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Sometimes only flowing waters can make a
person feel better. One evening this past June was just such an occasion for
me.
I’d spent the better part of a week feeding a pit in the
bottom of my stomach with leftovers from a series of newspaper stories,
scientific journal articles, and governmental reports, none of which had
much inspiring to say concerning the condition of the nation’s fisheries.
What I needed was the kind of therapy only pristine waters and the wild fish
that inhabit them can provide.
Fighting my way through the tangled undergrowth lining a
favored Matanuska Valley destination, I eagerly anticipated the evening of
casts and contemplation that waited ahead. The solstice sunset had turned
the peaked horizon a hundred different shades of pink and orange, a warm
breeze beckoned, and the night was as still as it was picturesque. The
stream flowed clean and clear and proclaimed its good health in a cascade of
little chirps and burbles. It looked and sounded nothing like the played out
waters I had read about.
“Ploink,” said a small trout, its rainbow sheen flashing
against the blooming sky as it arced from the water. A wild trout, too,
there was no doubt. My heartbeat accelerated like it only can when standing
shin-deep in cold mountain water and spotting that first rise. Thank
goodness for Alaska, I thought.
By driving a mere thirty minutes from my home, it seemed I
had crossed over to a realm millions of miles away from the one stuffed with
rumors of impending catastrophe facing the world’s fisheries.
The World Summit on Salmon—a gathering of over 160
scientists, fishing and environmental advocates, and government
officials—had recently concluded with their now standard predictions of the
doom (interspersed with a dash of gloom) facing the Pacific’s wild salmon.
Unfortunately, none of the information they provided was novel, which I
think is a fairly telling indictment of the world we live in today.
Overfishing, destruction of habitat by urban development,
logging and agriculture, dams, hatcheries, fugitives from the ever more
prevalent fish farms, water withdrawals for irrigation, and predation from
birds and marine mammals—the remaining wild stocks face life impediments
enough to make market-bound steers feel hopeful.
All scary stuff, but somewhat tempered by the knowledge that only the last
of those is beyond our control. Sooner or later, one likes to think, we’ll
have to figure it out. Being keen students of history, none of us needs to
be reminded of what happened when the inhabitants of Easter Island cut down
their last tree. (The trick to this sort of self-induced obliviousness is to
forget that despite strong returns to the Columbia Basin in recent years,
the wild salmon populations of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California
have continued on a downward trend that began over 150 years ago.)
Depressing? Yes. But it was nothing a few quick casts of a
Little Yellow Stonefly couldn’t handle.
Then came the 144-page report released by the Pew Oceans
Commission in early June, wherein the private study panel made sweeping
recommendations to Congress for saving the nation’s oceans, showing concern
for which is now very fashionable. In an otherwise dismal document, it was
nice to see Alaska’s fishery managers singled out for maintaining the
healthiest wild fish populations while also accounting for over half of the
country’s annual commercial landings in tonnage. From there, though, things
went downhill.
The Pew panelists said that U.S. and global seas were in
dire need of better protections, and that the nation’s primary commercial
fishing law emphasized profit and jobs over preserving wild fish
populations. The parallel offered was of the 1970s when an acquiescent
bureaucracy allowed the logging industry to basically set its own
regulations, which were based on maintaining the harvest, not the forest.
Flying over the Oregon coastline is enough to tell anyone how well that
worked out.
On the whole, the Pew Commission’s appraisal of our
country’s waters was more disturbing than the first I had read, enough so
that it would take a little more than scenery and a few false casts to
digest. Still, the wine-red fingers of evening light did much to encourage
peace, and the stream, seeming to recognize my considerable unease,
responded by prompting more and more trout to leap all around me.
I was just beginning to believe that the almost
preternatural harmony afforded anglers was going to extend to me on that
evening. Then I remembered the most unsettling of the recent articles. It
was the cover story of the May 15 edition of the international journal
Nature, where two of the world’s leading fisheries biologists revealed the
results of a ten-year study of large predatory fish communities from four
continental shelves and nine oceanic systems. Their conclusion? Only ten
percent of all large fish—both open ocean species like tuna, swordfish, and
marlin, and large ground fish such as cod and halibut—were left in the sea.
