SEA CHANGE | THE NEW ENGLAND FISHING CRISIS
By Gareth Cook and Beth Daley, Globe Staff | October 29, 2003
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
Last of four parts
GLOUCESTER -- Paul Cohan, with his bushy beard, plaid shirt, and jeans, looked every bit the fisherman he is as he strode across the blue carpeting of a ballroom overlooking the harbor here and sat down heavily. Across from him were two government officials, in town last month to hear testimony about sweeping new fishing regulations to be voted on soon.
Cohan cleared his throat. He pulled the microphone on the table a little closer.
And then he began to sing.
It was a dirge, a mournful lament about seafaring men in the oldest fishing community in America, men who have worked hard and honestly and who were having their livelihood taken away. In a clear, lilting voice, Cohan went on for five stanzas, as more than 100 silenced people listened in at a local function hall.
As Cohan ended, his lament gave way to defiance: "We can either go fishing with you or without you," he said, "but we are going fishing."
The room broke into cheers.
Cohan and his boisterous colleagues are on a collision course with reality. They know it and show few signs of backing away from it.
Barring an act of Congress, dramatic reductions in commercial fishing will be announced as early as next month, and imposed in May. Yet, even at this late date, many fishermen remain fixed in denial or disbelief, hoping the changes won't come, offering up unrealistic alternatives to the additional restrictions that now seem likely.
This port city, whose docks still offer up the pungent fish odor locals call "money," is home to some of the most militant of the region's fishermen. Some here vow that they will defy stricter limits by fishing illegally or by lying about how much they catch. But Gloucester's fishermen only say more loudly what many of their peers elsewhere in New England are coming to believe:
Why should they obey a government which seems bent on their destruction?
Why should they let their way of life be changed, perhaps forever, by bureaucrats who may never have set a net or cast a line?
Why won't anyone listen when they say the fish are coming back?
Their complaints are more than just the inevitable background noise to the painful work of saving the fishery. Their attitude is critical. For without the cooperation of fishermen, the decades-long effort to rebuild the region's failing groundfish stocks will likely fail. When fishermen go out alone into the giant 35,000-square-mile Gulf of Maine, the size of their catch is monitored largely through an honor system; spot checks and audits are exceedingly rare. Government officials privately worry that the fishermen, if enough of them rebel, could wreak havoc.
Still, consensus, even in the name of protest, won't come easily. Outwardly, fishermen present a remarkably united front, scornful of the need to further limit their catch. But they are in truth a deeply splintered band, divided into tribes by the size of their boats, the types of gear they use, and the ports they call home. Proudly individualistic and thus essentially leaderless, they have been unable to agree on what should be done. The dream of many is that nothing more will be done to change New England's oldest trade.
"Too many people are struggling to think about how to get back to the good old days," says Paul Parker, head of the Chatham-based Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association, who is loathed by some fishermen for aligning his group with environmentalists. "If you are thinking about how to get back to the way it was, you are not watching the news enough."
'A life force'
Why won't fishermen back down? Joe Mike Brancaleone thinks he knows.
He will never forget the looks he got after he took a job flipping hamburgers at a Burger King on the road to Gloucester.
Brancaleone, a soft-spoken man, comes from a three-generation Gloucester fishing family renowned as "highliners" -- the elite fishermen who catch and earn the most. He was the captain of one of the boats the family owned, the Joseph and Lucia II, named for his grandparents, who left Sicily in the 1920s to build a small fishing empire on Cape Ann.
They enjoyed some heady years. But by 1988, the family had decided, as a group, to get out of fishing. The profits had gotten too slim, while the risks, as always, were high.
And so Brancaleone and his cousins found new jobs: Tom, a boat engineer, took a position in the maintenance department of Gorton's. Joe Charley got a job with a shellfish company.
And Brancaleone ended up at Burger King.
"People on their way to Gloucester came in and laughed at me," says Brancaleone, now a district manager with the fast-food chain. "When I got out of fishing I represented some offshore fishermen, but when they ran out of money I took a second job at Burger King, wearing a beanie like everyone else."
