Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse

Managed Annihilation

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The Nature | History | Society series is devoted to the publication of high-quality scholarship in environmental history and allied fields. Its broad compass is signalled by its title: nature because it takes the natural world seriously; history because it aims to foster work that has temporal depth; and society because its essential concern is with the interface between nature and society, broadly conceived. The series is avowedly interdisciplinary and is open to the work of anthropologists, ecologists, historians, geographers, literary scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and others whose interests resonate with its mandate. It offers a timely outlet for lively, innovative, and wellwritten work on the interaction of people and nature through time in North America. General Editor: Graeme Wynn, University of British Columbia Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia Greg Gillespie, Hunting for Empire: Narratives of Sport in Rupert’s Land, 1840-70 Stephen J. Pyne, Awful Splendour: A Fire History of Canada Hans M. Carlson, Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-55 Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 Jamie Linton, What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction

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Managed Annihilation An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse

dean bavington

foreword by graeme wynn

UBC Press • Vancouver • Toronto

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© UBC Press 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

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Printed in Canada on ancient-forest-free paper (100% post-consumer recycled) processed chlorine- and acid-free Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

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UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 www.ubcpress.ca

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For my parents – Grace Ann Willis and Bill Bavington

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Contents

Figures and Tables / xx Foreword / xx Graeme Wynn Preface / xx Acknowledgments / xx Abbreviations / xx 1 A Sea Swarming with Fish / xx 2 The Introduction and Development of Cod Fisheries Management / xx 3 Success through Failure: The Expansion of Management after the Moratorium / xx 4 Socio-Ecological System Description of the Cod Fishery / xx 5 From Managing Fish to Managing Fishermen / xx 6 Managing Cod from Egg to Plate / xx

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Contents

7 Articulating Management into Cod Fisheries / xx 8 Alternatives to Management and Managerial Ecology / xx Notes / xx Bibliography / xx Index / xx

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Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 Major managerial meanings and their hierarchical relations / xx 2.1 NAFO fisheries management zones / xx 2.2 Adapted Gordon-Schaefer model / xx 3.1 Conceptual model for SOHO systems / xx 3.2 SOHO systems model / xx 3.3 Large, middle, and small number systems / xx 5.1 Cartoon by political cartoonist P. Pickersgill / xx 6.1 Newfoundland and Labrador cod aquaculture sites and cod hatcheries / xx Tables 3.1 History of economic organization, political logics, fishing technologies, and fisheries science in the cod fisheries of Newfoundland (1500-2010) / xx 3.2 Comparison between single-species and ecosystem-based fisheries management / xx 3.3 Properties of complex systems to keep in mind when thinking about SOHO fisheries systems descriptions / xx

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3.4 New questions that flow from the SOHO systems heuristic applied to fisheries / xx 4.1 Data on landings, number of fishing vessels, and licences between 1991 and 2001 / xx 4.2 Types of uncertainty faced by global seafood-processing corporations and the managerial coping strategies they use to address them / xx

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foreword

This Is More Difficult Than We Thought by Graeme Wynn

A

nother study of the demise of the Newfoundland cod fishery? Surely this topic, like the codfish itself, has been done almost to death. Since 1992, when Canada’s minister of fisheries acknowledged the dramatic collapse of northern cod stocks in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador and imposed a strict moratorium (subsequently extended indefinitely, although subject to limited regional exemptions) on all fishing for cod, thousands of trees have been sacrificed and much ink has been spread to produce countless pages of discussion of this calamitous event, described by one commentator as “an ecological crime comparable to the Soviet Union’s draining of the Aral Sea.”1 Writ large this story offers a classic tale of human rapaciousness and the plundering of nature’s bounty.2 Waters that sixteenth-century sailors described as teeming with cod quickly became the focus of an international fishery that drew men and ships on annual voyages from the eastern shores of the Atlantic to the Grand Banks (and other fishing grounds) to provide food for much of Europe. With time, men from England, Ireland, and France began to overwinter on the island of Newfoundland, a colonial territory that British politicians thought of, metaphorically, as “a great ship moored near the banks in the fishing season for the convenience of English fishermen.”3 Gradually, women joined the fishermen, and settlement of the “new founde lande” advanced. Late in the eighteenth century, some 30,000 English-speakers engaged in the Newfoundland fishery. Approximately forty percent of these people voyaged to the fishing grounds each

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year. The remainder, including almost 3,000 women, sojourned on the island, and when war and economic perturbations at the end of the century sent the fishery into decline and all but ended annual voyaging, they formed the nucleus of an expanding population resident in Newfoundland. By 1840, there were 80,000 people living on the island, most of them scattered in bays and coves beyond the commercial centre of St John’s, and heavily dependent on the fishery. Mainly working the onshore waters, they produced dried salt fish for European and Caribbean markets. Despite the reduced productivity of cod stocks attributable to cold ocean conditions into the 1840s, Newfoundland exports increased almost threefold through the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, and sustained a growing population, albeit usually in very modest circumstances. In truth, the broad long-term upward trend of aggregate catch statistics, which reflected the exploitation of new geographical areas (by extending the fishery to northern Newfoundland and on to Labrador), as well as increasing fishing effort, masked local and short-term fluctuations in the productivity of the fishery. Catch rates per person fell by two-thirds during the nineteenth century. We cannot be certain, but both historical and biological evidence suggests that some bay stocks may have been overfished in the eighteenth century, and there are firmer indications that years of intense (and increasing) exploitation led to local failures of the fishery by the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century, the total catch on the Banks, the inshore, and off distant Labrador began to decline. In the 1940s, inshore catches were lower than they had been for a century, and all of this despite the efforts of growing numbers of fishermen spending more time on the water. In the 1890s there were approximately twice as many fisherman as there had been in 1850s, half the colony’s workforce fished, and almost 85 cents in every dollar of the island’s export earnings came from the cod and seal fisheries.4 In these circumstances, market perturbations hit Newfoundland hard. The world price of salt codfish fell sharply toward the end of the century and after a brief resurgence, declined again after the First World War. Between 1921 and 1945, the number of fishermen in Newfoundland fell by half; early in the 1930s a quarter of the population depended on government relief. The colony teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. In 1934 the government of the United Kingdom assumed responsibility for Newfoundland’s finances and the colony’s elected government was suspended in favour of a sixperson Commission. The Commission moved immediately, despite difficult trading conditions, to assist the fishery by building and then subsidizing the construction of fishing vessels, and improving methods of

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production and marketing. Fifteen years later, in 1949, the colony joined the Canadian Confederation. Still, Newfoundland’s salt fish trade struggled. Exports fell by more than half in the decade after 1947. Economic historian David Alexander, the most astute analyst of this period, concluded his account of these difficult years when 15,000 fishing jobs were lost with a chapter on the “demoralization” of the fishery.5 But the fishery was changing, not dying. Modernization and industrialization were the watchwords of the day. People and communities were forced to confront wrenching alterations to their ways of life. Challenged to improve services to its scattered outport population, the provincial government encouraged some 30,000 residents of over 250 communities to resettle in designated growth centres, where their health and educational needs could be better served. At the same time, new technologies encouraged a shift away from the traditional dispersed onshore salt fish industry to a more capital intensive near-shore and offshore fishery utilizing larger vessels to deliver the catch to central fish plants, where it was frozen for dispatch to distant markets. The costs of participation in this new industrial fishery were not easily met by capital-poor Newfoundlanders, and initially at least markets for frozen fish were neither as large nor as lucrative as anticipated. Moreover, the new technologies robbed Newfoundland of its locational advantage on the edge of the fishing grounds. From the mid-1950s onward, large, diesel-engined trawlers from France, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Portugal, West Germany, the USA, and the USSR worked offshore waters alongside Canadians, processing and freezing their catch onboard and delivering it to market. By 1953, more than 500 trawlers were fishing the northwest Atlantic; a decade later, the number approached 1,000, and many of them were among the largest fishing vessels in the world. Catch rates climbed as the nations of Europe and North America mounted what historian Paul Josephson has termed their “war” on the fish of the North Atlantic ocean.6 Initially, fish stocks may have been larger and healthier than for decades, even centuries, as wartime reductions in fishing effort and long-term productivity cycles produced a population rebound and an increase in the biomass of haddock, plaice, and other species as well as cod. But the battle was more uneven than anyone envisaged. In 1954 the British sent the first stern-trawler to the Grand Banks. In a couple of months the crew caught over 2,000 tonnes of fish. In the years that followed, sophisticated new vessels “armed with the intelligence of oceanography and marine fisheries science,” harvested fish with unprecedented precision and efficiency.7 In the decade or so after 1958, the

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quantity of cod taken from waters off Newfoundland and Labrador tripled. In 1968 the catch from the northwest Atlantic was 1.2 million tonnes, with approximately two-thirds of this from the northern cod stock alone. By one estimate four to five billion cod (more than 14 million tonnes of fish) were taken from the Banks between 1960 and 1972. Indeed, Canadian fisheries biologists Jeffrey Hutchings and Ransom Myers later estimated that between 1960 and 1975 the northern cod catch equalled that taken between 1500 and 1750.8 Onshore, however, catch rates per person fell sharply. By the mid-1970s, the populations of several species of fish (including cod) were down by 75 percent from historical levels of abundance. Late in 1970, Canadian politicians and their officials followed dozens of other states in extending their country’s offshore territorial claim from three to twelve nautical miles. Although this gave Canada the right to stop foreign vessels fishing within this zone, agreements and concessions allowed most nations engaged in the Newfoundland fishery to reduce their activity over several years. When the third United Nations Law of the Sea Conference convened in 1973, Canada sought exclusive control of waters (and fisheries) to the edge of the continental shelf, but international opinion favoured a clear boundary. By 1977, Canada had declared and had recognized its right to manage fisheries within an exclusive economic zone that extended 200 miles offshore. This left the southern and eastern tips (the nose and tail) of the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap (further east) in international waters and open to fishing vessels from other countries, but conferred upon Canada a form of “ownership” over the fish in the exclusive economic zone. Despite the wise and cautious words of the federal minister of fisheries and oceans, Romeo LeBlanc, who “saw no faster road to disaster than forgetting ... that biology cannot keep up with ... technology – that the wealth of the oceans cannot yet match the greed of man,” most local, political, corporate, and bureaucratic minds were filled with optimism.9 Stocks would be rebuilt, the fishery would be rationalized, new fishing and processing capacity would be constructed. In 1980 the Department of Fisheries and Oceans released a report: Northern Cod: A Fisheries Success Story.10 A dozen years later, “the formerly vital Grand Banks, and adjacent continental shelf – once a marvel of the world and a centre of human food production – [had been reduced] to a virtual desert.”11 Many reasons have been offered to explain this collapse. Historical anthropologist Gerald Sider sees the “historical logic of industrial capitalism” as the destroyer of the fishery, and suggests, bizarrely, that a combination of merchant capital and geography (as location) turned rural

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Newfoundlanders into the Mexicans of Canada.12 David Alexander argued that things might have been different after 1949 had the Canadian government not been “either unbelievably myopic or terribly timid about venturing out into the world,” in failing to help Newfoundland achieve an international trading presence “at a time when foreign nations were busily building vessels to come to fish in Canadian waters.”13 Some have blamed the foreign fishermen. They, of course would not have been a “problem” had Canada held out for control of the entire continental shelf in the 1970s, and had not the Law of the Sea Convention insisted that other countries have access to “underutilized” species within Canada’s EEZ.14 One line of thought suggests that there has been “an age-old negative social attitude toward the fishery and its support services, including science.”15 Other accounts have indicted those common villains of environmental declensionist narratives, greed, incompetence, negligence, and rapacity. Climate change appears as the deus ex machina in some versions of this story, because the North Atlantic Oscillation brought some of the coldest years on record to the waters of Newfoundland and Labrador in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and capelin, the most important food of the cod, all but disappeared from northern waters. Political opportunism, bureaucratic incompetence, and industry pressure tactics have also been apportioned a large share of responsibility.16 Although snow crab and shrimp populations in Newfoundland waters have provided a lucrative fishery in the years since the moratorium, and hitherto underutilized species (such as Greenland halibut, winter flounder, and sea cucumbers) have also been taken by some of the 25,000 people still engaged in the fishing industry of Newfoundland and Labrador, doubts about the future – the ecological and social future – of the fishery remain. World seafood prices are high, and money is being made, but both crab and shrimp fisheries face problems, and there is little research into the effects of the rapid increase in exploitation on these stocks. Moreover, the globalization of the fishing industry, which has led to the processing in China of crustaceans taken from Newfoundland waters, has meant that disproportionately few jobs and benefits have been generated for shore workers in Newfoundland and Labrador by the post-moratorium fishery. Cod stocks have not rebuilt as quickly or as widely as hoped since 1992, and when limited catch quotas have been allowed due to political pressures and industry demands they have almost invariably slowed the recovery process. As outport communities face decline, and the young people of Newfoundland and Labrador drift away from the fishery and out of the province, there are insistent concerns about the future.

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Managed Annihilation shares these concerns, but broadens them. Interested in the decades before and after 1992, in the historic fishery as well as the fishery without cod, and convinced that the fate of Newfoundland’s fisheries signals a wider crisis of late-modern resource management, Dean Bavington takes the Newfoundland case as reason to think again about the relations between human and non-human nature in western societies. As its title indicates, Managed Annihilation contends that northern cod were administered unto virtual extinction. Further, the book argues that when this untoward (albeit unintended) outcome became clear, in 1992, neither politicians nor fisheries scientists questioned the fundamental tenets of the managerialist impulse that had brought them to this point. Instead they simply ushered in a new phase of managerial ecology, emphasizing risk and uncertainty in place of “the confident forecasting and control-oriented approach associated with [earlier] single-species scientific management” (p. xx). According to Bavington’s thought-provoking account, for the last two decades fisheries managers and the governments they represent have been abandoning their former roles as researchers and regulators seeking to ensure stability in the fishery in favour of encouraging fishermen to manage themselves. To this end, they have considered two substantially different approaches.17 Turning away, in one direction, from what have come to be regarded as the industrial, capitalist, state-led, and abstractly scientific shortcomings of earlier forms of management, they have acknowledged the value of Local Ecological Knowledge (without denying the worth of formal scientific understanding), recognized the importance of the fishing economy to the (generally small and scattered) places in which fishing families live, and envisaged the possibilities of effective community stewardship. Communitarian at its base, this approach seeks to empower local people and to reduce the socioeconomic inequities that are said to have resulted from the former management regime. Much discussed, it has not been widely implemented. More effective, as an action strategy, at least, has been a second approach that (in Bavington’s words [p. xx]) seeks to achieve “‘mutual coercion mutually agreed upon’ through the self-organizing disciplinary power of the market’s invisible hand.” In pursuing this option, fisheries scientists and managers have discarded their conviction “that the conditions for manageability exist in the nature of cod and fishing people as natural laws passively awaiting discovery” (p. xx) and re-envisaged managerialism “as a condition that must be actively engineered into the very nature of cod and fishing people” (p. xx). To put Bavington’s point bluntly, fisheries

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managers turned from attempting to manage wild fish to domesticating fish and managing fishermen. As a corollary, fishermen are encouraged to “act more like corporate ranchers and farmers than hunters” (p. xx). Rather than pursuing wild fish in the depths of the untamed ocean, they are now expected to become careful harvesters of marine biomass (or fish conceptualized as living property even before they are caught [p. xx]) from a sea that is ever more like the land – enclosed, owned, and fenced about with laws and limits. Conveniently, these strategies proved entirely congruent with prevailing neoliberal economic doctrines emphasizing the challenges of complexity, conflict, and uncertainty in economic systems: “As centralized, state-led command and control, bureaucratic rule-following, and proceduralism ... [fell from] favour, flexibility, coping, experimentation, and learning ... [rose] to take their place” (p. xx). In practice, the line between these seemingly discrete courses of action has blurred. As Bavington notes, “participatory management under neoliberal influence has stressed the importance of using local ecological knowledge and achieving ’buy-in‘ from resource users to achieve consensus, avoid conflict, and permit ongoing economic growth” (p. xx). More to the point, however, is Bavington’s view that neither of these strategies, the communitarian or the neoliberal approach, is truly a significant step forward, because neither questions the ultimate “need for, or the usefulness of, management” (p. xx). And this is the crux of the matter. Managed Annihilation argues that both the colossal failure of natural resources management that became evident in 1992 and subsequent efforts to manage the fishery hold wider lessons for people too much given to framing the world as a set of problems that they have the capacity to fix. Managed Annihilation pleads for renunciation of “the holy grail of manageability,” the belief that all problems (including environmental ones) can be solved merely by exerting more effort, and obtaining greater efficiency, within the status quo order of advanced industrial societies. In the end, this book urges a new view of human-environment relations, one that would replace Western society’s long-standing drive to manage nature with a commitment to living within the limits of the ecosystems of which we are part. This is a bold, some would even say audacious, agenda, not least because it challenges the foundations of environmental stewardship as it has been conceived and practised by a growing proportion of first world societies in the last 150 years. When George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature in 1864, he aimed to challenge prevailing ideas that “the earth made man” by demonstrating that “man in fact made the earth” or, as the subtitle of his book had it, that physical geography was modified by human

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action.18 His fundamental point was that people and their technologies changed nature, in innumerable, often unavoidable ways. There was nothing intrinsically bad about this. Marsh believed, with others of his era, that “mankind’s mission was to subdue and domesticate nature.”19 But the consequences could be serious. Marsh was well aware of “the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world.” Indeed, his book was written out of a deep concern that humankind had “too long forgotten that the earth was given to ... [them] for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste ”20 Recognizing their responsibility for the world they passed to their descendents, responsible societies would, Marsh insisted, mitigate or repair the damage they did, not cease to modify their habitat, because – and on this he was unequivocal – “wherever man fails to master nature, he can but be her slave.”21 Human impacts on nature, understandings of science and society, attitudes toward the environment, confidence in the future, and individual and collective expectations, as well the very language we use to discuss these things, have changed markedly since Marsh’s day. But we live with the legacy of his work, which is often said to have “ushered in a revolution in how people conceived their relations with the earth,” and which Lewis Mumford saw fit to identify as “the fountain-head of the conservation movement.”22 It is not too much to say that Marsh’s plea for stewardship of the earth – starkly but effectively summarized by his biographer and closest student David Lowenthal as: “We are stuck with a managed world; it is up to us to manage it better” – was instrumental in fostering a long, and not ignoble, series of efforts to ensure prudent use of the world’s natural endowments or, as more recent generations would have it, effective resource management.23 Marsh’s identification of the destructive implications of the nineteenth century’s voracious onslaught on American forests, and his arguments for “the necessity of adopting a different course” were instrumental in the establishment of the Division of Forestry within the US Department of Agriculture in 1883, the passage of the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, and the organization of various American Forestry Congresses held at the turn of the century. They also influenced the creation of the Commission of Conservation in Canada in 1909, and the important developments of the early twentieth century in the United States, described in a 1910 book by Gifford Pinchot, one of the leading figures in the movement, as “the fight

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for conservation.”24 In this formulation, rooted in forestry, but which set the template for North American resource management for decades to come, conservation was a utilitarian doctrine that sought to reconcile competing interests to secure “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.”25 Its proponents, imbued with the reformist zeal of the Progressive era, believed that expert scientific and technical knowledge of nature, coupled with the administrative capacities of the state, could benefit everyone by ensuring the fair, wise, and efficient use of resources. Through the early twentieth century, the basic tenets of progressive conservation were extended in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and in several European countries by a growing cadre of bureaucrats and experts committed to eliminating the wasteful exploitation of resources by promoting the wise and rational use of nature’s bounty. Similar developments occurred in colonial possessions dispersed across Africa, Asia, and South America, where (in the British case at least) statedirected “constructive imperialism” evolved, as Joseph Hodge has shown, into “development” conceived as a means to improve “the social and economic welfare of colonial peoples through sound ecological and population management.”26 In the years immediately following the Second World War, belief in the capacity of technology, of science and management, to order and improve the world became widely entrenched. In the mid-1950s, when a major symposium inspired by Marsh’s work convened to assess “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,” the seventy invited participants were generally positive about the changes they considered.27 Although one of the organizers, Lewis Mumford, worried that there had been too much discussion of the ways in which people could exercise control over nature and not enough on the need for restraint, the prevailing attitude, of the symposium and the era, was encapsulated in some ironic doggerel written at the symposium by University of Michigan economist Kenneth Boulding. A work in two parts, it begins with sixteen lines styled as “A Conservationist’s Lament”: “The world is finite, resources are scarce, / Things are bad and will be worse. /... Man is far too enterprising. / Fire will rage with Man to fan it, / Soon we’ll have a plundered planet.” Then it continues with fourteen more lines offering “The Technologists Reply,” which begins: “Man’s potential is quite terrific, / You can’t go back to the Neolithic. / The cream is there for us to skim it, / Knowledge is power, and the sky’s the limit.”28 In the third quarter of the twentieth century, the heyday of what James Scott has called the age of “high modernism” and the critical period in

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the despoliation of northern cod stocks, the technologists’ knowledge was power indeed, and most acknowledged its capacity to negate the conservationists’ lament and resolve Boulding’s dilemma by turning nature into something ordered, rational, and machine-like.29 The 1950s were momentous years in American ecology, during which, it is now broadly agreed, the discipline fragmented. Some see this fragmentation as a consequence of move away from holistic to reductionist approaches, others see it as the result of a shift from taxonomic to functionalist emphases.30 In any event, during these years of relative intellectual turmoil in the field, the mathematization of ecology, new studies of island biogeography, the combination of population ecology and economic reductionism, and a focus on ecological objects (fish, trees) rather than upon the complex relations among the numerous components of ecosystems, brought the concept of Maximum Sustained Yield to the fore in resource management. By determining the size of and calculating growth or reproduction rates in forests or fish stocks, managers believed they could identify the extent of the “harvestable surplus.” With this in mind (and with due consideration of economic and social as well as ecological factors), they could establish an Allowable Annual Cut or Total Annual Catch, removal of which would ensure a perpetual yield of equal or increasing volume. Cogent, efficient, and seeming to meet the promise of providing the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run, the MSY doctrine created the conviction (some would say illusion) that natural resources are inexhaustible. In the mid-1970s a small group of ecologists associated with the University of British Columbia began to question the MSY dogma. Among them C.S. (Buzz) Holling interrogated the simplifications inherent in the use of ecosystem theory for resource management, and Peter Larkin argued that ideas about the harvestable surplus rested on ideal types that ignored ecological realities and conceived of ecosystems as assemblages of commodities.31 Holling even went so far as to ask his colleagues whether “our traditional view of natural systems ... might well be less a reality than a perceptual convenience.” The complexity, indeterminacy, and openness of natural systems identified by these scholars and others are now widely accepted, and Holling’s notion of resilience – “a measure of the persistence of systems and their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationship between populations or state variables” – offers an important challenge to older ideas of stability and equilibrium in natural systems.32 The world is a lot more complicated, and more difficult to manage, than proponents of MSY have taken it to be. Many scientists had known this for years, of course. They appreciated, with Aldo

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Leopold, that “the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully understood” and with Frank Egler, one of the leaders of the field in the 1950s, that “the ecosystem is not more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can think.”33 But resource managers could not find refuge in imponderable complexity. They were charged to think, and decide, as catch (and cut) rates had to be set each year. Managing nature depended on predictions, which depended upon models, which depended on assumptions, which depended on data (which were often partial). In the end, the whole business depended on a series of constructs, and necessary simplifications. And 1992 proved that the predictions of those who managed the Newfoundland fisheries were awry. But what if, Bavington asks, the pressures placed on ecosystem scientists to “set out simple and clear rules for proper ecosystem management” were removed (p. xx)? What if the very idea of “management” – an idea “rooted in the political and economic context of capitalist resource extraction”– were abandoned?34 What if moral values replaced management techniques as the basis of the relationship between human and non-human nature? Bavington’s answers to these questions, his musings about a new way forward, will not be entirely unfamiliar to those who have paid attention to recent debates about scientific practice among social scientists. Challenging the reductionism of modern science, and “raising the spectre of irreducible uncertainty, context dependence, and relationality in scientific knowledge,” he proposes a new “post-normal relational understanding of nature,” as the route toward “a moral approach” to defining the “relationships that should exist between people and cod and their mutually supporting contexts” (p. xx). In Bavington’s view we need to acknowledge both the limits of our knowledge and our inability to extend it indefinitely. Above all, we need to replace the hubristic conviction that it is possible to manage and control nature with a more humble attitude that places justice, compassion, and learning above science, rationality, and profit in shaping our interactions with the earth. Not all will agree with these views, especially if they overlook the complex intricacy of Bavington’s argument. Indeed, there is need for careful balance here. There is no doubt that political and public confidence in fisheries science was damaged by the events of 1992, or that efforts to deflect responsibility for the debacle onto others exposed some fisheries scientists to public ridicule immediately thereafter. The government slashed funding for fisheries research on Canada’s east coast and in 2005 an allparty Standing Committee of the federal parliament released a report titled, bluntly: Northern Cod: A Failure of Canadian Fisheries Management.35

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Yet there are dangers in following this track to the conclusions that all fisheries science has been discredited by this particular failure to deliver on a managerial promise, that scientific representations of nature are but one set of opinions among many, and that the common sense observations of fishermen are better than the quantitative constructs of fisheries science. Pause, in the wake of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, to consider the parallel implications that might be drawn from the efforts of some climatologists to attribute inaccurate predictions about the imminent disappearance of Himalayan glaciers to the work of social scientists, from the efforts to discredit the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by claiming evidence of collusion to suppress information and interference with the peer-review process on the basis of illegally obtained emails and documents, and from the argument that atmospheric science is of no value because its evidence of long-term global climate warming is contradicted by short-term fluctuations in the weather. Neither scientists nor citizens will be well served by unbridled skepticism about scientific efforts to understand the processes that affect and change complex atmospheric, oceanic, or other systems. Shaped by internal tensions between positive and negative feedback loops as well as by emergent properties, complex organic systems are far more difficult to comprehend and to model than mechanical systems (such as the orbits of the planets).36 There is, observes one commentator on these matters, a law of gravity but “no law for a cloud.”37 There may never be a cloud law. But this is no reason to reject the efforts of atmospheric physicists seeking better understanding of these phenomena. Even as climate scientists debate projected rates of climate change and dispute the details of future scenarios, there is ample scientific (rather than sensory) evidence that carbon dioxide has a warming effect on the atmosphere, and that emissions of this gas are increasing. By the same token, and even as the particular failings of fisheries management that led to the 1992 moratorium are acknowledged, there seems no reason to abandon the quest for better scientific knowledge of fish and the waters in which they live. Such evidence, such knowledge will surely be integral to the process of making wise and informed decisions about what we do, about how we live in the world. Yet Bavington is right to question the authority widely granted scientific/ managerial estimates of the future state of complex organic systems. Given the uncertainties inherent in these systems, observes the mathematician and author of Apollo’s Arrow: the Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything with reference to climate modeling, “trying to make detailed mathematical predictions is just a distraction, another symptom of the

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hubris that got us into this fix in the first place.”38 Indeed, hubris may be reinforced by the very act of prediction, because it is easy to conclude that “if scientists can model the future ... they can control it as well.” The effective management of nature has proven far more difficult than Marsh, and generations who followed him, thought. In this context, as we grapple with a growing sense that much is not right with the world, Bavington’s efforts to shine a new and critical light on the managerial impulse that has underpinned decades of resource extraction around the globe offers an arresting call to find different ways of thinking about the state of our planet and our individual and collective roles in shaping its future. Let the discussion begin.

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Preface

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he aim of this book is to understand the history of, and possible alternatives to, managerial responses to environmental issues by examining one of the largest natural resource management failures of the twentieth century: the collapse of the northern cod fisheries off Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. I wanted to understand this history partly to make sense of a childhood loss. I fondly remember fishing for cod with my father and grandfather off the St. Anthony point on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. Before I reached my twentieth birthday, the cod fishery had collapsed, and a strict moratorium on fishing was imposed in 1992. The northern cod had been reduced to 1 percent of their historical abundance, and cod fishing as a way of life had come to an end. After the cod collapse, fishing for cod off the point in St. Anthony became a crime for which one could be arrested. This book tries to understand the role that scientific management played in the destruction of the northern cod and the criminalization of fishing as a way of life. What I have found illustrates the destructiveness of management as it has been applied not only to the Newfoundland cod fisheries but also to fish, fishermen, and fisheries around the world. Understanding the damaging effects of fisheries management is all the more urgent today as scientific management is often viewed as the solution to the global fisheries crisis. To gain distance from management, I begin by developing and applying a critical theory of management to explore the history and consequences

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of scientific ideas and interventions in the cod fisheries. I argue that fisheries management is deeply implicated not only in the collapse of the cod fisheries and the failure of cod stocks to recover but also in creating novel ecological and social problems that cannot be solved by new and improved managerial techniques. In the rest of the book, I describe the ascendance of management within Newfoundland and Labrador cod fisheries, beginning with the introduction of the fisheries management idea and its development up to the time of the 1992 moratorium on cod fishing. I then present developments after 1992, emphasizing the tendency of politicians, bureaucrats, and academic researchers to offer new managerial strategies for the cod fishery rather than call into question the managerial relationships themselves and propose fundamental alternatives. I illustrate how, under post1992 reforms, cod have become managed as elements in complex ecosystems as opposed to single-species populations; how traditional fishermen1 who want to continue fishing are required to become self-managing professional fish harvesters; and how industrialists and government bureaucrats promote the idea that the wild cod fishery should be replaced by industrial fish farming. The book concludes with a reflection on the development of management in the face of natural resource collapse. I offer suggestions for future political action in world fisheries that move beyond managerialism. I also focus on debates within the philosophy of ecological science that challenge the efficacy of management and on normative-political arguments that question its legitimacy. Future fisheries research would benefit immensely by listening to fisherman as to how fishing should be done and to what end it should be pursued.

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Acknowledgments

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his book represents a collective effort, with encouragement and assistance from people located around the world. Without their support, I would never have been able to undertake this scholarship. I would like to recognize specifically the support, encouragement, and insight provided during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Michigan Society of Fellows and the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2008. The generous support from the university and the collegial interdisciplinary environment that I was part of developed my ideas about management and allowed me to test ideas on graduate students, who provided innumerable insights. As members of the joint program in geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo Scott Slocombe, Bob Gibson, George Francis, Ken Hewitt, James Kay, and Kevin Hanna provided mentorship and encouraged an engaged examination of environmental management. I particularly cherish the time that I was able to spend learning from James Kay before his early passing. He offered friendship and insights into the world of complex systems that continue to influence my thought. In particular, I warmly recall the discussions with and mentorship offered by James Kay and George Francis in my ecosystem-based fisheries management work and the facilitation that they provided into the world of post-normal science in the PNS discussion group that was invaluable to my intellectual development. I also wish to thank Carolyn Merchant at the University of California, Berkeley, for her friendship and mentorship. In 2000, I spent an xxvii

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extremely enjoyable and formative year as a Fulbright scholar working with Carolyn at UCB. Her enthusiasm for my project and her openness to my questioning and development of her partnership environmental ethic helped to sustain my interest in engaging critically with managerial ecology and offered hope for alternatives. Carolyn’s encouragement, foundational knowledge, and influence in the field of environmental history and philosophy made the many seminars and courses that I participated in while at Berkeley pivotal to my intellectual development and ability to engage critically with management. While attending Berkeley, I also had the honour of meeting Ivan Illich and participating in a series of seminars with his friends and colleagues in Oakland. Illich’s colleagues Sajay Samuel and Samar Farage became close friends and mentors during the process, and in the years since Sajay has contributed to my understanding of management, especially its deep historical roots and contemporary influence. In addition, I would like to thank Max Oelschlaeger, who has continually supported me as an intellectual mentor and friend since our first meeting at Acadia University in 1995. Without Max, I would not have continued on in academia or pursued the research that I have on the cod fisheries. I also wish to thank Barbara Neis and Rosemary Ommer at Memorial University and the University of Victoria for providing the opportunity to participate in the Coasts under Stress (CUS) research project and offering their friendship and mentorship. Barb’s generosity, encouragement, and support while I was undertaking fieldwork in Labrador greatly influenced my understanding of fisheries issues and fully integrated me as a CUS team member at Memorial University. Several of my students have read over sections of the manuscript and provided extremely useful suggestions and insights. In particular, I want to thank Jennifer Johnson, Zachary Caple, Ted Lawrence, Nancy Pottery, Michael del Vecchio and Hugh Stimson. Colleagues at Nipissing University, especially James Murton, Hilary Earl and David Tabachnick, have helped develop ideas contained in the manuscript. In addition to these academic supporters, I want to single out friends and family members who have made the research and writing process possible. This has been especially true of my best friend and love of my life, Jodi Oliver, who has not only listened patiently to my ideas on management and provided crucial editorial suggestions but also selflessly offered laughter and tenderness just when I needed them most. My parents, Bill and Grace Bavington, and my sister, Beth Ann, have always supported my

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academic pursuits and have remained interested and involved in the ideas that I have developed over the years. Friends have provided crucial support for the ideas that I developed to the point where it is hard to determine where my ideas start and theirs begin. Some of these friends include Reade Davis, Heath Priston, Emily Head, Nick Garside, Matt Szabo, Mark Hudson, Beth Dempster, Dan McCarthy, Fred Winsor, Greg Zuschlag, Belinda Lyons, and Darcy Butler. I would also like to recognize for their financial support AquaNet the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Coasts under Stress, the US-Canada Fulbright Program, Wilfrid Laurier University, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, the Michigan Society of Fellows, School of Natural Resources and Environment, Nipissing University, and the Canada Research Chairs program. I am aware of how fortunate I have been in obtaining funding during such lean times in the academy. Without this support, I would not have been able to undertake this research.

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Abbreviations

ACOA AFPR CGP

Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review Atlantic Cod Genomics and Broodstock Development Project COSEWIC Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada DFA Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture DFO Department of Fisheries and Oceans EBFM ecosystem-based fisheries management EEZ exclusive economic zone EI Employment Insurance FAO Food and Agriculture Organization FFAW Fish, Food, and Allied Workers FPI Fisheries Products International FRAC Fisheries Recovery Action Committee FRCC Fisheries Resource Conservation Council GLOBEC Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics Project GMOs genetically modified organisms ICNAF International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries

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xxxii IQs ITQs LEK MEY MPA MSY NAFO NRC NRM PFHCBNL PNS SOHO TAC

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Abbreviations individual quotas individual transferable quotas local ecological knowledge maximum economic yield marine protected area maximum sustainable yield North Atlantic Fisheries Organization Natural Resources Canada natural resource management Professional Fish Harvesters Certification Board Newfoundland and Labrador post-normal science self-organizing, holarchic, open total allowable catch

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Managed Annihilation

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1 A Sea Swarming with Fish The sea is covered with fish which are caught not merely with nets but with baskets. – Raimondo de Soncino, London, 18 December 1497 1

O

n the surface, the story of the northern cod fishery appears to be a classic case of uncontrolled human exploitation, ignorance, and mismanagement pushing an unfathomably abundant species toward scarcity and extinction. Like the now-extinct flocks of passenger pigeons, at one point so numerous that they reportedly blocked out the noonday sun, or the seemingly infinite numbers of plains buffalo that once obstructed the paths of people for hours at a time, northern cod (Gadus morhua) abundance and decline have become legendary.2 The first European explorers to Newfoundland, at the end of the fifteenth century, reported schools of cod so thick that they slowed the movement of ships and could be scooped from the sea with baskets.3 Codfish from Newfoundland fed the coffers, slaves, and subjects of the British Empire. Cod abundance in the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador supported the largest ground fishery in the world, leading to an international “cod rush” that attracted over twenty fishing nations in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1500 to 1992, approximately 100 million tons of cod were killed.4 On 2 July 1992, the cod fishery that had been pursued for over 500 years came to a sudden end when Canada’s fisheries minister – a Newfoundlander named John Crosbie, who had recently returned from the Rio Earth Summit in Brazil – made the staggering announcement that the northern cod fishery had to be immediately shut down. Crosbie placed a moratorium on all cod fishing off the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, thereby ushering in the largest single-day layoff in Canadian history.5 Over 30,000 people were put out of work, 1

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and the cod were declared a commercially extinct species.6 By 2003, after more than a decade of rotating fishing moratoria, cod were recommended for placement on Canada’s endangered species list, raising the spectre of biological extinction.7 Cod breeders – the so-called spawning stock biomass – were estimated to be at a level less than 1 percent of what they had been historically.8 So what happened? Did the cod simply suffer the same fate as the plains buffalo, the passenger pigeon, and the close to 200 species per day that we are told now go extinct? On closer inspection, similarities between the collapse of cod and other species break down. Unlike the demise of passenger pigeons, the plains buffalo, and contemporary species, the northern cod was scientifically managed out of existence. Rather than a case of ignorance, neglect, or unwise management, prior to the moratorium the northern cod fishery was presided over by one of the world’s most comprehensive renewable resource management systems.9 Almost overnight the northern cod fishery went from being an example of managerial best practice to being a textbook case of fisheries management failure.10 The story of the northern cod fishery is an astonishing example of management creating the very thing that it was designed to prevent.11 Despite this failure, fisheries management has not suffered the fate of fish and fishermen. Most retrospective investigations into the cod collapse have highlighted numerous cases of mismanagement, producing a vast array of proposals for new and improved managerial interventions. Academic, bureaucratic, and economic discussions on what to do about the cod collapse over a decade after it occurred have largely become arguments over competing managerial designs, with disagreements over what should be managed, who should do the managing, and how fisheries management should be reinvented. Although these proposals for the reinvention of cod fisheries management often suggest contradictory explanations for the underlying causes of the fishery collapse, and offer divergent proposals for intervention, they all agree that new and improved management is the solution. The proposals differ only on the specifics of their managerial designs. None questions the usefulness or appropriateness of the idea of management itself. Only a select few protest against management dictating responses to the cod collapse. The inherent worth of management is taken as a given, and the implications of framing the cod collapse as a management failure are left largely unexplored. Could it be, however, that the very idea of managing fish is somehow flawed? In the rush to propose managerial solutions to the cod collapse,

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could an important opportunity to explore management itself thoroughly, and the relationships that it brings to nature, have been overlooked? Is it possible that cod fisheries management is part of a broader managerial ecology that raises management to an ideal, thereby confining responses to the cod fishery collapse and other mounting environmental crises? Despite broad agreement and volumes of academic and governmental studies on the failure of cod and other fisheries management, the underlying idea of management itself and, more broadly, the inherent value of managerial ecology have largely escaped critical engagement. My purpose in this book is to historicize management by focusing on two critical issues: the interrogation of the idea of management as it has been, and is currently being, applied to cod fishermen and cod fisheries in Newfoundland and Labrador, and an exploration of the possibilities for thinking before and beyond managerial ecology more broadly.

Managerial Ecology and Our Relationship with Nature

Management is a tertiary skill – a method, not a value. And yet we apply it to every domain as if it were the ideal of our civilization. – John Ralston Saul, The Doubter’s Companion 12 Carolyn Merchant describes managerial ecology as a modern utilitarian approach to nature with philosophical roots in the Age of Enlightenment and the revolutionary economic, political, and scientific order that began to emerge in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As society became increasingly organized around the dictates of the market, and a scientific view of nature gradually replaced organicism, “a value system oriented to nature as a teacher whose ways must be followed and respected” gave way to a system of human values focused on “efficiency and production in the sustained use of nature for human benefit.” Managerial ecology became the dominant way of framing society-nature interactions as modern people sought to “maximize energy production, economic yields and environmental quality through ecosystem modeling, manipulation, and prediction of outcomes.”13 Management and modernity emerged historically together in western Europe. By assuming that solutions ultimately lie within the hands of managers, that better organization is the key to improvement, and that problems can

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be solved merely by increasing effort or efficiency, managerial ecology has come to significantly constrain human relations with the natural world, obscuring alternative ways of framing and responding to environmental issues.14 Although theories, practices, philosophies, and meanings of management have changed significantly over time, faith in management’s applicability has only strengthened.15 Indeed, management of all kinds expanded rapidly in the twentieth century to become ubiquitous, dominating the ways in which social, economic, political, and environmental issues are framed and addressed.16 As R. Paehlke and D. Torgerson state, “if there is a problem, better management is often assumed to be the solution. This assumption has deeply influenced the rise of advanced industrial societies and now guides much of the response to environmental problems.”17 Max Oelschlaeger supports the observations of Paehlke and Torgerson, tracing managerial responses to the global ecological crisis back to the Age of Enlightenment. It is not surprising that the Western intelligentsia “would want to manage their way out of ecocrisis,” Oelschlaeger explains, “because that is the Western paradigm. We have been trying to manage the planet for at least three hundred years.”18 Management thinking now defines much environmental scholarship and practice. For example, charts and measurements, central to the enterprise of modern, scientific geography and planning, are vital to the exercise of managerial powers. This is the case not only for empires and states 19 but also for economic elites and corporations interested in conquering, instrumentalizing, and commodifying space. Such ambitions are clearly reflected in the contemporary digitization and remote sensing of space, whether the aim is to manage fish, forests, and fields, competitive commercial advantage, or modern warfare.20 Despite proclamations by environmental scholars about worldwide crises, pathologies, and even the end of management itself, managerial interventions remain firmly mapped across the face of the Earth and stand unchallenged as the dominant legitimized response to a host of social, political, economic, and ecological problems.21

What Does Management Mean?