Ouch.
Not surprisingly, the Nature article had initiated the
spilling of gallons of ink. The New York Times ran an editorial under the
title “Oceans in Peril,” and almost every news outlet I could find, from CNN
to the Anchorage Daily News, at least acknowledged the report’s existence.
Responses ranged from alarm to downright hostility.
What the Nature article did not say was that commercial
fishing is older than the nation itself. Shortly after an Italian-born
skipper’s three famous boats sailed upon the coast of North America, Basque
fishermen were finding profitable new fishing grounds off what is now New
England and Nova Scotia. Small towns and villages from the northeastern
coast of the United States to the western shores of Alaska owe both their
birth and their continued existence to a commercial fishing heritage.
Alaska’s first salmon cannery began operations in the Tlingit village of
Klawock on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island in 1878. Statehood
didn’t come until some eighty-odd years later.
From the writings of Melville and Joseph Conrad to the
images of hardy sailors braving Poseidon’s most violent storms, fishing the
high seas and the men and women who do it have seeped into our national
consciousness. They’re as embedded in the American myth as the narrow-eyed,
leather skinned cowboys of the West. It’s a mighty tradition—not mine, but I
do respect, and in some ways, envy it.
The Nature article does most emphatically point out,
however, that there were little to no regulations imposed on early
commercial fishermen. Those with some grasp of Alaska’s past already know
this. Often an early saltery would be built near a productive stream or
river mouth and after a cycle of salmon runs (four or five years), the
salter would move on, as there hadn’t been nearly enough escapement to
provide for the future. Salmon populations appeared boundless, and that
appearance was taken as fact. Eventually, the federal government began
regulating the Alaskan wild salmon fisheries, but those early attempts at
management were either too feeble or rather weakly enforced.
On a worldwide scale, the industrialization of fishing
really began in the early 19th century, when English fishermen began
operating steam trawlers, soon after rendered even more effective by power
winches and post-World War I diesel engines. The close of the Second World
War added more peace dividends to the industrialization of fishing: freezer
trawlers, radar, and acoustic fish finders.
Regulation in no way kept pace with technology. Fishermen
were allowed to scoop up or hook fish until production declined in their
area of operation, after which they could simply move on to more fertile
fishing grounds. This cycle of first exploitation and then relocation
constituted a major point within the Nature article. The authors’ study
showed that the numbers of fish dropped fastest during the first years, as
fisheries moved into new areas, often before any fisheries management
protocols were in place—and before anyone was looking. Thus, they contend
the scale of devastation has remained hidden, as in most of the world’s
oceans industrial fishing began long before accurate estimates of fish
numbers began to appear. The danger, the authors insist, is that fisheries
managers to this day remain unaware of the initial plenty and come to see
this degraded state as normal or even healthy.
Ransom Myers, a renowned biologist based at Dalhousie
University in Canada and one of the Nature report’s authors went even
further. “We are in massive denial and continue to bicker over the last
shrinking numbers of survivors,” he said, “employing satellites and sensors
to catch the last fish left.”
It’s hard to envision the collapse of the world’s
fisheries when standing amidst a squadron of wild trout, or when a two-hour
drive, flight, or boat ride in almost any direction will land a person smack
in the middle of more wild salmon than they could ever count. But I was
having trouble wishing (or fishing) this one away. Just maybe, I thought,
there’s fact enough here to support some belief, however unpopular it may be
in some circles, however fashionable in others. After all, it seems
ludicrous to prolong the idea that our country’s oceans, lakes, rivers, and
streams will continue to provide what we need just because we need it.
“Ploink,” said a little trout. Wild, no doubt.
Thank goodness, I thought.
—Troy Letherman
Editor
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