It is one of the biggest obstacles to bringing change to the New England seafood trade: the fishermen's deeply anchored sense that there is no other life for them. Other jobs seem pale, even pathetic, in comparison.
Partly it is the money. In good times, a fisherman fresh out of high school can make $60,000 to $80,000 in a year -- and that's as a crew member. A captain's share often runs to $95,000 and more.
Some, like the Brancaleones, have tried to branch out. At the Gloucester Fishermen and Families Assistance Center, an agency that trains fishermen for new jobs, there are snapshots of success stories posted on the wall: Men and women holding up truck driver licenses, or computer technician certificates, jobs that in many cases will pay them much less than they once made on the water.
But even more than the money, fishermen say they are addicted to the life. They have spent hundreds of hours in the classroom of the sea, learning how to ease a huge net into the water so that its mouth stays open wide enough to swallow schools of fish. They learn how to chip ice off the rigging so that the boat doesn't become top-heavy and tip during fierce winter storms. They have mastered the complex hunt that leads them to the fish, a game of intuition and skill that is among fishermen's most closely guarded secrets.
And above all, they feel free. No boss in the normal sense, no office, and days spent enveloped by nature's spectacle.
"I think fishermen want to stay fishing because of the total independence," says Gloucester's Bill Crossen, who has been groundfishing for 30 years. "It's a life force. It's a whole mindset. It's just something I'd be scared to death to change."
And so rather than face up to the long-term consequences of ever-tightening limits, fishermen have, for years, cleverly fished their way around the rules, supplementing their income from more abundant, if less marketable, species. Many hope they can survive the coming quotas in much the same way, though some fisheries specialists believe that this time they are wrong.
When cod stocks first showed signs of trouble in the 1980s, fishermen started to go after the spiny dogfish, a beastly snouted shark used in Britain's fish and chips. And more fishermen went after monkfish, a gape-mouthed species popularized by Julia Child. Then, like the cod, both the dogfish and monkfish began to fail.
Now fishermen find themselves moving faster and farther down the food chain -- and running out of alternatives. In recent years, New England fishermen have turned to sea urchins, whose roe is a delicacy in Asia, but now urchins are disappearing. They are also pursuing hagfish, also known as slime eels, which are sold in Korean roadside stands, often with a shot of liquor on the side.
Two years ago, when a federal judge declared that the government needed to impose severe limits on ground-fishermen, Mark Davis of Rockport thought he was being smart to spend $6,000 outfitting his boat for hagfish. Now, after finding most large inshore hagfish gone, he must spend more on fuel to forage farther out to sea.
"It's to the point where you can just make enough money to keep the crew happy," says Davis, father of a 7-year-old and 5-year-old triplets. "You know, I used to do just one fishing thing, and I made a living. Then I did two. Now, I may have to do three."
A changing landscape
But if New England fishermen can't imagine another life, New England might not find it nearly as hard to imagine life without them. This is another reality that fishermen haven't quite faced.
Once the region's defining industry, fishing is now, outside of a few key ports, closer to an economic afterthought. Government statistics show that all commercial fishing workers -- from net weavers to fish processors to the lobster, scallop, and groundfish boat crew members -- constitute about 32,000 of the 8 million jobs in coastal New England, $2.5 billion in sales of the $842 billion regional economy in 1998. Even more to the point, New England fishermen aren't even the region's major seafood providers. Some of the catch is sent to other markets. Their hard and dangerous work brings in only about a quarter of the fish we consume here -- and less than 10 percent of the cod. The region's fishery, once the world's leader, has become a small part of a globalized fish business.
The point is brought home on a visit to Captain Marden's Seafoods, a market in Wellesley. When the original store opened in 1945, the only fish on display were cod, haddock, and a few other species hauled up by local fishermen. Now owner Kim Marden points to up-and-comers like salmon raised on farms in Maine's Washington County, and tilapia, a bland white fish raised on farms in Costa Rica.