Despite the grip that management holds over the contemporary imagination, clear definitions of the term, and its implications, remain largely unexplored. At first blush, management appears to be a word without history or geography, a received tool, a ubiquitous technical necessity, a

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rational given. Management has been described as a “plastic,” archetypically pliable term because its use conjures up numerous connotations without a specific denotation.22 However, the etymology of the word management foils this interpretation. The term, in fact, encompasses three principal meanings: management as control, management as caretaking, and management as coping. Management as control originated in Italy during the sixteenth century. Descending from the Latin root word for “hand,” manus, the Italian maneggiare suggests the exertion of dominion over nature through the breaking and training of wild horses.23 Extended through to the present, the essence of management as control can be found in the faith that management can successfully manipulate nature, human beings, and, increasingly, the enterprise of management itself.24 Management as control implies a sovereign power, steering and directing the managed along a charted course. As Petter Holm observes, “management is a control strategy by which processes or people are handled indirectly through a system of representation.”25 These representations simplify the world, turning it into a malleable space. Through a wide variety of scientific and technical methods, people and other living species are rendered legible as resources, or “standing reserves” in Martin Heidegger’s words,26 subject to manipulation by managers. Once objectified and quantified, the world becomes an actionable space open to rational control and instrumentalized intervention from a distance.27 Management, however, means much more than manipulation, iron fists, and control. During the early part of the seventeenth century, the meaning of management was influenced and confused further when the French word ménager, meaning “to use carefully,”28 was introduced into the English language. With its Latin root, mansionem, meaning “a dwelling or household,” ménager shifted the meaning of management to a different location (the household in place of the horse corral), a different set of activities (housekeeping as opposed to horse training), and a different set of attitudes (caretaking and wise stewardship instead of brutal command and control). The caretaking sense of management introduced a domestic and morally positive association of management with housekeeping, stewardship, and husbandry. With caretaking, the iron fist of management as control donned a velvet glove. This warm, paternal meaning of management, conjuring up illusions of happy households, well-tended gardens, and wise pastoral custodians, introduced a misunderstanding of its application throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.29 Whereas management as control

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referred to a hierarchical two-way relationship between the manager and the managed, management as caretaking placed the manager in the role of custodial middleman, entrusted to use objects previously mapped and staked by an owner or master creator in the heavens.30 Management as caretaking involves a hierarchical three-way relationship between owners, stewards, and wards.31 Stewards look after and carefully use private property ultimately owned, and thereby presumably controlled, by someone else positioned above the steward. Management as caretaking does not indicate a relationship of altruistic care for another person or an autonomous subject that is accorded intrinsic value; rather, it implies looking after and tending to objects and possessions – forms of property with instrumental value. Management as caretaking, therefore, points not only up to control but down to a third meaning of management, one epitomized by the position of the ward or the managed. The plight of wards, workers, targeted populations, and others who are managed is to cope with being controlled and carefully used. This third meaning of management, management as coping, therefore, implies the opposite of management as control and management as caretaking. Coping as a management strategy is a response to being controlled or carefully used. It refers to situations of unequal power where the one coping is reduced to “a subsystem, a creature that functions within an oppressive system.”32 Management as coping implies that one is “just getting by,” “barely managing” in a system or environment over which one has little say, ownership, or control. None of these meanings of management situates the actors as equal citizens in a polis allowing them to engage in democratic politics. At the top of the hierarchy, managerial actors are situated as masters, trainers, and directors; in the middle as husbands heading households; at the bottom as slaves, wards, usable property. When control or caretaking breaks down, the position of the manager can suddenly become that of the ward. In the context of managerial failures, managers can merely cope with disorder, uncertainty, and conflict while trying desperately to survive long enough to restore an order that allows them to regain control and caretaking ability. When this type of desperate managerial coping appears in natural resource management, the overwhelming tendency is for the control and caretaking functions of management to shift their targets – from what is understood to be irreducibly complex and therefore unmanageable to something perceived as more manageable. In this instance, management as coping becomes an instrumental, institutionalized response to a crisis brought on by a temporary loss of control or caretaking ability.

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As inequality and perceptions of threats posed by global systems failure, risk, uncertainty, ignorance, conflict, and complexity have increased, management as control and management as caretaking have declined in significance, leading to the expanded use of management as coping in natural resource management theory and practice.33 This is perhaps most clearly evident in discussions about global climate change. The conversation has expanded in recent years from narrow talk of controlling or mitigating global warming to broader discussions that propose adaptive strategies to cope with the world-changing effects of climate change. This expansion of management amounts to an acceptance of the industrial way of life and ecosocial relations that have ultimately led to the climate crisis. Coping forms of management, therefore, conserve status quo hierarchical social and ecological relations. From humble beginnings in horse handling and housekeeping, managerial thinking has expanded in scope to include economies, ecosystems, resources, environments, industries, transnational corporations, human labour, and the planet itself. Even emotions, values, beliefs, motivations, and life in general are now viewed as being in need of, and amenable to, managerial interventions. Internal human natures and external biophysical natures have become the objects on which management operates. In any or all of its three guises, management has been used to describe most every aspect of daily life, and in so doing it has entrenched the notion that everyone everywhere is a manager – and always has been.34 It is important to remember that in practice management remains rhetorically pliable. It can simultaneously mean control and coping with the lack of control; careful use and coping with misuse; controlling private access while promoting participatory stewardship; and coping when all the assumptions permitting a belief in control and caretaking have broken down. In this context, battles are waged over preferred styles and types of management as opposed to drawing attention to the effects of pervasive managerialism (see Figure 1.1). As the critical management scholar Martin Parker observes, managerialism, of which managerial ecology is but one example, focuses on a narrow conceptualization of management as a generalized technology of control and caretaking applied “to everything – horses, humans and hospitals. This is management as the universal solution, not a personal assessment of a local problem.”35 Management applied as a universal solution to a world defined as a series of technical problems serves to silence assessments made by non-experts and those identified as problems in need of management. Managerial ecology – the particular version of managerialism that

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Controlling

Caretaking

Coping Figure 1.1 Major managerial meanings and their hierarchical relations

targets nature and was constructed during the Age of Enlightenment – is deeply implicated in the environmental crisis and limits our collective capacity to imagine alternative forms of organizing relationships with nature. The expansion of management and its colonization of environmental discourse and practices of interacting with nature should not be taken as a sign of the end of history, leaving us with little more than cynicism or acquiescence. Rather, this state of affairs points to the need for a critical understanding of the enterprise of management itself. It is important to ask how management has mobilized human relationships with nature and how it has been deployed to address environmental issues at particular times and in specific places. Only when a clear description of the multiple meanings of management, their interconnections, and how they have been expressed in particular geographical practices over time is achieved can a space be provided in which to begin to understand managerial ecology and possible alternatives.

Managerial Ecology: The Case of the Northern Cod Fishery

In a comprehensive review and categorization of the cod fisheries management literature published since the fishing moratorium was declared in

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1992, environmental historian Sean Cadigan groups the various management remedies for the fishery into two main schools of thought.36 One school of thought supports a neoliberal management perspective that has significantly influenced government policy in the wake of the northern cod collapse. Another, less influential, school of thought comes from socialist and communitarian perspectives. Both schools advocate managerial approaches to address the fishery collapse. The neoliberal school of thought frames the cod collapse as a classic case of Garret Hardin’s influential “tragedy of the commons” thesis.37 Hardin presents a tragic neo-Malthusian tale. A common pasture is destroyed when its users, modelled as a collection of individuals out to maximize their short-term gain, overexploit the unpriced, uncommodified grass of the commons by grazing as many cattle on it as they can. Tragedy ensues when the carrying capacity of the common pasture is exceeded as each individual attempts to maximize gain. The thesis assumes that individual self-maximizing behaviour is a natural, universal characteristic of human beings and suggests that privatization of the commons, by turning it into either state or individual property, is the only available avenue to avert tragedy. It also assumes that the pasture has a calculable carrying capacity that can be determined with enough accuracy to allow maximum exploitation. Hardin’s presentation of people as asocial, atomized, self-interested individuals and commons as tragedies waiting to happen has been criticized for naturalizing and reifying a narrow view of human and biophysical nature and for mistaking a tragedy of open access for a tragedy of common property resource systems.38 The tragedy also seems to imply the empirically dubious claim that, if the commons is turned into property (public or private), overexploitation will automatically be averted.39 Neoliberals advocate a thorough privatization of fisheries, favouring managerial tools that achieve “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon” through the self-organizing disciplinary power of the market’s invisible hand. They argue that, when Canada extended national jurisdiction over its 200-mile exclusive economic zone in 1977, it did not manage the new national property in the interests of cod.40 Rather, the enclosed ocean space was managed as monopolized state property to implement social policy objectives, such as maximizing modern fisheries-related employment and negotiating favourable terms of trade for Canadian exports.41 Neoliberals argue that creating and defending exclusive property rights for fish would remove this legacy of ecologically harmful and expensive government control over fisheries management. They propose that, by

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transferring management tasks to professionalized fishermen with an interest in conserving private property allocated as individual transferable quotas, fishing behaviour can be steered by self-regulating free market mechanisms rather than central planners in Ottawa.42 On the other side of the cod fisheries management debate is the socialist-communitarian school of thought. It frames the cod collapse as a tragic case of state mismanagement driven by the interests of an industrial capitalist system that promoted inappropriate scientific and industrial models of cod, fishermen, and the fishery. Proponents of this perspective, however, argue for a reinvented fisheries management re-embedded in the interests of coastal communities through the encouragement of “new partnerships between fishers, fisheries scientists and fisheries managers.”43 This approach to fisheries management, while rarely implemented as government policy, has encouraged a wide variety of policy research in three broad areas. First, there is a growing literature advocating the integration of local ecological knowledge into fisheries science and management.44 Second, scholars are exploring the ways in which normative control, based on community stewardship ethics and nested governance rather than top-down, state-mandated rational control, can be maintained, encouraged, and recovered.45 Third, some researchers argue for the allocation of fishery resources to place-based communities through the adjacency principle to address equity concerns.46 The socialist-communitarian position focuses on debunking the tragedy of the commons thesis, illustrating historical and contemporary examples of the communal management of collective property – given the right norms and material conditions.47 Neither the neoliberal nor the socialist-communitarian schools of thought fundamentally question the need for, or the usefulness of, management. Both agree that management is the solution, and they simply argue over the correct managerial means. Management is often equated with all forms of organization and order. The neoliberal perspective places fisheries management within a history beginning with Canada’s enclosure of the ocean commons in 1977. It frames management as a triumphant story of scientific and technological linear progression toward increasing human control, prediction, and ultimate stewardship of enclosed sections of commodified and domesticated nature. In neoliberal accounts, inefficient state-led fisheries management is to be replaced by finely tuned market mechanisms that steer the behaviour of an exclusive group of economically rational professional fish harvesters. The socialist-communitarian school of thought criticizes the massive inequalities generated by state-guided scientific fisheries management and

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the market managerialism of the neoliberals. However, in a bid to justify the value of fishing people in the wake of the cod collapse, socialistcommunitarians have tended to naturalize management as a neutral tool that can be put to good use if control and caretaking are deployed by local fishing communities in partnership with social scientists and the state.48 Both neoliberal and socialist-communitarian schools of thought rely on narrow assumptions of human nature and the benefits of enclosing fish stocks as property to achieve control over, and careful use of, nature.49 Both represent fishing people as economically rational actors who naturally seek to maximize short-term profits from their individual fishing activities in the absence of managerial constraints or incentives.50 Although neoliberals propose competitive market mechanisms to achieve managerial constraint on individual economic actors, socialist-communitarians argue that a variety of cultural practices and institutional designs can achieve managerial constraint in ways that make it economically rational for individuals to co-operate. In both schools of thought, managerial constraints are to be achieved through enclosure of “the oceans within carefully delimited regimes of property, be those regimes of collective, state, or private control.”51 Fish are conceptualized as living property or swimming inventories that can be owned long before they are actually captured. Existing fisheries management regimes in Newfoundland and Labrador have favoured the neoliberal approach that reflects the federal and provincial governments’ current passion for market-based solutions. Parts of the socialist-communitarian argument for cultural practices and institutional designs that encourage co-operative management of collective and state-owned property have been applied as long as they have been made congruent with government downsizing and downloading initiatives.52 However, both of these approaches have helped to enlarge managerial ecology without fundamentally questioning the enterprise of management itself, with its focus on the control and caretaking of nature conceived as various forms of available and alienable property.

Questioning Managerial Ecology in Cod Fisheries

To gain critical distance from the ideological debates in cod fisheries management, and to explore the possibilities for thinking before and beyond managerial ecology, it is important to answer three main questions. First, “when, how, and why did management come to be applied to cod

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fishing, and what was the original form of the management regime in Newfoundland and Labrador?” Second, “what have been the major managerial responses to the collapse of the cod fishery?” Detailed answers to this question illustrate the ongoing resilience of managerial ecology in the face of failure and document the specific ways in which cod fisheries management in Newfoundland and Labrador has been restructured in response to the demise of wild cod. And third, “are there alternatives to managerial ecology in cod fisheries and beyond?” Answers to this question serve three main purposes. First, they provide an opportunity to reflect on the cod story and clarify exactly how managerial ecology has expressed itself in cod fisheries. Second, answers provide not only ground from which to explore patterns of society-nature relations that existed before the onset and development of managerial ecology in the cod fisheries but also a vantage point from which to understand why fishing people resist industrial fishing tools and the management that necessarily accompanies their introduction. And third, answers permit an exploration of the possibilities that currently exist to move beyond managerial ecology in cod and other fisheries worldwide. I will explore the answers to these three important questions throughout the remainder of the book, which is divided into three main sections: the introduction and development of cod fisheries management; the managerial responses to the collapse of the cod fisheries; and alternatives to management and managerial ecology in cod and other fisheries around the world.

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2 The Introduction and Development of Cod Fisheries Management

W

hat is the history of cod fisheries management in Newfoundland and Labrador? How did the world’s best funded, most prestigious, scientific fisheries management system result in the endangerment of cod, the largest layoff in Canadian history, and the end of cod fishing as a way of life dedicated to providing food from the sea? Cod fisheries management emerged slowly over a 100-year period in response to the industrial modernization of fishing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a slow shift was occurring in Newfoundland from a mixed subsistence-mercantile economy focused on self-sufficiency at the household level to a universal market economy based on wage labour. This transformation away from subsistence toward a market-based economic order saw owners of capital and other fishing interests – bankers, investors, and merchants – problematize and seek to control fluctuations in annual fish landings that had previously been taken for granted and understood to be unchangeable by fishermen. Without the elimination of naturally occurring inter-annual fluctuations in cod availability and the resulting uncertain landings by fishermen, investors could not be guaranteed capital returns, and fishing could not be successfully developed into a modern industry. The slow construction of a manageable cod fishery in response to these economic interests eventually led to the creation of a quantitative fisheries science founded on single-species population modelling. Eventually, fisheries management models claimed to be able to determine the maximum sustainable biomass of fish annually available to be captured

13

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from populations exposed to industrial fishing. The subsistence-mercantile order that once depended on the seasonal coming and going of codfish was targeted for development into a modern market order where fish biomass was to be rationally harvested at the maximum sustainable rate.

The Need to Control Fluctuations in Cod Landings

Although cod and other fish landings in Newfoundland and around the world had fluctuated for centuries, by the latter part of the nineteenth century the attention of British and other European governments became focused on controlling these fluctuations. Governments were lobbied to this action by merchants, bankers, and investors who were seeking to generate profits by transforming fishing into an industry. Rather than being understood as being the providence of God – as natural cycles requiring adaptation and coping by resilient fishing communities – fishery fluctuations in the second half of the nineteenth century became an urgent problem for investors and governments. Without a guaranteed flow of fisheries resources, it was impossible for industrialists to achieve economies of scale permitting the deployment of profitable mass-production techniques in fisheries. A predictable supply of human resources was also needed if profits were to be made. Men and women would have to give up one way of life and adopt another. At the beginning of the nineteenth century an increasing number of European countries began sending fishermen to fish for cod. More efficient methods of hunting marine species opened up greater economic opportunities in fishing and fish-processing operations. Investors and bankers, and eventually politicians, became interested in helping their national fishing fleets harvest profits from the sea.1 They also became alarmed by the largely unpredictable inter-annual fluctuations in catches that put all fishery investments at risk. Without a predictable annual supply of fish, it was impossible for governments and private investors to plan and develop a profitable fishing industry. The need for stability in the fisheries of the Atlantic ocean dictated the shape that scientific management took in fisheries around the world. The desire to become the masters and possessors of nature, as encouraged by René Descartes and other natural philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, created an enabling context for the growth of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Turning fluctuations in fish landings into a problem to be solved by governments was a unique phenomenon associated with modernization. Killed, split, salted and dried, codfish had long served as property with international exchange value. What a modern fishery demanded was a way to calculate and commodify future fish landings. A clear assessment of the potential productivity of marine species was required if they were to become alienable natural resources – swimming inventories with exchange value in a modern market economy. However, fluctuations in the fishery had historically been accepted by fishermen as natural, something beyond human control, and therefore attempts to stabilize and rationalize annual cod landings had not been aggressively pursued by governments. Biophysical and market fluctuations have always affected the cod fishery in Newfoundland and continue to do so. Cod fishermen hunt a wild species embedded in a capricious sea that poses many threats and challenges to personal safety, family livelihood, and community survival. Markets often become glutted with fish since fishing is often seasonal and fish prices can be easily manipulated by fish buyers. Gluts driven by seasonal, biophysical, or market fluctuations drive down the price paid to fishermen for their catch and favours buyers, who can buy low and sell high by stockpiling and transporting fish products to international markets. Fishing is one of the most dangerous occupations in Canada, with injuries and lives lost to unpredictable weather and accidents at sea. Before the advent of fisheries management, fishing households relied on occupational pluralism and customary local practices that determined access to common fishing grounds. They were able to adapt to natural fluctuations associated with cod and other marine species and cope with market fluctuations in the price of fish that were dictated by local merchants and international markets by balancing subsistence practices and occupational pluralism. In the last half of the nineteenth century, Newfoundland slowly began to modernize. Outport poverty dramatically increased, the rural population and the number of fishing operations grew, and opportunities in the formal economy began to expand. Many different governments found themselves under increasing pressure to find ways to predict and control annual fluctuations in fish landings to guarantee profits. Fisheries science and management were the tools governments developed to achieve this goal.2 In the decades following confederation with Canada in 1949, Newfoundland’s embedded merchant economy and outport society (formerly dependent on occupational pluralism and the seasonal inshore cod fishery)

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rapidly transformed under the modern development vision of Premier Joseph Smallwood.3 Instead of credit at the merchant store, cash was increasingly paid directly to fishermen for their catches. Wage labour in fish plants and offshore trawlers replaced unpaid household production and small inshore boats built by fishermen. Financial support from the Canadian government through Unemployment Insurance and other postwar social welfare programs injected money into rural fishing outports. The emphasis on a seasonal inshore cod fishery began to be replaced by enthusiasm for a modernized all-season fishery far offshore on the fishing banks. With this change, organization of the fishery slipped further from fishermen’s hands and increasingly became the purview of fisheries scientists and managers. The beginning of a government-led industrial development program that portrayed the inshore fishery as part of a backward and inefficient element of Newfoundland’s past originated in government initiatives at the end of the nineteenth century.4 In response to shrinking returns and declining prices for codfish on international markets, as well as a doubling of the number of cod fishermen and a rapidly growing rural population dependent on the fishery, the government of Newfoundland intervened to assist cod fisheries by any and all means at their disposal with an emphasis on industrializing the sector and developing landward industries.5 Promotion of this industrial development program greatly accelerated after the Second World War when a series of unprecedented transformations in the cod fishery occurred. They affected the central organizational unit in the fishery, the scale of capital investment, the dominant commodity form that cod took, and the rate at which cod were killed and removed from the Atlantic Ocean. Factories replaced families as the major organizational unit in fishing and processing. Year-round wage labour on fishing vessels and in fish plants also became common to meet the requirements of industrial production. Industrial fish plants required a consistent supply of fish that was impossible for seasonal inshore fishermen to deliver. Such fishermen caught most of their fish from June to October, when cod migrated inshore and seasonal weather patterns permitted access to fishing grounds adjacent to shore. The scale of capital investment in the offshore industrial fishing fleet exceeded that of the total value of inshore fishing boats, gear, and onshore fishery-related installations by 1964 and continued to exceed inshore capital investments continuously thereafter.6 The production of frozen fish more than quadrupled between 1950 and 1969, and modern freezing

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plants spread to all regions of the island, shifting the dominant export commodity from dried-salted cod to frozen cod blocks, which were served in modern institutional cafeterias (schools, hospitals, and prisons) or processed into low-quality frozen fish sticks.7 Annual cod catches that had fluctuated from less than 100,000 tonnes to a maximum of 300,000 tonnes up to the 1940s expanded to a historical high referred to as the “killer spike” in 1968, when over 800,000 tonnes of cod were landed.8 Fisheries biologists Jeff Hutchings and Ransom Myers tie this qualitative shift in the scale and efficiency of cod killing to the introduction of technologically advanced factory freezer stern trawlers after the Second World War. These fishing vessels were first used to catch cod off Newfoundland by the British in 1954, the Soviets in 1956, the West Germans in 1957, and numerous other nations thereafter. This led to almost a tripling of reported cod landings over the twelve-year period from 1956 to 1968, when maximum historical landings were reached.9 At night during this period, reportedly, the Grand Banks fishing grounds were so crowded with industrial fishing vessels that they became a floating city of lights.10 In the twentieth century, modernization of the fishery was complemented by a number of land-based industrial projects, such as the railway, mines, pulp and paper plants, hydroelectric projects, and an oil refinery. The modern development vision was perhaps most clearly expressed in the outport relocation program in 1965 that eliminated over 250 isolated fishing communities. The government offered the 30,000 to 40,000 citizens, about a tenth of the population of Newfoundland, monetary and service incentives to abandon their isolated outports and the inshore saltcod fishery and move to a number of industrial growth centres.11 Mobilization and concentration of the dispersed outport communities was deemed necessary so that the state could industrialize the fishery and provide modern jobs with wages and government services, such as education and health care, to rural Newfoundlanders. The relocation program, like many other modern state projects aimed at civilizing and improving the human condition, “took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices ... and created a standard grid whereby [they] ... could be centrally recorded and monitored.”12 Industrial modernization promised a radical reorganization and simplification of the cod fisheries. Fish, fishermen, and fishing practices would all have to be transformed to achieve modern development. The solution to the complexity and uncertainty of the inshore fishery, and a way of life based on coexisting with the precarious migratory behaviour of codfish, was simply to leave it behind. This high modern developmental vision was epitomized by Newfoundland’s

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first premier, Joseph Smallwood, who encouraged inshore small-boat fishermen to burn their boats and promised to pull Newfoundland fishing families “kicking and screaming” into the twentieth century.13 Modern industrial development required a dramatic transformation of Newfoundland’s economy, ecology, and society, resulting in fundamental changes to how codfish and fishermen were conceptualized and how fishing was conducted. Cod, fishermen, and fishing had to become manageable – controllable and amenable to careful rationalized use – for the government and capital investors to realize their economic development goals. Knowledge of cod had to change if an ecosocial order agreeable to industrial modernity was to supplant the cashless merchant-subsistence order. To achieve predictable economic growth and returns on capital investment, cod and cod fishermen had to become predictable and controlled scientific objects – on hand and available year-round to provide a stable, uniform stream of natural and human resources to fuel export-oriented industrial fish plants. Cod had to cease being a wild fish subject to unpredictable annual fluctuations to which fishermen had no choice but premodern passive adaptation. The number of people fishing had to decline, and those who remained had to adopt new fishing gear and change their identity from semi-subsistence peasants dependent on seasonal inshore cod migrations to offshore workers on industrial trawlers, actively locating and harvesting cod with modern technology. Modernization of the cod fishery lowered the number of fishermen needed and thereby produced surplus labour because technological change dramatically increased fishing effort while decreasing the necessary labour required in an increasingly wage-based economy.14 It is perhaps not surprising, given their precarious position relative to technology, that the long-held belief that ocean life was inexhaustible was first challenged by fishermen.

From Unlimited Natural Abundance to Fears of Exhaustion

In the last half of the nineteenth century, modern industrialization in Europe and the progressive era in the United States created political and economic pressures to maximize the exploitation of cod and change how fishing was conducted. Modern fishing methods, mechanization, and the industrialization of processing focused on increasing production and efficiency in the fishery. Modernization also required a steady, stable supply

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of marine resources unencumbered by the vagaries of the natural environment, life history traits, migration behaviours, and resulting fluctuations in fishing success. Furthermore, though the dominant scientific and expert consensus up to the end of the nineteenth century echoed T.H. Huxley’s belief that marine fish were inexhaustible, experiences in Newfoundland and Labrador, and in other fishing communities in Europe and North America, began to suggest otherwise.15 Although Huxley and other scientific experts have become infamous for their belief in unlimited fish abundance relative to fishing impacts, Grant Head and other Newfoundland historians have noted that fishermen and merchants were concerned about cod exhaustion as early as the eighteenth century. Cod became increasingly scarce in Newfoundland in the nineteenth century, and by the last half of the century international debates had erupted over the cause of fluctuations in fish landings and the potential for fisheries exhaustion.16 Cod fisheries fluctuated wildly around the island of Newfoundland from 1815 to 1836, when landings declined as cod became scarce in inshore waters. This decline led many fishermen to adopt new fishing technologies (jiggers, seines, and longline trawls) and to shift their fishing efforts onto less exploited grounds in Labrador and seasonally fished offshore grounds.17 These technological and spatial responses to the decrease in cod abundance, however, were reluctantly adopted, and in some cases actively resisted, by many fishermen in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The scarcity of fish relative to merchant demand led to heated debates on what to do about the fluctuations and the possibility that cod could become permanently exhausted. Inshore fishermen and some merchants complained to colonial administrators and government officials that new fishing technologies were a threat to the moral economy of fishing, customary local fishing practices, and the egalitarian way of life in the rural outports. These new fishing gears, it was argued, killed and injured both juvenile and “mother” codfish, resulting in wasteful harm to the fish and growing inequality between fishermen using the new fishing technologies and those who could afford only the traditional baited hand line gear. Similar complaints appeared earlier in Europe, where fishing communities immediately appealed to rulers to ban novel fishing technologies deemed a threat to fish abundance.18 Ongoing declines in landings combined with plummeting international cod prices and fluctuating catches caused the collapse and temporary withdrawal of merchant credit in Newfoundland outports from the

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middle of the nineteenth century. Credit withdrawal resulted in economic crises in the outports. Extreme poverty and the social instability this created forced the Newfoundland government to intervene in the fishery. The government responded by establishing a fisheries inquiry that proposed laws regarding the size and use of herring seines (herring were used as bait in longline cod trawls) and “an omnibus act to protect the fish – the Rorke Bill of 1863, which was dropped the following year out of fear of falling exports.”19 The emphasis on maximizing exports and turning cod into an international commodity continued to dominate government interventions into the fishery during this period in an attempt to solve the economic crisis. The state was weak and could not afford to enforce fishing regulations.20 It abandoned attempts to ban gear and focused on increasing exports and improving quality. By 1889, a Fisheries Commission was created by the newly established responsible government to respond to the ongoing fishery crisis, and regulations were instituted to protect immature and spawning codfish, reflecting the suggestions of fishermen who testified to the commission. Although the regulations eventually became statutory law with precedence over local customs, the capacity of government to enforce statutory law was limited, and fishing regulations were frequently violated.21 Ultimately, the law failed to save outport fishing communities from the constant threat of hunger, poverty and exploitation. Tightening merchant credit continued to persist under the subsistence-mercantile system into the early twentieth century.22 Fluctuations and failures in the Newfoundland cod fishery and other marine fisheries around the world became a serious problem for governments at the end of the nineteenth century. As fisheries historian Tim Smith observes, governments around the north Atlantic were provided with four main explanations for these fluctuations: the complexity of shifting fish migration routes; predation of fish by marine mammals, such as seals or consumption by sea birds; pollution from sewage, industrial and agricultural runoff; and overfishing. The vast array of explanations for the flux and uncertainty in marine fish landings spurred demands, first in Norway and then in other western European countries, for a new field of fisheries science capable of producing instrumental knowledge amenable to long-term productivity and stability in landings.23 Early explanations in Newfoundland for fluctuations in the cod fishery involved a plethora of observations and arguments from natural historians, fishermen, merchants, citizens, and government leaders as the cod fishery became a serious political concern. Despite a spotty historical record with

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little evidence of the views of women and other unpublished opinions, the arguments and explanations that were recorded illustrate a diversity of perspectives on the nature of cod, especially on the question of cod migratory behaviour. The public record in Newfoundland and the United Kingdom included debates about the relative contribution of fishing to overall fish mortality by scientists such as T.H. Huxley, the number of cod types that existed, the migration patterns of the fish, the relative importance of marine pollution from sewage and the impact of predators such as seals, as well as the dangers posed by new technologies, such as bottom trawls and longlines.24 Although these opinions on cod abundance reflected deep concern and experiential knowledge of fish and fishing, they did not produce the type of knowledge that governments could effectively use to solve urgent economic and political problems associated with landing fluctuations and market instabilities. As early as the 1860s, governments began to fund scientists to study the problem of fisheries fluctuations; to test the wide variety of contradictory explanations that had been developing among scientists, fishermen, and citizens; and to deliver practical advice to help maintain productivity and profitability in fisheries. In 1864, George Ossian Sars of Norway set about to determine why fluctuations of cod and other fisheries were so great in northern Norway. Within twenty years, Sars had succeeded in establishing the first scientific agency for that purpose in Europe. And, by the turn of the century, many other countries had established their own scientific agencies.25 Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of budding scientists, including Henry Youle Hind (1823-1908) a self-trained geologist and chemist from the University of Toronto whose university degrees were all honourary, gave advice to the Newfoundland government on how to respond to the decline of inshore cod fisheries.26 Following T.H. Huxley and most other fishery scientists at the time, Hind, believed that “the means for reproduction of the cod resources of Labrador and Newfoundland are ‘inexhaustible’ and beyond the power of man to injure.”27 Hind advocated extending the spatial extent of the fishery to allow the recovery of inshore cod-fishing grounds. Despite a plethora of reports, royal commissions, and studies, the rapid development of the scientific study of fishing in the latter half of the nineteenth century resulted in few useful answers for governments. In fact, much of the scientific knowledge was being drawn from experiential knowledge offered by fishermen and others in the rapidly expanding industry.28 Even with the subsequent development of a Fisheries Department,

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fishery laboratories, scientific research on cod migration, and the artificial propagation of cod through a hatchery, up to the late 1940s, fisheries regulations were “more related to orderly fishing than to conservation or control of total fishing effort and catches.” The main goal of the government during this period was to increase export earnings from the fishery to generate income for supporting growing outport populations, demands for profit and taxes, and the exploitation of expanding supplies of surplus labour. In this context, the government had no interest in limiting the number of fishermen and their catches or restricting harvesting and production capabilities.29 Prior to 1949, in both Newfoundland and Canada, significant state efforts were put into fisheries science and technology to modernize fishing and fish processing. In Newfoundland, these efforts involved the establishment of a number of fisheries colleges to transform fishermen into disciplined industrial workers for the offshore fishing fleets and to train fish plant managers and employees.30 These new wage based jobs differentially transformed lives in the outports as familial patriarchy slowly gave way to a social order based on gendered access to the Canadian welfare state. Originally, women were not recognized as workers eligible for unemployment insurance and married women were assumed to be tied to household reproduction by early government programs.31 Just as rural fishing communities had to be relocated and concentrated to make them comprehensible to the modern state, so too did the vast and diverse experiential knowledge of fishermen and wide-ranging early scientific work on cod require simplification. Causal laws were necessary if governments were to obtain knowledge of cod that permitted control and profitable industrial use. To advance industrial modernization and rationally develop the cod fishery, governments had to simplify the reasons underlying cod fishery fluctuations to get a handle on the complexity of wild fish productivity and the impact of fishermen’s actions on cod abundance.

Constructing the Manageable Cod

In 1898, German fisheries biologist Friedrich Heincke published an influential paper that “encouraged biologists to consider the population as the unit of study, rather than the species.”32 Heincke borrowed the population concept from human demography to develop a powerful quantitative

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methodology to distinguish marine fish populations. This focus on quantitative marine biology was revolutionary in its time, and by 1930 population thinking had been accepted by most fisheries biologists. Fisheries research organizations then began to apply the population concept to answer questions surrounding fluctuations in marine fish landings.33 Even though the precise boundaries of populations were difficult to determine and measurements were often restricted by political and practical considerations, the switch from qualitative typological species descriptions to quantitative population analyses permitted the emergence of a demographic paradigm in fisheries biology that held out the enticing possibility of predicting future catch levels based on statistical laws.34 Although the process was slow and cumbersome, involving a number of fisheries biologists and economists, Heincke’s conceptualization of fish as members of statistical populations set the stage for the development of bio-economic models of the fishery that permitted the emergence of cod fisheries management and what appeared to be a final solution to the problem of fluctuations in marine fisheries exploited under industrial capitalist relations of production. Although variation between individuals of the same fish species had long been observed by natural historians, fishermen, and other lay observers, there was no consensus on how to interpret the observations and turn them into useful applied knowledge for fishery administrators in governments. Fluctuations in cod landings were blamed on both local overfishing and variability in migration patterns, leading to contradictions and confusion over the need for, and usefulness of, fisheries management.35 The dominant scientific theory on fish migration before Heincke – the Dodd-Anderson polar migration theory – was based on the assumption that Atlantic fish species, such as cod and herring, migrated annually as one vast aggregation to the northern polar region. If the polar migration theory was correct, then local declines in landings could be attributed to inter-annual differences in migration patterns rather than local overfishing. Efforts to restock local fishing grounds with hatchery-raised juveniles (a practice pursued for cod in Newfoundland, the United States, and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century) therefore appeared to be pointless.36 The Swedish biologist Nilsson, a predecessor of Heincke, hypothesized that herring did not migrate over large distances but formed numerous spatially bound varieties, what he referred to as “races,” that required local regulation of fishing to ensure stable inter-annual fish landings. Neilson was accused, however, of “oversplitting”: identifying too many local

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varieties of herring. The dispute between “splitters” and polar migration “lumpers” formed a significant scientific debate “fought out not only in the essays of learned societies, notably the Swedish Academy, but also in writings of economic societies, in numerous lectures, and in the daily press” of European and North American newspapers.37 The conflict and chaos in the literature were fuelled by methodological limitations in the identification of local varieties or populations and the political implications that seemed to follow the identification of local so-called races. Different races, varieties, and populations of fish were identified through qualitative diagnosis of individuals according to typological descriptions. Neilson and his followers advocated local control of fishing for all the populations that they identified. Many of the “descriptions of putative populations very quickly turned out to be useless,” however, since they could be explained in terms of “differences in age, sex, maturity, and nutritional state, rather than due to population differences.”38 Heincke solved the long-standing debate between the influential polar migration theory and Neilson’s local population hypothesis by developing a rudimentary form of multivariate statistics and calculating normal curves following a methodology that he borrowed from anthropology. He made measurements of over fifty characteristics on approximately 8,000 individual herring specimens collected from various geographical locations. He tested for differences between geographical populations in single characteristics by comparison of distribution curves, which differed according to their means, coefficients of variation, or both. Heincke analyzed, in this manner, a number of characteristics that he showed to be independent of age and sex (number of vertebrae, keel scales, and fin rays). He found that variability in many of the morphological characteristics of the northeast Atlantic herring that he studied were distributed following normal curves that accordingly obeyed the laws of probability, allowing populations to “be identified by the use of single characteristics, and individual membership by his method of least squares of combined characteristics.”39 The use of quantitative methodology was a major accomplishment and detour from the traditional work of natural historians and fisheries biologists who had, according to Heincke, “a pronounced aversion toward measurements and numbers.”40 Heincke suggested that this aversion to mathematics had to change if knowledge of nature’s laws and the advancement of practical fisheries research were to occur. Heincke’s call in 1898 for marine biologists to adopt population thinking and embrace measurements and numbers in their research methodologies

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led to profound changes in fisheries science and its usefulness to governments interested in solving the problem of fluctuating landings. The development and spread of population thinking in fisheries biology from 1880 to 1930 fundamentally altered how nature was perceived and understood. From the typological species of Linnaeus that emphasized qualitative descriptions of ideal types, a Darwinian view of the world emerged in fisheries biology that placed emphasis on variability, evolutionary change, and a disciplined analytical search for natural laws. Not until after the Second World War, however, did a theory amenable to fisheries management emerge, thanks to the contributions of numerous scientists. The symbolic representation of fish as members of statistical populations changed how fish, fishermen, and fishing were understood, rendering them conceptually manageable. By 1950, fisheries scientists had largely abandoned qualitative description and were concentrating on quantitative measurements and the application of statistical tools not only to identify but also to model the dynamics of fish populations exposed to fishing pressure. Fish populations were eventually represented as selfregulating systems tending toward equilibrium, whose fluctuations were determined by the relationship between reproduction, individual growth rates, natural mortality, and fishing mortality.41 Building on a number of partial theories on the dynamics of fish populations under exploitation, in 1957 R.J.H. Beverton and S.J. Holt published a groundbreaking model that allowed scientists to “predict the future size and yield of fish stocks for different catch regimes on the basis of readily available data.”42 By assuming that fish populations were reasonably stable over time, and that they behaved predictably under moderate levels of exploitation, the Beverton and Holt model permitted the calculation of optimal yields from a fishery. Their theory focused on what they termed “self regenerating population models,” adapting language used by radio system engineers to describe feedback.43 By controlling the amount of fish killed due to fishing, Beverton and Holt argued, fish populations could be made to produce maximum sustainable yields (MSYs). No longer was fishing, with all its various techniques, to be seen solely in a positive or negative light. In the influential population dynamics models of Beverton and Holt, and other fishery scientists, fishing mortality was aggregated and came to be seen as a variable, which, if controlled and carefully used, would directly influence the productivity of fish populations.44 The statistical description of fish as aggregated members of reproductively separated populations eventually produced models that allowed

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governments to believe that they could finally predict and control fishery fluctuations and pursue socioeconomic development goals associated with industrial modernization. For the first time in history, cod appeared to be manageable objects – statistically determined aggregations of self-sustaining groups of wild fish that persisted in particular geographical areas over ecological time scales, whose productivity could be influenced by carefully using fishing to kill specified numbers of “surplus” fish in separate, identifiable populations.45 Rather than rely on the diverse observations of fishermen, unenforceable local fishing rules, and the uncertainty of inshore cod migrations, by the 1950s governments had been presented with scientific knowledge of cod abundance offshore and quantitative tools to calculate optimal fishing levels that promised to put an end to fluctuating landings and the political and economic problems that accompanied them. In Newfoundland and Labrador, population-based management units for northern cod were established from 1932 to 1978 by the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF) and later the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO). Throughout the early history of ICNAF and NAFO, debates about the relative homogeneity of northern cod populations, the scale at which statistical data should be collected, and how boundaries should be drawn for fisheries management zones were intense. Ultimately, they were determined by pragmatic considerations associated with collecting statistical population data to permit quantitative modelling. Despite the presence of scientific evidence indicating complex inshore and offshore migration routes, stock mixing, and diverse spawning patterns, large-scale management zones emphasizing offshore populations became institutionalized.46 While several proposals to redraw cod management boundaries to recognize the existence of separate inshore and offshore cod populations were proposed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the expense and difficulty of collecting accurate statistical data in numerous small management zones, as well as the significant modelling benefits of maintaining historically consistent boundaries that permitted inter-annual statistical comparison, led to the maintenance of large-scale northern cod management zones based ultimately as much on lines of latitude as on complex stock structures, life history traits, or migration routes (see Figure 2.1).47 Fisheries management zones for Gadus morhua aggregated inshore and offshore populations, assuming that all cod followed capelin in the spring from offshore banks to inshore waters and that all spawning took place randomly within the specified management zones on the offshore banks after cod had migrated back from inshore waters in the autumn.48 These

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Introduction and Development of Cod Fisheries Management 27 simplistic assumptions allowed northern cod to be conceptually domesticated and grasped, symbolically represented as numbers that could be calculated and manipulated safely in models on land while the actual living cod swam freely in the wild North Atlantic.

Figure 2.1 NAFO fisheries management zones | Source: Cartography by Eric Leinberger. Adapted from a 2005 map from the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Management of the Northern Cod Fishery: Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Management Divisions, http://library.mun.ca/.

