The collapse of a fishery

There’s plenty of blame to go around in the cod disaster

By JODI DELONG

George Rose has been thinking about the oceans, fish and fisheries for his entire adult life. He’s head of fisheries conservation with the Fisheries and Marine Institute at Newfoundland and Labrador’s Memorial University, a former fisheries scientist with DFO, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-sponsored scientific body that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.

In his recently released book, Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Rose has put his years of research and experience to work. The result is a comprehensive, exhaustive and balanced look at a fishery and a fish that has affected countless lives over the centuries.

"Many fishermen remain more excited catching one cod worth $2 than tonnes of crab worth thousands," Rose writes in the preface to his book. In that sentence he captures the passions that have fuelled a fishery and a people for hundreds of years.

Maybe it’s only Atlantic Canadians, and others who live and work by and on the sea, who remember the terrible des-pair when then-federal fisheries minister John Crosbie announced "the moratorium" on cod fishing in 1992. But this book should be required reading for anyone in politics in this country, or for anyone who is interested in climate change, the fisheries and the human role in such weighty subjects.

You don’t have to have a degree in fisheries science to read or learn from this book, although you may feel like you’ve obtained one. As Rose observes, telling the story of the Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery couldn’t be done in isolation; he had to explore the marine ecosystems where the fish lived, and also the social and historical events that created, maintained and ultimately undermined an immense fishery and the people dependent on it.

So he starts his story with a genesis, that of the Grand Banks, and explains about ocean currents and temperatures before moving into the origins of cod and other fish. He then explores the history of the humans who relied on the fishery, starting with ancient races of Indians and Paleo-Eskimos and moving through to modern aboriginals and the arrival of Europeans. He demonstrates that politics was enmeshed in the nets of the fishery from its earliest days.

According to Rose, most fish species other than cod and salmon weren’t terribly affected by human activities before 1800, when "be they English or French, planter, migrant, by-boat keeper or settler, there were fish for all."

Making a living from the sea wasn’t easy. Dr. Rose looks at fishing vessels and means of taking fish as well as the species that were being harvested. As we move forward into the 19th and 20th centuries, means of going farther and taking more fish were perfected.

Signs that the stocks were in trouble began to be noticed in the 1950s and ’60s, but commissions and reports urged politicians to continue lauding the efforts of the fishery, for, as the Dawe Commission said, "one can never deplete a fishery."

There are many who can be blamed for the collapse of the cod stocks, and not just those from many countries who harvested the fish to near-extinction. A lack of strength in fisheries science at Memorial throughout the second half of the 20th century is a factor, according to Rose; politicians eager for votes listened to those with interests in continuing to fish. Couple this with changes in water temperatures and fish movement patterns, add the rapacious foreign and Canadian trawler fleets, and the die was cast for what Rose calls "the ‘perfect’ demise of the northern cod."

Will stocks of the once mighty cod recover and flourish again? Rose is not optimistic; he’s been heard in the media in recent months criticizing the opening of a modest food fishery for cod in Newfoundland and Labrador. But he also argues that climate change will inflict more damage on the fishery than overfishing.

He does maintain: "Whichever path is taken, the fishery will write the future of Newfoundland and Labrador as it has written its history."

( jdelong@herald.ca)