Danial Pauly is the Nobel Prize level scientist from
UBC who has done the Sea Around Us program/document/computer systems that put
together global fish catches from 1950 to 2010. He has just had a new book out,
that summarizes his stellar career and catch stats: Vanishing Fish –
Shifting Baselines and the Future of Global Fisheries.
This book moves rapidly over five decades and all over
the world where he has lived and worked in the fishery stats world,
particularly the tropics. He has somehow managed to live several lives in
multiple places with his greatest achievement to put different scientific areas
together that had little previous interaction, figure out computer models to
track catches and execute them. He has done several different modelling systems
over the years, the Sea Around Us being where you can enter his world: http://www.seaaroundus.org/. It has nifty
graphics on its home page. Go take a look.
Other issues included his term ‘shifting baselines’,
the tendency of each new generation, in his case, science people, to consider
what came before them as the baseline, rather than go back to the beginning to
see how much really has been lost. An example would be east coast cod over the centuries,
as interestingly put together by Mark Kurlansky, in Cod: A Biography of the
Fish that Changed the World. The 500-year history is a cool read, which
includes how black people ‘came’ to America, sugar plantations, and rum.
Shifting baselines means that each new generation has
a faulty picture of where the fish resource was, and thus whatever solutions they
have are wrong.
Historically, fishing has had three major features:
utilizing near shore waters and moving out until they drop into the abyss;
developing different methods of fisheries to exploit deeper and deeper water,
and the species found there; and moving into uglier species once the catch of
what was wanted could no longer be caught, and further and further away from
home port. And fuel subsidies have distorted effort.
Along with this there were a whole range of problems
with the stats, and putting the stats together: commercial fishing demersal trawling
methods destroyed the ocean floor, or benthos; ignoring discards; ignoring
artisanal and sport fisheries; and, vast over reported catch from China, which
lead to higher and false estimates of fish abundance. Along with this are the distorting
effects of subsidies for fleets, tropical countries that were decades behind in
the science and governance structures of Europe and North America.
Additionally, fleets were developed with billion-dollar
bank projects. They then moved all around the globe catching other people’s and
global fish. EEZs means ‘exclusive economic zones’, meaning 200 miles offshore,
in both Canada and the States, but now up to 270 nations. ‘Agreements’ which
allowed distant fleets to plunder African, Ghana for instance, stocks lead to
crashing numbers around the world.
An example of how specific the coalesced global stats
could be, Pauly’s project determined that Norway had destroyed the Jack Mackerel
stocks off Chile, and on far Pacific, pelagic stocks of the same species. Here
is the graph of that collapse:
The Sea Around Us determined that 19 of 20 global fish
stocks of ‘reduction’ fisheries were collapsing, poorly managed, or both. It is
the reason, after trashing them, fish farm companies now have to move to single
cell algae, maggots, soybean and other materials to feed their carnivorous
salmon.
Pauly points out that so-called ‘reduction’ fisheries
destroyed distant stocks to make feed for agricultural species like cows, hogs,
chickens, fish. Yes, even species that had never eaten a fish, have been
stuffed with them, rather than catching these small, pelagics for third world humans.
They are instead used to fatten up ‘meat’ for first world mouths, since only
they can afford them.
The other kind of fisheries are for ‘direct human
consumption’ and the sad commentary is that fully 25% of all global fish are
for reduction fisheries. An additional 25% are discards, meaning unwanted fish
that are killed while catching the intended target and are simply dumped overboard,
rather than be required to be landed for human use. And more recently, ‘high
grading’ which is the reprehensible turfing of dead target fish already caught,
when the fishing boat comes in contact with larger members of the target
species. Terrible.
Moving back to Pauly: the list of brought together subjects
includes meshing ecology with biology, subjects that a non-specialist would
think were always meshed, but not so. Pauly attended conferences around the
world and worked in more places than all the rest of us put together. Perhaps
his single best quality, is that he has a mind that can see what conceptual outcome
is required, find a way to add together the various fields, including
developing and meshing technical languages, rigorizing the data, holes and
figuring out data that don’t exist.
Pauly is well connected with other scientists, which
allows him to work with tons of distant people with good minds. The references
number 702 and an alarming number bear his name. I say alarming because how
come the rest of us haven’t done the same?... probably not a good thought train
to move along the many miles. Or laziness, at least that has the shifting
baseline of our sloth, as in the definition of a rationalization includes that
it has to be made in our favour.
Pauly makes short forays into North American fisheries
subjects, NOAA and DFO. He covers the Miller, Viral Signature work, so important
to the Cohen Commission third session, which Cohen reconvened to cover disease.
She showed that PRV, er, a Viral Signature affected up to 90% of Fraser
sockeye, so badly that they failed to spawn, even if they made it back to their
tributary. In other words: “The smoking gun.” The look on her face, when coaxed
to say the words, is indelible in the mind.
Additionally, he went with Alexandra Morton to catch
salmon fry in the Broughton Archipelago in shallow bays near shorelines. In
2001, for example, the escapement fell from, as I recall, 1,470,000 pink salmon
to just exceeding 100,000, an absolute collapse. Pauly then, briefly mentions
that he was alarmed to be in a meeting with DFO scientists, who, were trashing
her personally saying she had ‘spiked’ the lice data.
Pauly also discusses ITQs, individual vessel quotas,
TAC, total allowable catch, and how DFO uses those concepts and stats to divvy
up potential catch among commercial, sport and First Nations. Anybody on the
SFI, SFAB, WSAC, PSC and other technical committees would benefit from this
book.
Vanishing Fish
is clear, direct, succinct. It has an unmistakeable self authenticizing tone. Pauly
comes across as a unique mind, with unique contacts, putting together unique minds
and subject matters. It would be nice if there were many more of him. If would
do humanity good. Read this book.
Vanishing Fish
is from Greystone Books. Buy it here: https://www.amazon.ca/Vanishing-Fish-Shifting-Baselines-Fisheries/dp/1771643986/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Vanishing+Fish%2C+Pauly&qid=1561927154&s=gateway&sr=8-1.