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Managed Annihilation Constructing the Manageable Cod Fishery

Population dynamics models were a powerful invention that promised the possibility of not only controlling fluctuations in landings but also maximizing the productivity of cod populations. However, the models required fishermen to adjust their activities to come in line with what the models suggested. To achieve maximum catches, the population models proposed what was, at the time, a counterintuitive notion – that less fishing would lead to greater landings over the long term. The connection between lower fishing efforts and increased cod landings was first noticed in Europe when large catches of groundfish species in the North Sea immediately followed the end of each world war. These catches suggested that lowering fishing efforts could produce larger yields. Although fisheries biologists had identified demographic laws and selforganizing feedback relationships among individual growth, reproduction, natural mortality, and fishing mortality rates that determined cod population sizes over time, there was little scientific understanding of how fishermen behaved when they went fishing for cod. Fishermen, therefore, were an external factor in fisheries models. If fishermen followed scientific advice to reduce their fishing to a level where they would gain optimal yield, then this would not have been a problem. However, they were encouraged to adopt industrial fishing methods and expand their ability to catch fish. In the 1950s, fisheries biologists began to lament the growing competitive element in the fishing industry, which made it “difficult if not impossible for the industries to regulate themselves to obtain a more favorable balance.”49 Although self-regulating feedbacks between reproduction, growth, and natural mortality had been discovered in fish populations, and the impacts of various levels of fishing mortality on these variables could be calculated to determine the level of fishing that would result in maximum sustainable yields, the behaviour of the people who imposed fishing mortality on populations had not been theorized. Economists addressed this problem in the early 1950s by arguing that the costs of fishing and the behaviour of fishermen could be quantified and dynamically related to the other elements in population models. Canadian economist H. Scott Gordon led the charge in proposing the integration of fishermen’s behaviour into biological models, arguing that “the large numbers of fishermen permit valid behaviouristic generalization of their activities along the lines of the standard economic theory of production.” By modelling fishermen as rational profit-seeking individuals,

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Yield and cost

Introduction and Development of Cod Fisheries Management 29

Cost line

Yield line

E mey

E msy

Eo

Fishing effort

Figure 2.2 Adapted Gordon-Schaefer model | Note: This model combines Gordon’s assumptions about the behaviour of fishermen with Schaefer’s population surplus production model and illustrates how a fish population will develop under different fishing intensities, given the assumption that each effort level results in a stable population size and a stable reproductive output. | Source: P. Holm, “Fisheries Management and the Domestication of Nature,” Sociologia Ruralis 36, 2 (1996): 181.

operating with free access to productive fish populations and linearly increasing fixed unit costs for their boats and gear, Gordon developed an influential cybernetic systems model that illustrated how human fishing activity was “behaviorized or determined” by elements in a mutually interdependent bio-economic system (see Figure 2.2). The demographic laws of cod populations were joined to economic laws associated with competitive human behaviour.50 Gordon’s bio-economic model revealed the need for fundamental changes in how fishing was organized and conducted. Gordon argued that the management goal of maximum sustainable yield (Emsy ) promoted by fisheries biologists was economically irrational because it did not take into account the costs of fishing or the need for reasonable profits for those engaged in hunting fish. Gordon’s model also argued that fishing effort would eventually regulate itself as rational profit-seeking fishermen realized that the costs of removing fish from sparse populations exceeded the profits that they were able to obtain (Eo ). Gordon argued, however, that

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both Emsy and Eo were suboptimal. From this, he promoted the idea of maximum economic yield (Emey ), arguing that the fishery should be controlled and carefully used to maximize the resource rent – the profits gained from fishing after the costs of catching the fish and returning them to port were subtracted from their landed value.51 The expanding competition in the fishing industry that concerned fisheries biologists in the 1950s, and that formed the underlying assumption of profit-seeking human behaviour in Gordon’s bio-economic models, was directly tied to the effects of industrial modernization. The gradual industrialization of the inshore fishery, and the arrival of foreign offshore draggers on the Grand Banks, dramatically increased the ability to locate and kill cod in the post-Second World War period. Adding to the competition associated with new fishing technologies was the shift away from the subsistence-merchant economy and toward a reliance on wages and cash in an expanding market economy that left fishermen with decreasing access to merchant credit and their traditional adaptive strategies associated with seasonal occupational pluralism. For those who remained in the modernized fishery, technological abilities and economic pressures to catch fish and turn them quickly into cash before they were killed and sold by someone else threatened to both overexploit cod populations and result in poor fishermen who spent more to win the race to fish than they could earn from selling the fish when they returned to shore.52 To obtain the MSYs promoted by biologists, or the maximum economic yields advocated by economists, the fishery had to change. Bioeconomic models pointed to several ways in which the fishery could be altered to achieve maximum yields (Emsy or Emey in Figure 2.2); however, all of the proposals required fundamental changes to the centuries-old freedom-of-the-seas law, Mare liberum.53 To obtain maximum yields, economists argued, fish populations had to be owned as if they were swimming inventories. Without ownership, there was no incentive for fishermen to act in an economically or biologically rational way and bring their fishing efforts in line to achieve maximum yields. Ownership would produce the predictable, economically rational fishing behaviour assumed in the bio-economic models; however, it was impossible to achieve if access was freely available to all. If fish populations were not owned, it was argued, then there would be a race to fish, and a tragedy of the commons would ensue. However, if fish populations were owned by a single actor with the power to exclude others from fishing,

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then maximum economic or sustainable yields could be obtained indirectly through the imposition of resource or effort taxes or directly by limiting access and effort in the forms of quotas, licences, or gear restrictions. According to the bio-economic models, “a fishery left to itself will always be suboptimal. The structure of the situation thus requires external intervention.”54 After 100 years of state-sponsored fisheries research, by the 1960s scientists had finally provided governments with knowledge of how to control landing fluctuations in cod fisheries. By representing fish as statistical populations and developing quantitative bio-economic models, they were able to predict future abundance under a variety of fishing regimes and give advice to governments on the most optimal fishing levels for given biological or economic goals. National governments, however, were unable to implement the knowledgeable recommendations of fisheries scientists because they did not have the right under international law to take ownership of fish populations beyond their small territorial sea zones, extending three miles offshore. The bulk of the cod populations were identified as being located far offshore on the continental shelf. For effective cod fisheries management to exist, the knowledge of scientists had to be connected with vast new territorial powers that granted property rights and ownership responsibilities to the Canadian state.55 On 1 January 1977, Canada declared a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off its east and west coasts. Overnight the majority of the northwest Atlantic cod populations fell within Canada’s national territory. Canada justified the massive extension of its national territory in the name of creating the conditions for effective fisheries management. If the tragedy of the commons was to be avoided among fishermen on the fishing grounds, then national ownership of the cod populations had to be established. Once ownership was vested in the Canadian state, the promising knowledge of fisheries scientists could be linked to state power to produce effective fisheries management that put an end to fluctuations in landings and the threat of under- or overfishing.56 Although total allowable catch (TAC) limits for northern cod in 2J3KL (see Figure 2.1) had been introduced by ICNAF in 1973, they were extremely difficult to enforce, compliance was voluntary, and the ICNAF did not possess the capability or legal right to enforce its recommendations, leading to frequent violations of the recommended TAC. Once Canada declared its EEZ, the newly established federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) immediately reduced TAC levels and enforced

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a significant drop in cod-fishing activity to permit cod populations to rebuild. The DFO eventually established quotas, licences, and gear restrictions for the cod fishery to bring landings in line with TAC levels that would produce maximum yields. TAC levels were eventually set at the F0.1 level, which meant that by adding one more boat the yield would increase just 10 percent more than the first boat’s yield.57 Once the foreign fleets had been removed from Canada’s EEZ, the federal and provincial governments began subsidizing the development of an offshore cod-fishing fleet to permit the development of a year-round harvesting and frozen processing industry in Newfoundland and Labrador. Population survey data from the offshore, and predictions of population rebuilding from bio-economic models, indicated that huge surpluses of cod would become available by the 1980s. The rules surrounding the EEZ dictated, however, that any surplus cod not removed by Canadian fleets had to be made available to NAFO members.58 The United States was the first to explicitly advocate for the inclusion of the concept of maximum sustainable yield in national policy (1949) and in international fisheries agreements (1955). Mandating under international law that fish had to be harvested at the maximum sustainable yield ensured that the United States and other highly developed countries would continue to have unrestricted access to the waters of undeveloped coastal states. Subsequent developments in international law have biased fisheries policy in favour of large distant water industrial fleets over small-scale inshore fleets. In Newfoundland, the MSY stipulation encouraged the rapid development of a Canadian offshore dragger fleet to capture as much of the TAC as was feasible since the small-scale inshore cod fishery was unable to capture enough of the TAC. Even with the rapid expansion of the Canadian dragger fleet, foreign distant water fleets from the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union were granted access to fish quotas that could not be harvested by existing Canadian capacity. Fishing agreements granting access to foreign fleets within Canada’s EEZ were given in exchange for monetary payments or preferential terms of trade.59 After declaring the 200-mile limit in 1977, it appeared that Canada had created the conditions to implement an effective cod fisheries management regime. Although inshore fishermen complained of declining catches in the early 1980s (when cod populations had supposedly recovered), offshore scientific surveys reported increasing catch-per-unit efforts, indicating that cod populations had rebuilt and were abundant offshore. Declining inshore catches were assumed to be caused by changes in cod migratory behaviour,

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hypothesized to be the result of changes in water temperature and salinity that supposedly blocked their migrations inshore. Furthermore, the bulk of the northern cod populations was assumed to be located on the offshore banks. All indications from scientific surveys and data from the offshore commercial fleet indicated that cod populations were abundant and able to safely sustain even larger TAC levels. The abundance of cod offshore led fisheries management efforts to focus on regulating the offshore fleet with the introduction of licensing, quota allocations, gear restrictions, and seasonal limits. Management measures came later to the inshore and received less attention than those of the highly productive and tractable offshore cod populations and the industrial fishing fleets capable of harvesting the maximum sustainable yields enshrined in international law. By the 1980s, the development of cod fisheries management had resulted in an “invisible revolution” in Newfoundland and Labrador.60 All indications were that fish and fishermen had been effectively domesticated, represented as quantifiable elements in predictable and controllable population dynamics models. The identities of both cod and fishing people as well as the relationship between them were “deeply transformed.”61 The invention, introduction, and development of cod fisheries management from Sars’ original scientific studies of the fish in the 1860s up to the modern bio-economic models had occurred in tandem with industrial modernization and uneven postwar economic expansion among coastal states. The number of people hunting codfish for a living, the tools that they used, the fishing economy, and the numerous sparsely populated outport communities were all changed to develop the fishery into a manageable modern industry. The cod had changed too. Before the advent of fisheries management, cod were understood as a free species embedded in an uncommodified common ocean – nobody owned cod until they were hunted down and pulled aboard a fishing vessel. After the spread of population thinking, the development of population dynamics models, and the establishment of the 200-mile EEZ to permit effective fisheries management, northern cod became members of large swimming inventories whose current and future biomass and economic value could be assessed onshore long before they were killed by a fisherman or had been spawned offshore by a motherfish.62 Managers in St. John’s or Ottawa need not ever set foot on a fishing boat to control fluctuations in landings – by modelling cod populations,

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fishermen, and the relationships among them, productivity, and profitability could be planned from a national centre of calculation.63 The establishment of fisheries management changed the identity of fishermen from fish killers, hunting a wild species on the edge of modern society, to modern fish harvesters, licence holders, and quota owners running businesses in the midst of a modern market society. Management also changed the knowledge considered important to enable fishermen to carry out the practice of fishing. As Holm points out, “it is no longer the practical knowledge of how to find and catch fish that equals expertise, but the command of scientifically certified methods and models designed for measuring and predicting the size of fish stocks.”64 The pre-industrial fishery ordered according to customary fishing practices had been transformed into a scientifically managed industrial fishery.

The Managed Annihilation of Gadus morhua

In 1988, after numerous inquiries into the northern cod fishery, persistent claims from inshore fishermen that TACs were being set too high, and an independent assessment of the DFO’s stock assessment data,65 the minister of fisheries and oceans ordered an official report to review the estimates of northern cod abundance that had formed the basis of Canada’s cod fisheries management regime. The resulting Alverson Report claimed that, though northern cod populations had increased since 1977, the stock assessments had massively overestimated the health of northern cod populations in management zones 2J3KL (see Figure 2.1).66 This shocking admission of error from a government-sponsored report resulted in a northern cod enquiry called the Harris Report, which published its findings in 1990. After taking into consideration both the biological and the economic implications of a cut in cod landings, the report recommended a modest reduction in TAC levels from 235,000 to 190,000 tonnes.67 However, “during the 1992 fishing season it became apparent that there was little left to catch. The situation was far worse than even the most pessimistic projections.”68 On 2 July 1992, after the Canadian offshore dragger fleet was unable to find enough cod to even come close to meeting its quota, federal fisheries minister John Crosbie was forced to announce closure of the northern cod fishery after nearly 500 years of uninterrupted fishing activity. The careful creation of a world-renowned cod fisheries management system, originating

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with the work of Sars in Norway in the 1860s, Heincke’s population thinking at the end of the nineteenth century, the bio-economic systems models of the 1950s, and the declaration of a 200-mile EEZ in 1977, had tragically produced what it had been designed to prevent. Rather than bringing stability to fish landings, it had eliminated landings altogether.

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3 Success through Failure: The Expansion of Management after the Moratorium I felt and still feel it was the opportunity for the government to change the management of the fishery. – John Crosbie 1

I

n 1992, the cod fishery collapsed. Permanently. Despite what was recognized worldwide as the most advanced and well-funded fisheries management regime, the cod fishery off Newfoundland had been destroyed. With no fish, fishermen out of work, and closed fish plants, there appeared to be nothing left to manage. Paradoxically, however, annihilation of the cod fisheries did not fundamentally challenge the very instrument that had brought it about. The identified problem, that of fisheries management, reinvented itself as an all-encompassing solution. This chapter attempts to explain this absurdity. Ideas from the science of ecology that had the potential to undermine management instead interacted with changing economic, political, and technological contexts since 1992 to expand the scope of fisheries management in the wake of its prior failure. Increasingly capital-intensive technologies, greater concentration in the ownership of fisheries resources, industrial aquaculture, and the rise of neoliberal modes of governance have spurred the elaboration of a new mode of fisheries management. This apparently new mode is in fact unlimited management, because it potentially includes within its ambit the ecology of fish and people.

36

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Cod Fisheries Management after the Collapse

The collapse of the northern cod fishery in 1992 marked the beginning of a number of fundamental shifts in the economic organization, political logics, technologies, and science applied to the cod fishery (see Table 3.1). As discussed in Chapter 2, the original economic organization of the cod fishery was based predominantly on subsistence-oriented peasant fishing families who produced salt-dried cod for trade with merchants. In the post-Second World War period, this familial production and mercantile system gave way to a Fordist capitalist model based on wage workers catching and processing fish in factory environments. The salt-dried cod commodity shifted to frozen fish products such as fish sticks targeted at mass consumer markets. Since 1992, the economic organization of the cod fishery has shifted to a post-Fordist modality. Cod are increasingly imported from other countries or are grown as domesticates on fish farms. Processing has become highly mechanized and focused on quality in order to compete with lowcost Chinese labour, which now handles close to 30 percent of the world’s commercial catches. Seafood processed in Newfoundland must increasingly be sold in upscale fresh and frozen markets as a variety of highquality, valued-added commodities if it is to be profitable in world markets. The political logics that have governed the cod fisheries in Newfoundland have encapsulated three main phases of liberalism: classical liberalism, welfare liberalism, and neoliberalism. The laissez-faire orientation of the classical liberal state changed in the postwar years, with the Canadian state becoming heavily involved in the development of a nationalized industrial cod fishery. Canada’s implementation of the United Nations Law of the Sea in 1977 transformed the ocean commons adjacent to Newfoundland and Labrador into regulated public property – a 200-mile exclusive economic zone under jurisdiction of the Canadian state. In the post-1992 period, under the sway of neoliberal logics, the state has been privatizing this national public property to enable development of a self-regulating fish-harvesting market. Mandatory professionalization of all remaining fishermen has been accompanied by its obverse – criminalization of subsistence use of the coastal zone for food consumption. Subsequently, market-led as opposed to state-led managerialism has become the focus of post-1992 reforms in fisheries technology and science.2

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1500-1849 Mercantile order with familial production of salt-dried codfish traded into Caribbean and European markets Classic liberal: British colonial rule and responsible government Baited hooks and hand lines Species

Timeline (approx.)

Economic organization

Political logics

Fishing technology

Fisheries science

Ecosystems

Fish farms

Jiggers ➔ Draggers Populations and bio-economics

Neoliberal: global integration through NAFTA and world trade agreements

Post-Fordist order with niche production of farmed cod fillets for the global fresh luxury seafood market

1993-2010

Welfare liberal: province under the Dominion of Canada

Fordist order with factory production of frozen cod blocks and fish sticks for North American commodity markets

1850-1992

History of economic organization, political logics, fishing technologies, and fisheries science in the cod fisheries of Newfoundland (1500-2010)

Table 3.1

Success through Failure

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The emphasis on market managerialism and economic globalization significantly influenced responses to the failure of the cod fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador. Rather than receiving increased resources for fisheries management after the moratorium, the DFO and other government departments were asked to “do more with less.” The DFO’s budget was cut, reducing its capacity to conduct scientific research, monitoring, and policing, and it was burdened with additional management responsibilities in the decade after the moratorium. In addition to enforcing cod-fishing restrictions and outright bans, the DFO had its mandate broadened to include integrated, ecosystem-based oceans management under the Oceans Act of Canada (1996) and Canada’s Oceans Strategy (2002), which expanded the responsibility of the DFO and increased the scope of management to include a multitude of ocean uses in addition to fisheries.3 The strategy “is based on [the] three principles of sustainable development, integrated management and the precautionary approach. These three principles guide all ocean management decision making.” Canada’s Oceans Strategy stresses that “oceans governance ... is much more than a federal government responsibility. It is a collective responsibility shared by all.”4 Emphasizing that management was a collective responsibility not only of the federal government but also of all Canadian citizens generalized managerial identities to the whole population. Doing so obscured the fact that the state was attempting to download responsibilities for management at a time when fisheries science was undergoing a dramatic transformation with the potential to undermine the very idea of management. Influential ecological metaphors, scientific theories, and fishery models were also changing around the time of the cod collapse. From an emphasis on single-species populations, MSY, and equilibrium-based bioeconomic modelling, ecological science began to advocate non-linear complex ecosystem approaches focusing on disturbance, irreducible uncertainty, adaptability, and change. The science of ecology began to reject a view of the world as tending toward balance, which had dominated up to the 1970s, and began focusing on disturbance, “especially signs of disturbance that were not caused by humans,” which could be framed as “natural.”5 Scientific research into the reasons behind the cod collapse reflected these shifts away from equilibrium thinking toward disturbancebased explanations and resulted in the DFO emphasizing the importance of climate variability for cod stock recruitment and recovery.6 Rather than placing the emphasis on human-induced disturbance caused by overfishing and other controllable industrial marine activities, natural variability and unmanageable environmental change (primarily colder

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than normal sea temperatures in the 1980s) became the favoured DFO explanations for the cod fishery collapse.7 Although overfishing drew attention to scientists’ failure to predict fish stocks, and managers’ inability to control industrialized fishing effort to bring landings in line with careful use (sustainable exploitation) goals, environmental change was outside human control and therefore beyond managerial responsibility. Focusing on fluctuations in water temperatures as the driving factor behind the cod collapse took the emphasis off fisheries managers and their socioeconomic and political context, thus legitimizing a program of reformed management as the magic bullet for solving the fishery crisis. The largest layoff in Canadian history and the failure of cod fisheries management, therefore, did not lead to a single public enquiry or royal commission into the reasons behind the annihilation of the northern cod – even though numerous enquiries (dealing primarily with production, employment, and seafood commodity price issues) had been undertaken in the cod-fishing industry in the years prior to the moratorium. Although the DFO managed to depoliticize the cod collapse and deflect blame from itself and capitalist economic relations, by emphasizing environmental explanations for the collapse, the department had to respond to demands from fishermen for a more inclusive role in stock assessment, fisheries science, and management in a climate of government fiscal restraint and market managerialism. The DFO began to experiment with increased public consultations, stakeholder negotiations, the use of privatization, self-organizing market mechanisms, and the inclusion of inshore fish harvesters in data collection and co-management arrangements rather than the traditional emphasis on the offshore dragger fleet and topdown bureaucratic structures centrally located in Ottawa. These changes helped to form a new fisheries management discourse that responded to the cod collapse in ways that were compatible with the neoliberal restructuring of government and the ideological emphasis on self-organizing free markets. The type of management that emerged emphasized the careful use and stewardship of domesticated and wild cod fisheries while coping with and adapting to uncertainty and change in seafood markets and ecosystems that contain endangered species requiring protection in marine protected areas (MPAs). The single-species wild fish population model has given way to a multiuse ecosystem approach with numerous subpopulations of inshore and offshore cod. Uncertainty and fluctuation in fish landings and seafood markets, once targeted for elimination and control, are increasingly accepted as realities demanding innovative coping strategies and adaptations through

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corporate restructuring and conglomeration. Large-scale, non-linear change and hierarchically nested, unpredictable processes, such as climate change, localized fish populations, market demand, fishing-down sequences, foreign overfishing beyond the 200-mile EEZ, by-catch, and the complexity of wild cod recovery, emphasize uncertainty and flux over predictability and equilibrium.

Depleted Fisheries Systems in an Age of Neoliberal Globalization

In the face of the northern cod and other global stock collapses, budgetary restraints, and extreme overfishing of species thought to be managed effectively, national fisheries managers are increasingly left to cope with and adapt to failures as opposed to taking a confident, proactive stance toward fisheries under their managerial control. The global fisheries crisis, in which the Newfoundland and Labrador cod collapse is situated, involves interconnected biophysical, social, and political complexities.8 Attempts to address this complexity have revolved around calls to move from singlespecies to ecosystem-based management. Ecosystem-based fisheries management emphasizes modelling a greater number of variables beyond commercially relevant fish populations and integrating a diversity of knowledge outside traditional fisheries biology and economics, such as the experiential knowledge of fishermen, interdisciplinary science, and the concerns of environmentalists (see Table 3.2).9 The need to address irreducible uncertainty with respect to scientific knowledge, regime shifts, fishing-down theory, hierarchical nesting from the local to the global across system types and temporal scales, and the inclusion of a range of knowledge types and forms of stakeholder participation in the management process has raised continuing challenges for the implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management in Newfoundland and Labrador and around the world.10 Fisheries scientists and international fishery organizations are increasingly becoming aware of the immense challenges associated with ecosystembased fisheries management in the northwest Atlantic as overfishing, environmental fluctuations, climate change, and scientific uncertainty interact with and amplify the number of variables that need to be predicted if managerial control is to be achieved. As M. Barange and colleagues of the Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics Project (GLOBEC) observe, “not only do environmental and human factors separately affect fish population dynamics, but these two sets of factors interact, compounding their effects.”11

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Table 3.2 Comparison between single-species and ecosystem-based fisheries management Single-species fisheries management

Ecosystem-based fisheries management

Sector-based. Control oriented: aimed at target commercial species and harvesters (harvest regulation).

Area-based. Coping oriented: focused on habitats, ecosystem integrity, and facilitating the self-control of people.

Objectives

Not always coherent or transparent. “Optimal” system output focused on commercial fish production.

A desired state of the ecosystem (health, integrity). Conservation, rebuilding of depleted stocks, and risk management.

Scientific input

Formalized (particularly in regional commissions). Variable impact. Population statistics.

Less formalized. Less operational. Often insufficient. Stronger role of advocacy, forensic science, and local ecological knowledge.

Decision making

Most often top-down. Strongly influenced by industry lobbying.

Promotes bottom-up, participatory approaches and market mechanisms. More opportunity for influence by environmental lobbies. Stronger use of tribunals and councils.

Role of the media/PR

Historically limited. Growing as fisheries crisis spreads.

Stronger use of the media, public relations, and facilitation techniques.

Local, regional, and global institutions

Central role of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, regional fishery bodies (e.g., NAFO), and National Fishery departments (e.g., DFO).

Central role of United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the Regional Seas Conventions, and partnerships between different levels of government, including municipal scale and industry self-management.

A process of overlapping and cascading subdivision of the oceans for allocation of resources and responsibilities. (e.g., NAFO subdivisions 2J3KL).

A progressive consideration of larger-scale ecosystems for more comprehensive integrated management (e.g., from specific areas with bay stocks to entire coastal zones and large marine ecosystems (LME).

Criteria Management

Governance

Geographical basis

䊳

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Table 3.2

Criteria

Single-species fisheries management

Ecosystem-based fisheries management

Stakeholder and political base

Narrow. Essentially fishing industry stakeholders.

Much broader. Society-wide. Often with support from subsistence, recreational, and smallscale fisheries.

Global instruments

1982 Law of the Sea Convention, UN Fish Stock Agreement, and FAO Code of Conduct.

Ramsar Convention, UN Conference on Environment and Development and 1992 Agenda 21, Convention on Biological Diversity, and Jakarta Mandate.

Measures

Regulation of fishing activity outputs (removals, quotas) or inputs (gear, effort, capacity) to maintain resource productivity and trade benefits.

Protection of specified areas and habitats, including limitation or exclusion of extractive human activities. Total or partial ban of some human activities. A focus on controlling human interaction with marine resources versus the resources themselves.

Sources: Adapted from D. Bavington, “Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents: Exploring the Complexities of Control, Careful Use, and Coping in Resource and Environmental Management,” Environments 30, 3 (2002): 3-21; D. Bavington and J. Kay, “Ecosystem-Based Insights on Northwest Atlantic Fisheries in an Age of Globalization,” in Globalization: Effects and Fisheries Resources, ed. M. Schechter, W. Taylor, and L. Wolfson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); W. Busch, B. Brown, and G. Mayer, eds., Strategic Guidance for Implementing an Ecosystem-Based Approach to Fisheries Management (Silver Springs, MD: NMSF, 2003); and S.M. Garcia et al., The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries: Issues, Terminology, Principles, Institutional Foundations, Implementation, and Outlook, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 443 (Rome: FAO, 2003).

D. Pauly and J. Maclean summarize the managerial challenges posed by dynamic interactions between overfishing and environmental fluctuations by focusing on aquatic food chains. As long food chains with large carnivorous predatory fish begin to disappear due to overfishing, shorter food chains with smaller herbivorous fish, jellyfish, and algae take their place. These shorter food chains expose remaining predators to the environmentally driven fluctuation in plankton at the bottom of the chain. The fish that fisheries target feed on plankton that have now become more exposed to environmental change, which, in turn, leads to fish populations

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that fluctuate unpredictably. Adding to this uncertainty is the scarcity of old fish in exploited populations. When “combined, these two effects make catches even harder to predict, and fisheries more difficult to manage than they already were.”12 In addition to a growing list of complex biophysical dynamics emphasized by Pauly and Maclean, fisheries managers are faced with challenges that include an array of interconnected socioeconomic, legal, and political systems flowing from a diverse set of historical circumstances and operating at a variety of spatial and temporal scales with differing goals, levels of influence, and power. The task of managing endangered cod embedded in the wild northwest Atlantic marine ecosystem, as opposed to idealized cod populations in abstracted equilibrium-based models, presents enormous challenges that are only beginning to be explored. Since the mid-1990s, ecosystem-based approaches of various types have presented themselves as theoretical alternatives to single-species models that – despite their many identified failings – continue to influence how management is perceived and implemented in fisheries systems in Canada and throughout the world. The very idea of maximum sustainable yield has been challenged on scientific grounds, but it continues to form the foundation of international law and fisheries management organizations such as NAFO. Overfishing is still defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with reference to MSY, and sustainable certification schemes rely on the surplus production model underlying the construct. These institutional realities continue to influence and constrain how the theory of ecosystem-based fisheries management is actually implemented.13

Coping with Complexity: Ecosystem Approaches and the Crisis of Controlling Fish Populations

Ecosystem-based theories of fisheries management tend to focus on coping rather than the control and caretaking orientation of single-species population management. This managerial coping and adaptive stance has been encouraged by characterizing fisheries as special types of systems that are self-organizing, holarchic, and open (SOHO systems). Such systems organize their internal structures and dynamics, are nested like Russian dolls within other systems, and remain open to energy, materials, and information. Descriptions of SOHO systems are useful in situations where there are high levels of uncertainty and conflict and high stakes for decisions.14

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Self-organizing system Context Physical environment Flows: Exergy (energy) Material Information

Dissipative process

Dissipative process

Figure 3.1

Conceptual model for SOHO systems | Note: This diagram represents a conceptual model for self-organizing systems as dissipative processes and structures.

Many have argued that these situations call for a new type of postnormal science (PNS) that moves beyond expert-based, reductionist, mechanistic approaches. One such alternative is the self-organizing system based on dissipative processes and structures. These processes surface whenever sufficient high-quality energy, known as exergy, is available to support them or when they are able to restructure available raw materials to dissipate exergy.15 Once established, dissipative processes create structures from exergy, biophysical materials, and information. These structures create new processes that themselves become structures so that they become nested and a new SOHO system emerges. In a marine ecological setting, examples of structures would include individuals of a particular species, stocks of fish or breeding populations, coral, eelgrass, and so on. The ecological processes would take in reproduction, metabolism, primary productivity, and so on. The context would be determined by the available set of nutrients and energy sources in the physical environment, and the information would consist of the range of biodiversity (see Figure 3.1).16 R. Hengeveld and G.H. Walter, in support of post-normal science (PNS), criticize the “demographic paradigm” that forms the scientific foundation of population-based fisheries management. Contrary to the arguments put forward by F. Heincke against qualitative natural history at the end of the

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nineteenth century, Hengeveld and Walter argue that scientific paradigms and methods that rely on statistical techniques and quantifiable demographic “laws” fail to take into account the actual experiences of organisms living in fluctuating, heterogeneous environments. They believe that there is “a serious dislocation [that] exists between demographic theory and ecologists’ experience with organisms in natural situations” and that “many of the expectations generated by demographic models are frequently not observed in natural systems, or are not measurable there.”17 Hengeveld and Walter argue that scientists trapped within the demographic paradigm end up searching for general ecological laws and quantifiable principles in isolation from real-world physio-chemical and biological contexts. They argue that demographers and population modellers rely on statistical attributes that are idealistic abstractions that do not exist in the natural world. Scientists operating within the demographic paradigm assume that attributes such as mean population density and the type and degree of density dependence directly impact ecological performance and evolutionary trajectories of the species in question. However, these statistical attributes do not represent anything that can be experienced by individual organisms. In the end, the only things that are actually quantified and analyzed in demographic models are the incidental population consequences of individual-level processes.18 As an applied science involving high levels of uncertainty surrounding measurements, high decision stakes for the communities and species involved, and conflicts around how to proceed, fisheries science seems like a perfect candidate for a post-normal scientific approach that does not rely on idealized demographic models such as those deployed under populationbased cod fisheries management. SOHO systems understanding is a postnormal approach to science that moves beyond equilibrium-based demographic theory by building on the tradition of L. von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory and A. Koestler’s notion of holons and holonarchy.19 SOHO systems approaches emphasize nested hierarchies, self-organization, and the openness of social and ecological systems to energy, materials, and information. The hierarchical nature of complex systems requires that they be studied from different types of perspectives and at different scales. With SOHO systems descriptions, there is never only one correct perspective; rather, a diversity of views is required for understanding, controlling a SOHO system is recognized as an impossible goal, and in theory management becomes focused on coping with and adapting to largely unpredictable risks and uncertainties.20

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Applied to fisheries, SOHO systems models focus attention on the hierarchical nature of fisheries systems by considering issues of scale (temporal and spatial), system type (physical, biological, societal), and the bounding and nesting of fishing activities within these systems. Although physical and biological systems often display hierarchical nesting, societal systems often involve tangled hierarchies that exhibit scale mismatch with respect to ecological hierarchies, structures, and processes. Additionally, SOHO systems models draw attention to the dissipative structures and processes that can evolve in marine ecosystems out of specific physical environments that provide exergy, material, and information, permitting the emergence of self-organization (see Figure 3.1).21 From the nested hierarchical perspective of SOHO systems modelling, marine ecosystems provide the context for the emergence of complex societal fishing systems, or fishing societies, that exhibit self-organizing dissipative structures and processes contingent on the extraction of structure or biomass from the marine ecological system for their survival (see Figure 3.2). In addition to framing the nested hierarchical nature of fishing activities, SOHO systems models focus attention on the feedbacks that exist between fishing activities, ecological structure, and the physical environmental context, out of which both ecological and societal self-organizing systems are theorized to emerge.22 SOHO fisheries systems can exist in a number of stable states around attractors23 (sometimes referred to as ecological regimes) and can resist movement away from them. This resistance to change is accomplished by feedback loops in the SOHO system that serve to maintain the systems’ current state; however, when critical thresholds are breached, and the SOHO system moves beyond the domain of an attractor, system change tends to be rapid and catastrophic, flipping from one regime/attractor to a new one. Flips in aquatic systems have been observed in Lake Erie, involving a benthic and pelagic attractor, and regime shifts have been postulated for marine systems, including changes from groundfish to crustacean regimes driven by modifications in water temperature and salinity in the northwest Atlantic off Newfoundland and Labrador and others throughout the world’s oceans.24 The precise time when flips occur, the domain-space of the new attractor, and the exact state that the system will change into are generally not predictable because, in any given SOHO fishery system, there are often several possible system states (attractors/regimes). The state that the system arrives in is a function of its history, and there is never a universally correct,

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C

Ecological system Context Physical environment Flows: Exergy (energy) Material Information D

Process

Societal system

Process Structure

A

Structure

B

Figure 3.2 SOHO systems model | Note: This model illustrates Newfoundland fishing dynamics by focusing on the physical environmental context (D), the self-organizing structures and processes of the ecological and societal systems, and feedbacks between them (B and C), and the transfer of ecological structure into the societal system (A).

proper, or fitting state for a system, even though there will be system states that are preferred by specific groups of people.25 This means that ecosystems do not possess any nature or essence that can objectively dictate any limit or threshold, foundation, or truth from which human beings can judge what is proper, appropriate, fitting, beautiful, or good with respect to their actions. The theoretical recognition that there is never a universally “correct” regime for an ecosystem increases the scope of possible managerial interventions and legitimate stakeholder interests well beyond fishing concerns. Managing fish populations for maximum productivity, and fishing activities for maximum sustainable or economic yield as enshrined in international law and postulated under demographically derived bioeconomic models, becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to justify theoretically under ecosystem-based fisheries management. Uncertainty and the lack of objective universal truth mean that there can no longer be a single expert-derived answer or easily reached consensus on management

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goals and techniques. Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) requires opening up managerial processes of goal formation, and it demands new skills among managers. Fisheries managers must shift from giving expert advice on total allowable single-species catch levels to facilitating diverse stakeholder participation, “learning within the unknowable,”26 and negotiations to determine which self-organizing ecological regimes they should be attempting to influence. This shift requires changes not only by managers but also by institutions, the managed, and all those with an interest in the ecosystem. Cod fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, have an interest in promoting groundfish regimes with healthy stocks of capelin, other cod prey, and low numbers of cod predators such as harp seals; crab and shrimp harvesters depend on crustacean attractors with appropriate environmental and trophic dynamics to maintain their fishery.27 The preferences of fishermen and other marine stakeholders for particular marine regimes or attractors will be mediated by their values, perspectives, linkages to other systems, historical attachments, understanding, interests, power, influence, and a multitude of other factors. In the world of ecosystems-based management, theoretically there are no stakeholder interests and perspectives that can be legitimately excluded. Ecosystem-based management expands the number of possible stakeholders well beyond fishermen and their concerns to include a wide variety of new actors, from environmentalists and marine tour operators to oil and gas and shipping interests and others who can demonstrate an interest in how the ecosystem is managed. In theory, since ecosystems are connected to each other in time and across space, an unlimited number of non-local actors, and even future generations, can lay claim to interests in ecosystem-based fisheries management. In practice, market demand exerts the dominant influence on how selforganizing marine regime shifts are interpreted by fish harvesters and processors, whereas the direction of the regime change relative to trophic levels and biodiversity alters how marine biologists and environmentalists interpret new system states, perceiving them either as signs of ecological recovery or as further evidence of degrading fishing-down sequences.28 How regime shifts and attractors are interpreted is influenced by power relationships and knowledge struggles located in particular histories, in political, economic, social, and ecological contexts. The SOHO systems model permits a new understanding of the complexity of fisheries systems and suggests an expanded role for science, monitoring, and management. It removes the idea of an objective, context-free

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assessment of changes in ocean systems, and it focuses on the importance of who is making monitoring and management decisions and what is motivating their preferences and perspectives. The hierarchical nature of SOHO fisheries systems must be understood through a consideration of issues involving system scale and type and the bounding and nesting of the system that inevitably involve identifying “important” processes, structures, feedbacks, and contexts. What constitutes an “important” process, structure, feedback, or context will be characterized by the position of the system observer and can never capture everything: “importance” will always involve values, interests, and disproportionate power relationships that require multiple observers to capture a diversity of perspectives on the SOHO fishery system and introduces the contradictory challenge of attempting to resolve and facilitate conflicting, and often incommensurable, perspectives.29 Although possibilities of future system states can be offered by experts, exact predictions of fishery system dynamics are not possible when fisheries are understood as ecosystems. Prediction is impossible because marine ecosystems, like all self-organizing systems, display “middle number” behaviour (see Figure 3.3) that can only be described and understood by exploring possible attractors accessible to the system, the feedbacks that might maintain the system at the attractors, the external influences that could define the context for a specific attractor (or regime), and the conditions under which flips between attractors (or regimes) are likely. In the middle number systems that characterize most of the environmental and social issues associated with marine fisheries today, the assumptions of large number systems, where population statistics can be applied, and of small number systems, where deterministic quantitative methods such as calculus can be used, are of limited applicability. Fisheries issues exhibit complex system dynamics that contain too many diverse elements for deterministic analysis and not enough elements of identical and average type to apply statistics.30 The decision stakes surrounding fisheries issues are often extremely high, with associated levels of uncertainty that move beyond the scope of normal science. Single-species management of fisheries systems has tended to focus on attempts to absorb complexity and reduce uncertainty – messes, where problems and solutions are in dispute, are recast as being amenable to directed puzzle solving by experts in management agencies. According to the theory of EBFM, this practice is inappropriate and leads to management failures and surprises because fishery systems are inherently complex. R. Rosen defines complex systems as those that cannot be

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Randomness

Unorganized complexity (aggregates) Large number systems (linear and equilibrium thermodynamics) • Tool: statistics (probabilistic rules) • Order out of chaos or complexity (take the average of behaviour) • Parts similar and interact in just a few ways • Statistical control

*

Organized complexity (SOHO systems) Middle number systems: neither over- nor under-connected • Tool: post-normal science (complex systems rules) • Too many parts for deterministic analysis, not enough for probabilistic analysis • Many parts with diverse ways of interacting • Non-linear thermodynamics and dynamic self-organization • Limited control/coping and adapting Organized complexity (Newtonian mechanics) Small number systems • Tool: calculus (deterministic rules) • Linearity and equilibrium • Analysis/machines • Direct control

Complexity Figure 3.3

Large, middle, and small number systems | Note: * Strong “cultural attractor” to conceptualize medium number systems as large or small number systems | Sources: J. Kay and J. Foster. “About Teaching Systems Thinking,” in Proceedings of the HKK Conference, University of Waterloo, 14-16 June 1999, ed. G. Savage and P. Roe, (Waterloo: University of Waterloo, 1999); G.M. Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1975).

quantitatively modelled: “A system is complex if it has noncomputable models. This characterization has nothing to do with more complication, or with counting of parts or interactions.”31 Fishery systems involve many different types of interacting systems (societal, biological, physical) displaying non-linear dynamics, operating at a variety of nested and tangled temporal and spatial scales, with multiple possible attractors and self-organizing regimes, irreducible uncertainties associated with their observation, and a variety of legitimate perspectives on their description and proposals for interaction (see Table 3.3). Ecosystem approaches to fisheries such as the SOHO systems models raise different questions, data needs, monitoring requirements, and managerial outlooks from those offered by the reductive single-species approach.32 SOHO systems descriptions focus managers and interested stakeholders on new questions that go beyond the traditional focus on

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Table 3.3 Properties of complex systems to keep in mind when thinking about SOHO fisheries systems descriptions Non-linear

Behave as a whole, a fishery system. Cannot be understood by taking them apart into pieces that can be added or multiplied together.

Hierarchical

Are holarchically nested. The fishery system is nested within a system and is made up of other systems. The “control” exercised by a holon of a specific level always involves a balance of internal or self-control and external, shared, reciprocating controls involving other holons in a mutual causal way that transcends the old selfish/altruistic polarizing designations. Such nesting cannot be understood by focusing on one hierarchical level (holon) alone. Understanding comes from multiple perspectives of different types and scales.

Internal causality

Non-Newtonian, not a mechanism, but rather is self-organizing. Characterized by goals, positive and negative feedback, auto catalysis, emergent properties, surprise, and irreducible uncertainty with respect to their description.

Window of vitality SOHO systems must have enough complexity but not too much. There is a range within which self-organization can occur. Complex systems strive for optimum, not minimum or maximum, conditions. Non-equilibrium/ There may not exist equilibrium points for the fishery system; dynamic stability however, fishery systems may be characterized by dynamic flux within the constraints imposed by the physical environmental context. Multiple steady states/regimes

There is not necessarily a unique preferred system state in a given fishery. Multiple attractors are possible in a fishery and the current system state may be as much a function of historical accidents as anything else. For example, regime shifts in fishery systems may be a result of the combination of particular fishing pressures, changes in the physical context (e.g., ocean currents, water temperature, and salinity), and shifting ecological structures and dynamics. There may be multiple regimes that are valued differently by different actors in the system.

䊳

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Catastrophic behaviour

The norm. • Bifurcations: moments of unpredictable behaviour. • Flips: sudden discontinuous, rapid change. • Holling four-box cycle/shifting steady state mosaic or Schupeter’s business cycle concept.

Chaotic behaviour

Our ability to predict fishery systems is always limited. For example, with weather forecasts, it is between 5 and 10 days, regardless of how sophisticated the computers are or how much information is available, due to the sensitivity to measurement conditions and unavoidable measurement errors. Stock assessments, therefore, cannot be used for anything like future predictions over multiple years, and managers need to establish safe biological limits with reference to particular regimes or attractors as opposed to precise total allowable catch (TAC) levels.



䊴

53

Sources: Adapted from M. Boyle, J. Kay, and B. Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy: An Adaptive Ecosystem Approach,” in Encyclopaedia of Global Environmental Change, vol. 4, ed. T. Munn (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2001); J. Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability: Addressing the Challenge of Complexity,” Futures 31 (1999): 727.

annual single-species stock assessments, TAC levels, and quota allocations in fisheries science, monitoring, and management. The new questions expand the scope of possible managerial intervention by focusing on the ecological and physical contexts within which fishing takes place and on the feedbacks within and between societal systems and ecological systems and in the physical environmental context (see Table 3.4 and Figure 3.2). Rather than focusing on managing fish populations and environmental contexts directly, most ecosystem-based fisheries management models focus on explicitly managing human interactions with the biophysical systems that make up the ecological context and structures desired by dominant institutional actors in social systems. The complexity of fished ecosystems and the inherent limits on accurately forecasting the consequences of fishing have led the FAO and national fisheries departments to advocate application of the precautionary principle as a major component of ecosystem-based fisheries management. This principle has introduced an “official element of uncertainty into stock assessments where previously there had officially been certainty,” and it

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Table 3.4 New questions that flow from the SOHO systems heuristic applied to fisheries 1 What are the elements (structures and processes) of the societal fishing system that you wish to maintain? 2 What is the ecological context necessary to maintain the processes and structures of the societal fishing system? (Figure 3.2-A) 3 What are the ecological structures and processes that provide the context for the societal fishing system? 4 What is the physical environmental context necessary to maintain the processes and structures of the ecological system? (Figure 3.2-D) 5 What structural changes does the societal fishing system make to the ecological system? (Figure 3.2-B) 6 How does the societal system alter the physical environmental context? (Figure 3.2-C)

has shifted the emphasis in fisheries management away from optimizing production toward conservation and risk management initiatives in which “the most important outcome to be predicted ... [is] not catch but spawning biomass.”33 The application of the precautionary principle has resulted in fishery management actions that are more tightly defined in space and time “than would be wished for by ... nourishers of the modernist control ideal.”34 Incorporation of the precautionary principle and spawning biomass monitoring into ecosystem-based fisheries management has not, however, fundamentally altered the quantitative foundation of population-based fisheries science or ongoing dreams of the modern control ideal. Although fisheries managers and their institutions are increasingly acknowledging scientific uncertainty and complexity – “because the environment and the organisms inhabiting it are both essentially non-stationary in time and space” – the dominant response “to this changed perception ... has been various ad hoc modifications to demographic ecological theory, and the belief that such adjustments are adequately coping with the changed perceptions.”35 The DFO has adopted a weak version of the precautionary principle, interpreting it as a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis tool that effectively reverses the burden of proof requirement embedded in the principle.36

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Although the precautionary principle has been adopted in ecosystembased management policies created by a number of national and international fisheries departments and organizations, it has been implemented only as the precautionary approach. This minor word change masks a fundamental shift in the meaning of precaution. The precautionary principle places the burden of proof on development proponents to prove that any harm resulting from their operations will be reversible, placing the emphasis on proponents to develop failsafe systems where unexpected outcomes will not lead to catastrophic biophysical or social effects. Fisheries managers are not to delay cost-effective conservation measures simply because they lack definitive scientific evidence or undisputed data on damaging fishing practices and other industrial activities in the marine environment. The precautionary approach places the burden of proof on regulators to calculate cost-benefit analyses, illustrating that restrictions on fishing and other marine development activities do not, on balance, irrevocably or unnecessarily harm the economy.37 Although the precautionary principle implies a deontological ethical framework that places strict limits on human activity, the subtle shift in terminology from principle to approach promotes a permissive utilitarian ethical stance focused on maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number of human or corporate econo'mic actors.38 Thus, the DFO’s precautionary approach provides the very ethical framework and burdenof-proof requirement that the precautionary principle was designed to avoid and eliminate. The shift from principles to operationalized approaches that shift the burden of proof to the opposite of what was intended provides further evidence of the counterintuitive changes that have occurred when EBFM theory has been put into practice. With no diminishment of management post-collapse, we see that managerial ecology remains the dominant context within which relationships between cod and people are mediated. Rather than undermining the very idea of management by emphasizing indeterminacy and precaution, ideas from ecological science have only expanded the scope of management to include whole ecosystems in addition to single-species fish populations and simplistic bio-economic models. The next chapter will describe how the theory of EBFM has actually been applied in Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries.

