers.  But until that final day, they’ll keep expanding the fleet, and fishing like there’s no tomorrow.

Back in the good old days of the Stone Age, there were vast numbers of fish, and a few scattered clans of low-tech subsistence fishers.  Most people in prehistoric Europe lived near the water, because that’s where the food was.  In the days before trawlers, the oyster population was astonishing.  Many were the size of dinner plates, and some oyster reefs were so big that they hindered navigation.  The Thames and Rhine rivers had huge salmon runs.  There were massive sturgeons in the Rhine delta.  It was an era of glorious abundance.

With the passage of centuries, tribal subsistence fishing eventually mutated into a business, and sustainability drifted away into the mists of the past.  Commercial fishers had an entirely different mindset, one with vivid fantasies of wealth and power.  Some refer to it as get-rich-quick fever, a painful incurable spiritual disease.  Using the technology of the day, they caught as many fish as possible, and converted them into money.  No matter how much they made, their burning hunger for treasure could never be satisfied. 

Over time, new technology enabled fishers to increase their landings.  By 1848, the “inexhaustible” halibut fishery on Georges Bank crashed, after a mere decade of overfishing.  It was once common to catch halibut as big as a man, but these fish are rarely seen at markets today.  The advent of steam-powered trawlers radically increased overfishing.  Today there are $89 million floating fish factories, 480 feet long, that can catch and freeze 440 tons of fish per day, and store 7,700 tons in the hold.  The Technology Fairy is a demon.

In 1500, there were 4,400,000 tons of cod off Newfoundland.  By 2003, there were just 55,000 tons.  Cod fishing was shut down in 1992, and 44,000 people lost their jobs.  The cod have yet to show signs of recovery.  The same is true for the North Sea mackerel, which collapsed in the 1970’s.  Tuna, sharks, and swordfish are swimming briskly down the Dinosaur Trail.

Experts calculate that global fish production peaked in 1988, and may now be declining at a rate of 770,000 tons per year.  Production statistics don’t include bycatch — the fish, sea mammals, birds, and turtles that are caught but tossed back, because they can’t be sold.  Nobody keeps records on bycatch, but some believe that one-third of the global catch is dumped overboard, almost all of it dead or dying, usually because of ruptured swim bladders or drowning.

Clover complains that we can put a man on the moon, but no nation does a competent job of managing fisheries, with the possible exception of Iceland.  Everybody can see that the industry is heading for disaster.  There are already plenty of intelligent rules on the books, but effective enforcement is almost non-existent.  Overfishing generates good income, fuels the economy, and hurts no one except for our children, the aquatic ecosystem, and poor people in foreign countries — none of whom can vote.  The bottom line is that nobody will voluntarily back off, because the fish that you don’t catch will be caught by someone else. 

Monthly payments on modern boats are huge, and for many fishers, the only way to pay the bills is to catch and sell illegal fish.  There are many ways of getting illegal fish to market.  Port inspectors often look the other way, especially in Spain and Portugal.  Extremely inaccurate paperwork is submitted and accepted.  Illegal fish are delivered in mismarked boxes.  If an inspector appears at port A, the boat will unload at port B, and truck the catch to the processor.  Few violators get busted and punished.  The huge economic benefits of pirate fishing far exceed the trivial risks.

Four times every day, all fish stop what they’re doing, bow their heads, and fervently pray for World War III on the dry land above, because world wars put a halt to most fishing activities.  War provides a much-appreciated break from the underwater mass extermination.  They also pray for skyrocketing energy prices, catastrophic stock market crashes, and major bankruptcies in the seafood sector.  They’re sick and tired of being the target of genocidal maniacs.  Who can blame them?

During the research process, Clover was surprised to discover that McDonalds got a top score for their fish, all of which is certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).  At the opposite end of the spectrum are most chi-chi restaurants.  World-famous celebrities, who would never dream of wearing a fur coat, are often photographed with famous chefs who serve the seafood equivalent of rhinoceros steaks or condor barbeque — species on the brink of extinction, like the extremely endangered tuna served at gold-plated sushi places.  MSC-certified fish is also sold at Wal-Mart.

Clover has no kind words for aquaculture, which many perceive to be the amazing high-tech “solution” to all of our seafood problems.  Industry is vacuuming up the smaller fish in the ocean to make feed for high value fish raised in horrid concentration camps.  This game cannot last long.  Be aware that “organic” farmed salmon is given feed made from overfished species.

Thankfully, Clover provides us with a brilliant alternative to aquaculture.  Rather than feeding low-value fish to concentration camp salmon, why don’t we simply eat the perfectly edible blue whiting, herring, horse mackerel, and sand eels?  They could provide us with excellent high quality protein and oils that totally bypass the mega-harmful worlds of agriculture and aquaculture.  Eating small wild fish is healthier for us, much less cruel, causes less harm to the seas, and makes us feel like an intelligent species.

Did you know that recreational fishers catch 30 percent of the cod taken off the coast of Maine?  Did you know that about 25 percent of “catch and release” fish die soon after being returned to the water?  Sport fishers now have sonar, fish finders, GPS systems, and small fast boats.  Their impact is not insignificant.  Anglers often break the rules, and their chances of getting caught are close to nil.

Clover provides us with intelligent, effective, commonsense solutions that are politically impossible, unfortunately.  We should set aside 50 percent of the ocean as reserves where fishing is prohibited.  We should also cut back industrial fishing by 50 percent.  We should create an aggressive full-scale oceanic police force that would have absolute authority to promptly end illegal fishing, and provide extra-generous punishment to offenders.  We should consume less fish, and shop more mindfully.  And so on.  “We have on offer two futures.  One requires difficult, active choices starting now.  If we don’t take those choices, the other future will happen anyway.”

Clover, Charles, The End of the Line, The New Press, New York, 2006.