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4 Socio-Ecological System Description of the Cod Fishery The solution to proper management, if it is to be found, will not be through improving science alone. In fact, further development of the conventional management approach which describes first the state of the resource, and only later decides how it is to be allocated, has been proven unsuccessful by the events of recent decades. – J.F. Caddy and J.C. Seijo, “This Is More Difficult than We Thought!” 1

I

n spite of several expert-based cod fisheries reports, and enquiries looking into the state of the cod-fishing industry and scientific stock assessments throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, quotas for northern cod remained high up until 1992, when the stock collapse crisis was declared. Beliefs that fishing mortality was the only relevant variable determining stock size, that the associated assumptions of environmental variables remained relatively constant and favourable to cod population growth, and that fishing did not significantly alter the natural growth rates and productive dynamics of cod populations, permitted managerial confidence that controlling fishing effort would allow for accurate, quantitative predictions of stock structure.2 Operating on the assumptions embedded in single-species fisheries management models, the initial cod population growth estimates claimed that cod would recover quickly (within two to five years) with the cessation of directed commercial fishing.3 The optimistic belief in rapid recovery flowed from assumptions central to single-species stock assessment and population-based fisheries management models. Predictions of rapid cod recovery appeared to be rational and legitimate because the ecological, 56

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environmental, and behavioural conditions associated with cod productivity were assumed to be similar to the conditions that existed during the original rebuilding effort in the late 1970s for which data were available. In addition, legal by-catch, illegal fishing, and scientific survey fisheries were assumed to be inconsequential for cod population rebuilding.4 More than a decade after the moratorium, it is stating the obvious to acknowledge that single-species management assumptions applied to the northern cod were overly optimistic and recklessly simplistic. Since 1992, forensic fisheries science has found that cod have failed to recover across their range and that their spawning biomass has been all but eliminated – having declined 99.9 percent from levels measured in the 1960s. Other groundfish stocks have also collapsed, resulting in the complete closure of the cod fishery and scientific recommendations that northern cod be listed as an endangered species.5 Increasingly, fisheries scientists argue that system-wide regime shifts and fishing-down sequences have occurred in the northwestern Atlantic as higher-trophic-level groundfish species decline and jellyfish, scavenger species (e.g., sculpins), and crustacean populations (e.g., snow crab [Chionocetes opilio] and northern shrimp [Pandalus borealis]) expand. The fishing industry, the provincial Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture (DFA), and rural development boards are responding to these regime shifts by focusing harvesting efforts on crustaceans and developing harvesting strategies for “underutilized” species, such as sea urchins, jellyfish, and sculpins. “Fishing down the food web” has thus become part of official fisheries policy.6 Fisheries scientists observe that cod are maturing younger, that they experience high mortality rates for unknown reasons at age five, and that female cod often fail to spawn annually as predicted. Inshore cod populations have also experienced sudden mortalities due to super-cooling events in Smith Sound, Trinty Bay on the east coast of Newfoundland. Oceanographers emphasize the cyclical nature of environmental fluctuations postulated to have bottom-up forcing implications on plankton and fish abundance, including the northern cod. Each new piece of scientific information and interpretation undermines the equilibrium assumptions that permit legitimate and effective population-based fisheries management. New scientific knowledge about cod, and the recognition of large zones of ignorance about their behaviour, create a general perception, and an increasing reality, of unmanageable complexity, confusion, and conflict around the appropriate direction for future cod fisheries management.7

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The uncertainty, ignorance, complexity, and conflict associated with the collapse of the Newfoundland and Labrador northern cod fishery provide a relevant case study to apply the SOHO systems model to work through some of the structural changes hypothesized to have occurred in biophysical and socioeconomic systems and the exergy, material, and information flows and feedbacks that currently exist within and among them. The collapse also provides a good example of the reasons behind calls for shifts from single-species to ecosystem-based fisheries management and illustrates the paradoxical expansion and shifted focus of managerial interventions under EBFM. In addition to building a more realistic picture of the dynamics of exploited fish populations, proponents argue that ecosystem models of fisheries highlight the interconnections between social and ecological systems and the complexities and challenges associated with attempts at their management.8

The Transfer of Marine Ecological Structure to the Societal System

From a SOHO systems perspective, the socioeconomic and cultural systems of Newfoundland and Labrador have historically been, and continue to be, extremely dependent on extracting marine ecological structure through fishing. The abundance of codfish and the belief in their manageability were predicated on favourable ecological structures and processes, comprising a groundfish-dominated regime with capelin forming a critical source of prey for cod. Half of the ecological structure (cod biomass) removed from the ocean was fished seasonally over a 400-year period, from 1500 to 1900, using pre-industrial fishing technology, primarily baited hooks on hand lines. This period experienced severe fluctuations in landings, which had to be accepted and adapted to until the birth of fisheries management, when fluctuations were targeted for elimination to permit modernization, industrialization, and rationalization of cod fishing and the way of life associated with hunting fish. With industrialization and rationalization of fishing and processing technologies, 50 million tons of codfish were rapidly removed from the Newfoundland and Labrador ecosystem from 1900 to 1993 – an amount of cod that had taken 400 years to catch before the mechanization of fishing. Fisheries management developed in the historically unprecedented context of industrialization, when year-round fishing activities took place on the offshore banks, often during spawning or on pre-spawning

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Table 4.1 Data on landings, licences, and number of fishing vessels, 1991 and 2001 All species Landings in metric tonnes (MT) Landed value before processing Total no. of fishing licences Core/full-time licences Non-core/part-time licences Crew members

1991

2001

424,808 MT $261,973,000 24,409 14,184 10,225 n/a*

267,959 MT $519,027,000 14,385 4,057 10,328 4,500

Various species** Cod landings (MT) / no. of groundfish licences Crab landings (MT) / no. of licences Shrimp landings (MT) / no. of licences

160,396 MT / 9,447 16,149 MT / 736

23,774 MT / 5,039 58,107 MT / 779

21,729 MT/ 57

75,871 MT / 420

Fishing vessels Total no. of licensed fishing vessels Inshore > 35-ft vessels Nearshore 35–65-ft vessels Midshore 65–100-ft vessels Offshore < 100-ft vessels

14,905 13,678 1,143 8 76

8,712 7,693 982 11 26

* Category did not exist in 1991. ** Data on separate groundfish, crab, and shrimp licences were available only for 1991 and 2000. Source: DFO, Statistical Services, 2004, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/.

aggregations, and bait, roe, and reduction (fishmeal) fisheries targeted squid, capelin, and other prey species of cod. This industrialization led to a spatial and temporal scaling-up of the fishery and initiated a trophic fishing-down trajectory, resulting in the loss of large breeding “mother” fish and decreases in their size at age.9 Since 1993, the species composition and the annual biomass of landings extracted from the ecological system have changed dramatically and had profound effects on the processes and structures of the societal system.10 The biomass of all fish landings in the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery has been cut roughly in half compared with the average landings in the last decades of the pre-1992 period, and the main composition of the landings has shifted from groundfish (northern cod) to crustaceans (see Table 4.1). Counterintuitively, from the perspective of fishing-down theory but in keeping with capitalist market logic, the high market value of the

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lower-trophic-level crustaceans (mainly snow crab) has resulted in an extremely profitable fishery, exceeding the historical cod fishery to become the most profitable in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. The shift from a ground fishery to one focused on crustaceans has altered the structure of the fishing industry, rural fishing communities, and the societal processes that rely on and help to sustain them.11 The crustacean fishery involves fewer people, and with fewer fishermen capturing a higher-value product wealth has become increasingly concentrated within fishing communities and regions of the province where crab licences are plentiful versus those areas where they are scarce (see Table 4.1). Processor profit margins and market demand for crab have allowed some fishermen to finance expensive upgrades to their boats (increasing the overall fishing capacity of the fleet, especially the thirty-five- to sixtyfive-foot boats) through “trust” agreements with fish processors, who gain price guarantees and access to the profitable crab resource without having to compete with other processing companies. This change has increased fishing capacity and undermined the DFO’s fleet separation policy, encouraging corporate vertical integration of the industry by allowing processors to obtain proxy ownership of crab licenses that are supposedly held by small, owner-operated harvesting enterprises.12 In addition, there are fewer processing jobs associated with crustaceans due to the market preference for unprocessed snow crab in the shell, leading to disproportionate impacts on women, who are the main workers in the processing sector. Processing workers have also been exposed to new occupational hazards, such as crab asthma, associated with handling large amounts of crab. The reassignment of shrimp quotas to Prince Edward Island in recent years also might have contributed to an increase in the number of seasonal migrant plant workers from rural Newfoundland going to that province. The change in landings resulted in fishermen having to travel longer distances to catch their quotas and pressure to expand fishing efforts and the sizes of boats, resulting in a greater number of marine accidents. The change in the spatial distribution of the fishery, and concerns over managing crab and shrimp stocks, have led the DFO to require all vessels over thirty-five feet to carry a GPS satellite tracking device that can send real-time position data to the department during the fishing season.13 Since 1993, corporate fish-processing companies, such as Fisheries Products International (FPI), have increasingly sourced products globally rather than locally as one among a number of strategies that international seafood corporations are using to cope with uncertainties in quantity,

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timing, and quality of marine resource supplies (see Table 4.2). Seafood corporations focus on value-added processing that combines wild seafood caught off Newfoundland and Labrador with seafood sourced internationally from both wild and cultured fisheries. FPI, one of the largest seafood corporations in North America, operates plants in Newfoundland that import farmed salmon from Chile, frozen cod and other whitefish captured in the Barents Sea and pre-processed in China, and farmed tilapia for use in value-added products mainly destined for the large restaurant chains in the United States, and it produces premium value-added brands, such as President’s ChoiceTM and CostcoTM, for the Canadian market.14 The switch to value-added processing, product diversification, and the combination of multiple sources and types of seafood and agricultural commodities from around the world resulted in FPI becoming profitable in the midst of the cod moratorium after years of financial trouble and government subsidies. FPI’s seafood production became increasingly decoupled from dependence on fish captured or cultivated in Newfoundland and Labrador. The company’s delinkage from exclusive reliance on local raw material and dependence on the US market has, however, exposed the corporation, and the Newfoundland and Labrador fishing industry in general, to risks associated with American currency fluctuations. A strong US dollar increases export profits and demands for Newfoundland and Labrador crab, shrimp, and other processed seafood products, whereas a falling US dollar has the opposite effect.15 These pressures and a successful hostile takeover bid by Nova Scotian John Risely, with support from several Newfoundland businessmen, including former politician and federal fisheries minister John Crosbie (who closed the cod fishery in 1992), resulted in the closure or sale of all of FPI’s significant assets by 2007. Closure of FPI fish plants in Newfoundland has been accomplished by sending fish formerly processed in the province to China. FPI’s lucrative assets, including a profitable US marketing branch and a secondary valueadded processing plant in Burin, Newfoundland, were sold to High Liner of Nova Scotia as part of the takeover scheme that created one of the largest seafood companies in North America.16 Changes in price and market demand (consumer demand is stronger for crustaceans, and they fetch higher profit margins per pound than groundfish), and the relative abundance of crustaceans compared with groundfish species in Newfoundland and Labrador’s current ecological system, have resulted in complex dynamics within the post-1992 societal fishing system. The gradual replacement of the resilient, pre-modern, low-profit, labour-intensive inshore cod-fishing society with a highly

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• Direct or proxy ownership of vessels • Loans to fishermen • Anticipatory marketing tactics • Developing a portfolio of suppliers • Using price mechanisms to increase supplies • Direct or proxy ownership of vessels • Developing a portfolio of suppliers • A focus on specific vessels and gear types • Prices to attract and educate specific suppliers

Quantity of supply

Quality, size, and type of marine species

• Developing a diversity of production options through mechanization and retraining human resources • Sorting and grading

• Stockpiling of raw materials

• Developing high production capacity • Financial slack • Stockpiling of raw materials

Coping through transformation of production process

• Educating, branding, and providing information about seafood supplies to customers • Avoiding long-term contracts with buyers • A diverse and flexible product mix with a focus on value-adding (not necessarily in the same physical factory but within the overall corporation) • Selecting and developing niche markets and the “right” customers for particular products

• Educating, branding, and providing information about seafood supplies to customers • Avoiding long-term contracts with buyers

Output-focused coping

Source: Adapted from G. Ottesen and K. Gronhaug, “Primary Uncertainty in the Seafood Industry: An Exploratory Study of How Processing Firms Cope,” Marine Resource Economics 18 (2003): 368.

Time of supply

Input-focused coping

Type of uncertainty

Types of uncertainty faced by global seafood-processing corporations and the managerial coping strategies they use to address them

Table 4.2

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profitable, less resilient, modern, crustacean-based market society raises questions about social and ecological sustainability. The present societal system is extremely reliant on harvesting a lowtrophic-level species (snow crab rather than northern cod), employing relatively few fish harvesters and processing workers (whose corporate customers and employers are tied to a global capitalist economic system heavily dependent on continuing US consumer demand), and cheap Chinese labour, high crab prices, and the abundance of snow crab in the ecosystem. There are signs that snow crab populations are falling as catch per unit effort and overall fishing capacity have declined in recent years. Hence, quotas have been reduced in some areas, notably off the southeast coast of Labrador and the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. Snow crab are still managed using a single-species population quota model, catch-per-unit-effort information, and index fishing data collected by selected commercial crab harvesters to complement the DFO’s annual research survey trawl.17 Because of their relative abundance and favourable environmental conditions, managers believe that single-species demographic models are appropriate for snow crab; however, some fishermen are already raising warnings that the models do not reflect their experiences on the water or the little that is known about the snow crab’s life cycle. Ecosystem approaches to Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries focus on the feedbacks that exist between the societal system, the ecosystem, and the broader physical environmental context. The approach emphasizes risk and shifts what is targeted for management. In theory, once ecosystem approaches become accepted, the confident stance of the scientific manager who can control and carefully use fisheries resources becomes rapidly delegitimized and ineffective in reaching stated policy goals such as MSY and MEY.

Feedbacks from the Societal to the Ecological System

The SOHO systems model represented in Figure 3.2 draws attention to the ecological and physical systems that form the contexts for societal fishing systems and the relationships that exist among all three. When trying to understand relationships in the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery, EBFM emphasizes the importance of including the overall impact of fishing activities on ecological systems. Arrow B in Figure 3.2 can be used to represent the total amount of ecological structure (species) removed

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from the ecological system or killed through fishing practices. These structures will exceed the biomass of fish landings because ecological structure (overall biomass and species composition) can be disturbed or destroyed through by-catch, discards, and high-grading, with impacts on marine mammals, fish, sea birds, and other marine species critical for ecological integrity and health. Ongoing fisheries deploying non-selective gears have resulted in high levels of unintended cod by-catch and some intentional targeting of cod up to legal by-catch landing limits.18 Marine fishing practices have also been shown to influence populationlevel genetic composition, which ecologists argue can act as an artificial selection agent. Noise produced by sonar, boat engines, and underwater seismic testing for petrochemical deposits can also affect fish behaviour, including mating rituals, population dynamics, and broader ecological structures. Shifts toward crustacean fisheries, especially the shrimp fishery, have been associated with high levels of multi-species by-catch due to the trawling gear used.19 Recent studies of the crab fishery have also shown high mortality rates associated with throwing back juvenile crab that are caught in pots and pulled to the surface. Mortality is thought to be caused by the damage that is inflicted on immature and soft-shell moulting crab during handling and increased vulnerability to predation pressure after release.20 Structural changes to marine ecosystems induced by fishing gears such as otter trawls have resulted in claims from crab fishermen that shrimp trawling damages the bodies and habitat of snow crab, leading to increased susceptibility to diseases and physical harm to legs and the carapace. An almost endless variety of additional structural changes could be highlighted in relation to fishing and other human activities conducted in the marine environment. Ecosystem approaches do not provide direction on which relationships and changes are most important; rather, they make available a conceptual framework that identifies a plethora of processes and activities that potentially require management. Structural changes in the ecological system feed back into ecological processes, causing alterations that then feed back into ecological structures, often in unpredictable ways. The ecosystem approach to fisheries management promotes thinking through these feedbacks and facilitating the participation of a group of diverse stakeholders with knowledge of them to help managers integrate knowledge from a diversity of observers, identify knowledge gaps, and assess the overall impact of harvesting technologies critical for the application of the precautionary principle in fisheries

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management.21 However, recognition of these feedbacks significantly increases the challenges associated with, and the scope of, fisheries management. The focus shifts from single-species fish populations and fishing mortalities associated with them to a broader range of human activities requiring control and caretaking as well as environmental variables requiring ongoing monitoring and adaptation responses. In practice, fishermen’s activities, behaviours, values, and beliefs increasingly become targets for managerial intervention under EBFM, even though in theory all human activities could be targeted for intervention. In addition to feedbacks from fishing activities, the SOHO ecosystem model can be used to think through the connections between other societal activities and ecological systems. The changes in the ecological system ultimately loop back to affect which ecological structures are available for societal fishing systems. These changes can also affect societal systems that are spatially and temporally separated from the societal system that initiated the activity. In Figure 3.2, the spatial separation and the temporal separation of feedbacks from the changes induced in the ecological structure available for a specific societal fishing system are especially relevant to think through as capitalist economies become more globally integrated, industrial fishing and aquaculture expand, and human systems enhance their feedbacks in the physical environmental context over increasing spatial and temporal scales, as seen in Figure 3.2, feedbacks C and D. EBFM draws attention to all of these human activities and targets them for potential management, greatly expanding the scale, scope, and targets of would-be ecosystem managers and their associated management institutions.

Feedbacks from the Societal System to the Physical Environmental Context

From the SOHO ecosystem perspective, the physical environmental context shapes the self-organization that is expressed in ecological processes and structures by determining the available exergy, material, and information. Temperature changes (especially those associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Labrador Current, and the Gulf Stream) and other dynamic “bottom-up” processes, such as relative amounts of precipitation, salinity, nutrients, genetic information, and introductions of ice and freshwater runoff into marine ecosystems, can influence spawning

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success, recruitment, migration, and other behavioural attributes of species that are of direct interest to the societal system and those that form important indirect trophic interactions with commercially relevant species.22 In addition to focusing on natural cycles and dynamics, ecosystem-based management emphasizes that human activities in the societal system can feed back into the physical environment, as shown in Figure 3.2, feedback C, that comprises the context for a particular ecological system. There are high levels of uncertainty and complexity associated with the identification and prediction of these feedbacks. EBFM aims to produce an integrative picture or narrative of the general trends, possible relationships, cascades, and results of current feedbacks and interrelationships, but interpretive flexibility associated with the ecosystem concept itself makes consensus on the overall narrative illusive in practice.23 Ecosystem-based perspectives, like the SOHO model, increase the scale and scope of managerially relevant structures and processes beyond singlespecies fish populations and fishing mortality. In most cases, the naturaland human-induced feedbacks into the biophysical environmental context are hard to separate causally and are beyond the control of managers, thus leading to calls for coping and adaptive stances, as is clearly evident in climate change adaptation and management research.24 From the perspective of budget-restrained fisheries managers, the challenges associated with EBFM are often overwhelming and require interagency co-operation and increased participation by marine users willing to take on greater responsibility for fisheries management in a context of degrading ecological systems and underfunded state agencies and institutions. Feedback loops from the societal system to the physical environment alter the context for the whole marine ecological system. These feedbacks can include human-induced climate change, damming projects that affect the amount and temperature of freshwater and nutrients entering the marine ecosystem,25 and many others such as intensive industrial aquaculture, which can introduce (or remove in the case of bivalves) large amounts of energy and materials (nutrients, therapeutics, and other chemicals used on the farm) and non-native behaviours and genetic information through escapees. Fishing practices can also feed back to influence the physical environment and therefore the ecological context. Structural changes induced by fishing gears such as otter trawls can disturb ocean habitat and have resulted in legal action against the Government of Canada by environmental groups focused on the risks to demersal fish habitat associated with this type of deleterious feedback.26

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Many more perspectives on the interactions between, and internal dynamics of, the hierarchically nested, physical context, ecological system, and societal systems of the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery could be offered. Although Figure 3.2 illustrates a model that helps to identify and think through feedback loops, it does not necessarily illustrate actual hierarchical nesting involved in specific socio-ecological systems. Institutional hierarchies, power dynamics, and political boundaries often do not reflect biophysical boundaries, processes, and structures, resulting in scale mismatch issues and tangled institutional hierarchies and responsibilities. From the perspective of EBFM, it is crucial that scale and cross-scale issues and system types are taken into consideration when thinking about globalized fishery systems such as those in Newfoundland and Labrador.27 Dams, for example, alter the physical context of entire regions and require large-scale societal resources to construct and maintain, often at numerous scales of governance, including transnational venture capital and long-term legally binding contracts. Aquaculture sites tend to alter contexts more locally; however, industrial aquaculture operations can exhibit cross-scale feedbacks when farms draw on fishmeal, therapeutics, and terrestrial agricultural products from diverse ecosocial systems around the world or when genetically modified organisms are raised on fish farms. In addition, aquaculture involves both tangled and nested institutional hierarchies that are contested and complicated by unequal power interests. For example, Third World debt, global trade rules, and food safety standards originating in societal systems (institutional structures) at various scales can feed back to influence where fishing and aquaculture activities take place, the practices that they employ, and whether the fish are eaten locally or exchanged for profit in the global seafood market. These feedbacks ultimately loop back into ecological structures and the physical environmental context. In the current political economy, managing these feedbacks can be deemed protectionist and in violation of international trade rules and regulations.28 Recent attention to nested scalar relations and tangled institutional hierarchies has been used to explore the uneven management of inshore and offshore fisheries that target fish at different life stages from a variety of subpopulations. As discussed in Chapter 2, when the population theory of fish migration was developed by Heincke in the 1890s, North Sea herring (contrary to popular belief ) were shown to exist as isolated populations, and management was proposed at the local level, corresponding to individual inshore stocks. Management of individual populations was rejected,

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however, because industrial fishing permitted the discovery of abundant offshore herring populations throughout the first half of the twentieth century.29 Recent scientific discoveries of genetically distinct bay stocks of cod have rekindled calls for localized small-scale management. Metapopulation analysis is leading to a “growing awareness that the [northern cod] ‘stock’ is made up of more or less discrete local populations.”30 This finding has implications for reformed fisheries management focused on habitat protection through marine protected areas, and recovery programs with smaller management units and local involvement, in designing and implementing management plans. For this reason, both offshore and inshore areas are now targeted for protection and monitoring, expanding the scale and scope of management.31

Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management

Post-1992 cod fisheries managers are faced with a daunting task. The predictable statistical cod populations that Canada claimed for nationalized use and managerial control in 1977 have been managed into endangerment. Wild cod are increasingly represented as elements in precarious and largely unpredictable self-organizing ecosystems influenced by fluctuating environmental and economic conditions and a host of human feedbacks that both include and transcend fishing-related mortalities. Ecosystembased approaches point to the need for fundamental changes in populationbased fisheries management as wild cod populations continue to remain at unprecedented low levels. However, there are two vastly different responses to EBFM that are vying for support. One is aimed at assimilating “the ecosystem approach, like the precautionary approach, within the existing methodology of fisheries science ... The second response is to abandon the existing methodology of fisheries science, and, ceasing to try to measure fish stocks quantitatively, instead seek to monitor indicators of ecosystem health.”32 Both approaches entrench managerial approaches to fisheries. The first response entrenches the control-oriented managerial status quo. Under this approach, “ecosystem management involving control of the whole resource and environment is what needs to be aimed for, however imprecisely we may hope to achieve our goals with present techniques.”33 The second response to EBFM focuses on the irreducible complexity of marine ecosystems and accepts that wild cod can be “managed” only from

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a coping and adaptive stance that emphasizes control of human interactions with wild cod as opposed to manipulation of idealized populations abstracted from their unique ecosocial contexts. Under this approach to EBFM, monitoring shifts from a narrow focus on expertly obtained single-species population information to permit accurate stock assessments and TAC levels to a much broader range of indicators of ecological health and integrity34 that must be defined through negotiation with interested stakeholders with huge differentials in levels of power and influence. In the current political and economic context, fisheries management is changing from the confident control of commercial fish populations for powerful economic interests to a more humble focus on coping with and adapting to ecological systems while attempting to facilitate the selfcontrol of anthropogenic feedbacks that produce unsustainable socioecological contexts. The approach emphasizes institutional, attitudinal, value, and behavioural change as well as spatial management focused on marine zoning and establishment of MPAs and no-take zones. It has also tended to focus on the allocation of individual property rights to fish quotas that are calculated with larger margins of safety versus the exact prediction of commercial stock biomass conceptualized as common state property. The current political economy of neoliberalism has guided how EBFM has been operationalized, restricting how ecosystem theories have been put into practice. Government attention to and rhetorical support for EBFM are occurring at a time when fisheries management institutions are experiencing intense pressure to cut back on their expenses and download responsibilities, risks, and costs onto industry user groups, voluntary organizations, and local levels of government. The fish-processing industry has adapted to the lack of wild northern cod by replacing them with crustaceans, other whitefish, and cod from the North Sea that are pre-processed in China, increasingly linking itself to globally integrated seafood markets. In the present political climate, entrepreneurial fishermen are increasingly expected to help fund and participate in scientific data gathering, monitoring, and management activities. Although these initiatives can bring stakeholders together to learn from past managerial mistakes and antagonisms, the emphasis on cutting costs and shifting responsibilities from state agencies to fishing enterprises and the global seafood market runs the risk of passing on immense burdens without the necessary resources to implement effective EBFM.35 The manageable wild cod, constructed carefully as a statistical singlespecies population at the turn of the nineteenth century, has lost legitimacy in post-moratorium Newfoundland and Labrador. The commercial

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extinction and biological endangerment of wild cod, currently conceptualized as endangered elements in complex ecosocial systems, have led to a new type of fisheries management focused on the construction of manageable human beings and their relations with marine ecosystems. It is to human resource management that fisheries managers increasingly turn, from managing wild fish to managing fishermen.

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5 From Managing Fish to Managing Fishermen Fisheries management means managing people; not the fish. – A. Bundy, “The Red Light and Adaptive Management” 1

A

lthough ecosystem-based fisheries management offers expanded representations of codfish, emphasizing their biophysical contexts and their complex, evolving interconnections with other species, the dominant representations of fishing people in new forms of cod fisheries management lack reference to these rich contextual details and complex historical interconnections. Like the simplified images of cod, modelled as singlespecies populations, that formed the foundation of state-based management in the pre-moratorium period, simplified images and models of fishing people form the core of contemporary approaches to fisheries management. By representing fish in scientifically complex ways and fishing people as relatively simple scientific caricatures, the latter have come to be understood as easier to manage than the former.2 Figure 5.1 illustrates a new belief prevalent in fisheries management – that it is fishermen who must be managed, not fish. The bifocal-wearing cod in the cartoon is portrayed as a fisheries scientist or government bureaucrat. The fisherman caricatured under the microscope has been reduced a specimen, atomized, stripped of complex social ties, subjectivity, and any sense of history. The microscope can be seen as an indication of the reductionist “normal” science that studies objects in isolation from their supporting contexts in an effort to achieve prediction and control. Although addressing many of the technical problems and power relations associated with top-down, state-based, scientific fisheries management, 71

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Figure 5.1 This cartoon by political cartoonist Peter Pickersgill appeared in The Express, a weekly St John’s newspaper, in 2003.

contemporary forms of cod fisheries management that emphasize the management of people over fish have produced new problems and power dynamics. They have created new forms of power associated with neoliberalism and individual resource users and markets rather than bureaucrats and central planning as preferred management tools. In contrast to the original cod fisheries management regime, new approaches emphasize that most of the factors that affect fluctuations in wild cod abundance and global seafood markets lie beyond the reach of fisheries managers. This has not meant that cod fisheries management has come to an end. Fisheries management interventions in Newfoundland and Labrador have abandoned state-led attempts to control cod stocks and seafood markets that began at the end of the nineteenth century. However, cash-strapped,

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state-based fisheries managers now focus on transferring responsibility for fisheries management functions to fishery resource users and other actors who lack political power and are therefore easier to control – “the fella at the bottom of the ladder,” as an inshore cod fisherman described himself at a Fisheries Resource Conservation Council meeting.3

Inshore Fishermen: From Exclusion to Inclusion

We have to wait for them [DFO scientists] to say there is or there isn’t fish, our experience don’t mean a thing. – Inshore cod fisherman quoted on the Fishline Call-In Show, 2003 4 The local ecological knowledge (LEK) of inshore cod fishermen, once dismissed by fisheries managers as unscientific and anecdotal, is increasingly embraced by and integrated into new forms of cod fisheries management. LEK is knowledge derived from experience. The Canadian authority on the ethical, social, and political effects of technology, Ursula Franklin has termed it “vernacular knowledge,”5 and others have referred to it as “tacit knowledge.” As G. Murray, D. Bavington, and B. Neis note, when referring to LEK in their research, they are concerned not only about the physical and biological components of ecosystems but also about fishing itself and how it relates to the social and economic contexts of fishing. They have discovered that fishermen are changed by events other than just biophysical or ecological conditions and are embedded in a host of different social conditions. Therefore, LEK is a socio-ecological product that reflects social and ecological times and cultures “and is mediated by labour processes, technologies, modes of management, economic, and ecological conditions.”6 A number of factors have helped to encourage a shift in managerial attitudes toward cod fishermen’s LEK in the post-1992 period. First and foremost is the fact that most of the remaining cod in Newfoundland and Labrador waters are aggregated into small, spatially dispersed coastal populations located inshore. As J. Wroblewski explains, the inshore components of bays and headlands were thought to be minor issues in managing northern cod.7 But this was before large aggregations of cod in the major bays of eastern Newfoundland and an absence of cod in large offshore areas were discovered. The lack of cod in the offshore led to renewed

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interest in the population structure and dynamics of the inshore northern cod by the scientific community. Another factor that influenced managerial attitudes toward cod fishers’ LEK was the loss of data on cod that accompanied the collapse of offshore stocks. Prior to the moratorium in 1992, data for cod stock assessments and management models were obtained exclusively from large offshore commercial groundfish trawlers and a small number of annual randomized survey trawls conducted by the DFO on the offshore fishing banks. When cod stocks and other groundfish populations collapsed in the early 1990s, the offshore commercial ground fishery collapsed with them, and many commercial trawlers were sold to foreign countries or given as foreign aid to developing countries. The decline of the offshore trawler fleet eliminated an important source of data that the DFO had used in its cod stock assessments and fisheries management modelling.8 Furthermore, throughout the 1990s, the DFO’s science and management budget was slashed by approximately 40 percent, leaving fewer resources committed to cod science, monitoring, management, and enforcement. During the budget cuts, many permanent full-time employees at the DFO were replaced by temporary part-timers and private contractors, and time at sea on research vessels was significantly reduced. In the wake of the cod collapse and budget cuts, the DFO had to find ways to manage the remaining inshore cod populations while achieving cost reductions. The incorporation of fishermen’s LEK into the DFO’s cod fisheries science and management program was one way in which the department responded to these ecological and economic challenges.9 The Sentinel Fishery program was the most prominent of the DFO’s LEK initiatives designed to integrate cod fishermen’s knowledge into fisheries management. Established in 1993, and significantly expanded in 1995, it was collectively organized by the DFO and the Fish, Food, and Allied Workers union, which represents Newfoundland and Labrador fish harvesters. The Sentinel Fishery program was designed to make inshore cod populations legible to fisheries managers by prescribing fishing practices that would yield statistically significant annual results. Under a DFO directive, commercial fishermen specially trained in data collection could gather information on groundfish stocks by fishing in predetermined areas under predetermined guidelines.10 Fishermen participating in this program were paid by the DFO to fish in precise locations using standardized gear at specific times of the year. They tagged and measured the fish that they caught and extracted otoliths11 to help scientists age the landed fish. Due to the need for statistically

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significant information to feed into single-species population models, gill nets became favoured over other forms of fishing gear, such as cod traps or baited hand lines, for which it was more difficult to quantify catch-perunit effort accurately and consistently.12 Perhaps due to this narrow use of fishermen’s knowledge, the Sentinel Fishery program for cod has become highly contested. Some fishermen have unsuccessfully sought to influence the design of the program, arguing that gear types other than gill nets should be used, and disagreements about the accuracy and interpretation of the catch-rate information have erupted between Sentinel and non-Sentinel fishermen and between fishermen and scientists. Some fishermen argue that their experiences on the water do not confirm the experimental results of the Sentinel survey. Rather than relating to the life history traits of cod or fishermen’s experiences at sea, stock assessment science relies heavily on catch-rate information developed under controlled, repeated (and therefore statistically valid) circumstances.13 The protocol involved in fishing for science is deliberately different from commercial, recreational, and subsistence fishing practices. For example, commercial fishermen using mobile gears, such as gill nets or bottom trawls, can sustain high catch rates under a variety of stock conditions by varying efforts across time and space.14 Fishermen using fixed gears, such as cod traps, can catch cod only when they migrate into inshore shoal water. Fishermen using baited hand lines require cod to be hungry before they will go for baited hooks. Different fishing gears, therefore, lead to different forms of knowledge, assessments of stock abundance, and judgments about what should be done. Some practices of fishing yield knowledge that can be integrated into fisheries management systems; other practices do not. Fishing practices that are easily turned into standardized repeatable experiments that can be performed by trained operators (e.g., bottom trawling and gill nets) are more applicable to and easily integrated into management than fishing that relies on hands-on experience and place-based knowledge (hook and line). Although fishermen were paid to fish for the DFO and to obtain knowledge of and familiarity with the scientific methods used in the Sentinel Fishery program and other scientific stock assessment procedures, this appeared to strengthen, rather than reduce, skepticism about the DFO’s science and management, contrary to the intentions of the Sentinel program. Fishermen argued that the program produced high levels of uncertainty about the actual state of coastal cod abundance since the fishery used short time series, limited knowledge of fish behaviour, and random,

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sparse sampling of mobile cod populations. Much like the scientific knowledge gathered prior to the cod fishery collapse, the uncertainty associated with the knowledge gathered in the Sentinel Fishery program permitted “interpretive flexibility” and divergent conclusions on the health and abundance of coastal cod stocks.15 Interpretive flexibility in data related to the cod fishery had produced conflict between the DFO and cod fishermen in the past. In the 1980s, inshore fishermen argued that cod were scarce when fisheries scientists claimed that they were abundant. Since 1992, many fishermen claim that several coastal cod stocks are abundant, whereas most fisheries scientists and managers believe that Newfoundland and Labrador cod stocks have continued to decline and are faced with endangerment and extirpation. These dramatically different interpretations of the status of cod flow from fundamentally incommensurable types of knowledge, fishing practices, and beliefs about what constitutes evidence of abundance and the scale of analysis taken to be proper and fitting.16 The Sentinel Fishery program, and the management of coastal cod that it has enabled, illustrate the power that the DFO continues to hold over the LEK of inshore cod fishermen. By specifying how, when, and where inshore cod fishing occurs, and selecting who can participate, the Sentinel Fishery program has allowed the DFO to maintain its authority to define the official meaning of inshore fishermen’s LEK and the status of cod abundance. However, the program also illustrates that inshore cod fishermen do not easily believe the experimentally based claims of fisheries scientists and managers when these assertions contradict their fishing experiences on the water. The Sentinel Fishery program permitted the DFO to translate the inshore fishery and coastal cod into manageable objects. However, the program “represented the enrolment of fishermen as technicians, and solicited a very narrow and transformed slice of inshore LEK without seeking to substantially change the relative decision-making power of fishermen, scientists and fisheries managers.”17

From Top-Down Statecraft to Participatory Fisheries Governance

After years of demanding to be let in, some cod fishermen have pushed through the doors to participation in cod fisheries management. Since the cod fisheries collapse in 1992, the DFO has increasingly moved away

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from top-down management and has begun to emphasize collaborative partnerships and co-management arrangements with the fishing industry and individual fishermen. Fishermen can now become directly involved with cod fisheries management, including providing advice on when, where, and under what conditions moratoria should be lifted on cod fisheries. Over the same time period, however, the DFO has undergone significant budgetary cuts and has seen its mandate expand to include greater management responsibilities for oceans, transportation safety, and search and rescue. Neoliberal-style budget cuts throughout the 1990s placed significant pressure on the department to do more with less and has meant that “the fishing industry must increase its management capacity and expertise” as the DFO cuts back, downloads, and redistributes managerial tasks once considered its exclusive responsibility.18 With the right to participate in fisheries management have come significant costs and responsibilities for fishermen in Newfoundland and Labrador.19 Like many government-run programs, the DFO’s fisheries management initiatives experienced a loss of legitimacy in the 1990s. This was facilitated by the collapse of the cod fishery and the rise of influential neoliberal policy initiatives that aimed to transform welfare bureaucracies charged with managing common state property into entrepreneurial, marketoriented agencies focused on enabling self-organizing private property regimes.20 Under these material and ideological conditions, fishermen were encouraged to take on more of the costs of fisheries management as the DFO created an extensive fisheries governance regime.21 As a response to budgetary cuts, fishermen are now required to assist in the delivery of the DFO’s fisheries management programs and to carry out the federal government’s legislative mandate to conserve, manage, and rebuild fish stocks, in a number of ways that were not mandated prior to 1992. Scientific data gathering, monitoring, regulatory enforcement, management planning, and decision-making processes have been increasingly transferred to a consolidated fishing industry. The new participatory management programs established since 1992 include (1) collecting data through surveys, logbook programs, and other stock assessment processes, such as the Sentinel Fishery program; (2) paying for onboard fishery observers and dockside monitoring programs; (3) equipping boats with GPS locator boxes linked back to DFO headquarters; (4) reporting poaching activities to anonymous snitch lines (modelled on the successful Crime Stoppers program) established by the DFO; and (5) spending an increasing amount

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of time in collaborative consultations and decision-making processes, where fishermen are expected to provide feedback on management plans and present solutions to technical problems surrounding the design, implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of fishing rules.22 The rapid establishment of the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council in 1993 was the DFO’s first attempt to open up planning and decisionmaking processes in cod fisheries management. The FRCC was established “to form a partnership between scientific and academic expertise, and all sectors of the fishing industry.”23 In annual public meetings held throughout Atlantic Canada’s four provinces, Nunavut, and Quebec, the fifteenperson council, made up of members from both science and the industry chosen on merit and standing in their respective communities, and not as representatives of organizations, areas, or interests, was charged with creating a forum for information sharing and collaborative management planning among fishermen, seafood processors, academics, government scientists, and other interested members of the public. After widespread consultations, the FRCC published annual stock status reports and management recommendations reflecting what the council heard. Status reports and management recommendations were made available to the public and were presented to the federal minister of fisheries and oceans, who was expected to use them in making decisions related to cod and other commercially harvested groundfish species.24 The FRCC represented a significant departure from past practices, when fisheries management decisions were made behind closed doors. Before the establishment of the council, scientific data from offshore scientific surveys and the commercial dragger fleet were reviewed exclusively by fisheries scientists to determine cod stock status. Once the stock status was agreed upon, TAC levels were secretly negotiated by DFO officials and hand-picked representatives from the fishing industry.25 Creation of the FRCC represented a break with this history of unaccountable top-down management since it created the opportunity for transparency and public participation from fishermen in reviewing the DFO’s scientific data and presenting management recommendations directly to the fisheries minister. The minister was expected to use the FRCC recommendations when considering lifting moratoria and when determining TACs, fishing licences, and individual quotas in reopened cod and other commercial fisheries. Since 1993, the FRCC has consistently emphasized opening up and stabilizing the cod stock assessment process and allocating individual quotas for cod and other fish stocks to resource users based on their level of participation in fisheries management functions. The FRCC and the DFO

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believe that fishermen who agree to participate in conservation and management efforts should be guaranteed access to cod when (and if ) the stocks recover to avoid “free riders” benefiting from the self-management and conservation-oriented behaviour of others. This belief in stabilizing stock assessments and using economic incentives to encourage cod recovery and conservation was reinforced by a leading FRCC member at a meeting to discuss cod stocks in the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization division 3Ps on Newfoundland’s southwest coast when he acknowledged that the most important thing to a fishery is stability and that the way to encourage it is to make sure fishermen have financial incentives to conserve stocks.26 The ultimate goal of the FRCC, and other co-management reform initiatives pursued by the DFO, is to develop the management capacities of fishermen and fishing corporations so that responsibilities for fisheries management functions can eventually be transferred away from the federal government onto resource users themselves. The DFO has argued that downloading and devolution are necessary because cod and other fisheries management are becoming more expensive, complicated, and challenging. In addition, the DFO claims that fishing corporations, seafood processors, and fishermen themselves are now “demanding greater control over their day-to-day operations and greater influence over the overall management of the industry.”27 Arrival of the FRCC occurred amid a general lack of confidence in centralized, state-based, bureaucratic scientific management. In the years prior to 1992, and with increasing frequency immediately after the cod collapse, many fisheries participants and fisheries management scholars actively called for participatory co-management institutions such as the FRCC to be established. In theory, once co-management and participatory fisheries governance institutions such as the FRCC were established, greater citizen-led control, community empowerment, equity, and inclusive democratic participation would be forthcoming.28 In practice, however, participatory governance in the Newfoundland cod fishery fell far short of these idealistic objectives. The unique neoliberal form of participatory co-management that the DFO began to implement in the wake of the cod fisheries collapse became highly contested and criticized for downloading fisheries management onto fishing people and seafood corporations without obtaining changes to Canada’s fisheries legislation or providing the necessary budgetary resources and desired property rights.29 Although the FRCC was enabled to share scientific information about the state of the cod stocks with fishermen, and was able to gather advice

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on cod management strategies and present recommendations directly to the fisheries minister, the minister was not legislatively mandated to act on the council’s recommendations. Under Canada’s Fisheries Act, all responsibility for executing management functions and making decisions related to the cod and other fisheries remained exclusively with the federal fisheries minister. The concentration of managerial authority in the hands of the minister meant that, though fishing representatives often attended local FRCC meetings to voice their concerns, they also directly lobbied the fisheries minister in Ottawa to attempt to gain influence over fisheries management decisions. Participation in cod fisheries management, therefore, became split between a transparent public process run through FRCC meetings and private lobbying that occurred behind closed doors with the fisheries minister. This situation undermined the significance of the FRCC since what was supposed to be a participatory management institution turned into one stakeholder group among many vying for influence over the fisheries minister.30 Fisheries ministers since establishment of the FRCC have consistently ignored many of the council’s management recommendations on cod and other threatened species. Therefore, though most fishermen express support for FRCC stock status reports and management recommendations, there is cynicism about the overall process. The extent of the minister’s authority and the fragility of the FRCC’s participatory management approach were vividly illustrated in 2004 when federal Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan decided unilaterally not to ask the FRCC to provide him with any advice on cod stocks along the northeast coast in the NAFO divisions 2J3KL. The FRCC and many cod fishermen from the northeast coast had planned to argue for reopening a limited commercial cod fishery in 2005. The fishery had been closed indefinitely by the minister in 2003 in direct opposition to advice from the FRCC and an all-party committee report produced by the Newfoundland and Labrador government.31 The minister’s refusal to consult with the FRCC on the northeast coastal cod removed all avenues for public participation in cod fisheries management for the stock, terminating a process that had been in existence since 1993. The minister’s action led to widespread condemnation from fisheries stakeholders and illustrated that, though the FRCC had enabled participation in fisheries management, it had not been able to provide an avenue for citizen-led control or legally mandated co-management arrangements in the cod fishery.32

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Privatization, Fleet Separation, and Canada’s Fisheries Act

A central assumption of the DFO’s participatory management approach is the belief that private ownership of fisheries resources is required to create economic incentives for resource users to take on costs associated with fisheries management and to develop stewardship ethics and conservation-oriented behaviour. This has been a central policy of the Canadian government since the early 1970s, when it proposed to register all commercial fishing vessels and gear in Newfoundland and Labrador and license all vessels, skippers, and operators. The policy proposal was criticized for the uneven effects that it would have on the small-scale inshore fishery and for failing to propose licensing and registration for the more than fifteen foreign nations fishing for cod at the time in offshore and inshore Newfoundland waters. D. Alexander argued that a much greater emphasis should be placed on regulating the large foreign fishing vessels that could be shifted around the world in search of fishing grounds with the highest marginal yields.33 In a report commissioned by the provincial government and Memorial University, Alexander argued that emphasis needed to be put on the international fishery in preparation for the UN Law of the Sea conference that was to negotiate extension of exclusive economic rights beyond the nearshore to include the continental shelf. The DFO began to implement the privatization vision by allocating individual quotas (IQs) to cod stocks and restricting access to fishing licences after the declaration of Canada’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone in 1977. Starting with individual enterprise allocations and restricted licensing in the offshore fleet, it took the DFO until well after the cod collapse in 1992 to overcome resistance and implement IQ allocations and restricted licensing in the inshore fishery.34 The DFO argued that IQs helped to stabilize individual and corporate access to fish stocks, reducing the “race to fish” that was associated with broad fleet-level quota allocations. The department also discovered that “the level of licence holder participation in the management of IQ programs [was] generally greater than in non-IQ programs.” The policy message was that privatizing allocations through IQs allowed fisheries management functions to be increasingly turned over to economically capable and interested resource users.35 Individual quotas also created an opportunity for sensitive allocation, and hence equity issues, to be settled increasingly through the operation of markets in individual transferable quotas (ITQs) as opposed to politicized

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decisions made directly by the DFO and the minister of fisheries and oceans. The department realized that, by privatizing access to commercial cod and other fisheries through limited licensing and ITQs, the economic value associated with the right to fish would increase dramatically, allowing the department to demand increased participation in management functions by fisheries resource users, “either through paying for them or through direct participation in the function.”36 However, despite greater enthusiasm for privatization than central planning at the DFO, its vision of a self-managing, free-market fisheries management utopia ran into significant challenges. The federal fisheries minister continued to maintain complete legal authority over fisheries management decisions under Canada’s Fisheries Act, including the right to allocate and withdraw fishing quotas and licences. The Fisheries Act specified that fishing licences and quota allocations had to be renewed annually by the minister and could be revoked at any time. The annual renewal removed stability and security of tenure for fisheries licence and quota holders, making it impossible for fishermen to gain access to loans and credit from banks and other financial institutions to help fund the costs associated with capital-intensive fishing and the management functions being downloaded onto them by the DFO.37 Without being able to offer security of tenure for fishing access and quota rights, the DFO had a difficult time encouraging fishermen to buyin to its co-management and participatory fisheries governance initiatives, which, like the FRCC process, appeared to offer additional costs and responsibilities without guaranteed rights and privileges. Legislative and regulatory restrictions under Canada’s Fisheries Act, along with a decreasing budget to live up to expanding ocean management obligations, left the DFO in a precarious position in its efforts to implement participatory fisheries governance in Newfoundland and Labrador.38 A bill to revise the Fisheries Act to address the lack of secure private property rights in the fishery was put forward in 1999. The bill contained provisions that would have authorized the minister of fisheries and oceans to enter into long-term, legally binding partnership agreements with fishing corporations and groups of fisheries resource users, thereby stabilizing and extending the legal standing and secure property rights in commercial fisheries and eliminating the uncertainty associated with the minister’s annual reviews. The DFO promoted the bill “as the next logical step in the evolution of co-management,” arguing that it would offer “long term security of access to groups willing to accept responsibility for management.”39 However, despite support from the department, the bill faced

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considerable opposition from inshore fishermen and common property advocates, and it failed to pass into law. Despite this legislative setback in 1999, the DFO’s 2001 Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review (AFPR) continued to advocate “rights-based” fisheries management through the allocation of secure individual property rights to resource users and through restricted licensing.40 Since the current legislative and regulatory framework has yet to be significantly amended, fishing people and fishing corporations have had to be convinced to take on a host of managerial responsibilities being abandoned by the federal government, without obtaining complementary guarantees of fishing rights or the authority to make legally binding management decisions. The current legal, legislative, and institutional context has created increased support within the fishing industry for privatized access to fisheries resources to obtain the necessary financial capacity to take on new management functions being downloaded by the DFO.41

Individualizing and Privatizing Fisheries Management

In tandem with moves toward the incorporation of fishermen’s LEK into fisheries management, and shifts away from top-down approaches toward greater sharing of management responsibility and accountability with resource users, the DFO has increasingly emphasized the risks and uncertainties associated with fisheries management. In its 2001 AFPR, the DFO clearly articulated a new emphasis on risk and uncertainty, which it identifies as a central feature of managing resources. As fish stocks react to changes in the ocean environment, the ability to forecast the effects of these changes is challenged, leading to a total loss of control. The DFO argued that, though conservation is paramount, there is still a level of acceptable risk to fish stocks that might permit some industrial exploitation. However, if that acceptable level of risk crosses a negotiated threshold, then fishery stakeholders must collectively agree on the actions required to lower the risk.42 This new emphasis on risk and uncertainty marks a radical shift from the confident forecasting and control-oriented approach associated with single-species scientific management that was applied to the cod fishery when Canada declared its 200-mile EEZ. The DFO’s contemporary approach emphasizes personal rather than collective social responsibility to ensure against a growing list of risks and uncertainties associated with natural fluctuations in fish landings, seafood market instabilities, and

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failures in fisheries management.43 In the process, fisheries failures and catastrophic stock collapses have become categorized as manageable risks as opposed to natural disasters or acts of God. Natural disasters and acts of God are understood as unpredictable events that are beyond the control of individuals. Since they present challenges and hardships beyond the scope of individual control, it was believed that these events were best responded to collectively by governments. Following this logic, the cod collapse in 1992 was presented as a “natural” disaster by the federal government. No individuals, corporations, government agencies, or fishing practices were officially blamed. The DFO focused on unexpected natural changes in water temperature and salinity as causes of the collapse, and from 1992 to 2001 the federal government provided $3.9 billion in “income support, industry adjustment measures and economic development assistance programs for the Atlantic fishing industry” delivered through two federal departments, the DFO and Human Resources and Development Canada, and one federal agency, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA).44 The aim of the moratorium disaster relief initiatives was to remove people from the cod fishery and decrease the federal government’s role and responsibility in all future fisheries management activities. People were removed from the cod fishery through licence buy-back programs and by forcing all recipients of moratorium-related funding to retrain for jobs outside the fishery. The government also tightened up eligibility requirements for Employment Insurance (EI), making it far more difficult for seasonal fishery workers to qualify for benefits.45 The overall message coming from the federal government through its cod fisheries management policies throughout the post-moratorium period was that fishing was an uncertain and risky activity that the government was no longer going to support as it had done in the past. After initial reports that the cod stocks would rebuild quickly within two to five years, fishermen were eventually told that scientists did not know how long it would take before the cod stocks would rebuild or if a vibrant commercial cod fishery would ever be possible in the future. The government’s cod moratorium programs and policy statements encouraged all remaining participants in the fishery to “clearly acknowledge the existence of risk” and to take individual actions to manage the risks.46 What was once considered to be the world’s most effective scientific fisheries management system began to rely on individual and corporate voluntarism and the actions of financially motivated fishermen to help manage the vast resources of Canada’s EEZ.47

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In the post-moratorium period, the Canadian government promoted the self-serving belief that wild fishery resources oscillate naturally, moving through cycles of boom and bust, much like the global seafood economy.48 It was, therefore, now up to individual fishing “enterprises” (real persons and legal “persons” or corporations) to insure privately against, and take individual responsibility for, risky ecological and economic conditions associated with fishing and fisheries management. The state was not to be relied on to bail out fishermen and their communities when the fishery underwent a downturn due to natural ecosystem fluctuations, overfishing, or price fluctuations associated with global competition in seafood markets. The government’s role moved away from a top-down welfare state model, where risks associated with fluctuating fish landings were collectively managed, to a neoliberal market-led approach. Under this new fisheries management regime, catastrophic risks associated with fluctuations in wild fish landings were naturalized, and responsibilities for managing these risks were downloaded with increasing frequency onto resource users. Rather than offering guarantees of stability and delivering state-based fisheries management functions, the Canadian government refashioned itself as an “enabler” and “facilitator” – attempting to create conditions that allowed fishermen to manage themselves. The new self-managing professional fish harvester who emerged out of this neoliberal participatory fishery governance was conceptualized as a capable entrepreneur, ably competing in globalized seafood markets by professionally harvesting fish using the latest technology rather than hunting them in a small boat as a needy welfare client making do with government handouts.

Self-Managing Professional Fish Harvesters

Professionalization is the first step in securing the harvesters’ role in the fishery of the future. Professional Fish Harvesters will have to play a greater role in the management of the fishing industry. – Professional Fish Harvesters Certification Board Newfoundland and Labrador (PFHCBNL), “Frequently Asked Questions,” 200449

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Newfoundland and Labrador was the first province in Canada to recognize legally and promote fishing as a profession, including a code of ethics and training standards.50 In 1996, the provincial government passed the Fish Harvesters Act, and the DFO established a new Commercial Fisheries Licensing Policy for eastern Canada. The act and the policy complemented each other by mandating professionalization and full-time “core” status for all commercial fishery participants. The provincial Fish Harvesters Act required that all persons engaged in commercial fishing in Newfoundland and Labrador become certified through the PFHCBNL,which created three designations for harvesters: Apprentice, Level I, and Level II. The DFO’s Commercial Fisheries Licensing Policy was designed to limit and stabilize participation in the fishery so that only full-time “core fish harvesters” could participate. This was done to simplify fisheries management by standardizing and implementing a mandatory fisheries training program, thereby making fishermen legible to fisheries managers. With the exclusion of part-time “moonlighters,” fisheries resources could be concentrated in fewer hands, ensuring a higher standard of living for those who remained and financial resources for the participants to provide managerial functions. To maintain status as a core professional fish harvester, participants had to prove that they earned 75 percent of their income from full-time fishing activities during the designated fishing season (1 May-1 October) and that they did not hold full-time employment outside the fishery.51 When the professionalization act was established, all licensed full-time “core” fishermen were grandparented in as Level II fish harvesters. New entrants were assigned an Apprentice level, and those without a licence who had participated in the fishery as crew members were assigned Level I status. To remain active in the fishery, all Apprentice and Level I fish harvesters had to obtain a specified number of hours fishing under the guidance of a Level II fish harvester and were required to successfully complete fee-based training and educational courses if they wanted to advance to higher levels. To qualify to purchase a fishing licence, fish harvesters had to obtain Level II status.52 To advance from an Apprentice through Level I to a secure licence-holding Level II position, individuals had to participate in both formal and informal learning activities as mandated by the PFHCBNL. Fisheries professionalization courses had to be arranged through the Marine Institute, an arm of Memorial University, located in the provincial capital, St. John’s. The Marine Institute established a Community-Based Fishery Program to deliver the professionalization training beyond the St. John’s campus.

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However, the costs associated with the training and the administrative difficulties of arranging courses outside St. John’s meant “that fishermen working aboard bigger vessels” and those who lived closer to St. John’s were “more likely to access professionalization training than those on smaller vessels living in rural areas.”53 In a study of the fisheries professionalization program, B. Grzetic found that it was difficult for women to meet the certification standards because they often work part time, for both voluntary and involuntary reasons. In addition, financial and institutional barriers put the mandatory fisheries training program “far out of reach for the small-boat inshore fishermen in rural communities.” One of Grzetic’s informants, named Gloria, told her that “it costs more to do those [fisheries professionalization] courses than it would to do a university degree ... I think they want to get us out of the fishery and that’s it.”54 The concerns expressed by Gloria that professionalization was designed to remove people from the fishery reflect the actual policy goals of both the federal and the provincial governments. Licensing and professionalization created a standardized occupational hierarchy in the fishery that limited fishing opportunities to the commercial sector. Subsistence fishing for food was to be finally subservient to fishing for the market. The professionalization program followed the general outline that was first proposed in the 1920s and 1930s as part of early attempts to force Newfoundland fishermen away from the small-boat inshore fishery and produce the conditions necessary for a new modern fishing economy. Although the government created training programs, a fisheries college, and plenty of information promoting the shift toward industrial wage labour in the cod fishery at the turn of the twentieth century, actual opportunities for wage labour were extremely rare until confederation with Canada in 1949 and the eventual state-subsidized development of frozen fish plants and a Canadian offshore trawler fleet.55 After the collapse, restrictive licensing and professionalization were called for immediately in the 1993 report of the Task Force on Incomes and Adjustment in the Atlantic Fishery.56 The report emphasized that responsibilities associated with fisheries management functions needed to be transferred from the federal government to fishermen themselves. It argued that this transfer would be helped along through the commercial professionalization of fishing people. Although the policy was sold in government-funded advertising campaigns as a way to recognize and respect traditional fishing skills and attachments to the inshore fishery, in practice licensing and professionalization forced fishermen to get big or

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get out. The approach reflected similar attempts to rationalize the fishing sector in the 1970s with the first federal licensing program, which attempted to scale back the number of fishermen to allow the industry to become self-sufficient and reduce reliance on government assistance. This program was resisted and criticized for its distributive implications and the removal of a small but vital source of livelihood in rural Newfoundland. The moratorium on the cod fishery in 1992 was the shock that gave both levels of government an opportunity that had been tried but failed in previous modernization efforts. The modernized fishing people imagined through the commercial fisheries licensing policy and the professionalization program were dramatically different from those who existed before the cod fisheries moratorium. Through professionalization, fishing people were forced to become self-sufficient fish harvesters who learned how to fish at the Marine Institute as opposed to relying on oral practical knowledge passed on from family members who hunted fish on the fishing grounds. Professionalization involved an increasing “emphasis on the individual fisher as ‘entrepreneur’,” turning fishing people into newly responsibilized subjects.57 Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes our current age as one of “responsibilization,” a time when the rise of individualism and freedom produces a society where people are called on to become increasingly selfresponsible rather than relying on other individuals, community associations, or state services.58 Cod fisheries resources, previously understood to be collective state-owned property open to the public for subsistence consumption and controlled commercial exploitation, were increasingly enclosed as fishing rights became privatized. The focus on individual fishing entrepreneurs created divisions among fishermen – between inshore and offshore, hook-and-line, trap, and gill-netters — and pitted fishing people against non-fishermen as familial individualism gave way to possessive individualism. These changes to the management regime disproportionately benefited some social groups and classes – among the winners were male investors, speculators and corporate entities – by restricting access through privatization and emphasizing exclusivity as managerial solutions to the fishery crisis.59

Harvesting Cod in an Enclosed Sea

In the post-moratorium period, the use of fishermen’s LEK in science and management, neoliberal participatory fisheries governance initiatives, the

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emphasis on risks associated with fishing, and the professional fish harvester program have all reflected and helped to produce a dramatically new type of fisherman in Newfoundland and Labrador. Rather than common Canadian stereotypes of Newfoundland fishing people as ignorant, needy, lazy welfare dopes, fishermen now are represented as being capable, enterprising, owner-operators with direct financial stakes in both the failures and the successes of fisheries management.60 These newly independent fish harvesters, cut off from dependence on the welfare state, local communities, and families, are conceptualized as being better able to adapt to the uncertainties and complexities emphasized by EBFM and the highly competitive global seafood market. Cod fishermen who have survived the fishery collapse and remain in the fishery are presented by the DFO as being more flexible and capable of making risky management decisions compared with pre-1992 fishermen and the bureaucratic management agencies that administered state-owned fisheries resources through top-down expertise, rational-legal frameworks, and inflexible proceduralism. The goals of LEK programs, participatory fisheries governance, risk management, licensing, and professionalization in Newfoundland and Labrador have been economically driven, exemplifying a neoliberal downloading mentality focused on cutting government costs associated with fisheries management while creating a flexible workforce. Resource users have been called on to absorb an increasing portion of the risks and responsibilities associated with fisheries management so that “license holders and fleets” can “make their own business decisions and be accountable for the consequences.” The DFO hopes that these changes will “spawn a new and positive fisheries management culture and usher in a new era of public-private sector co-operation in Canada’s fisheries.”61 The neoliberal, market-driven approach to cod fisheries management favoured by the DFO in the post-moratorium period emphasizes the management of fishing people rather than wild cod stocks, stressing bottom-up participation by economically interested stakeholders, publicprivate partnerships, and the creation of responsible, self-managing individuals and corporate “citizens.”62 Fishermen have been encouraged to act more like corporate ranchers and farmers than hunters. They are to harvest and trade individually allocated quotas of marine biomass rather than hunt actual fish, in an ocean that has become ever more like the land – enclosed as property with owners, laws, and limits. These changes have come about by focusing on the construction and management of simplified caricatures of fishing people. The complexity,

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uncertainty, and indeterminism associated with representations of wild codfish have reached levels where the management of wild fish seems to be overwhelmingly difficult. However, through this process, conditions have been created that favour a return to managing codfish, this time in laboratories and on farms where domesticated cod can be controlled from egg-to-plate and fish can finally be predictably harvested instead of hunted in a capricious sea.

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6 Managing Cod from Egg to Plate You were looking at over a million tons of cod at the peak of the fishery and now you are looking at virtually nothing. So this was the opportunity that started me in cod farming. The opportunity is very much better now than it was in 1992 when the moratorium closed the fishery. – Cod farmer, 2003 1

T

he failure of single-species fisheries management to predict and control fluctuations in cod abundance on Canada’s east coast emphasized that managers, despite having one of the best fisheries science and management systems in the world, had little control over the abundance and productivity of wild cod. The moratorium on cod fishing, and the DFO’s emphasis on managing fishermen rather than fish, did not lead to a rapid recovery of wild cod populations, as had initially been predicted. In 2003, after more than a decade of rotating fishing moratoria, several Newfoundland and Labrador cod populations were recommended for placement on the endangered species list by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Cod fisheries management appeared at an impasse, unable to deliver what it had been designed to create: a stable, rationalized flow of cod resources that could produce economic value within a modernized Newfoundland and Labrador fishery.2 The endangerment of wild cod, however, was not interpreted as a managerial impasse by everyone. As wild cod populations were declared endangered by ecologists, aquaculturalists geared up to manufacture cod on farms. In the post-moratorium period, scientists and entrepreneurs – with the help of significant expertise from universities and extensive financing and enabling policies from government – learned how to manage domesticated cod populations throughout their entire life cycle. A cod hatchery was built, cod brood stocks were developed, and a cod genome 91

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project was initiated. Coastal grow-out sites were surveyed, and licences were issued. Dependable, scientifically formulated feed sources and government loan guarantees for the aquaculture industry were established, and the demise of cod was presented as a profitable business opportunity.

Domesticating Gadus morhua

Steady, predictable year-round production is the goal for every new species that is being brought into aquaculture. It is a question of getting animals to spawn when you want them to rather than when nature dictates. – J. Lockett, “Aquaculture: What’s on the Menu?” 3 In Newfoundland and Labrador, attempts to domesticate the life cycle of cod to enhance production go back to the 1880s. In 1889, the Newfoundland government hired Adolph Nielsen, a Norwegian fishery expert, to construct a cod hatchery on Dildo Island in Trinity Bay (see Figure 6.1). The cod hatchery was promoted by the newly established Fishery Commission in 1887 as a way to develop techniques “for the artificial propagation of codfish, with the view of restocking our exhausted bays.” Nielsen’s hatchery work was financially supported by the Fishery Commission and the St. John’s Chamber of Commerce in the belief that cod hatcheries would “counteract the destructive process of nature and the waste caused by injurious modes of fishing.”4 From 1890 to 1896, the Dildo Island hatchery released millions of yolksac cod larvae at various locations in Trinity, Bonavista, and Conception Bays, becoming at the time the largest cod hatchery in the world. Although there was much debate over the hatchery’s effectiveness, scientific evidence that the cod fry released from the hatchery had a positive impact on wild cod production and cod landings was lacking. When banks collapsed in Newfoundland in December 1894, the government cut funding for the hatchery, and it eventually closed in 1897. Similar hatchery projects aimed at enhancing wild cod stocks were established at the end of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States. Despite the popularity of these programs, the scientific community criticized the release into the wild of hatchery-produced yolk-sac cod larvae, claiming that there was little evidence of long-term increases in the abundance of mature cod in any of the areas where larvae were released.5

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Figure 6.1 Newfoundland and Labrador cod aquaculture sites and cod hatcheries | Source: Cartography by Eric Leinberger. Adapted from DFA, AquaGis Printout (St. John’s: DFA, 2003).

There were no other efforts to augment wild cod production until the late 1980s when a version of cod farming developed as an outgrowth of the wild fishery. To add market value to small cod captured in the inshore trap fishery, a number of fishermen began holding undersized wild cod in net-pens. By feeding these cod readily available bait fish (male capelin,6

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squid, small herring, and mackerel), fishermen were able to double the weight of the penned cod in 100 days. This low-tech version of aquaculture offered fishermen additional control over how they used their quotas and when they had to sell their fish. Wild cod that were grown-out for three months could be sold in the fall, when market prices for cod peaked.7 Wild cod grow-out operations were small scale, requiring under $100,000 in start-up capital, access to a cod-fishing licence, and readily available cod trap gear. Since cod grow-out utilized wild stocks that were captured locally and held at low densities, there were relatively few environmental concerns associated with the practice. The short grow-out time avoided seasonal problems associated with annual ice floes along the coast, allowing wild cod grow-out to be undertaken successfully throughout Newfoundland and even in the cold coastal waters of Gilbert Bay in southern Labrador. Wild cod grow-out was supported by the Food, Fisheries, and Allied Workers union and the provincial government; however, the practice was largely eliminated when the cod-fishing moratorium banned access to most wild cod in 1992.8 Yet the moratorium spurred new entrepreneurial dreams of, and designs for, commercial cod aquaculture in the province. Full-cycle “egg-to-plate” cod aquaculture sought complete control over the life cycle of cod, with the aim of creating a fully domesticated farm animal that could be efficiently grown to compete in highly competitive seafood markets. In 2001, Northern Cod Ventures Limited began to develop a commercial cod hatchery in the town of Bay Roberts in Conception Bay as a first step toward large-scale commercialization of full-cycle cod farming in Newfoundland. This new hatchery replaced a previous hatchery that burned to the ground just as the company was preparing juvenile cod for commercial grow-out trials in 1997. The fire is cited by the aquaculture industry as a major reason for the delayed development of cod aquaculture in the province (see Figure 6.1).9 Northern Cod Ventures Limited drew on expertise developed at Memorial University’s Ocean Sciences Centre, where researchers had developed a cod brood stock program, an experimental hatchery, and feeding protocols to raise cod from fertilized eggs to juveniles ready for commercial grow-out. Financing for the hatchery was raised from the federal government through the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and a partnership involving a private Newfoundland aquaculture corporation and three provincial seafood processors. With a total cost exceeding $3 million, the Bay Roberts hatchery was designed to produce up to 10 million cod fry per year.10

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Cod-farming proponents are now working toward the goal of using hatchery-produced cod fry to grow 32,000 tons of farmed cod on Newfoundland’s south coast by 2010. Even though setbacks have delayed reaching these ambitious cod farming goals, plans for such explosive growth led Fish Farming International, the world’s leading source of aquaculture information, to proclaim a “cod comeback!” in Canada, enthusiastically arguing in its December 2003 cover story that Newfoundland, “for centuries home to the world’s biggest wild cod resource – could well become a world centre for cod supplies again through aquaculture.”11 The hype around cod farming conceals the many managerial challenges that have been associated with the domestication of cod. Compared with readily farmed Atlantic salmon, cod are extremely difficult and expensive to domesticate from the fertilized egg stage through to juveniles ready for commercial grow-out. Unlike Atlantic salmon, which can be fed pellet feeds soon after they consume their yolk sacs, larval cod must be fed live plankton before they can be weaned onto commercial feeds. The need for live plankton requires cod hatcheries to raise enriched plankton cultures on site and to feed the live cultures to larval cod at precise stages in their development.12 Once cod fry have been weaned off live plankton feeds, they must be grown-out as juveniles in nurseries before they are ready to be transferred to ocean net-pens for commercial farming. Furthermore, while cod are in their larval and juvenile stages of development, they display aggressive cannibalistic behaviour that requires extensive monitoring and careful separation of cod by size once they reach fifty to sixty days of age. All of this makes cod farming extremely expensive.13 Farmed cod must be sold into the luxury seafood market to recuperate capital investments. Newfoundland fish processing and marketing were based on selling frozen cod blocks into commodity whitefish markets and will therefore need to be reorganized to make cod aquaculture economically viable. The coastal geography and climate of Newfoundland and Labrador add management challenges for full-cycle cod grow-out. Twenty-four ice-free months are required for farmed cod to reach a marketable weight of two to three kilograms, and the presence of seasonal ice floes in Labrador and around most of the island mean that this is achieved in only a small area of the south coast (see Figure 6.1). Even on the south coast, however, warm summer water temperatures can exceed the narrow tolerance of Gadus morhua. Just as most of the world’s Atlantic salmon farms have migrated to Chile, where the protected Pacific coastline, cheap labour, and minimal environmental regulations provide for lucrative farming operations, so too

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there is no reason to believe that cod farming will ultimately remain associated with Newfoundland or even with the Atlantic Ocean. Management challenges and costs associated with egg-to-plate cod farming mean that cod aquaculture can only be undertaken by large corporations that can achieve economies of scale. To be profitable, farming operations have to sell cod at premium prices in exclusive markets. The commercial viability of full-cycle cod farms requires “large scale production of approximately 1,000 tons annually; total owner investment of cash and equity of at least $1.25 million; highly skilled farm management and staff with the requisite skills and experience in both business management and aquaculture; and optimal aquaculture site selection based on temperature profile, water flow, and the absence of pack ice.”14 Due to the financial risks associated with cod aquaculture, commercial lending agencies have been reluctant to provide loans for aquaculture in Newfoundland and Labrador. This reluctance has meant that the cod aquaculture industry has become highly dependent on support from the federal and provincial governments as well as foreign speculative capital. In the years following the cod fisheries moratorium, the federal government’s ACOA became the lead agency providing financing to develop an egg-to-plate cod-farming industry in the province. In 2006, ACOA, along with other government and private sector partners, funded the Atlantic Cod Genomics and Broodstock Development Project (CGP), with over $12 million in funding over two years to develop “tools that will allow the aquaculture industry to identify cod with traits of commercial importance.”15 The cod genome project has persisted past its initial phase and continues to engineer brood stock for industrial aquaculture operations.

Strengthening Market Managerialism

My sense of the relationship between ACOA and the aquaculture industry is like that of an old married couple ... [However,] unlike the old married couple who’ve been in bed together for so long that there isn’t much going on, that is not the case with ACOA and the aquaculture industry. We aren’t sure who is doing what to whom in this bed, but there sure is a lot going on. There should be no question in anybody’s mind that ACOA has been committed to the

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aquaculture industry ... If it is a good thing for the industry, we will find a way to do it. – ACOA official, 2003 16 The relationship between the cod aquaculture industry and government has been extremely cozy. In the years following the 1992 moratorium, the DFO released an Aquaculture Development Strategy that promised financial support for aquaculture-related infrastructure and the creation of “a regulatory and policy framework conducive to industry development.”17 In 1998, the federal government institutionalized support for aquaculture development by creating a new commissioner for aquaculture development, who was mandated to develop policy recommendations and deliver them directly to the fisheries minister without having to go through the DFO bureaucracy. Federal and provincial authorities have promoted cod aquaculture aggressively with funding from a specific aquaculture component built into the Canada-Newfoundland Agreement on Economic Renewal and, more recently, through a new Atlantic innovation fund administered by ACOA. Research and development support has been provided through AquaNet, a seven-year, $14.4 million aquaculture research network devoted to positioning the Canadian aquaculture industry globally by increasing the efficiency of aquaculture production through species diversification, biotechnology, environmental sustainability, and the training of highly qualified personnel.18 The province has encouraged aquaculture development by conducting an aquaculture review, completing a study on conflict management in the industry, producing a legislative framework that includes an Aquaculture Act with growth-friendly regulations, and a loan guarantee program for aquaculture-related feed purchases. Since feed is one of the most expensive components of full-cycle cod and salmon farming, accounting for up to 80 percent of operating costs, the feed loan guarantee program effectively transferred the majority of the financial risks associated with cod and salmon farming onto the public while ensuring the profitable viability of privately owned aquaculture operations in the province.19 The goal for both the cod aquaculture industry and the government is to create a modernized, intensively managed industrial cod production system along the south coast of the island. The emphasis is on increasing the efficiency of production by domesticating the life cycle of cod through

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technological and managerial interventions to achieve maximum singlespecies yields that can compete successfully in global seafood markets. This approach is succinctly illustrated in the federal government’s Aquaculture Development Strategy, whereby, “to remain internationally competitive, Canadian producers must sustain the relentless pursuit of technological and management improvements that allow Canada to gain stature in world aquaculture. The capability to produce and market desired products at internationally competitive prices is paramount to sustained development.”20 By interpreting sustainability as the maintenance of economic growth in a globally competitive market, the tensions between unlimited production and ecological limits are easily overlooked and obscured. Unlike the wild cod fishery that relied on ecological conditions in the northwest Atlantic Ocean and the life history traits of cod to reproduce fish naturally, industrial farming attempts to artificially create growing conditions and engineer cod biology to produce a commodity that can profitably compete in global seafood markets. The federal and provincial governments’ aquaculture management system focuses on single-species production, regulating how many sites are to be licensed and where they are located. Unlike ecosystem approaches to fisheries management, the management of cod from egg to plate pays little attention to the complex relationships that exist between activities on aquaculture sites and the larger social, ecological, political, economic, and cultural contexts within which they are embedded. Federal and provincial policy documents treat aquaculture sites as if they were discrete, disconnected objects that can be privatized through leasing arrangements. The Newfoundland Aquaculture Act permits the transfer of portions of harbours, bays, and inlets – which were formerly the collective property of the citizenry of Newfoundland and Labrador – into enclosed property, leased to private individuals and corporations.21 As with other forms of foreshore leasing, this permits the enclosure of coastal space and the privatization of cod populations as swimming inventories. Technological and managerial interventions that directly affect how fish are cultivated (the intensity of the fish-farming activity, the wastes produced, the inputs used, the genetic makeup and species composition of the fish grown, the salaries and organizational abilities of employees, and other internalized business factors) are left primarily to the discretion of individual aquaculture entrepreneurs, who are to be guided by the “invisible hand” of competitive markets. Egg-to-plate cod aquaculture reinforces

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a market managerialist approach to cod, reflecting DFO policy changes adopted in the wake of the cod collapse in 1992 that concentrate benefits in the fishery. Cod aquaculture emphasizes individual ownership and management responsibility for marine resources once under the exclusive purview of the state. The federal government’s Aquaculture Development Strategy is explicit about individual and corporate ownership in aquaculture. Aquaculture, the strategy observes, implies two different meanings of culture. One meaning implies intervention in the life history of farmed organisms to enhance production, but “culture also implies individual or corporate ownership of the stock being cultivated.”22 Cod farming extends and intensifies the government’s market-oriented management approach to marine fisheries that was discussed in Chapter 5. Rather than ownership and property rights being tied to a quota for a portion of the biomass of wild cod populations, ownership and property rights in aquaculture apply to the entire life cycle of cod and even to patented brood stocks and the genetic code of fish. The ability to control cod from egg to plate subsumes cod biology to the logic and needs of capital. International agreements and institutions, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and the proposed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, enshrine property rights that enable the privatization and commodification of cultured organisms on the enclosed coastal spaces of fish farms. Once coastal spaces have been privatized, the international trade regime creates the potential for corporations to sue governments to recuperate lost profits should a national or provincial government decide to reclaim coastal zones or coastal genomes as state-owned common property.23 In addition to the loss of collective state-managed property, the expanded logic of privatization, commodification, and enclosure that underlies industrial cod farming fundamentally transforms the identity and social relations of fishermen. In the earlier efforts to develop the Newfoundland fishing industry from a small-scale-dominated inshore fishery to an intensive offshore dragger fishery, governments and market institutions told fishermen that they had to abandon their small boats, outport communities, and detailed local knowledge and embrace the industrial efficiency of big-boat technology, frozen fish plants, urban growth centres, and scientific fisheries management. With aquaculture, fishermen are asked to cease being hunters altogether and evolve into professionalized industrial farmers. This perspective is bluntly stated in an article in The Economist:

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“[The ocean] is a resource that must be preserved and harvested. To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.”24 Cod aquaculture leads to the commodification of the coastal zone and requires intensive corporate-led management, a smaller, more efficient, and more flexible workforce, higher levels of capitalization, and more complete integration into global seafood markets than the wild cod fishery. Through egg-to-plate farming, cod become increasingly conceptualized as a pure commodity with exchange value rather than a food source with use value for local food sovereignty or a living fish with intrinsic existence value. To compete with low-cost global producers and other whitefish products, farmed cod must be branded as a high-end product. The needs and demands of the global seafood market come to influence everything that occurs on fish farms, since “there is very little point in growing seafood if you can’t sell it.”25 Competition in the global seafood market has led to concentration of ownership in the Canadian finfish aquaculture industry. The welldeveloped BC salmon-farming industry, for example, went from 140 start-up operations in the 1980s to a group of eleven corporations by 2003, with high levels of foreign ownership and corporate practices of vertical integration and contract farming. Five multinational companies control 83 percent of fish farm licences and generate 82 percent of production. Four of these companies are based in Europe and one in Canada.26 Internationally, one multinational Norwegian corporation (Marine Harvest) now directly produces 30 percent of all farmed Atlantic salmon worldwide and processes, markets, and distributes a larger range of seafood products. Contemporary capitalist logic dictates that most Atlantic salmon are farmed in the Pacific ocean in the coastal waters off Chile, where an outbreak of the infectious salmon anemia (ISA) virus killed millions of farmed Atlantic salmon in 2008, resulting in the loss of over 1,000 rural jobs.27 Concentrated ownership patterns create uneven commodity chains where individual producers capture only a small fraction of the overall value of their farmed products, even though they absorb the majority of the economic risks during the production process. Most cultivated finfish species, such as cod and salmon, become “commodities with hypercompetition amongst producers that tends to drive [down] producer prices,” leaving Canadian producers extremely vulnerable to international currency fluctuations.28

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These economic outcomes have important impacts on the distribution of benefits to communities living in coastal zones where industrial aquaculture takes place. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the recent move from small-scale wild cod grow-out to full-cycle cod aquaculture resulted in a dramatic increase in the capital costs and risks associated with codfarming operations. The expense and risk involved in cod farming mean that much of the capital investment has to come from government subsidies, grants, and loans and from capital investments by seafood processors, offshore banks, and venture capital funds. These conditions do not produce a wide distribution of benefits and often generate conflicts. In Newfoundland and Labrador, documented conflicts associated with aquaculture include • navigational safety issues involving recreational boating and inshore • • • •

fisheries; impaired access to the shoreline; aesthetic concerns voiced by home and cabin owners; environmental considerations; and aquaculture’s impact on access to traditional fishing grounds and perceptions of negative impacts on lucrative wild marine species, such as lobster and crab.29

Domesticated Fish and Wild Ecology

We will domesticate the fish over time ... knock them down to a more passive fish ... And we’ll have fish that will just swim around and graze like a cow ... That’s what we’re all shooting for. – National Film Board, Fish Wars, 1989 30 With these words, a BC salmon farmer succinctly describes the essence of industrial aquaculture. The idea is to establish highly controlled systems that domesticate profitable wild species to produce maximum output while minimizing capital input. Key components can include the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), enriched foods, and intensive management (focusing on disease prevention and treatment as well as nutrition for rapid growth). Aquaculture operations favour the most

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profitable species and harmonize harvest schedules with peak prices and market demand. Profit imperatives discourage attention to ecological and social costs. Considerable scientific uncertainty and debate swirl around the present and future ecological risks of aquaculture. The ecological systems involved are highly complex; possible effects are, at best, difficult to predict, and scientific certainty is rarely possible. The main ecological concerns raised have centred on • escapes (documented and potential genetic, parasitic, and disease

• •

•

•

transmissions to diminished wild stocks as well as increased predation and competition for food, habitat, and mates); chemicals and therapeutics used on the farm; the impact of wastes on fish habitat and ecological communities surrounding aquaculture sites (water quality concerns, such as eutrophication, anoxia, and the production of hydrogen sulphide and methane); the potential for deleterious effects on marine mammals, birds, and other species that are targeted as predatory pests by aquaculturalists; and the overall ecological footprint of the system.

The ecological footprint of industrial aquaculture operations far exceeds that of capture fisheries. Rather than removing pressure from wild stocks, industrial aquaculture consumes wild fish in the form of fishmeal and oil fed to farmed fish. Three to five pounds of wild fish are required to produce one pound of farmed salmon or cod. When fed to caged fish, feed pellets produce concentrated forms of waste that are continuously dispersed into the surrounding marine environment.31 Feed pellets used in aquaculture combine wild fish, agricultural products, and therapeutics that have to be collected from, and transported over, vast terrestrial and marine areas. Canada imports fishmeal and oil for use in fish feed and industrial feeds for cattle, chicken, and pigs. Fish meal is made largely from small pelagic fish, such as sardines, anchovies, and herring often caught in southern waters. “Canada’s fish and seafood imports in 2003 were $2 billion, [and] almost 35% of that volume (and about 4% of the value) were products destined for meal used in livestock and fish feed.32” As the demand for fishmeal and oil increases, human beings and other species that rely on small pelagic fish for food have to compete with the demand for fishmeal generated by industrially farmed carnivorous fish,

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such as salmon and cod. Cod and other carnivorous fish raised through industrial farming practices do not contribute to feeding the world’s undernourished or taking pressure off wild stocks. In fact, “every farmraised salmon, cod or tuna eaten in the Northern hemisphere represents a fourfold reduction in the fish protein available to the people of the South” and exacerbates pressure on wild fish stocks worldwide.33 In addition to these international concerns, for Newfoundland and Labrador communities the most troubling aspect of cod farming is the potential for damage to the remaining wild cod stocks. Fish from aquaculture sites escape from sea-cages that wear out or are torn by predators, storms, currents, and ice. The numbers of escaped fish can be large, leading to questions about possible genetic effects on wild stocks, disease transfers to wild populations, changes to ecosystem dynamics and structure, as well as confounding effects on wild stock assessment, restoration, and management. This is a significant concern in Newfoundland since the south coast (Placentia Bay, Fortune Bay, and Bay D’Espoir), where the majority of future egg-to-plate cod grow-out sites have been licensed, is also where remaining wild cod populations are the most abundant (see Figure 6.1).34 Although little empirical research has been done on the effects of escapees on wild cod populations and their ecosystems, past experiences with the introduction of exotic Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia provide grounds for prudence and precaution. Selection in natural and cultured environments is radically different. Fish raised in hatcheries and on fish farms are selected for traits that optimize marketability (e.g., faster growth rates and larger body size) rather than ability to produce viable offspring in the wild. Should domesticated cod escape and interact with wild cod, it is not known exactly how the market-oriented engineered traits of farmed codfish and the diseases associated with intense cod production will interact with the traits of dramatically reduced wild cod populations and their vulnerability to disease. A recent report by an expert panel from The Royal Society of Canada warns that, when the number of cultured escapees exceeds the number of wild fish, interaction will likely have a negative effect on wild populations.35 This is particularly significant for Newfoundland and Labrador, where the number of codfish cultivated is expected to grow exponentially in the future, while wild cod stocks are at historical lows and have continued to decline since the 1992 moratorium. Furthermore, it now seems that the remaining wild stocks are not a single population but a variety of genetically diverse, vulnerable, inshore and offshore populations. In a paper in

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the Journal of Fish Biology, D. Ruzzante and colleagues reported DNA research findings that “provide evidence that Atlantic cod Gadus morhua inhabiting Gilbert Bay, Labrador are genetically distinguishable from offshore cod on the north-east Newfoundland shelf and from inshore cod in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland.”36 These initial findings are extremely significant for policies aimed at aquaculture and wild stock fisheries management. As Ruzzante and colleagues note, “harvesting strategies for Northern cod should recognize the existence of genetic diversity between inshore and offshore components as well as among coastal components.”37 If escaped farmed cod (or other farmed species) were to interbreed, out-compete, spread diseases, or otherwise affect the spawning grounds of wild populations of northern cod, then the ability to restore wild stocks and the prospect for sustainable fishing livelihoods in Newfoundland and Labrador will be placed in further jeopardy.38 In addition to deleterious habitat, genetics, and disease interactions, escapees can confound wild stock fisheries management by complicating population estimates. For example, researchers reported that 40 percent of the fish caught in the Faroes wild salmon fishery in 1990 were of farmed origin. They caution that, unless there is a focus on distinguishing between farmed and wild stocks, there is the potential to overestimate the size of wild stocks, masking their real status.39 For cod fisheries managers, egg-to-plate cod aquaculture only adds to the complexities and increases the uncertainties associated with management. Aquaculture adds new variables, bringing additional data collection and ecological modelling challenges that make fisheries management more difficult and expensive. Given the difficulties that the DFO has in managing wild cod populations that are less complex, and given the department’s current budget constraints, it seems reasonable to argue that cod aquaculture development will only increase the difficulties associated with wild cod fisheries management and will actively undermine the possibility of cod recovery.

Fisheries Management Comes Full Circle

Egg-to-plate cod farming physically embodies the idea of single-species fisheries management that was discredited by advocates of ecosystem-based management in the wake of the cod collapse in 1992. It is seductive because

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it promises to simplify fisheries management and deliver control over aspects of fish production, reproduction, marketing, and consumption that, in the wild fishery, turned out to be highly complex and beyond managerial control and caretaking. Aquaculture once and for all eliminates fluctuations in landings and brings cod fully under control. Fishermen have no role in aquaculture while scientists play a central one. Natural fluctuations due to the vagaries of cod and the challenges of fishing are replaced by artificial fluctuations in markets, disease outbreaks, currencies, and interest rates. The development of cod aquaculture in Newfoundland and Labrador has been guided by a desire to compete in global seafood markets through the “relentless pursuit of technological and management improvements.”40 Cod farming exemplifies an expanded level of human arrogance by seeking to engineer natural and cultural systems to fit them into the logic of global markets through unending economic growth and managerial control. “The ultimate outcome of this techno-arrogance,” says conservation biologist Gary Meffe, “is the increasingly intensive and essentially perpetual management of a multitude of species in a world unfit for their natural existence.”41 In 2009, the marine research company DIOBAS announced that it had produced an innovative freshwater approach to farming cod in a landbased, self-contained system.42 The two computer-controlled tanks that make up the system include simulated lighting with twelve-hour daily cycles, seasonally comparative moon cycles, and a tidal replication sequence that the company claims can enable cod to develop at twice their normal metabolic rate. DIOBAS emphasizes on its website that cod can now be grown adjacent to lucrative markets far away from where cod naturally exist. “It is time,” DIOBAS proclaims, “that modern technology turned the very dangerous, heavily subsidized and often unproductive gathering of an important food source into a safe and reliable industry.”43 With this new technoscientific invention, cod can now be made completely on-hand as standing reserves grown in intensively managed systems. Outside the futuristic, self-contained farms, fish and fishermen are living in a world increasingly unfit for their existence.

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7 Articulating Management into Cod Fisheries More than any other form of knowing or practice, management is claimed to be absolutely nomadic and universally useful. – Martin Parker, Against Management 1

The Dynamics of Control, Caretaking, and Coping

Managerial ecology, like other forms of managerialism, presents management as neutral and all pervasive. Locating management as a specific set of historical practices helps to denaturalize it. And there is nothing natural about management. An exploration of management’s etymology in Chapter 1 revealed three meanings spanning control, caretaking, and coping. When used in contemporary natural resource management (NRM) contexts, the meaning of management oscillates among control, caretaking, and coping, influencing the tools and targets associated with successful managerial interventions and those individuals and institutions considered to be the most effective managers. However, though there is an everchanging diversity of managers, managerial meanings, theories, and practices, management raised to the status of an ideal seems to have strengthened its hold over contemporary responses to environmental issues worldwide. Managerial ecology is a modern utilitarian approach to ecology that matured during the scientific and industrial revolutions to become the dominant way of framing relations between humans and nature, especially in highly “advanced” industrial societies. Since the 1990s, many

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natural resource targets – once identified as easy to control and carefully use – are now seen as complex and unpredictable. Yet, this recognition of complexity and uncertainty has not led to the end of management as control and caretaking. Rather, managerial control and caretaking have been transferred onto objects deemed less complex and more determined by causal or statistical laws. These developments have manifested themselves in calls to manage people and human dimensions rather than biophysical systems and to domesticate wild species for the purpose of industrial aquaculture. Despite this change in how management operates, there is still a belief that solutions ultimately reside in the hands of managers and that better organization is the key to improvement. In addition, it is believed that all problems (including environmental ones) can be solved merely by exerting more effort, and obtaining greater efficiency, within the status quo order of advanced industrial societies. The scaffolding of concepts and assumptions varies considerably among the many alternative forms of NRM that have been proposed, though there is clear overlap in many of their recommendations and goals. For example, suggestions to move toward adaptive, participatory, and ecosystem-based management coincide with neoliberal economic approaches that stress the challenges of complexity, conflict, and uncertainty in economic systems. As centralized, state-led command and control, bureaucratic rule following, and proceduralism have fallen out of favour, flexibility, coping, experimentation, and learning have risen to take their place. They continue to maintain the underlying goals of managerial control and caretaking, even if confidence in the scale and scope with which they can be achieved has waned. Participatory management under neoliberal influence has stressed the importance of using local ecological knowledge and achieving “buy-in” from resource users to achieve consensus, avoid conflict, and permit ongoing economic growth. In practice, opening up management processes to resource users has done little to challenge existing hierarchical power relations or the underlying ecosocial order of late-industrial societies. The actual politics of participatory NRM have been primarily reformist, with little democratic deliberation on the ultimate ends of interventions into the natural world or challenges to hierarchical relations of power. The emphasis has been on the development of more effective and efficient means of problem solving over deliberation on the ecosocial order itself. Innovations in NRM have often served to strengthen rather than challenge managerial ecology. For example, the recognition of complexity in

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marine ecosystems has led adaptive fisheries managers to advocate the management of human activities. Strategies to address expensive and historically oppressive statist NRM have led to an emphasis on increased responsibility, autonomy, and self-management by individuals, firms, and local communities in the context of the increasing dominance of the global economy and transnational corporations. Managerial ecology continues to maintain its strength and expand into new areas by selectively incorporating insights from ecological science, politics, and ethics while largely leaving the advanced industrial economy unquestioned. In this context, it is clear that, despite good intentions, a focus on ameliorating mismanagement or managing things that previously fell outside the scope of managerial ecology is counterproductive to the goal of fundamentally questioning the relations and practices that lead to environmental crises. Perspectives within NRM science, politics, and ethics that call into question the normative status and practical efficacy of managerial ecology have been either largely ignored or selectively taken up in ways that help to strengthen the current late-modern industrial order by framing critique as an opportunity to remedy anomalies within the status quo. Problems that are structural or require the recognition of irreducible uncertainty and complexity in linked ecosocial systems are also poorly addressed by managerial solutions that require controllable and predictable objects to manage.

Managerial Ecology’s Articulation in the Cod Fishery

Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, cod fishing in Newfoundland and Labrador was primarily an inshore activity using baited hand lines to catch codfish. Access to common fishing grounds and fishing rules were regulated through a moral economy embedded in the social relations of small rural outport communities. Under this pre-industrial ecosocial order, fluctuations in fish landings were accepted as natural, the providence of God. Fluctuating landings were coped with and adapted to through occupational pluralism and a combined reliance on subsistence and mercantile economies that valued cod for its use and exchange values respectively. This pre-industrial fishery was not managed. Fishing tools and access to the inshore fishing grounds were organized by fishermen and fishing communities based on their collective experience. There was no science of fishing or a state powerful enough to intervene in the fishery.

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Both the “weather permitting” fishery, embedded within natural limits, and the subsistence-mercantile economy developed into a modern industrial market economy focused on maximizing exchange values through the exploitation of fishery resources and wage labour. It was this shift toward a modern capitalist fishery that stimulated, and ultimately required, the development of managerial ecology in the cod fisheries. During this period, fluctuations in cod landings became a technical problem that needed to be controlled rather than accepted as a fact of nature under the providence of God. Capital investment and industrial technological developments allowed uncertainties associated with accessing fishing grounds to be eliminated by scaling-up fishing activities spatially and temporally while progressively replacing passive-fixed gears with active-mobile ones. These new fishing gears increasingly made the hunger of cod and other aspects of cod biology and life history irrelevant to the task of landing fish. At the same time, the developing market economy and society required the eradication of uncertainties associated with fluctuations in cod landings to ensure the economic value of cod as a resource. Fluctuations in landings, therefore, became a problem that had to be managed in the context of the many changes associated with industrial modernity. It is the problematization of what was previously accepted as natural that marks the birth of management in the cod fisheries. With the onslaught of market society and industrial modernization, a great transformation occurred affecting the way in which cod, cod fishing, cod fishermen, and the relationships between them were perceived. Fluctuations in the fishery became a problem to be solved by fisheries scientists and government bureaucrats. Natural cycles of lean and plenty gave way to a focus on maximizing exchange values and eventually almost complete dependence on a modern industrialized fishery, growth-oriented state, consumer-oriented society, and capitalist market economy. With industrial modernity, mechanical metaphors came to dominate the fishery. Machine metaphors and theories especially dominated the original phase of managerial ecology in the cod fisheries. Cod were described as products made by a predictable ocean factory, and the paradigmatic fishing person increasingly became the industrial worker labouring on offshore factory trawlers operating mechanized fishing gear and the latest fish-finding electronics for a share of the catch or a set wage. Fishery models promoted the view that properly controlled fishing could, in turn, control the productivity of single-species fish populations, as if the fish were produced by a predictable organic machine.

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For fisheries scientists to provide the answers demanded by governments, amateur naturalism and natural history approaches in fisheries biology gave way to expertise and modern science. The search for universal laws that would permit quantification, prediction, and control over the objects of study, rather than the rich, qualitative descriptions of naturalists that were aimed at general understanding, represented a major shift in fisheries biology – one that put the knowledge of fish into a new relationship with managerial power. When fully formed, scientific representations of the fishery permitted centrally located managers to believe that they could predictably control the productivity of wild fish populations by regulating fishing as if they were controlling outputs from a factory by integrating machinery and human resources (wage labourers). The development of population thinking in fisheries science was crucial to the emergence of fisheries as a modern scientific discipline that could provide knowledge to serve the interests of managerial power. Modern fisheries science claimed to discover natural laws that controlled fishlanding fluctuations and – more importantly – explained how fishing could be used to control these fluctuations and maximize the productivity of fish stocks. When connected with economic laws that purported to describe human behaviour, representations of the fishery developed by biologists and economists offered governments not only a solution to fluctuating landings but also a blueprint for how to develop the cod fishery as if it were like any other modern industry. Institutions, economic relations, and social structures developed that relied on the knowledge and power regime of managerial ecology and built up substantial institutional inertia to any fundamental change in this arrangement.2 The construction of manageability in the cod fisheries was a crucial component of the new industrial fishing society that saw fishing emerge as a profitable modern industry and investment option. The modernization of fishing technology and the simplified representations of fish and fishing from scientists mutually supported the emergence of a modern industrial fishing society in Newfoundland and Labrador. Before the parallel birth of industrial modernization and managerial ecology in the cod fishery, the act of fishing and the fishermen themselves were integrated; there was no need for the fishery as a whole to be coordinated beyond adjacent community waters. The arrival of industrial fishing technologies changed this dynamic. Without a ban on this technology, all that was left was to attempt to develop a form of power commensurate with the revolutionary scale of the technology. Management, and

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the state power supporting it, flourished in this context and became pivotal components of the industrial fishery. Constructing cod and the fishery as manageable objects allowed a modern way of life and ecosocial order to develop along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Cod Collapse Crisis and Reformed Managerial Ecology

The collapse of the cod stocks was a massive ecological and social disaster that could have significantly undermined fisheries management and spawned new ways of living with cod. This did not happen. Rather, the collapse produced a renewed managerial ecology that provided fertile soil for the promotion of a variety of new managerial fixes that framed the collapse as a functional challenge to be met with new and improved techniques while taking the industrial way of life for granted. Understanding this response is crucial if alternatives to managerial ecology in the cod fisheries are to have a chance to emerge. Critical insights from the natural and social sciences, as well as the experiences and opinions of fishing people themselves, were put to work for science and management in the years following the 1992 moratorium as state-led managerialism gave way to market managerialism facilitated by government departments and agencies. Despite the status quo industrial nature of fisheries policy after the collapse, there were major changes in the character of cod fisheries management that became clear during this period. These changes signalled a development of industrial modernity from a high-modern to a latemodern stage. First, there were developments within natural science that promoted the view that wild cod were increasingly difficult to manage. Perceptions of complexity and uncertainty resulted in less confident forms of management, which called for an adaptive and precautionary ecosystembased approach emphasizing management as coping and the control of fishing people and domesticated cod. Second, there were developments that could be characterized as flowing from the social sciences. They emphasized the need to include selected fishermen in science and management to achieve cost savings and improved effectiveness. In the name of managerial efficiency and effectiveness, fishing people and enterprises became the primary targets for interventions that sought to internalize management as control through decentred context steering.3 These experiments responded to the call from

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ecosystem-based management to manage the “human dimensions” of fishing systems. And third, there were developments that touched on environmental ethics and the distinction between wild and domesticated animals. As wild cod became domesticated and seen as a farm animal, a rhetoric of stewardship and husbandry emerged that emphasized management as caretaking as cod became private property owned throughout their entire life cycle. This final development was linked to larger changes in the overall Canadian economy. Standardized, mass-produced commodities (including seafood) are now manufactured increasingly in China, while Canadian seafood corporations focus on the production of value-added niche products and specialized brands. Moves toward a “post-industrial” economy in Canada have involved the encouragement of biotechnology, information – processing, and knowledge industries that are more apt to value cod genes over cod biomass. Although motivated by a desire to understand cod as embedded in larger biophysical systems, the switch in emphasis from controlling cod populations to coping with marine ecosystems has only served to maintain and strengthen an overall managerial approach. The inability to manage many of the biophysical variables affecting cod populations was recognized by the DFO. However, attempts to create management systems that could slowly (re)gain competence in predicting changes in wild stocks of commercially valuable marine species have only increased since the collapse in 1992. A holding pattern thus emerges where faith continues to be placed in future scientific developments that will allow for greater prediction and control, this time of multiple species and eventually whole ecosystems. Although tempered by massive cuts to fisheries science and management budgets after the moratorium, faith in the normal science behind managerial ecology seems not to have suffered a significant blow from the cod collapse or the emergence of marine ecosystem-based management. As B. McCay and C. Finlayson have astutely observed, the collapse of the cod stock was not accompanied by a “parallel collapse of the paradigm of science-based fisheries management and its supported institutional structures, processes and relationships.” Instead, what collapsed along with the cod stock was “the social structure of the fishery to the extent that it was dependent on the northern cod.”4 The collapsed social structure strengthened conditions that helped to encourage a new round of internalized managerial control as fishing people were forced by changes in fisheries

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policies to become less oriented to family and community commitments and more directed by possessive individualism and monetary concerns. The social and political authority of fisheries science has not been fundamentally challenged in the wake of the cod fishery collapse. However, the cod collapse did challenge the scientific representation of wild cod as primarily a collection of homogeneous offshore single-species populations cut off from interactions with inshore cod populations, other species, and biophysical conditions. Management as coping was suggested as a response to deal with the wild cod populations that were left, after managerial control and caretaking had been safely relocated to new targets deploying more profitable means. Managerial interventions in the cod fishery now work by involving, rather than excluding, fishermen once they have been licensed and achieve bona fide professional fish harvester status. This approach is reminiscent of colonial attitudes toward granting responsible government to colonized peoples. Self-rule was only granted after the British colonial office was satisfied that colonial subjects would govern in the same way they had been ruled. Fishermen are now told that they have to govern themselves as if they were scientists, managers, and entrepreneurs rather than fishermen. Management now operates on the identity of fishing people – attempting to turn them into technicians for fisheries science and (self-) managing entrepreneurs. The managerial response to criticisms of fisheries science and management made by inshore fishermen before the 1992 collapse is to integrate narrow slices of their LEK into normal scientific and managerial procedures as an additional source of data. The rise of private ownership over marine resources as a solution to the overfishing of wild cod also forms a central theme in post-1992 fisheries management. Although the northwest Atlantic Ocean’s reproduction of wild cod continued to suffer declines after the moratorium, cod (re)production has largely been taken up by a burgeoning fish-farming industry. On farms, the abstract single-species populations described in fisheries management models as predictable swimming inventories embedded in controlled equilibrium environments became a reality. Connections between control, private ownership, and management as caretaking also became clear through this development. Aquaculture appeared to solve the ongoing economic problem of open access and lack of secure stock ownership long bemoaned by fisheries economists. Farming permits the emergence of privately owned cod that can be husbanded and carefully used according to the wishes of private owners and their appointed

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stewards. Industrial fish farming also perpetuates an understanding of cod as a commodity with exchange value and fishing as an activity geared exclusively to the production of commodities for the market as opposed to restorative models of fishing and aquaculture geared to wild cod capture-growth–release and rural food security, sovereignty and survival.5 A new phase of managerial ecology has emerged since the cod collapse in 1992. Rather than assuming that the conditions for manageability exist in the nature of cod and fishing people as natural laws passively awaiting discovery by scientists, manageability is now increasingly conceptualized as a condition that must be actively engineered into cod and fishing people. To achieve managerial effectiveness in the face of failure, cod fisheries management has tried to construct what the simplified management models previously took for granted as existing in nature: single-species populations of cod cut off from their supportive ecological context and disembedded entrepreneurial fish harvesters behaving as rational economic actors free of social ties. The increasingly technological nature of fishing, the concentrated ownership of fisheries resources accompanying the explosive rise of the crab fishery since the cod collapse, and the corresponding ecological regime shift have helped to encourage this new stage of managerial ecology. The emergence of the managerial language of coping with respect to the recovery of wild cod occurs in the context of the expansion of control and caretaking aimed at domesticated fish and professionalized fish harvesters. New configurations of managerial ecology in the cod fisheries have failed to take into account many of the diverse insights developed by natural and social scientists who have studied the cod fishery collapse and, most importantly, the experiences and opinions of fishing people. By selectively recognizing ecological complexity in wild ecosystems that have become commercially annihilated while simplifying complexity in society and on the fish farm, the potential insights and implications flowing from post-normal science and the ecosystem approach have been significantly blunted. All of these developments make it difficult to think and act beyond management with respect to fish, fishermen, fishing, and fisheries. Despite all of the changes in the means of obtaining control and caretaking, and the explicit recognition of the need to cope with wild cod, management as a practice and ideal aimed at controlling and stewarding fish and people to permit ongoing (post-) industrial capitalist economic growth remains dominant and appears beyond reproach.

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Now that the complexity of managerial ecology in the cod fisheries of Newfoundland and Labrador has been more clearly articulated, the challenge is to explore and present alternatives that will not become co-opted as yet another round of managerialism with new targets for managers to measure and hierarchically order through control, caretaking, and coping techniques.

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8 Alternatives to Management and Managerial Ecology So much management theory and practice is tunnelvisioned and dangerous – practically as well as intellectually, ecologically as well as culturally. – M. Alvesson and H. Willmott, Studying Management Critically 1

I

f the history of management teaches us anything, then it is that tragic, unintended consequences often accompany the actions of managers intent on fixing problems. Indeed, framing the world as a set of problems amenable to fixing helps to sustain the illusion that solutions to all problems are to be found in a more determined application of rationally organized expertise encapsulated in management theory and practice. John Ralston Saul warns us that, “in a civilization that has mistaken management techniques for moral values, all answers are a trap.”2 It is clear that framing the cod fishery as a series of problems and targeting fish, fishermen, and fishing for various managerial interventions have produced a series of traps that have been culturally and ecologically disastrous. Chris Grey argues that, since contemporary civilization is dominated by multiple forms of managerialism, the only sure way to avoid proposed solutions becoming part of the problem is to cease projects of reform and “renounce the search for the holy grail of manageability.”3 Renouncing the search for manageability is selectively accomplished with respect to biophysical systems. However, acceptance of irreducible complexity and uncertainty in biophysical systems has been accompanied by simplistic approaches to managing fishing people. By framing the problem

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as too many fishermen chasing too few fish, fisheries management has ironically led to far fewer of both without any reduction in fishing effort. Other critics of management point to a need to understand and value lay knowledge and practice in addition to scientific expertise. In theory, the inclusion of fishermen’s lay knowledge could have complicated and served to undermine the manageability of fishermen and opened up spaces for alternative forms of organizing Newfoundland fisheries. In practice, these knowledge initiatives have put fishermen’s knowledge to work in fisheries science and management by isolating testable hypotheses and reducing embedded knowledge and practices to scientific data. What would happen if complex systems science, democratic politics, and environmental ethics were taken more seriously? What if pressures placed on ecosystem scientists to “set out simple and clear rules for proper ecosystem management” were removed?4 If this were done, then perhaps it would become possible to formulate an alternative to managerial ecology based on a renunciation of the futile search for manageability and the emergence of just and democratic human-nature relations.

Complex Ecosystem Science: Reformed Managerial Ecology or a Radical Alternative?

As described in earlier chapters, complex ecosystem science points toward a number of changes in ecosocial relations. In adaptive and ecosystembased management, for example, anthropocentric exogenous control over ecosocial systems is abandoned in favour of ongoing experimental learning from within the system – effective coping replaces top-down control and caretaking as the underlying goal and primary stance of management. However, as J. Anderies points out, in the vast majority of cases, “this approach still emphasizes ‘management’ in the sense that the goal is, through active experimentation with the system, to progressively [re]learn to manage a given resource base.”5 In these cases, the complexity of ecosocial systems is interpreted as a functional, epistemological problem that will ultimately be solved through new and improved techniques that eventually deliver control over the whole ecosocial system or at least over critical system elements and relations.6 The coping stance in ecosystem-based and adaptive management is managerial because it attempts to regain lost control and caretaking rather than encourage any acceptance of natural thresholds or limits.

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Science, politics, and ethics maintain their focus on control and caretaking even if the language and means to achieve these goals change. This reformed managerial approach is clearly exhibited in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s recent report on world fisheries, which recognizes the increasing difficulty of monitoring and managing fish stocks influenced by natural oscillations and climate change. The FAO warns that in the face of such uncertainty, there is a great risk that stocks will be accidentally and repeatedly overfished, and that serious deleterious consequences will ensure.7 Although the FAO report recognizes the existence of natural fluctuations and changes, it maintains a functional epistemological understanding of complex ecological conditions that is reductionist, anti-democratic, and anthropocentric. It retains the modernist faith that fisheries science can and ought to predict changes in wild stock abundance and argues that the fishing industry must learn how to “adjust to systematic forecasts” delivered by scientists.8 Fisheries problems are seen as originating with the inability of managers to control the human side of the equation to come in line with predictive scientific assessments on the status of fish populations and ecosystems. This interpretation of complexity avoids the difficult metaphysical, political, and normative questions that are raised by post-normal science. Fluctuations, oscillations, and other complex phenomena associated with the ocean and marine species become constructed through this approach as problems that can be solved through better anticipatory scientific knowledge and more effective managerial interventions. This is quite different from ontological interpretations of complex phenomena that understand ecological complexity as a reflection of an underlying natural order that is, in principle, not fully graspable, knowable, predictable, or controllable. Just as the emergence of coping within natural resource management discourse has not automatically spelled the end of managerial ecology, so too the theoretical recognition of ecological complexity in the marine environment and the rise of complex ecosystem science have not automatically led to alternatives in practice. Rather, as Wolfgang Sachs argues, ecosystem theory represents the standard Western modernist view that nature is there to be controlled and stewarded in the interests of commerce and economic growth. The metaphor for systems thinking is the selfgoverning cybernetic machine. This metaphor encourages a managerial stance oriented to conditioning ecosystem responses to change, in an attempt to control self-organization through decentred context steering. As Sachs makes clear, “looking at nature in terms of self-regulating systems

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... implies either the intention to gauge nature’s overload capacity or the aim of adjusting her feedback mechanisms through human intervention. Both strategies amount to completing Bacon’s vision of dominating nature, albeit with the added pretension of manipulating her revenge.”9 A more recent critique of ecosystem science by Bruno Latour emphasizes the political implications of the ecosystem concept. Latour believes that those who use the term “ecosystem” do so without realizing that they are retaining a basic defect: namely, creating a system without taking into consideration the will of the humans and non-humans elements bound by it. Furthermore, grouping all beings into a global ecosystem, fails to take into account the political aspects of the ecosystem both as a scientific construct and as an actual assemblage of human and non-human elements. By integrating everything into the ecosystem too quickly and cheaply, the requirements of democracy are left out of the process, rendering it “eco-politically” incorrect.10 This is clearly observed in ecosystem managers when they express negative responses to existing political boundaries (e.g., the 200-mile EEZ limit) and advocate for the development of new management units for custodial management. A similar political critique of the ecosystem concept is offered by Stephen Bocking, who points out that, because the ecosystem concept originated as a strictly scientific construct, it has continued to imply “a dominant role for scientists in both understanding nature and determining appropriate conduct.” By adopting goals such as resilience and “other attributes of ecosystems not readily perceptible by non-scientists,” abstract scientific constructs continue to maintain a hierarchical relationship relative to the common-sense experiences of non-scientists. The dominance and authority of scientific abstractions entrenches the type of hierarchical relationship between knowledge and intervention typical of managerial ecology, where science maintains the hegemony of reason over common sense. As Bocking observes, within this hegemonic scientific context, “people may be included in the process, but [only] as objects to be studied, managed and occasionally consulted.”11 As a way to avoid the problems outlined by Sachs, Latour, and Bocking, we can understand the human-ecosystem relationship “not as a problem of humans learning how to manage a system, but rather of learning how to live within it.”12 In this interpretation, the complexity of ecosystems is taken as a fundamental reflection of the way in which the world is actually constituted, an ontological fact that demands a change in how life is lived. Complexity, understood in a strong ontological sense, and the coping stance associated with it are not to be understood as the results of

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limited knowledge that can ultimately be remedied through further study or better information gathering. Interpreting complexity as an ontological claim about reality demands a fundamental rethinking of how we relate to human and non-human nature. As A. Finlayson argues, it involves accepting that “we are always formally in error in our assessments of states of complex, open-ended systems,” and this error is “in an unknown direction and magnitude,” requiring a fundamentally new mode of interaction with nature compared with that of managerial ecology.13 Articulating a similar position, post-normal scientist and systems theorist James Kay has argued that the challenge of complexity “is to acknowledge the limits of our ability to know [and] to design decision/ intervention processes which can learn from both the positive and negative consequences of our limitations and redress those who are the victims of these consequences.”14 When this approach to complexity is taken, all decisions and interventions become “as much about humility, justice, compassion and learning as about ‘good science,’ rationality, and profit.”15 These words, coming from a post-normal scientist, point in radical new directions and raise a host of new issues outside the managerial status quo of control and caretaking. They also transcend coping, adaptive strategies and endless managerial reform by raising political and ethical questions that “imply new complexities for the relations between science and politics: determining how nature will be understood, who has the authority to determine what counts as knowledge, and who is permitted to make decisions on the basis of this knowledge.”16 Indeed, an ontological view of complex ecosystem science can challenge the control-oriented hubris and anti-democratic characteristics of modernity itself by forcing a fundamental questioning of manageability. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes, “modernity prides itself on the fragmentation of the world as its foremost achievement.” The modern world that fragments and falls apart into a plethora of problems is a “manageable world” and since all problems are theoretically manageable, “the question of the manageability of the world may never appear on the agenda, or at least be infinitely postponed.”17 By explicitly challenging the reductionism of modern science and proposing a new post-normal relational understanding of nature, complex ecosystem science has the potential to call manageability into question. By raising the spectre of irreducible uncertainty, context dependence, and relationality in scientific knowledge, complexity undermines the ability and authority of scientists to provide universal representations of nature

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that permit management to take place in any of its three hierarchically interconnected guises. This radical theory of science and intervention requires democratic political processes and deliberation on appropriate ways of seeing, being, and living in particular places as opposed to universally valid, objective, problem-solving exercises. Once the ability and authority of science to deliver effective management solutions have been undermined, scientific representations of nature can become one opinion among many that can enter the polis (political realm), where debate and deliberation, as opposed to the hierarchical command and obedience of the oikos (household sphere), become the focus. As Hannah Arendt discusses in The Human Condition,18 the oikos was a realm of rulership for the Greeks, a space where hierarchical mastery and relationships of control, caretaking, and coping predominated. During the modern period, oikos thinking has risen to prominence. Under ecological crisis, and other exceptional conditions, the experience of oikos thinking and being accelerates its expansion and eclipse of other spheres of human action, notably the freedom to act politically. Ontological complexity raises the problem of how to live within complex ecosocial systems as opposed to how to manage them. The question of how to live well points toward inescapably political and normative issues that require deliberation in a modality beyond the relationships of rulership that epitomize the oikos. Learning how to live well within ecosocial systems means recognizing that there can be no externally formulated objective solution or calculation that can achieve a universally acceptable outcome beyond the normative political sphere. When George H.W. Bush stated at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 that “the American way of life” was not up for negotiation, the possibilities for anything other than proposals for new and improved managerial techniques to enable the survival of this way of life were removed from the discussion. Ontological complexity obliterates the certainty of “objective” scientific solutions, freeing up possibilities for both discussion on and conflict over opinions, norms, and interests rather than straightforward consensus based on the facts. This is the opposite of the understanding of knowledge that dominates under managerial ecology. From a managerial perspective, increased understanding leads to the identification of causal levers and laws that can be manipulated and used to achieve predictable outcomes. Thus, management sets the conditions for bargaining over quantitative trade-offs and the establishment of consensus-based decision-making processes among interested stakeholders. What management does not

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encourage or permit is a deliberation among citizens striving to define, judge, and co-create a common good. Just admitting that complexity of either kind exists does not mean that the knowledge will be applied in the way theorized. Indeed, for operational methods to develop, a narrow form of ecology is required. As Donald Worster argues in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, ecological science comes in arcadian and imperial varieties.19 However, both the arcadian (romantic-pastoral-caretaking) and the imperial (progressive-mechanical-controlling) forms of ecological science are managerial. Imperial ecology, the quantitative modelling that first permitted the command and control of nature in the service of her majesties’ companies and later industrial corporations, obviously encourages relationships of mastery over the Earth and its creatures. Imperial ecology is evident in the statistical population thinking and quantitative MSY modelling initiated by Heincke when he called for natural history to become a modern science useful to governments at the end of the nineteenth century. However, the arcadian, romantic form of ecological science hypothesizes organic communities in perfect balance evolving toward climax. The model of human-nature relations that this Arcadian ecology provides is founded on a pastoral ethic of stewardship. In the cod fisheries example, the stewardship ethic leads to a model of managerial caretaking or stewardship that promotes an agricultural ethic more compatible with farming than fishing. This pastoral stewardship ethic originates in the Western literary canon with Virgil’s Eclogues, sometimes referred to as the Bucolics. As Benjamin Cohen explains, the Eclogues present images of “passive contemplation, of staff-holding shepherds resting in mountain valleys,” where people leisurely frolic in nature without the need to work the land.20 Although romantic values have been applied to the image of the Newfoundland fisherman and used to bolster nationalism and tourism (among other uses), the actual practice of fishing for cod is anything but a romantic endeavour. Just as science and romantic poetry are specific ways of knowing and relating to nature founded on contemplation, so too the practices involved in the work of fishing provide a unique way of knowing founded on engaged, place-based experience. In the cod fisheries, these ideas emphasize the need for processes of deliberation and normative debate over what ought to constitute a “good life” with respect to the relationships among cod, people, and their supporting ecosocial contexts and how people ought to learn how to live in an ontologically complex world that can no longer include cod fishing as

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a support for an industrial way of life. In the cod fisheries case, these contextual discussions will have to address the appropriate scale of cod fisheries and raise the issue of the underlying goals for recovery – cod to eat or cod to sell? Currently, the boundaries of what constitutes cod recovery, what cod ought to be saved for, and which cod fisheries ought to be prioritized, based on whose knowledge, are hotly contested. Rather than focus on offshore stocks, many advocate a focus on bay-level stocks that can include discussions on the food versus commercial and recreational fisheries and the role of fishing and aquaculture in ecological restoration. Scaling deliberations on the cod fishery to local bays, as opposed to NAFO management zones, might fit better with cultural patterns (identities and accents in Newfoundland are often associated with the bay that a person is from) as well as different genetic stocks of cod, the genetic diversity of which is increasingly recognized by fisheries scientists. This rescaling and redefinition of fisheries issues to focus on the inshore and political rather than managerial concerns will be challenging due to the lack of political representation at this level and institutions arranged in this spatial pattern. In recent years, however, fishing people have begun to articulate the need for a food fishery over commercial and recreational interests. Food fishery discussions have been accompanied by calls for a restorative versus exploitative relationship to cod, including an active role for fishing people in the restoration of the fish and their way of life. The food fishery continues to be contested by the DFO and most fisheries scientists, who argue that any level of fishing for food will threaten recovery. This claim is not believed by most inshore fishermen, who argue that most of the cod currently being landed are as by-catch in the offshore and midshore trawler fleets. This situation not only raises profound questions about food security and sovereignty but also illustrates how knowledge claims about the fishery are intimately connected with political and moral claims.

Political versus Managerial Ecologies

To the famous question “What Is to Be Done?” there is only one answer: “Political ecology!” – Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature 21

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Political ecology asks questions about power, struggle, justice, and resistance rather than asking how to solve problems associated with control, caretaking, and coping. The connection of knowledge with power is a particularly important part of political ecology, as are struggles over what gets constructed as manageable and what is deemed unmanageably complex. From the perspective of political ecology, the struggles of inshore fishermen against the knowledge and actions of cod fisheries scientists and managers can be seen as constitutive of a political stance as opposed to a problem to be solved through better knowledge management, public relations, social marketing, or green-washing techniques. Struggles over the status of cod reveal incompatible scales of analysis between different types of fishermen fishing for food or money, those deploying different gears, and among scientists, managers, and fishing people. Furthermore, assumptions about what cod should be captured for – profit or personal consumption – raise the question of the ultimate ends of fishing. Up to now, these discussions have not been given a space to appear in public. As noted in Chapter 5, the federal fisheries minister continues to monopolize decision-making authority on issues related to marine fisheries, and the goal of sustaining maximum economic growth continues to guide policy. The minister continues to issue licences for “underutilized” species that are deemed economically valuable to harvest, including exploratory fisheries for jellyfish and krill. Former East Coast fisherman Ray Rogers sees the overall goal of economic development as trying to squeeze the most out of human and non-human nature through the privatization of political power in the market, which puts nature in a disenfranchised position.22 According to Rogers,23 conservation goals should include a social project that frees nature from this position by politicizing the human relationship with nature so that it can receive public care in appropriate ecological and cultural terms. The buried politics of the economy that Rogers advocates uncovering are perhaps most clearly and consistently raised in discussions on the political character of fishing technologies. Debates over these technologies have played an ongoing role in cod and other fisheries since the emergence of industrial fishing technologies in the nineteenth century. At that time, the debate was primarily framed by governments as being about the equitable juridical ownership of fishing tools and the fish themselves. Industrial fishing tools would be put within the reach of everyone through loans and grants, while fish would be allocated based on scientifically determined total allowable catches and quotas. From the nineteenth century up to the

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present, the question of how cod are killed has had significant political dimensions, affecting the very character of the fish (their behaviour and the number of breeders) as well as the character of the fishermen and the possibility of equitable social and economic relations in the fisheries.24 When managerial solutions achieve hegemony, crucial questions surrounding industrial fishing technologies that have repeatedly been raised by inshore small-boat fishermen from the moment that industrial fishing gears appeared are effectively silenced and sidelined. Newfoundland fishermen have repeatedly claimed that industrial fishing gears threaten both the nature of the fish and the fishing person. Industrial fishing technology threatens the equitable distribution of the cod that are landed, since only some fishing gears make it possible for others to operate, and many new gears permit the capture of cod when they are spawning or resting and even after they have been satiated and will not bite at baited hooks. Once industrial fishing technologies were permitted to enter the fishery, discussions on how to fish began to focus on how many fish were available to be caught, who should own them, and how it would be possible for more people to gain access to new industrial fishing tools and modern lifestyles. Debates about the appropriate relationship between fishing people and cod were transformed into problems that could, at least in theory, be solved through calculated technoscientific interventions. Debates about fishing technologies continue to be politicized in Newfoundland and Labrador. A significant number of inshore small-boat fishermen have begun to call for a focus on how fishing is done and a return to the baited hook and hand line gear type to ensure an equitable cod fishery that respects the nature of cod and the character of fishermen and their communities. As one inshore fisherman noted at a Fisheries Resource Conservation Council meeting in St. John’s in 2003, “killing fish, that’s what I do for a living. And do it quite proudly, too. But we’ve got the technology developed now that we can catch the last one that’s out there ... We have developed and become very, very efficient at killing fish ... But we started off with the hook and the line!”25 Inshore fishermen who advocate baited-hook-and-line methods for catching cod have voiced their concerns and have appeared in other Canadian provinces, the United States, and other north Atlantic nations to present their case. Greater attention to arguments from fishermen about how fishing is done and to what end it is pursued, as opposed to how many fish can be removed from the ocean, should become the focus of future fisheries research. Local environmental groups, such as the Fisheries Recovery Action Committee, and fishing co-operatives, such as Fogo Island and Petty

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Harbour, have raised the issue of fishing technology repeatedly at fisheries meetings and in the media. A thorough exploration of fishing and aquaculture technologies is needed if we are to move away from an approach that has managed many marine species and fishermen out of existence. In the current context, however, it is difficult for fishing people and others to deliberate publicly on how fishing is and ought to be done because of the monetary and knowledge investments that have been made in highly efficient boats, industrial gears, and processing facilities. To move beyond the need for predictive science and the simplifications of ecosystems that necessarily accompany it, fishing technology will have to be conceived of differently. It will have to be seen as something that, far from being a neutral tool that can be used for good or ill, is constitutive of both intrahuman and human-nature relations. Recognition of the importance of technology is beginning to appear on the public agenda. Bottom trawling, long accused of damaging habitat and undermining the equitable distribution of fisheries resources, is being raised as an issue in Newfoundland and Labrador and around the world by a diversity of fishing groups and environmentalists, and the United Nations has started to act on banning high sea dragging and advocating the right to fish for subsistence over commercial exploitation.

Moral versus Managerial Ecologies

Since managerial knowledge must be “causal, expressible in generalizations, and must provide ... an essentially manipulative ability,” it is open to challenge on both political and ethical grounds.26 This is different from arguments about the efficacy of management that were discussed previously in this chapter. How can relationships with the natural world move beyond instrumental rationality to include communicative rationality and deliberation on the ends as well as the means of all interventions? What are the proper, fitting, and virtuous fishing practices in Newfoundland and Labrador and around the world at this time, and how should what constitutes good fishing be decided on and implemented? These questions constitute a moral rather than a managerial orientation. It is important that open debate occur about how and why fishing is done – not as a way to learn how maximum sustainable yields can be obtained from fish populations and ocean spaces but because fishing practices have political and moral consequences for how humans and fish live, who gets to eat, and how the restoration of lives based on fishing might proceed.

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At present, it is difficult to conceptualize discussions on fisheries management in moral terms since management is most often understood in terms of effectiveness, and effectiveness is not understood to be a moral issue. Rather, as virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, management is seen as “the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed”; furthermore, “effectiveness is a defining and definitive element of a way of life which competes for our allegiance with other alternative contemporary ways of life; and if we are to evaluate the claims of the ... managerial mode to a place of authority in our lives, an assessment of the ... managerial claim to effectiveness will be an essential task.”27 Explorations of moral versus managerial ecologies in the cod fisheries would focus attention on the relationships that should exist between people and cod and their mutually supporting contexts. What is required here is an emphasis on relational processes as well as on the conditions within which fishermen access the sea and marine life. Present competition ought to be replaced by communication and enclosures of state and private property with an exploration of how to rejuvenate commons and the types of relationships that sustain them.28 This is obviously far easier said than done, but it will have to be a crucial component of any alternative to managerial ecology. Aldo Leopold, Carolyn Merchant, Arne Naess, and others have proposed alternatives to utilitarian managerial ethics that are encapsulated within partnership and land ethics where nature is accorded intrinsic value and humans are understood as partners and citizens of land and sea communities. These new forms of ethics remove the emphasis on finding the most efficient means by which to achieve given ends and allow for debates about what ought to constitute “the good” and the scale at which organismic wholes (which must be accorded consideration) are identified with respect to fishing.29 These approaches to ethical ecology advocate a mutually respectful relationship between humans and non-humans. However, these ethical ecologies raise difficult questions that will need to be addressed if they are to inform practice. Nature cannot speak for itself or be represented universally if democratic political opinion is to be allowed expression as opposed to managerial rulership. Those who represent nature or other human beings must be seen as putting forth opinions open to contestation; therefore, environmental ethics that seek to include nature as a partner and humans as plain member citizens of land and sea communities must continue to address the problem of representation and permit different forms of rationality and argumentation to enter and cocreate public spheres.

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Although instrumental managerial rationality is concerned with “matching means to ends economically and efficiently,” practical rationality involves “reasoning about practice, about what should be done in society with others.” When applied to the cod fishery, a focus on practical reason draws attention to how fishing is done and what role it and other extractive ocean activities should play at this point in history. Drawing on Alasdair Macintyre’s work in virtue ethics, Kelvin Knight argues that practical reasoning results in practical learning, which “is a kind of learning that takes place in and through activity, and in and through reflection upon that activity, in the course of both communal and individual deliberation.”30 Practical learning and enquiry, therefore, can be features of various kinds of non-managerial activities. The distinction between practical and instrumental learning provides another example of how a shift away from managerial ecology might be discovered within the cod fisheries. An alternative view might ask “what are the appropriate relationships between cod and people at this point in history?” and seek answers through the application of practical reasoning with others involved directly in fishing. Practical reasoning relies on rationality and is susceptible to the limits associated with it. Uncertainty is one of the key limits imposed on rationality, which ends up being able to provide only a set of possibilities rather than quantifiable predictions. The choices made as to which path is correct given irreducible uncertainties cannot be found in science but must be based on “passion and morality.”31 Following the thought of post-normal scientist and systems thinker James Kay, decisions about how to organize fisheries would take the emphasis off how many fish are in the ocean to be caught and how the productivity of fish stocks and fishing profits can be improved. Instead, it would remain focused on how fishing is done, on why it is done, and on the ethical and political consequences of different fishing techniques in light of what is understood to be the present state of the ocean in particular places and at particular times, the nature of cod, and what constitutes right action in fishing practice. An environmental ethic that would support this type of right action would have to be based on engaged experience rather than the abstract scientific modelling that marks managerial ecology. Cohen argues that Virgil’s Georgic ethic, which places the emphasis on labour and interaction between humans and nature rather than the distant aesthetic of romantic leisure tied to the pastoral ethic of stewardship, might be exactly the environmental ethic needed today.32 An ethic like the Georgic that emphasizes experience and place-based values

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would invert the current emphasis on abstract mathematical constructs and universally applicable instrumental values tied to the control or caretaking of property. Once fishing experience and practice become the focus, industrial modernity and the tools that it has developed in the fishery and other areas of marine exploitation can become a topic for debate rather than a problem domain from which management is expected to deliver solutions. Indeed, fishing might need to become oriented to restoration and local food consumption as opposed to extraction for the world market. This approach has been advocated by cod fishermen who promote a catch, grow, and release form of aquaculture in combination with a limited food fishery.33 These suggestions for a shift away from managerial ecology and toward political and moral ecologies are evidently brief sketches. They are meant to indicate some of the new theoretical questions that must be asked as a first step toward breaking away from the hegemony of managerial ecology.

Where to from Here?

As T.S. Kuhn noted in 1962, mere disconfirmation or challenge never displaces a scientific paradigm; only a better alternative does.34 Operating from a view of science as a normal puzzle-solving exercise, Kuhn took as self-evident that the “better alternative” is one that could accomplish all of the tasks of the former paradigm and add to collective puzzle-solving ability. This exploration of the managed annihilation of the Newfoundland cod fisheries has not ultimately sought to discover the answer or single solution to the dominance of management. Indeed, a large part of the present difficulty lies in trying to “solve” the cod fisheries “problem” by framing fundamentally political and normative issues as technical problems amenable to managerial solutions. “Management,” as Paul Nadasdy has cogently observed, “is based on a set of underlying assumptions about the world that are rooted in the political and economic context of capitalist resource extraction.”35 Thought and action are therefore constrained by management and end up reinforcing existing political, economic, and environmental inequalities. Fisheries science, technology, and management have all been aimed at creating and sustaining this context of capitalist resource extraction by transforming fisheries around the world into an industrial sector. This transformation

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has required the construction of manageable fish and manageable fisheries. The result has been the endangerment of both fish and fishermen. For most of human history, fisheries have neither been managed nor been the object of industrial development. To this day, around the world fishing is primarily a small-scale subsistence activity, subjected to the rhythms of season and tide, subservient to the nature of fish and the ability of fishermen. By the latest count, small-scale inshore fishermen outnumber workers on the world’s industrialized fleets by a factor of sixty. They receive a fifth of the public money given to the industrial fleets yet catch as many fish. They produce none of the pollution routinely generated by industrial fishing, avoid harm to spawning fish and habitat, and waste none of the catch. Oriented primarily toward fishing for food instead of for profit, the wide array of small-scale fisheries in the world does not mistake fish for a commodity, fishermen for workers, or fishing as an industry.36 A marginalized yet insistent voice has accompanied the rise to dominance of fisheries management in Newfoundland and around the world. From its very inception, the scientific management of the cod fisheries has been beset by unrest and dissension among fishermen. Inshore fishermen in Newfoundland and around the world recognize that the seas have almost been denuded of fish, which once existed in abundance. They know that the disappearance of many of the fish is neither natural, like the devastation wrought by a tornado, nor accidental, like the forest fire sparked by a camp stove. Instead, it has occurred in tandem with fisheries management. Consequently, fishermen around the world remain understandably both wary and skeptical of the new and improved versions of fisheries management that are continually being produced. Modern scientific ideas, such as management, are not natural entities: they have been constructed and thus have a history, and as such they introduce a fundamental fracture between perception and reality. Constructs represent a way of knowing inside out -from the mind to the world. Descarte’s famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” reflects the epistemology of scientific constructs where abstract logic and reason that reside in the mind are raised to a superior position vis-à-vis the body and the five senses. In contrast, concepts reflect the way of knowing things from the outside in – from the world to the mind through the senses. In modern times, Sajay Samuel argues, what is given (e.g., real fish and fishermen) slowly disappears under the weight of all that is made up (e.g., singlespecies populations, quotas for biomass, farmed fish, and professionalized fish harvesters).37

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It is crucial to emphasize that scientific constructs, like management, are not rooted in the senses. Indeed, given Samuel’s contrast between concepts and constructs, strictly speaking, scientific ideas such as management are non-sensical because they do not include sensible concepts. Scientific constructs such as MSY were not abstracted from any fishing experience, but they have been used to reshape totally the practice of fishing. Fish populations and other scientific constructs, such as ecosystem productivity, can be experimentally tested, verified, or falsified. But it is clear that fishing experiments are not the stuff of ordinary fishing experience. Experiments are necessary precisely to test and verify what is not ordinarily evident.38 Experimental results do not illuminate fishing experiences. Hence, Samuel argues that the distinction between experiment and experience reveals that experimental results are neither continuous with nor comprehensible to the everyday experiences of people such as fishermen out on the water.39 Qualitative observations of fish drawn from experience are continuous with the common sense of fishermen and therefore superior in rank to the quantitative constructs of fisheries science. This philosophical argument about scientific constructs put forward by Samuel helps to answer a question posed by fisheries scholar Robert Francis, who observed in 1980 that the “reasonably successful fisheries seem to be those about which little is known,” while “the least successful fisheries are those heavily studied.” He asked “what is it about fisheries science specifically, or the science of renewable resource management in general, that makes this true?”40 It seems clear that, when it comes to making judgments about what is appropriate and fitting with respect to relationships between fish and fishing, fisheries science and management ought not to have been granted such an authoritative and central role. Once management is granted authority and is placed in a central organizing position, the more that is learned about fisheries the worse off they become. In the preface, I asked why it was that I can no longer fish for cod legally off the point in St. Anthony, as I did when I was a child. Although fisheries managers have made superficial gestures toward the inclusion of fishermen’s knowledge into fisheries science, there has been no interest in listening to inshore fishermen’s ideas about how the fishery should be organized. Fishermen claim that they have the technology to take the last fish, but Canadian fisheries ministers continue to toe the draggers’ line that there is no technology that is inherently destructive if it is managed correctly. The response to the managed collapse of cod has been further technoscientific elaborations. The failure of cod fisheries management has

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been misread as a failure in management. Therefore, attention has been directed at developing new and improved managerial techniques. Unfortunately, the managed annihilation of the cod fishery in Newfoundland is now repeating itself as the world’s oceans are emptied by industrial fishing fleets. Since the 1990s, annual wild fish landings have steadily declined. The Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that approximately 75 percent of global fish stocks are fully exploited or have collapsed. Ninety percent of large carnivorous fish have been removed from the world’s oceans by industrial fishing fleets. A recent paper in Science notes that all commercially valuable species will collapse within a generation if current industrial fishing trends continue. Fish grown on industrial farms now comprise close to half the global consumption of seafood and actively erode the world’s food supply by consuming wild fish as feed.41 This industrial plunder of the seas has not been equally applied, and its negative consequences have disproportionately impacted small-scale inshore fishermen. The International Collective in Support of Fisheries workers has observed that the world’s small-scale inshore fisheries have been destroyed, degraded, and marginalized by distant-water industrial fishing fleets. The problem for inshore fishermen is that the “equitable treatment of marginalized peoples is simply not a management issue.”42 Managerial ecology in the cod fishery is inseparably tied up with industrial modernity itself, and ultimately this whole way of thinking, imagining, and living will have to be called into question if we are to move beyond the deadly consequences of management. It is clear that a fundamental divide now exists between what cod fisheries managers on land are advising and the arguments of fishermen. This division has an extremely long and contested history around the world. Contemporary discussions on world fisheries consistently fail to understand the arguments of fishing people in part because of a generalized blindness to the existence of thresholds that high-energy industrial tools and ways of living transgress and ultimately obliterate. The colonization of the imagination and international institutions by managerial constructs such as single-species fish populations, MSY, quotas, biomass, and ecosystems occurred prior to the social disruption and ecological collapse that have followed their real-world applications. If we are to avoid the deadly paradox of fisheries knowledge that produces what it is designed to prevent, then knowledge that is heterogeneous to technoscience will have to be given priority in world fisheries. Giving primacy to the arguments of inshore fishermen over those

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of the industrial offshore fleets, restoring the priority of inshore subsistence over distant-water commercial fisheries, and joining the global ban on bottom trawling and other non-selective gears could begin to address the unnatural history of managed annihilation in cod and other fisheries around the world.

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Notes

Foreword 1 Terry Glavin, “All the Fish in the Sea,” Vancouver Sun, 11 October 2008. 2 For an introduction to the issues and the extensive literature see particularly George A. Rose, Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (St John’s, Breakwater Books 2007), a remarkably broad and sound account, and Alex Rose, Who Killed The Grand Banks? The Untold Story behind the Decimation of One of the World’s Greatest Natural Resources (Mississauga, ON: John Wiley and Sons, Canada, 2008). 3 D.W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland, From the English Colonial and Foreign Records (London: MacMillan, 1895), xix. 4 Today, those outside Newfoundland tend to refer to the “seal hunt.” Its local characterization, as a fishery, is a reminder that seal were generally taken by men who fished at other times of the year, and that the two endeavours were closely integrated in local lives 5 David Alexander, The Decay of Trade: An Economic History of the Newfoundland Saltfish Trade, 1935-1965 (St. John’s: ISER, 1977). 6 Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002). 7 Josephson, Industrialized Nature, 197. 8 Jeffrey A Hutchings and Ransom A Myers, “The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploitation, Harvesting Technology and Management,” in The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures and Challenges, ed. R. Arnason and L. Felt, 37-93 (Charlottetown: University of Prince Edward Island Press, 1995). 9 Cited by L.S. Parsons, “Management of Marine Fisheries in Canada,” Canadian Bulletin of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 225 (1993): 359. 10 Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Northern Cod: A Fisheries Success Story (Ottawa: 1980).

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11 Rose, Cod, 477. 12 Gerald Sider, Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press 2003), xi and 308-24. This is effectively Sider’s Culture and Class in Anthropology and History: A Newfoundland Illustration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986) with a new prologue and epilogue. For a probing critical assessment see Sean Cadigan, “Power and Agency in Newfoundland and Labrador’s History,” Labour/Le Travail 54 (2004): 223-44. 13 Alexander, The Decay of Trade, 164. 14 Article 62 of the Law of the Sea Convention specified that if countries failed to exploit marine resources within their allocated zones to the full, other countries should have access to the “surplus.” 15 Rose, Cod, 543. 16 As, for example, by Glavin, “All the Fish in the Sea.” 17 On this distinction see Sean Cadigan, “Whose Fish? Science, Ecosystems, and Ethics in Fisheries Management Literature since 1992,” Acadiensis 29, 1 (2001): 171-95. 18 Purpose cited in David Lowenthal, “Nature and Morality from George Perkins Marsh to the Millennium,” Journal of Historical Geography 26, 1 (2000): 1. 19 As summarized in Lowenthal, “Nature and Morality,” 6. 20 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864) [a digital copy of the 1869 edition (from which the paginations for the Marsh quotes in this paragraph are drawn) is available at: http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moa&cc=moa&idno=aja7231.0001.001 &frm=frameset&view=image&seq=1], iii, 35. 21 See Lowenthal, “Nature and Morality,” 5 22 Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1931), 78. 23 Lowenthal, “Nature and Morality,” 14; this article also discusses the “utility” of Marsh’s message for the present. 24 Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967, c1910). 25 Pinchot’s phrase is documented by the US Forest Service, in the media kit accompanying The Greatest Good. A Forest service Centennial Film; see http://www.fs.fed.us/greatestgood/ press/mediakit/facts/pinchot.shtml. It has often been rendered slightly differently; see for example Channing Kury, “Gifford Pinchot’s Philosophy: What Did Gifford Pinchot Mean by “The Greatest Good to the Greatest Number for the Longest Time?” Journal of Forestry 73, 3 (1 March 1975): 154-55. 26 Joseph M. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), quote from p. 178. 27 William L Thomas Jr., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation by the University of Chicago Press, 1956). 28 This is derived from an interview with Dr. Robert Solomon, retired geographer and Australian Federal Politician, entitled “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,” on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Radio show Ockham’s Razor on 18 March 2007. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2007/ 1872747.htm.

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29 James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 30 Michael G Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon, 233-55 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). 31 C.S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (November 1973): 1-23 (quote that follows is on p. 1); Peter A. Larkin, “An Epitaph for the Concept of Maximum Sustained-Yield,” Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 106, 1 (1977): 1-11. An MA thesis I read as I was thinking about these issues was helpful: Sinead Earley, “Hybrid Ecologies: Forest Management and Postcolonial Representation in British Columbia, Canada,” MA thesis, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2009. 32 Holling, “Resilience and Stability,” 14. 33 Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 201-26; Egler, quoted in Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation,” 247. 34 The quote is from P. Nadasdy, “Adaptive Co-Management and the Gospel of Resilience,” in Adaptive Co-Management: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-Level Governance, ed. D. Armitage, F. Berkes, and N. Doubleday (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 223. 35 Canada, House of Commons, Report of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans (Tom Wappel, MP, Chair), Northern Cod: A Failure of Canadian Fisheries Management (Ottawa: Communication Canada, Publishing, November 2005); also available on the Parliament of Canada Web Site, http://www.parl.gc.ca/. 36 On the general point, see Florin Diacu, Megadisasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 37 David Orrell, “Blind Oracles,” Literary Review of Canada (January/February 2010), 13. 38 David Orrell, Apollo’s Arrow: the Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything (Toronto: HarperCollinsCanada, 2008); this and following quote are from Orrell, “Blind Oracles,” 13.

Preface 1 I use the terms “fisherman” and “fishermen” to refer to men and women who are involved in fishing since the politically correct term “fisher” refers, as an annoyed fisherman once told me, to a “vicious weasel,” not a person who catches fish.

Chapter 1: A Sea Swarming with Fish 1 Cited in H.P. Biggar, ed., The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497-1534: A Collection of Documents Relating to the Early History of the Dominion of Canada (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), 20. 2 M. Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 3 Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 20. 4 G.A. Rose, Cod: An Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2007); G.A. Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador:

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An Independent Assessment, research paper for the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003). L. Millich, “Resource Mismanagement versus Sustainable Livelihoods: The Collapse of the Newfoundland Cod Fishery,” Society and Natural Resources 12 (1999): 625-42. Rose, Cod. Government of Canada, “Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada Status Assessments,” May 2003, http://www.cosewic.gc.ca/; Government of Canada, Species at Risk Act Legal Listing Consultation Workbook Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua): Newfoundland and Labrador Population of Atlantic Cod (2GHJ3KLNO) (Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 2004); Government of Canada, “Species at Risk Act Registry on Atlantic Cod,” 2004, http://www.sararegistry.gc.ca/. J. Hutchings, “Life History Consequences of Over-Exploitation to Population Recovery of Northwest Atlantic Cod,” presentation to the Canadian Conference on Fisheries Research and the Society of Canadian Limnologists, St. John’s, 9 January 2004; J. Hutchings and R.A. Myers, “The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploitation, Harvesting Technology, and Management,” in The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures, and Challenges, ed. R. Arnason and L. Felt, 37-93 (Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies, 1995). D. Newell and R. Ommer, “Introduction: Traditions and Issues,” in Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, ed. D. Newell and R. Ommer, 1-12 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). A.C. Finlayson and B. McCay, “Crossing the Threshold of Ecosystem Resilience: The Commercial Extinction of Northern Cod,” in Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, ed. F. Berkes and C. Folke, 311-38 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). D.H. Steele, R. Anderson, and J.M. Green, “The Managed Commercial Annihilation of Northern Cod,” Newfoundland Studies 8, 1 (1992): 34-68. J.R. Saul, The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1995), 200. C. Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 238. T. Luke, “Ecomanagerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power-Knowledge Formation,” in Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse, ed. F. Fischer and M. Hajer, 103-20 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); C. Pollitt, Managerialism and the Public Services: An Anglo-American Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); W. Sachs, “Global Ecology and the Shadow of ‘Development,’” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, ed. W. Sachs, 3-21 (Halifax: Fernwood Books, 1993); D. Torgerson, The Promise of Green Politics (London: Duke University Press, 1999). M. Parker, Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism (Malden, MD: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). D. Bavington, “Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents: Exploring the Complexities of Control, Careful Use, and Coping in Resource and Environmental Management,” Environments 30, 3 (2002): 3-21; C. Grey, “We Are All Managers Now; We Always Were: On the Development and Demise of Management,” Journal of Management Studies 36, 5 (1999): 561-85; Parker, Against Management; Torgerson, The Promise of Green Politics.

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17 R. Paehlke and D. Torgerson, ”Introduction,” in Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State, ed. R. Paehlke and D. Torgerson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1990), 5. 18 M. Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation: An Eccumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New York: Yale University Press, 1994), 47. 19 J. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London: Yale University Press, 1998). 20 D.M. Smith, Moral Geographies: Ethics in a World of Difference (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 21 Parker, Against Management. 22 U. Poerksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 23 R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 24 Parker, Against Management, 3. 25 P. Holm, “Fisheries Management and the Domestication of Nature,” Sociologia Ruralis 36, 2 (1996): 179. 26 M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 27 Holm, “Fisheries Management”; J. Law, Order and Obduracy (Lancaster, UK: Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2001), http://www.lancs.ac.uk/; F. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911). 28 Oxford English Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1989). 29 Williams, Keywords. 30 C. Palmer, “Stewardship: A Case Study in Environmental Ethics,” in The Earth Beneath: A Critical Guide to Green Theology, ed. I. Ball et al., 67-86 (London: SPCK, 1992). 31 C. Roach, “Stewards of the Sea: A Model for Justice?” in Just Fish: Ethics and Canadian Marine Fisheries, ed. H. Coward, R. Ommer, and T. Pitcher, 67-82 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2000). 32 G. Esteva, D. Stuchul, and M. Prakash, “From a Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation from Pedagogy,” in Re-thinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, ed. C. Bowers and F. Apffel-Marglin (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005), 23. 33 M. Thompson and A. Trisoglio, “Managing the Unmanageable,” in Saving the Seas: Values, Scientists, and International Governance, ed. L. Brooks and S. VanDever, 107-27 (College Park, MD: Sea Grant Press, 1997). 34 Grey, “We Are All Managers Now.” 35 Parker, Against Management, 11. 36 S. Cadigan, “Whose Fish? Science, Ecosystems, and Ethics in Fisheries Management Literature since 1992,” Acadiensis 29, 1 (2001): 171-95. 37 His thesis was presented in an article first published in Science in 1968; See G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243-48. 38 J. Acheson and B. McCay, eds., The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987); E. Ross, The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics, and Population in Capitalist Development (New York: Zed Books, 1998). 39 S. Fairlie et al., Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (London: Earthscan, 1993).

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40 R. Blake, From Fisherman to Fish: The Evolution of Canadian Fishery Policy (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 2000). 41 M. Harris, Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery, a True Crime Story (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998). 42 B. Crowley, ed., Taking Ownership: Property Rights and Fisheries Management on the Atlantic Coast (Halifax: Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, 1996). 43 Cadigan, “Whose Fish?,”171. 44 B. Neis and L. Felt, eds., Finding Our Sea Legs: Linking Fishery People and Their Knowledge with Science and Management (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2000). 45 R. Apostle et al., Community, State, and Market on the North Atlantic Rim: Challenges to Modernity in the Fisheries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); Newell and Ommer, “Introduction.” 46 H. Coward, O. Rosemary, and T. Pitcher, eds., Just Fish: Ethics and Canadian Marine Fisheries (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2000). 47 S. Cadigan, “Failed Proposals for Fisheries Management and Conservation in Newfoundland, 1855-1880,” in Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian SmallScale Fisheries, ed. D. Newell and R. Ommer, 147-69 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); S. Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855,” Labour/Le travail 43 (1999): 9-42; Cadigan, “Whose Fish?”; D.R. Matthews, Controlling Common Property: Regulating Canada’s East Coast Fishery (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 48 T. Gray, “Fisheries Science and Fishers’ Knowledge,” presentation to ENSUS 2002: Marine Science and Technology for Environmental Sustainability Conference, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, http://www.efep.org/ TSGENSUS.pdf; P. Holm, “Crossing the Border: On the Relationship between Science and Fishermen’s Knowledge in a Resource Management Context,” Maritime Studies (MAST) 2, 1 (2003): 1-22. 49 B. Mansfield, “Neoliberalism in the Oceans: ‘Rationalization,’ Property Rights, and the Commons Question,” Geoforum 35 (2004): 313-26; B. Mansfield, ed., Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009). 50 B. Mansfield, “Property Regime or Development Policy? Explaining Growth in the US Pacific Groundfish Fishery,” Professional Geographer 53, 3 (2001): 384-97. 51 Mansfield, “Neoliberalism in the Oceans,” 313. 52 G. Murray, D. Bavington, and B. Neis, “Local Ecological Knowledge, Science, Participation, and Fisheries Governance in Newfoundland and Labrador: A Complex, Contested, and Changing Relationship,” in Participation in Fisheries Governance, ed. T. Gray, 269-90 (London: Kluwer Academic Press, 2005).

Chapter 2: The Introduction and Development of Cod Fisheries Management 1 T. Smith, Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855-1955 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2 Newfoundland was granted democratic “responsible government” and political independence from Britain in 1888 and was an independent commonwealth nation until 1934. From

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1934 to 1949, Newfoundland was ruled as a British colony under an appointed commission of government. In 1949, Newfoundland became Canada’s tenth province, and control of the cod fishery fell under Ottawa’s jurisdiction. K. Hewitt, “The Newfoundland Fishery and State Intervention in the Nineteenth Century: The Fisheries Commission, 1888-1893,” Newfoundland Studies 9, 1 (1993): 58-80; M. Wright, “Young Men and Technology: Government Attempts to Create a ‘Modern’ Fisheries Workforce in Newfoundland, 1949-1970,” Labour/Le travail 42 (1998): 143-59. M. Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001). R. Ommer, ed., The Resilient Outport: Ecology, Economy, and Society in Rural Newfoundland (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2002); Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times. G. Wynn, Nature and Human Societies: Canada and Arctic North America-An Environmental History (Oxford, UK: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 222-23. P. Sinclair, “The State Encloses the Commons: Fisheries Management from the 200-Mile Limit to Factory Freezer Trawlers,” in A Question of Survival: The Fisheries and Newfoundland Society, ed. P. Sinclair, 157-77 (St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research 1988), 159. Sinclair, “The State Encloses the Commons,” 159; P. Josephson, “The Ocean’s Hotdog: The Development of the Fish Stick,” Technology and Culture 49, 1 (2008): 41-61. Sinclair, “The State Encloses the Commons,” 159; D.H. Steele, R. Anderson, and J.M. Green, “The Managed Commercial Annihilation of Northern Cod,” Newfoundland Studies 8, 1 (1992): 34-68. J. Hutchings and R.A. Myers, “The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploitation, Harvesting Technology, and Management,” in The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures, and Challenges, ed. R. Arnason and L. Felt, 37-93 (Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies, 1995). G.A. Rose, Cod: An Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2007); A. Rose, Who Killed the Grand Banks? The Untold Story behind the Decimation of One of the World’s Greatest Natural Resources (Mississauga: John Wiley and Sons Canada, 2008). S. Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); D.R. Matthews, “The Outport Breakup,” Horizon Canada 9 (1986): 2438-43, http:// collections.ic.gc.ca/; Ommer, The Resilient Outport; Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times. J. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London: Yale University Press, 1998), 2. Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times. Ommer, The Resilient Outport, 35. J. Hutchings, B. Neis, and P. Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod, Gadus morhua,” in The Resilient Outport: Ecology, Economy, and Society in Rural Newfoundland, ed. R. Ommer, 140-85 (St. John’s: ISER Press, 2002); T. Huxley,“Inaugural Address to the Fisheries Exhibition.” London, UK. 1883. S. Cadigan, “Failed Proposals for Fisheries Management and Conservation in Newfoundland, 1855-1880,” in Fishing Places, Fishing People: Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, ed. D. Newell and R. Ommer, 147-69 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); S. Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855” Labour/Le travail 43 (1999): 9-42; C.G. Head, Eighteenth

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Century Newfoundland (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976); Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod”; H. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954). D. Bavington, B. Grzetic, and B. Neis, “The Feminist Political Ecology of Fishing Down: Reflections from Newfoundland and Labrador,” Studies in Political Economy 73 (2004): 159-82; S. Cadigan, Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: Merchant-Settler Relations in Newfoundland, 1785-1855 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); S. Cadigan and J. Hutchings, “Nineteenth-Century Expansion of the Newfoundland Fishery for Atlantic Cod: An Exploration of Underlying Causes,” in The Exploited Seas: New Directions for Marine Environmental History, ed. P. Holm, T. Smith, and D. Starkey, Research in Maritime History No. 21 (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, Maritime Studies Research Unit, Memorial University, 2001); J. Hutchings and R.A. Myers, “The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploitation, Harvesting Technology, and Management,” in The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures, and Challenges, ed. R. Arnason and L. Felt (Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies, 1995); Ommer, The Resilient Outport. Cadigan, “Failed Proposals”; Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons”; S. Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of Retrenchment and Regeneration in the History of Rural Newfoundland,” in Retrenchment and Regeneration in Rural Newfoundland, ed. R. Byron, 14-42 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Newfoundland, “Journal of the House of Assembly of Newfoundland 1848-1849,” 1849, St. John’s; Innis, The Cod Fisheries; C. Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007). Ommer, The Resilient Outport, 26. Hewitt, “The Newfoundland Fishery.” Ommer, The Resilient Outport, 26. Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod,” 154. Smith, Scaling Fisheries. Cadigan, “Failed Proposals”; Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons”; Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod.” Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea; Smith, Scaling Fisheries. C.M. Levi, Comings and Goings: University Students in Canadian Society, 1854-1973 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003) 136. Cited in Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod,” 148. Ibid. D. Vardy and E. Dunne, New Arrangements for Fisheries Management in Newfoundland and Labrador, Report to the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003), 107, 108. J. Hubbard, A Science on the Scales: The Rise of Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Biology, 1898-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Wright, “Young Men and Technology.” Wright, “Young Men and Technology.” M. Sinclair and P. Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking’ in Fisheries Biology between 1878-1930,” Aquatic Living Resources 1 (1988): 201. Smith, Scaling Fisheries. Sinclair and Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking.’” Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod”; Smith, Scaling Fisheries.

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36 Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod”; Sinclair and Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking’”; Smith, Scaling Fisheries. 37 Sinclair and Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking,’” 192; see also Cadigan, “Failed Proposals”; Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons”; Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of Retrenchment”; and Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod.” 38 Sinclair and Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking,’” 192; see also S. Jansen, “Constitution of Objects: Pest, Population, Race, Mass,” in Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Research Report 1998-1999, 2000, Berlin, http://www.mpiwg-berlin. mpg.de/. 39 Sinclair and Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking,’” 194-95. 40 Cited in ibid., 195. 41 P. Holm, “Fisheries Management and the Domestication of Nature,” Sociologia Ruralis 36, 2 (1996): 177-88; Smith, Scaling Fisheries; J. Wilen, “Spatial Management of Fisheries,” Marine Resource Economics 19 (2004): 7-19. 42 Holm, “Fisheries Management,” 180. 43 R.J.H. Beverton and S.J. Holt, On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations (London: Chapman and Hall, 1957). 44 Ibid. 45 Holm, “Fisheries Management”; Sinclair and Solemdal, “The Development of ‘Population Thinking,’” 190; Smith, Scaling Fisheries. 46 R.G. Halliday and A.T. Pinhorn, “The Delimination of Fishing Areas in the Northwest Atlantic,” Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Sciences 10 (1990): 1-51; W.H. Lear and L.S. Parsons, “History and Management of the Fishery for Northern Cod in NAFO Divisions 2J, 3K, and 3L,” in Perspectives on Canadian Marine Fisheries Management, ed. L.S. Parsons and W.H. Lear, Canadian Bulletin of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences (Ottawa: DFO, 1993); W. Templeman, Marine Resources of Newfoundland, Bulletin No. 154 (Ottawa: Fisheries Research Board of Canada, 1966). 47 Halliday and Pinhorn, “The Delimination of Fishing Areas”; Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod.” 48 Hutchings, Neis, and Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod.” 49 R.J.H. Beverton, “Some Observations on the Principles and Methods of Fishery Regulation,” unpublished manuscript, 1952, 1. 50 H.S. Gordon, “An Economic Approach to the Optimum Utilization of Fishery Resources,” Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada 10 (1953): 445. 51 Ibid. 52 P. Holm, “The Invisible Revolution: The Construction of Institutional Change in the Fisheries” (PhD diss., Norwegian College of Fisheries Science, University of Tromso, 2001). 53 Holm, “Fisheries Management.” Mare liberum, or the freedom-of-the-seas principle, was codified by the Dutch-born Hugo Grotius in 1633 with reference to the freedom of the Dutch to take part in the lucrative marine trade with East India. The principle was first established by the Romans and it gave unrestricted use of non-territorial seas for naval and commercial navigation and fishing in times of peace. H. Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas or the Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade (1633; reprint, Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2000), http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/. 54 Holm, “Fisheries Management,” 182.

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55 As Holm observes, fisheries management “builds on a partnership between science and the state. Science must establish the facts: how large are the stocks? Which effort level will give the optimum return? The state must, besides funding science, regulate the fishermen’s activities and prevent them from destroying their economic basis.” Holm, “Fisheries Management,” 182. 56 Ibid.; Lear and Parsons, “History and Management.” 57 A. Finlayson, Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977-1990 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1994); Lear and Parsons, “History and Management.” 58 NAFO, the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization, replaced ICNAF in 1979 as the leading international agency responsible for northern cod management. 59 Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; C. Finley, “A Political History of Maximum Sustainable Yield, 1945-1955,” in Ocean’s Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, ed. D. Starkey, P. Holm, and M. Barnard, 189-206 (London: Earthscan, 2008); Vardy and Dunne, New Arrangements. 60 I borrow this term from Holm’s dissertation title; see Holm, “The Invisible Revolution.” He used the term to designate the revolutionary transformations that followed the introduction of fisheries management into the Norwegian fishery at the end of the 1970s. 61 Ibid., 10. 62 “Motherfish” is the term used by Newfoundland fishermen to refer to spawning female cod. 63 B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 64 Holm, “The Invisible Revolution,” 11. 65 Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; D. Keats, D.H. Steele, and J.M. Green, A Review of the Recent Status on the Northern Cod Stock (NAFO Divisions 2J, 3K, and 3L) and the Declining Inshore Fishery: A Report to the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association on Scientific Problems in the Northern Cod Controversy (St. John’s: Department of Biology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1986). 66 D. Alverson, “A Study of Trends of Cod Stocks off Newfoundland and Factors Influencing Their Abundance and Availability” (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1987). 67 L. Harris, “Independent Review of the State of the Northern Cod Stock,” report prepared for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 15 May 1990. 68 M. MacGarvin, “Fisheries: Taking Stock,” in Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896-2000: Environmental Issues Report No. 22, ed. European Environmental Agency (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2001), http://reports.eea.eu.int/.

Chapter 3: Success through Failure 1 T. Blades, T. “Three Years in the Woodshed,” Sunday Morning, CBC Radio, Toronto, 1 December 1996. 2 D. Bavington, B. Grzetic, and B. Neis, “The Feminist Political Ecology of Fishing Down: Reflections from Newfoundland and Labrador,” Studies in Political Economy 73 (2004): 159-82; B. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Oxford: Polity, 2002); B.

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Neis, “Flexible Specialization: What’s That Got to Do with the Price of Fish?,” Studies in Political Economy 36 (1991): 145-70; M. Parker, Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism. Malden, MD: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). Canada, An Act Respecting the Oceans of Canada, Bill C-26, First Reading, 17 April 1996 (35th Parliament, 2nd sess.); DFO, Canada’s Ocean Strategy: Policy and Operational Framework for Integrated Management of Estuarine, Coastal, and Marine Environments in Canada (Ottawa: DFO, 2002). DFO, Canada’s Ocean Strategy, 10, 18; emphasis added. D. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 393; D. Worster, “Nature and the Disorder of History,” in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. M. Soulé and G. Lease, 65-85 (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995). R. Apostle et al., Community, State, and Market on the North Atlantic Rim: Challenges to Modernity in the Fisheries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); D. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); F. Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (Toronto: Doubleday, 1996); E.B. Colbourne, “Decadal Changes in the Ocean Climate in Newfoundland and Labrador Waters from the 1950s to the 1990s,” Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Science 34 (2004): 41-59, http://www.nafo.int/; F.B. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); S. Levin, Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); R. Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos (New York: Collier Books, 1993); International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, ICES/GLOBEC Working Group in Cod and Climate Change, New Bedford, MA, 7-9 May 2003, CM2003/c:10, Ref.D,G, Copenhagen; International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, Workshop on Synthesis of the Cod and Climate Program, New Bedford, MA, 5-7 May 2003, CM2003/c:10, Ref.D,G, Copenhagen; Natural Resources Canada, Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective (Fisheries) (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2003), www.adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/; G.A. Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador: An Independent Assessment, research paper for the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003); J. Rosenhead, “Complexity Theory and Management Practice,” Science as Culture 4, 1 (1998): 1-25, http://human-nature.com/; D. Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainability,” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Global Conflict, ed. W. Sachs, 132-45 (London: Zed Books, 1993). This view remains dominant even after historical research by fisheries biologists J. Hutchings and R.A. Myers in 1995 showed that water temperatures were lower in the nineteenth century, with no observable effects on either cod recruitments or fish landings. J. Hutchings and R.A. Myers, “The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploitation, Harvesting Technology, and Management,” in The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures, and Challenges, ed. R. Arnason and L. Felt, 37-94 (Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies, 1995). M. Barange, “Ecosystem Science and the Sustainable Management of Marine Resources: From Rio to Johannesburg,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1, 4 (2003): 190-96; D. Bavington, “Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents: Exploring the Complexities of Control, Careful Use, and Coping in Resource and Environmental Management,” Environments 30, 3 (2002): 3-21; Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis, “Feminist Political Ecology”; J. Caddy and H. Regier, “Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries,” in The

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Encyclopaedia of Global Environmental Change (Volume 4), ed. M.K. Tolba, 343-51 (Mississauga: John Wiley and Sons, 2002); A.C. Finlayson and B. McCay, “Crossing the Threshold of Ecosystem Resilience: The Commercial Extinction of Northern Cod,” in Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, ed. F. Berkes and C. Folke, 311–37 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); D. Ludwig, “The Era of Management Is Over,” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 758-64; D. Ludwig, R. Hilborn, and C. Walters, “Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lessons from History,” Science 260 (1993): 17–18; B. McCay, “CoManagement and Crisis in Fisheries Science and Management,” in Marine Resources: Property Rights, Economics, and Environment, vol. 14, ed. M. Falque, M. De Alessi, and H. Lamotte, 341-59 (New York: JAI Press, 2002); M. Thompson and A. Trisoglio, “Managing the Unmanageable,” in Saving the Seas: Values, Scientists, and International Governance, ed. L. Brooks and S. VanDever (College Park, MD: Sea Grant Press, 1997), 107-27. 9 F. Berkes, “Alternatives to Conventional Management: Lessons from Small-Scale Fisheries,” Environments 31, 1 (2003): 5-19; T. Charles, Sustainable Fishery Systems (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 2001); DFO, Canada’s Ocean Strategy; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The Ecosystem Approach to Marine Capture Fisheries, FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries No. 4 (Supplement 2) (Rome: FAO, 2003); FAO, Report of the Expert Consultation on Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management, FAO Fisheries Report No. 690 (Rome: FAO, 2003); S.M. Garcia et al., The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries: Issues, Terminology, Principles, Institutional Foundations, Implementation, and Outlook, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 443 (Rome: FAO, 2003); R. Latour, M. Brush, and C. Bonzek, “Toward Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management: Strategies for Multi-Species Modelling and Associated Data Requirements,” Fisheries 28, 9 (2003): 10-22; McCay, “Co-Management and Crisis”; B. Neis, “Fishers’ Ecological Knowledge and Stock Assessment in Newfoundland and Labrador,” Newfoundland Studies 8 (1992): 155-78; B. Neis and L. Felt, eds., Finding Our Sea Legs: Linking Fishery People and Their Knowledge with Science and Management (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2000); B. Neis et al., “An Interdisciplinary Method for Collecting and Integrating Fishers’ Ecological Knowledge into Resource Management,” in Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, ed. D. Newell and R. Ommer, 217-38 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); B. Neis et al., “Fisheries Assessment: What Can Be Learned from Interviewing Resource Users?,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 56 (1999): 1949-63; T. Pitcher, P. Hart, and D. Pauly, eds., Reinventing Fisheries Management (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998). 10 M. Boyle, J. Kay, and B. Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy: An Adaptive Ecosystem Approach,” in Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, vol. 4, ed. T. Munn, 116-37 (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2001); J.F. Caddy and L. Garibaldi, “Apparent Changes in the Trophic Composition of World Marine Harvests: The Perspective from the FAO Capture Database,” Ocean and Coastal Management 43 (2000): 615–55; Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC), Towards an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management, report of the FRCC’s Environment and Ecology Workshop, University of Moncton, 15-16 December 1997, FRCC.98.R.3 (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1998); Garcia et al., The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries; J. Link, “What Does Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management Mean?,” Fisheries 27, 4 (2002): 18-21; McCay, “Co-Management and Crisis”; Neis and Felt, Finding Our Sea Legs; D. Pauly et al., “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs,” Science 279 (1998): 860-63.

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11 M. Barange et al., “The Tangled Web: Global Fishing, Global Climate, and Fish Stock Fluctuations,” Global Change Newsletter 56 (2003): 26. 12 D. Pauly and J. Maclean, In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean (London: Island Press, 2003), 53, 54, 56. 13 Barange, “Ecosystem Science”; J. Caddy, “Fisheries Management in the Twenty-First Century: Will New Paradigms Apply?,” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 9 (1999): 1-43; J. Caddy and K. Cochrane, “A Review of Fisheries Management: Past, Present, and Some Future Perspectives for the Third Millennium,” Oceans and Coastal Management 44 (2001): 653-82; Caddy and Regier, “Policies for Sustainable and Responsible Fisheries”; FRCC, Towards an Ecosystem Approach; Garcia et al., The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries; Link, “What Does Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management Mean?”; D. Pauly et al., “Towards Sustainability in World Fisheries,” Nature 418 (2002): 689-95. 14 D. Bavington and J. Kay, “Ecosystem-Based Insights on Northwest Atlantic Fisheries in an Age of Globalization,” in Globalization: Effects on Fisheries Resources, ed. M. Schechter, W. Taylor, and L. Wolfson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Figure 3.1; Boyle, Kay, and Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy”; J. Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability: Addressing the Challenge of Complexity,” Futures 31 (1999): 721-42; J.R. Ravetz, “What Is Post-Normal Science?,” Futures 31 (1999): 647-53. 15 High-quality energy is referred to as “exergy” and is a reflection of how organized or useful energy is with respect to its ability to do work. See J. Kay, “A Nonequilibrium Thermodynamic Framework for Discussing Ecosystem Integrity,” Environmental Management 15, 4 (1991): 483-95; Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability”; and J. Kay and E.D. Schneider, “Thermodynamics and Measures of Ecosystem Integrity,” in Ecological Indicators: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Ecological Indicators, ed. D.H. McKenzie, D.E. Hyatt, and V.J. McDonald, 159-82 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1992). 16 Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability.” 17 R. Hengeveld and G.H. Walter, “The Two Coexisting Ecological Paradigms,” Acta Biotheoretica 47 (1999): 143; emphasis added. 18 Ibid. 19 A. Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (London: Hutchinson, 1978); L. von Bertalanffy, “An Outline of General Systems Theory,” British Journal of Philosophy of Science 1 (1950): 13465. A “holon” is a whole/part entity or system that exists contextually in a nested network of other holons, forming a “holonarchy.” Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability.” Russian dolls provide a good analogy for holonarchy, where each doll in the nested set represents a complete system that forms a context for, and is embedded within, the context of other dolls. 20 Bavington, “Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents”; Boyle, Kay, and Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy”; Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability.” 21 Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability”; J. Kay and E.D. Schneider, “Embracing Complexity: The Challenge of the Ecosystem Approach,” Alternatives 20, 3 (1994): 32-38. 22 Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability.” 23 “A SOHO system exhibits a set of behaviours which are coherent and organized, within limits. The nexus of this organization at any given time is referred to as an attractor.” Ibid., 725. 24 C.S. Holling and G. Meffe, “Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management,” Conservation Biology 10, 2 (1996): 328-37; J.J. Kay and H.A. Regier, “An

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Ecosystemic Two-Phase Attractor Approach to Lake Erie’s Ecology,” in State of Lake Erie (SOLE): Past, Present, and Future, ed. M. Munawar, T. Edsall, and I.F. Munawar, 511–33 (Leiden: Backhuys, 1999); Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability”; H.A. Regier and J.J. Kay, “An Heuristic Model of Transformations of the Aquatic Ecosystems of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin,” Journal of Aquatic Ecosystem Health 5 (1996): 3-21; Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador; M. Scheffer et al., “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems,” Nature 413 (2001): 591–96; J.H. Steele, “Regime Shifts in Marine Ecosystems,” Ecological Applications 8, 1 (1998): S33–S36; D. WaltnerToews, J. Kay, and N. Lister, eds., The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Bavington and Kay, “Ecosystem-Based Insights”; J. Wilson, “Scientific Uncertainty, Complex Systems, and the Design of Common Pool Institutions,” in The Drama of the Commons, ed. Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), 327-58. R. Flood, Rethinking the Fifth Discipline: Learning within the Unknowable (New York: Routledge, 1999). J. Gray, “Who Needs Cod Anyway?,” Globe and Mail, 11 March 2000, A18; Wilson, “Scientific Uncertainty.” Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis, “Feminist Political Ecology”; Pauly et al., “Fishing Down Marine Food Webs”; Pauly and Maclean, In a Perfect Ocean. Boyle, Kay, and Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy”; B. Cooke and U. Kothari, “The Case for Participation as Tyranny,” in Participation: The New Tyranny?, ed. B. Cooke and U. Kothari, 39-52 (London: Zed Books, 2002); T. Gray, “Fisheries Science and Fishers’ Knowledge,” presentation to ENSUS 2002: Marine Science and Technology for Environmental Sustainability Conference, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, http://www. efep.org/; Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability.” Boyle, Kay, and Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy”; J.J. Kay and J. Foster, “About Teaching Systems Thinking,” in Proceedings of the HKK Conference, 14-16 June 1999, ed. G. Savage and P. Roe, 165-72 (Waterloo: University of Waterloo, 1999); Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability”; G.M. Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking (New York: Wiley, 1975). R. Rosen, Essays on Life Itself (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 44; see also S. Funtowicz and J. Ravetz, “Science for the Post-Normal Age,” Futures 25, 7 (1993): 73955; Ludwig, Hilborn, and Walters, “Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation”; J.M. Ottino, “Engineering Complex Systems,” Nature, 29 January 2004, 399; and D. Torgerson, The Promise of Green Politics (London: Duke University Press, 1999). Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability”; Link, “What Does EcosystemBased Fisheries Management Mean?”; S.D. Slocombe, “Environmental Planning, Ecosystem Science, and Ecosystem Approaches for Integrating Environment and Development,” Environmental Management 17, 3 (1993): 289-303; S.D. Slocombe, “Lessons from Experience with Ecosystem-Based Management,” Landscape and Urban Planning 40 (1998): 31-39. Gray, “Fisheries Science and Fishers’ Knowledge,” 3. C.L. Kwa, “Models and Modernism: Between Anxiety and Hubris,” in Ecology, Technology, and Culture: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, ed. W. Zweers and J. Boersema, 80-93 (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press, 1994), 92; see also FAO, Precautionary Approach to Fisheries, Part 1: Guidelines on the Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries and Species Introductions, FAO/Swedish Board of Fisheries Technical Paper 350 (Rome: FAO, 1995);

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and M. MacGarvin, “Fisheries: Taking Stock,” in Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896-2000, ed. European Environmental Agency, Environmental Issues Report No. 22 (Copenhagen: European Environmental Agency, 2001), http://reports. eea.eu.int/. R. Hengeveld and G.H. Walter, “The Structure of the Two Ecological Paradigms,” Acta Biotheoretica 48, 1 (2000): 16-17. DFO, Proceedings of the DFO Workshop on Implementing the Precautionary Approach in Assessments and Advice, Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (Ottawa: DFO, 2002), http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/; FAO, Precautionary Approach to Fisheries; S.M. Garcia, “The Precautionary Principle: Its Implications in Capture Fisheries Management,” Ocean and Coastal Management 22 (1994): 99–125. DFO, “A Canadian Perspective on the Precautionary Approach/Principle Discussion Document,” 2001, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/; DFO, Proceedings of the DFO Workshop; C.S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecosystems,” in Evolution and Consciousness: Human Systems in Transition, ed. E. Jantsch and C.H. Waddington, 73-92 (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1976). H. Coward, O. Rosemary, and T. Pitcher, eds., Just Fish: Ethics and Canadian Marine Fisheries (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2000); D. VanDeVeer and C. Pierce, The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book, 2nd ed. (New York: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998).

Chapter 4: Socio-Ecological System Description of the Cod Fishery 1 J.F. Caddy and J.C. Seijo, “This Is More Difficult than We Thought! The Responsibility of Scientists, Managers, and Stakeholders to Mitigate the Unsustainability of Marine Fisheries,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 360 (2005): 59-75. 2 A. Finlayson, Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977-1990 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1994); L. Harris, “Independent Review of the State of the Northern Cod Stock,” report prepared for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 15 May 1990; D. Keats, D.H. Steele, and J.M. Green, A Review of the Recent Status on the Northern Cod Stock (NAFO Divisions 2J, 3K, and 3L) and the Declining Inshore Fishery: A Report to the Newfoundland Inshore Fisheries Association on Scientific Problems in the Northern Cod Controversy (St. John’s: Department of Biology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1986); M. Kirby, Navigating Troubled Waters: A New Policy for the Atlantic Fisheries (Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing Centre, 1983); J. Rice et al., “Recovering Canadian Atlantic Cod Stocks: The Shape of Things to Come?,” presented at the International Council for Exploration of the Sea Annual Conference, Tallin, Estonia, September 2003, CM 2003/U:06, http://www.ices.dk/; G.A. Rose, Cod: An Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2007); G.A. Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador: An Independent Assessment, research paper for the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003); D.H. Steele, R. Anderson, and J.M. Green, “The Managed Commercial Annihilation of Northern Cod,” Newfoundland Studies 8, 1 (1992): 34-68; C.J. Walters and J.J. Maguire, “Lessons for Stock Assessment from the Northern Cod Collapse,” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 6 (1996): 125–37. 3 As Finlayson notes in a study of the DFO’s cod fisheries management, single-species fisheries models contain large amounts of interpretive flexibility. There were large political

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and institutional incentives within the DFO for scientists to downplay the uncertainty and complexity of cod stock assessments and the time that would be required for cod stock recovery. Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; see also M. MacGarvin, “Fisheries: Taking Stock,” in Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896-2000, ed. European Environmental Agency, Environmental Issues Report No. 22 (Copenhagen: European Environment Agency, 2002), http://www.reports.eea.eu.int/. D. Bavington, B. Grzetic, and B. Neis, “The Feminist Political Ecology of Fishing Down: Reflections from Newfoundland and Labrador,” Studies in Political Economy 73 (2004): 159-82; Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; MacGarvin, “Fisheries”; Rice et al., “Recovering Canadian Atlantic Cod Stocks”; Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador. Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, “COSEWIC Status Assessments,” 2003, http://www.cosewic.gc.ca/; J. Hutchings, “Life History Consequences of Over-Exploitation to Population Recovery of Northwest Atlantic Cod,” presentation to the Canadian Conference on Fisheries Research and the Society of Canadian Limnologists, St. John’s, 9 January 2004; Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador. D. Curtis, “Sculpin Project Update,” presentation to the 2002 Fisheries Forum: Fisheries Issues and Opportunities, Fish Harvesters’ Resource Centres, Renews, NF, 14 November 2002; R. Harte, “Emerging Fisheries Development (Jelly Fish),” presentation to the 2002 Fisheries Forum: Fisheries Issues and Opportunities, Fish Harvesters’ Resource Centres, Renews, NF, 14 November 2002; D. Pauly and J. Maclean, In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean (London: Island Press, 2003); Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador. M. Barange et al., “The Tangled Web: Global Fishing, Global Climate, and Fish Stock Fluctuations,” Global Change Newsletter 56 (2003): 24-27; K.F. Drinkwater, “A Review of the Role of Climate Variability in the Decline of Northern Cod,” American Fisheries Society Symposium: Fisheries in a Changing Climate 32 (2002): 113-30; L.B. Klyashtorin, Climate Change and Long Term Fluctuations of Commercial Catches: The Possibility of Forecasting, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 410 (Rome: FAO, 2001), http://www.fao.org/; G. Lilly et al., “The Mass Mortality of Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) in Smith Sound, Eastern Newfoundland, in April 2003,” presentation to the Canadian Conference on Fisheries Research and the Society of Canadian Limnologists, St. John’s, 9 January 2004; Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador; S. Rowe and J. Hutchings, “Implications of Mating Systems for the Collapse and Recovery of Atlantic Cod,” presentation to the Canadian Conference on Fisheries Research and the Society of Canadian Limnologists, St. John’s, 9 January 2004. D. Bavington and J. Kay, “Ecosystem-Based Insights on Northwest Atlantic Fisheries in an Age of Globalization,” in Globalization: Effects on Fisheries Resources, ed. M. Schechter, W. Taylor, and L. Wolfson, 331-63 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); J. Link, “What Does Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management Mean?,” Fisheries 27, 4 (2002): 18-21. Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis, “Feminist Political Ecology”; Pauly and Maclean, In a Perfect Ocean; Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador; Steele, Anderson, and Green, “Managed Commercial Annihilation.” Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis, “Feminist Political Ecology.”

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11 B. Neis, B. Grzetic, and M. Pidgeon, From Fishplant to Nickel Smelter: Health Determinants and the Health of Women Fish and Shellfish Processors in an Environment of Restructuring (St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001). 12 Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis, “Feminist Political Ecology”; Fish, Food, and Allied Workers Union (FFAW), “Preserving the Independence of the Inshore Fleet in Canada’s Atlantic Fisheries,” presentation to the DFO Consultation on the Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review, St. John’s, 20 January 2004. 13 This requirement was introduced for the 2004 fishing season. The cost of the “black box” transmitters required by the DFO ranges from $1,000 to $5,000. NTV Late Night News, Newfoundland Television Network (NTV)190 March 2004. See also Bavington, Grzetic, and Neis, “Feminist Political Ecology”; Neis, Grzetic, and Pidgeon, From Fishplant to Nickel Smelter; and M. Wiseman, M. Burge, and H. Burge, “Fishing Vessel Safety Review (Less than 65 Feet),” Coast Guard DFO Intra-Departmental Working Group, 2001. 14 D. Rowe (FPI president), interviewed on Fishline Call-In Show, CBC Radio, St. John’s, 14 January 2004; D. Rowe, “Global Trends in Food Quality, Safety, and Marketing,” presentation to Newfoundland Aquaculture Industry Annual Conference and Trade Show, St. John’s, 10 February 2004. 15 Ibid. 16 Rose, Cod. 17 J. Anderson, interviewed re crab stock assessment and quotas for 2004 on Fishline Call-In Show, CBC Radio, St. John’s, 7 April 2004. 18 Rice et al., “Recovering Canadian Atlantic Cod Stocks”; F. Winsor (executive director of the Fisheries Recovery Action Committee [FRAC]), interviewed on Fishline Call-In Show, CBC Radio, St. John’s, 28 January 2004; F. Winsor and D. Bavington, “South Coast Cod Stocks in Danger,” Evening Telegram, St. John’s, 29 February 2004, A7. 19 B. Ernande, U. Dieckmann, and M. Heino, “Fisheries-Induced Changes in Age and Size at Maturation and Understanding the Potential for Selection-Induced Stock Collapse,” International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, 2002, CM 2002/Y:06, http://www. ices.dk/; D. Policansky, “Fishing as a Cause of Evolution in Fishes,” in The Exploitation of Evolving Resources, ed. T.K. Stokes, J.M. McGlade, and R. Law, 2-28 (New York: Springer, 1993); A. Popper, “Effects of Anthropogenic Sounds on Fishes,” Fisheries 28, 10 (2003): 24-31; Rowe and Hutchings, “Implications of Mating Systems.” 20 S.M. Grant, “The Mortality of Snow Crab Discarded from Newfoundland and Labrador’s Trap Fishery: At Sea Experiments on the Effect of Drop Height and Air Exposure Duration,” presentation to the Canadian Conference on Fisheries Research and the Society of Canadian Limnologists Annual Meeting, St. John’s, 8-10 January 2004. 21 DFO, Northern (2J+3KL) Cod Stock Status Report A2-01 (St. John’s: DFO, 2003); DFO, Proceedings of the DFO Workshop on Implementing the Precautionary Approach in Assessments and Advice, Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (Ottawa: DFO, 2002), http://www. dfo-mpo.gc.ca/; FAO, Precautionary Approach to Fisheries, Part 1: Guidelines on the Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries and Species Introductions, FAO/Swedish Board of Fisheries Technical Paper 350 (Rome: FAO, 1995); S.M. Garcia et al., The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries: Issues, Terminology, Principles, Institutional Foundations, Implementation, and Outlook, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper No. 443 (Rome: FAO, 2003).

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22 Barange et al., “The Tangled Web”; Bavington and Kay, “Ecosystem-Based Insights”; Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador; G. Sharpe, “Historical Fishing Events and Climate Fluctuations,” 2004, http://www.sharpgary.org/. 23 J.J. Kay and H.A. Regier, “An Ecosystemic Two-Phase Attractor Approach to Lake Erie’s Ecology,” in State of Lake Erie (SOLE): Past, Present, and Future, ed. M. Munawar, T. Edsall, and I.F. Munawar, 511-33 (Leiden: Backhuys, 1999); M. Scheffer et al., “Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems,” Nature 413 (2001): 591–96; J.H. Steele, “Regime Shifts in Marine Ecosystems,” Ecological Applications 8, 1 (1998): S33–S36. 24 NRC, Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective (Fisheries) (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 2003), http://www.adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/. 25 For example, the Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam in Labrador might have nutrient, water temperature, and salinity effects on Groswater Bay in Labrador. These physiochemical changes brought on by the dam are thought to have affected the productivity of cod stocks and the ecological integrity of the southeast Labrador coastal zone and offshore continental shelf ecosystem. J. Wroblewski, “Investigation of Local Fisheries Resources of the Labrador Coast,” Coasts under Stress Research Project, 2003, http://www. coastsunderstress.ca/. 26 D. Bavington, “From Jigging to Farming,” Alternatives 27, 4 (2001): 16-21; Ecology Action Centre, “Lawsuit Challenging Unregulated Dragging on George’s Bank,” 2004, http:// www.ecologyaction.ca/; D. Pauly et al., “Fishing down and Farming up the Food Web,” Conservation Biology in Practice 2, 4 (2001): 25; L. Watling and E.A. Norse, “Disturbance of the Seabed by Mobile Fishing Gear: A Comparison to Forest Clearcutting,” Conservation Biology 12 (1998): 1180–97; Winsor, interview on Fishline Call-In Show. 27 Bavington and Kay, “Ecosystem-Based Insights”; M. Boyle, J. Kay, and B. Pond, “Monitoring in Support of Policy: An Adaptive Ecosystem Approach,” in Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, vol. 4, ed. T. Munn, 116-37 (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2001); J. Kay et al., “An Ecosystem Approach for Sustainability: Addressing the Challenge of Complexity,” Futures 31 (1999): 721-42; D. Peterson and V. Parker, eds., Ecological Scale: Theory and Applications (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 28 Bavington, “From Jigging to Farming”; R. Naylor et al., “Effects of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies,” Nature 405 (2000): 1017-24; Pauly et al., “Fishing down and Farming up the Food Web.” 29 MacGarvin, “Fisheries.” 30 Ibid., 22. 31 J. Hutchings, B. Neis, and P. Ripley, “The ‘Nature’ of Cod, Gadus morhua,” in The Resilient Outport: Ecology, Economy, and Society in Rural Newfoundland, ed. R. Ommer, 140-85 (St. John’s: ISER Press, 2002); R. Smedbol et al., “Outcome of an Inshore Spawning Event by Northern Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) at Low Stock Level,” Canadian Journal of Aquatic Sciences 55 (1998): 1-9; C. Taggart, D. Ruzzante, and D. Cook, “Localized Stocks of Cod (Gadus morhua L.) in the Northwest Atlantic: The Genetic Evidence and Otherwise,” in The Implications of Localized Fishery Stocks, ed. I. Hunt von Herbing et al., 56-90 (Ithaca, NY: NRAES, 1998); J. Wroblewski, “The Colour of Cod: Fishers and Scientists Identify a Local Cod Stock in Gilbert Bay, Southern Labrador,” in Finding Our Sea Legs: Linking Fishery People and Their Knowledge with Science and Management, ed. B. Neis and L. Felt, 72-81 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1999), J. Wroblewski, “Substocks of Northern Cod

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and Localized Fisheries in Trinity Bay, Eastern Newfoundland and in Gilbert Bay, Southern Labrador,” in Proceedings of the Workshop on Cod Stock Components, ed. J.R. Rice, Canadian Stock Assessment Process Series, 104-16 (Ottawa: DFO, 1998). T. Gray, “Fisheries Science and Fishers’ Knowledge,” presentation to ENSUS 2002: Marine Science and Technology for Environmental Sustainability Conference, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 2002, 3, http://www.efep.org/. J. Caddy, “Fisheries Management in the Twenty-First Century: Will New Paradigms Apply?” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 9 (1999): 17. The terms “health” and “integrity” have a diversity of definitions and do not have an agreed upon operational meaning in EBFM or ecosystem health. Garcia et al., The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. Ibid.

Chapter 5: From Managing Fish to Managing Fishermen 1 A. Bundy, “The Red Light and Adaptive Management,” in Reinventing Fisheries Management, ed. T. Pitcher, P. Hart, and D. Pauly, 361-68 (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 366. 2 D. Bavington, “Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents: Exploring the Complexities of Control, Careful Use, and Coping in Resource and Environmental Management,” Environments 30, 3 (2002): 3-21; P. Larkin, “The Future of Fisheries Management: Managing the Fisherman,” Fisheries 13, 1 (1988): 3-9. 3 FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL, St. John’s, 4 March 2003. 4 Fishline Call-In Show, CBC Radio, St. John’s, 16 October 2003. 5 U. Franklin, The Real World of Technology, CBC Massey Lectures (Toronto: CBC, 1990). 6 G. Murray, D. Bavington, and B. Neis, “Local Ecological Knowledge, Science, Participation, and Fisheries Governance in Newfoundland and Labrador: A Complex, Contested, and Changing Relationship,” in Participation in Fisheries Governance, ed. T. Gray (London: Kluwer Academic Press, 2005), 273; see also J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London: Yale University Press, 1998). 7 J. Wroblewski, “The Colour of Cod: Fishers and Scientists Identify a Local Cod Stock in Gilbert Bay, Southern Labrador,” in Finding Our Sea Legs: Linking Fishery People and Their Knowledge with Science and Management, ed. B. Neis and L. Felt, 72-81 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1999). 8 A. Finlayson, Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977-1990 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1994); Murray, Bavington, and Neis, “Local Ecological Knowledge.” 9 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), “Crab Science in Jeopardy, Fishermen Fear,” 4 October 2004, http://stjohns.cbc.ca/; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps, Sunnyside, NF, 8 December 2002; G.A. Rose, Fisheries Resources and Science in Newfoundland and Labrador: An Independent Assessment, research paper for the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003). 10 DFO, “Sentinel Fishery Projects,” 1995, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/.

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11 Otoliths, or fish ear bones, display annual growth rings much like tree rings and can be counted to determine approximate age. 12 FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL. 13 COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation, St. John’s, 28 October 2004; Fishline Call-In Show, CBC Radio, St. John’s, 16 October 2003; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL. 14 L. Harris, “Independent Review of the State of the Northern Cod Stock,” report prepared for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 15 May 1990. 15 COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; Finlayson, Fishing for Truth; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL; Murray, Bavington, and Neis, “Local Ecological Knowledge.” 16 COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; COSEWIC, “COSEWIC Status Assessments,” 2003, http://www.cosewic.gc.ca/; DFO, “Stock Assessment of Northern (2J3KL) Cod in 2009,” Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat Science Advisory Report 2009/009, http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/; B. Neis, “Fishers’ Ecological Knowledge and Stock Assessment in Newfoundland and Labrador,” Newfoundland Studies 8 (1992): 155-78. 17 Murray, Bavington, and Neis, “Local Ecological Knowledge,” 285. 18 DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast: A Discussion Document on Policy Direction and Principles (Ottawa: Atlantic Fisheries Policy Review, 2001), 36; emphasis added. 19 DFO, Canada’s Ocean Strategy: Policy and Operational Framework for Integrated Management of Estuarine, Coastal, and Marine Environments in Canada (Ottawa: Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 2002). 20 B. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002); B. Mansfield, “Neoliberalism in the Oceans: ‘Rationalization,’ Property Rights, and the Commons Question,” Geoforum 35 (2004): 313-26; M. McCarthy and S. Prudham, “Neoliberal Nature and the Nature of Neoliberalism,” Geoforum 35 (2004): 275-83. 21 “The term ‘governance’ refers to the various systems of authority and decision making in fisheries management. It goes beyond what government does to include the participation of industry and other stakeholders in consultation and planning processes.” DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast, 36. 22 COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; DFO, anti-poaching ad, in Crime Stoppers Newfoundland and Labrador 2nd Annual Awareness Guide (St. John’s: Crime Stoppers, 2004); FRCC, 2002/2003 Conservation Requirements for 2J3KL Cod Stocks (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2002); FRCC, 2003/2004 Conservation Requirements for 2J3KL Cod Stocks (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2003); FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps. 23 FRCC, “What Is the FRCC?” 2004, 1, http://www.frcc.ca/mandate.htm. 24 In 2004, the council had its mandate extended to include commercially harvested crustacean species, such as snow crab. Ibid. 25 A.C. Finlayson and B. McCay, “Crossing the Threshold of Ecosystem Resilience: The Commercial Extinction of Northern Cod,” in Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, ed. F. Berkes and C. Folke,

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311-38 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); B. McCay, “Co-Management and Crisis in Fisheries Science and Management,” in Marine Resources: Property Rights, Economics, and Environment, vol. 14, ed. M. Falque, M. De Alessi, and H. Lamotte, 341-59 (New York: JAI Press, 2002); Neis, “Fishers’ Ecological Knowledge.” FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps. DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast, 36. R. Apostle et al., Community, State, and Market on the North Atlantic Rim: Challenges to Modernity in the Fisheries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998); F. Berkes, “Alternatives to Conventional Management: Lessons from Small-Scale Fisheries,” Environments 31, 1 (2003): 5-19; F. Berkes et al., Managing Small-Scale Fisheries: Alternative Directions and Methods (Ottawa: IDRC, 2001); L. Felt, B. Neis, and B. McCay, “Co-Management,” in Northwest Atlantic Groundfish: Perspectives on a Fishery Collapse, ed. J. Boreman et al., 18594 (Bethesda: American Fisheries Society, 1997); R.Q. Grafton, Individual Transferable Quotas and the Groundfish Fisheries of Atlantic Canada (Ottawa: Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1993); Mansfield, “Neoliberalism in the Oceans”; McCay, “Co-Management and Crisis”; E. Pinkerton, Co-Operative Management of Local Fisheries (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1990); E. Pinkerton, “Cooperative Management as a Strategy for the Sustainable Management of Fisheries,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 51 (1994): 2363-78. COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL. FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps. COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps; FRCC, 2003/2004 Conservation Requirements for 2J3KL Cod Stocks; Newfoundland and Labrador All-Party Committee on the 2J3KL and 3Pn4RS Cod Fisheries, Stability, Sustainability, and Prosperity: Charting a Future for Northern and Gulf Cod Stocks (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003). COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; B. Dean-Simmons, “Independent View Critical: FRCC a Necessary Component for Fisheries Minister to Judge Groundfish Stocks, The Express, 10-16 March 2004, 24. D. Alexander, Report of the Committee on Federal Licensing Policy and Its Implications for the Newfoundland Fisheries (St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1974), 27. L. Burke and G.L. Brander, “Canadian Experience with Individual Transferable Quotas,” in Use of Property Rights in Fisheries Management, ed. R. Shotton, 151-60 (Rome: FAO, 2000), http://www.fao.org/; DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast; J.W. Van der Schans, Governance of Marine Resources: Conceptual Clarification and Two Case Studies (Delft, Netherlands: Edburon, 2001); D. Vardy and E. Dunne, New Arrangements for Fisheries Management in Newfoundland and Labrador, report to the Royal Commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003). Burke and Brander, “Canadian Experience with Individual Transferable Quotas,” 27; DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast; Vardy and Dunne, New Arrangements for Fisheries Management.

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36 Burke and Brander, “Canadian Experience with Individual Transferable Quotas,” 27; DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast. 37 Canada, Fisheries Act, R.S. 2004, c. F-14, s. 1, http://www.laws.justice.gc.ca/; Murray, Bavington, and Neis, “Local Ecological Knowledge”; N. Power, What Do They Call a Fisherman? Men, Gender, and Restructuring in the Newfoundland Fishery (St. John’s: ISER Books, 2005); Vardy and Dunne, New Arrangements for Fisheries Management. 38 COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast, 20; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps; FRCC, 2002/2003 Conservation Requirements for 2J3KL Cod Stocks. 39 Burke and Brander, “Canadian Experience with Individual Transferable Quotas,” 34-35. 40 Canada, “Privatization and Quota Licensing in Canada’s Fisheries,” report of the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries, 1998, http://www.parl.gc.ca/. 41 COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL; FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 3Ps. 42 DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast. 43 Ibid. 44 DFO, “A Recent Account of Canada’s Atlantic Cod Fishery,” 2004, http://www.dfo-mpo. gc.ca/; V. Higgins, “Calculating Climate, Advanced Liberalism, and the Governing of Risk in Australian Drought Policy,” Journal of Sociology 37 (2001): 299-316. 45 DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast; Power, What Do They Call a Fisherman? 46 DFO, “A Recent Account of Canada’s Atlantic Cod Fishery,” 16. 47 R. Cashin, Charting a New Course: Towards the Fishery of the Future, report of the Task Force on Incomes and Adjustment in the Atlantic Fishery (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1993); COSEWIC, COSEWIC Public Consultations on Atlantic Cod Endangered Designation. 48 DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast. 49 PFHCBNL, “Frequently Asked Questions,” 2004, http://www.pfhcb.com/. 50 PFHCBNL, Board Policy: Maintenance of Status (St. John’s: PFHCBNL, 2000); PFHCBNL, Code of Ethics for Professional Fish Harvesters (St. John’s: PFHCBNL, 2000); PFHCBNL, Fish Harvester Professionalization: General Information (St. John’s: PFHCBNL, 2000). 51 Canada, An Act Respecting the Oceans of Canada, Bill C-26, First Reading, 17 April 1996 (35th Parliament, 2nd sess.); PFHCBNL, Board Policy. 52 B. Grzetic, Women Fishes These Days (Halifax: Fernwood, 2004); PFHCBNL, Fish Harvester Professionalization. 53 Grzetic, Women Fishes These Days, 65. 54 Ibid., 63, 67-68; see also P. Armstrong, “The Feminization of the Labour Force: Harmonizing Down in a Global Economy,” in Invisible: Issues in Women’s Occupational Health, ed. K. Messing, B. Neis, and L. Dumais, 368-92 (Charlottetown: Gynergy Books, 1995). 55 M. Wright, “Young Men and Technology: Government Attempts to Create a ‘Modern’ Fisheries Workforce in Newfoundland, 1949-1970,” Labour/Le travail 42 (1998): 143-59. 56 Cashin, Charting a New Course. 57 Grzetic, Women Fishes These Days, 9. 58 C. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993); see also C. Maravelias, “Post-Bureaucracy: Control through Professional Freedom,” Journal of

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Organizational Change Management 16, 5 (2003): 547-66; Canada, An Act Respecting the Oceans of Canada, Bill C-26, First Reading, 17 April 1996 (35th Parliament, 2nd sess.); and PFHCBNL, Board Policy. Power, What Do They Call a Fisherman?, 132, 156. These negative stereotypes were often used, in both print and broadcast advertisements produced by the PFHCBNL, to justify the need for a fisheries professionalization program. DFO, The Management of Fisheries on Canada’s Atlantic Coast, 26, 49; see also W. Schrank, R. Arnason, and R. Hannesson, eds., The Cost of Fisheries Management (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). As McCarthy and Prudham, “Neoliberal Nature and the Nature of Neoliberalism,” 276, argue, “neoliberal notions of citizenship and social action are discursively repackaged in the image of homo-economicus, the ideal, entrepreneurial, self-made individual.”

Chapter 6: Managing Cod from Egg to Plate 1 Cited at Cultivating a Sustainable Future: Cold HarvestTM 2003, NAIA annual conference, Gander, NF, 18-20 March 2003. 2 COSEWIC, “COSEWIC Status Assessments,” 2003, http://www.cosewic.gc.ca/. 3 J. Lockett, “Aquaculture: What’s on the Menu?,” Atlantic Business Magazine 12, 3 (2001): 56. 4 Report of the Fisheries Commission, 1889, cited in M. Baker, A.B. Dickinson, and C.W. Sanger, “Adolph Nielsen: Norwegian Influence on Newfoundland Fisheries in the Late 19th-Early 20th Century,” Newfoundland Quarterly 87, 2 (1992): 26, 27; see also D. McGrath, “Taming the Fishery: Scientists and Entrepreneurs Believe Aquaculture Is the Way of the Future,” The Downhomer 16, 9 (2004): 74-78; and NAIA, An Analysis of the Growout Phase of the Egg-to-Plate Cod Aquaculture Industry in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s: NAIA, 2002). 5 Baker, Dickinson, and Sanger, “Adolph Nielsen”; K. Chan et al., “Assessing the Effectiveness of Releasing Cod Larvae for Stock Improvement with Monitoring Data,” Ecological Applications 13, 1 (2003): 3-22; M. Harrington, “New Light on Dildo Fish Hatchery,” Evening Telegram, 16 November 1987, 6; NAIA, Analysis of the Growout Phase. 6 Wild capelin fisheries target females for their eggs, which are sold by Newfoundland fishermen to buyers in Japan. This leaves an abundance of male capelin, for which there is no market. Wild cod grow-out was seen as an opportunity to use male capelin while increasing the value of undersized cod and adapting to the surplus of male capelin. 7 B. Dean-Simmons, “Cod Closure Threatens Fledgling Fishery,” The Express, 27 November-3 December 2002, 7; C. Martin, No Fish and Our Lives: Some Survival Notes for Newfoundland (St. John’s: Creative Publishers, 1992); J. Wroblewski, J. Volpe, and D. Bavington, “Manufacturing Fish: Transition from Wild Harvest to Aquaculture,” in Power, Agency, and Nature: Shaping Coastal Society and Environment, ed. P. Sinclair and R. Ommer, 14560 (St. John’s: ISER Press, 2006). 8 D. Bavington, “Cod Aquaculture as a Restoration Tool for an Endangered Species,” Presentation to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, 2003, St. John’s, NL; D. Bavington, “Gilbert’s Bay Proposed Marine Protected Area: SocioEcological Considerations,” presentation to the Newfoundland and Labrador Natural History Society and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Marine Institute, St. John’s, 2003; DFA, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Aquaculture Licensing Guide

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9 10

11

12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27 28

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(Grand Falls, NF: Licensing and Inspection Division, Aquaculture Branch, DFA, 2002); NAIA, Analysis of the Growout Phase; J.S. Wroblewski, W.L. Bailey, and J. Russell, “GrowOut Cod Farming in Southern Labrador,” Bulletin of the Aquaculture Association of Canada 98, 2 (1998): 47-49; Wroblewski, Volpe, and Bavington, “Manufacturing Fish.” D. Bavington, “From Jigging to Farming,” Alternatives 27, 4 (2001): 16-21; NAIA, Analysis of the Growout Phase. D. Boyce, Cod Aquaculture: “Egg to Plate Project 2001” (Logy Bay, NF: Aquaculture Research Development Facility, Ocean Sciences Centre, 2002); D. Boyce, “Cod Aquaculture Research Development Facility Tour,” Ocean Sciences Centre, Logy Bay, NF, 9 March 2003; NAIA, Cultivating a Sustainable Future. S. Fennelly, “Newfoundland Cod Comeback!,” Fish Farming International 30, 12 (2003): 1; S. Fennelly, “Newfoundland’s First Cod Hatchery,” Fish Farming International 30, 12 (2003): 34-36. Boyce, Cod Aquaculture; Boyce, “Cod Aquaculture Research Development Facility Tour.” Boyce, Cod Aquaculture, 31; NAIA, Analysis of the Growout Phase. NAIA, Analysis of the Growout Phase, 36; see also J. Sackton, “Cultivating a Sustainable Future: Global Markets and Outlook,” presentation at Cultivating a Sustainable Future: Cold HarvestTM 2003, NAIA annual conference, Gander, NF, 18-20 March 2003. DFA, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Aquaculture Licensing Guide, 8; CGP, “Atlantic Cod Genomics and Broodstock Development Project Summary,” 2007, http:// www.codgene.ca/. Cited at Cultivating a Sustainable Future: Cold HarvestTM 2003, NAIA annual conference, Gander, NF, 18-20 March 2003. DFO, Federal Aquaculture Development Strategy (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1995), 8. For more information, see AquaNet: Canada’s Research Network on Aquaculture, http:// www.aquanet.ca/. CBC, “Loan Program to Aid Struggling Fish Farms,” 3 November 2004, http://www.stjohns. cbc.ca/; CBC, “Salmon Farms on Verge of Collapse,” 4 October 2004, http://www.stjohns. cbc.ca/. DFO, Federal Aquaculture Development Strategy, 9. Newfoundland and Labrador, Newfoundland and Labrador Aquaculture Act: An Act Respecting the Encouragement and Regulation of an Aquaculture Industry in the Province, Revised Statutes of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1990, http://www.gov.nf.ca/. DFO, Federal Aquaculture Development Strategy, 3. Public Citizen, North American Free Trade Agreement, 2004, http://www.citizen.org/ trade/nafta/. E. Carr, “Survey: The Deep Green Sea — a Second Fall,” The Economist, 23 May 1998, S3. Sackton, “Cultivating a Sustainable Future.” “Only nine salmon farming tenures (7% of the total) are controlled by companies that are majority-owned by British Columbians.” D. Marshall, Fishy Business: The Economics of Salmon Farming in B.C. (Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2003), 9, http://www.livingoceans.org/. A. Barrionuevo, “Salmon Virus Indicts Chile’s Fishing Methods,” New York Times, 27 March 2008, http://nytimes.com/. G. Lockwood, “Who Is Capturing Aquaculture’s Values?,” Aquaculture Magazine, January-February 1999, 30; see also C. Bailey, S. Jentoft, and P. Sinclair, Aquaculture Development: Social Dimensions of an Emerging Industry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

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29

30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

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1996); D. Conley, “Environmental Concerns: The Anti-Salmon Farming Lobby in BC,” Aquaculture Magazine, July-August 1998, 36-51; and Marshall, Fishy Business. DFA, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Aquaculture Licensing Guide; Newfoundland and Labrador, “Sharing Coastal Resources: A Study of Conflict Management in the Newfoundland and Labrador Aquaculture Industry,” prepared for the aquaculture component of the economic renewal agreement, 1998, http://www.gove.nf.ca/; G. Newkirk, “Sustainable Coastal Production Systems: A Model for Integrating Aquaculture and Fisheries under Community Management,” Ocean and Coastal Management 32, 2 (1996): 69-83. NFB, Fish Wars, transcript, NFB, 1989. B. Belton, “High Seas Drifters: The Reckless Deep-Sea Gold Rush that Could Turn the North American Continental Shelf into One Giant Factory-Style Fish Farm,” The Ecologist, August 2004, 32-38; J. Davenport et al., Aquaculture: The Ecological Issues (London: Blackwell, 2003); C. Folke and N. Kautsky, “Aquaculture with Its Environment: Prospects for Sustainability,” Ocean and Coastal Management 17 (1992): 5-24; C. Folke et al., “The Ecological Footprint Concept for Sustainable Seafood Production: A Review,” Ecological Applications 8, 1 (1998): S63-S71; D. Pauly et al., “Fishing down and Farming up the Food Web,” Conservation Biology in Practice 2, 4 (2001): 25; P. Tyedmers, “Salmon and Sustainability: The Biophysical Cost of Producing Salmon through the Commercial Salmon Fishery and the Intensive Salmon Culture Industry” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2000). J. Kohane, “East/West Coast Seafood: Innovation in Packaging and Product Offerings Buoy Up the Industry,” Food in Canada, November-December 2004, 38; see also R. Naylor et al., “Effects of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies,” Nature 405 (2000): 101724. Belton, “High Seas Drifters,” 36; see also Naylor et al., “Effects of Aquaculture on World Fish Supplies,” and Pauly et al., “Fishing down and Farming up the Food Web.” FRCC, 2004/2005 Conservation Requirements for 3Ps Cod (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2004). Royal Society of Canada, Elements of Precaution: Recommendations for the Regulation of Food Biotechnology in Canada (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 2001); see also Bavington, “Cod Aquaculture as a Restoration Tool”; Bavington, “From Jigging to Farming”; Bavington, “Gilbert’s Bay Proposed Marine Protected Area”; S. Leggatt, “Clear Choices, Clean Waters,” 2001, http://www.leggattinquiry.com/; and J. Volpe, Super Un-Natural: Atlantic Salmon in BC Waters (Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation, 2001). D. Ruzzante et al., “Bay-Scale Population Structure in Coastal Atlantic Cod in Labrador and Newfoundland,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries Biology 56 (2000): 431. Ibid. Bavington, “From Jigging to Farming.” L. Hannsen, J. Jacobsen, and R. Lund, “The Incidence of Escaped Farmed Atlantic Salmon, Salmo salar L., in the Faroese Fishery and Estimates of Catches of Wild Salmon,” Journal of Maritime Science 56 (1999): 205. DFO, Federal Aquaculture Development Strategy, 9. G. Meffe, “Techo-Arrogance and Halfway Technologies: Salmon Hatcheries on the Pacific Coast of North America,” Conservation Biology 6, 3 (1992): 354. A. Anson, “Breakthrough: Cod Farms Fit for the 21st Century,” 2009, http://www.thefishsite.com/.

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43 DIOBAS, “Freshwater Cod Program,” 2009, http://www.diobas.com.

Chapter 7: Articulating Management into Cod Fisheries 1 M. Parker, Against Management: Organisation in the Age of Managerialism (Malden, MD: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 5. 2 D. Bella, “Organizational Systems and the Burden of Proof,” in Pacific Salmon and Their Ecosystems: Status and Future Options, ed. D. Stouder, P. Bisson, and R. Naimon, 617-38 (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1997); A. Finlayson, Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977-1990 (St. John’s: ISER Books, 1994). 3 Decentred context steering, a term from systems theory, involves providing co-ordination and direction for self-ordering processes by designing decision environments within which self-organizing negotiations take place among individual and/or institutional actors. See B. Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002). 4 B. McCay and C. Finlayson, “The Political Ecology of Crisis and Institutional Change: The Case of the Northern Cod,” presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, 15-19 November 1995, 10, http://www. arcticcircle.uconn.edu/. 5 D. Bavington, “Cod Aquaculture as a Restoration Tool for an Endangered Species,” Presentation to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, St. John’s, NL, May 2003.

Chapter 8: Alternatives to Management and Managerial Ecology 1 M. Alvesson and H. Willmott, eds., Studying Management Critically (London: Sage, 2003), 11. 2 J.R. Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992), 582. 3 C. Grey, “Towards a Critique of Managerialism: The Contribution of Simone Weil,” Journal of Management Studies 33, 5 (1996): 605. 4 J. Kay and E.D. Schneider, “Embracing Complexity: The Challenge of the Ecosystem Approach,” Alternatives 20, 3 (1994): 32. 5 J. Anderies, “The Transition from Local to Global Dynamics: A Proposed Framework for Agent-Based Thinking in Socio-Ecological Systems,” in Complexity and Ecosystem Management: The Theory and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, ed. M. Janssen (Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2002), 16. 6 D. Bavington, “Managerial Ecology and Its Discontents: Exploring the Complexities of Control, Careful Use, and Coping in Resource and Environmental Management,” Environments 30, 3 (2002): 3-21. 7 FAO, The State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture (Rome: FAO, 2004). 8 Ibid., 143. 9 W. Sachs, “Environment,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (Halifax: Zed Books, 1992), 32. 10 B. Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004). 11 S. Bocking, Nature’s Experts: Science, Politics, and the Environment (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 98.

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12 Anderies, “The Transition from Local to Global Dynamics,” 17. 13 A. Finlayson, cited in M. Ben-Yami, “Faeroese Lecture,” 2004, 3, http://www.sharpgary. org/. 14 J. Kay, “On Myths and Sustainability,” 2002, 3, http://www.jameskay.ca/. 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Bocking, Nature’s Experts, 99. 17 Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 12. 18 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 19 D. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 20 B. Cohen, “The Once and Future Georgic: Agricultural Practice, Environmental Knowledge, and the Place for an Ethic of Experience,” Agriculture and Human Values 26, 3 (2009): 155. 21 Latour, Politics of Nature, 235. 22 R. Rogers, The Oceans Are Emptying: Fish Wars and Sustainability (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995). 23 R. Rogers, “The Voyage out and the Voyage Back: Ecological Knowledge and Canada’s East Coast Fishery,” presented at the Ecological Knowledge Working Seminar, St. Francis Xavier University, 24-31 May 1999, http://www.stfx.ca/. 24 S. Cadigan, “Failed Proposals for Fisheries Management and Conservation in Newfoundland, 1855-1880,” in Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian SmallScale Fisheries, ed. D. Newell and R. Ommer, 147-69 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); S. Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855,” Labour/Le travail 43 (1999): 9-42; S. Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of Retrenchment and Regeneration in the History of Rural Newfoundland,” in Retrenchment and Regeneration in Rural Newfoundland, ed. R. Byron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 25 FRCC, Public Consultation on Northern Cod Stock Status in 2J3KL, St. John’s, 4 March 2003. 26 K. Knight, ed., The Macintyre Reader (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 64. 27 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 71, 72. 28 M. De Angelis, “PR like Process! Strategy from the Bottom-Up,” Ephemera 5, 2 (2005): 193-204. 29 Knight, The Macintyre Reader, 6; see also A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (London: Oxford University Press, 1949); C. Merchant, “Fish First! The Changing Ethics of Ecosystem Management,” Human Ecology Review 4, 1 (1998): 25-30; and C. Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). 30 Knight, The Macintyre Reader, 24, 15, 242. 31 Kay, On Myths and Sustainability, 4. 32 Cohen, “The Once and Future Georgic.” 33 Newfoundland and Labrador All-Party Committee on the 2J3KL and 3Pn4RS Cod Fisheries, Stability, Sustainability, and Prosperity: Charting a Future for Northern and Gulf Cod Stocks (St. John’s: Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2003). 34 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

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35 P. Nadasdy, “Adaptive Co-Management and the Gospel of Resilience,” in Adaptive CoManagement: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-Level Governance, ed. D. Armitage, F. Berkes, and N. Doubleday (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 223. 36 FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008 (Rome: Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, FAO, 2009); D. Pauly, “Fisheries Management: Sustainability vs. Reality,” in Production Systems in Fisheries Management, ed. D. Pauly and M.L.D. Palomares, Fisheries Centre Research Reports 10.8 (Vancouver: Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, 2002), 5-11; World Bank, The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, Agriculture and Rural Development Series (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009). 37 S. Samuel, “Episode 11,” in How to Think about Science, ed. D. Cayley, CBC Radio series Ideas (Toronto: CBC, 2008), 94-102. 38 S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 39 Samuel, “Episode 11.” 40 R. Francis, “Fisheries Science Now and in the Future: A Personal View,” New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 14, 1 (1980): 96. 41 FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008; R. Myers and B. Worm, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities,” Nature 423 (2003): 280-83; D. Pauly, R. Watson, and J. Alder, “Global Trends in World Fisheries: Impacts on Marine Ecosystems and Food Security,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 360 (2005): 5-12. 42 Nadasdy, “Adaptive Co-Management,” 223.

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