Americans' taste for some fish species has grown -- salmon consumption, for example, has more than doubled in the last decade. But some of the old groundfish species have been, by contrast, falling off the plate. Since 1990, average cod consumption has dropped by half, to about two servings per person per year, as cheaper alternatives have come along and diners have turned to other delicacies.
And fish consumers seem increasingly indifferent to whether what they eat is caught locally, or caught by fishermen at all. Fish raised on farms have grown cheaper and more plentiful. The rise of aquaculture, as it is known, is part of the slow but relentless squeeze on the fishing fleet, a squeeze that economists predict will continue for the foreseeable future. Of all the seafood on the planet now, roughly a third of it -- half of it by value -- is created by farmers.
So far, in a break for local fishermen, scientists have not perfected a way of spawning and raising cod and some other key groundfish species in captivity. But time may be running short. Canada's Northern Aquaculture Corp. and several other companies say they have overcome most of the major scientific obstacles to breeding cod and are working on scaling up production. Nutreco, the world's largest supplier of farmed salmon, says that it plans to produce 3,000 tons of cod in Norway next year, and that it hopes to hit 100,000 tons by 2010 -- several times larger than New England's total catch.
"You have to provide better quality food, more cheaply, just to stay even," says Gunnar Knapp, a professor of economics at the University of Alaska. "Globalism is ramming changes through this industry the way it did New England's textile industry or the Detroit auto industry."
As pressures grow on the fishing trade, the look of the New England coast has also changed. The fishing fleet has gradually abandoned the smaller harbors that dot the coast, in favor of larger ports. Tourist attractions and vacation homes have taken their place at the water's edge.
In Rockland, Maine, Donald Paulsen II has watched it happen. From the deck of the Misty Mae, an aging wooden fishing boat bobbing off the end of the fish pier here, he has seen a new city taking shape. To the north, a long red building that used to be a sardine cannery now serves as a parking area for tourists in the summer and houses yachts in the winter. To the south are wide banks of well-manicured lawns and the gleaming new offices of MBNA, the credit card company.
Rockland was once a rough-edged fishing village, with a harbor full of boats in search of Gulf of Maine cod and haddock. Everybody has a story about the free-spending, free-drinking fishermen who used to light up the town between voyages. Now Rockland is Maine's leading port for windjammers, the sailing ships that take tourists out in the summer. Boutiques have invaded the brick hulls of department stores along Main Street. And Paulsen, toiling in an oil-stained green sweatshirt, is the last man docked here who brings groundfish into this port.
"I think if the city had their way they'd love to turn this into another marina for yachts and sailboats," says Paulsen, referring to the aging town dock he uses. "If someone could give me a halfway decent price for the boat, I'd sell out. I'd hate to, but I might just do it."
Between 1996 and 2002, the number of days fishermen spent at sea fell by 20 percent. And as the industry has shrunk, the crucial businesses that support the trade -- ice makers, marine supply stores -- have also begun to close down. After two decades, Portsmouth's Fishermen's Cooperative, a peeling gray-shingled building on the waterfront, may have to close in the next year, leaving fishermen to buy their fuel and ice at premium prices. In Provincetown, the 13 or so groundfishing boats that remain from a fleet that once boasted more than 50 boats, huddle together at the end of a long state pier, and the fishermen in them worry that if any more leave they won't be able to afford the truck that takes their fish to be processed in New Bedford. In Plymouth, groundfisherman James Keding wonders if he will be allowed to dock in town when he spends so few days at sea.
"The town bylaws say you have to move a boat every 30 days," Keding says. "I wonder how long they'll let me stay there."
Adaptation in Iceland
Caught between such forces of change, it isn't surprising that fishermen have grown convinced that they have compromised enough, that accepting further limits will only lead to ruin.
But one doesn't have to travel all that far to find a place where fishermen, confronting similar challenges, decided to give change a chance. The island nation of Iceland, dotted with volcanic hot springs and glacial ice, is a very different place from New England. But its fleet pursues the same North Atlantic fish, and Icelanders have already fought their way through their own groundfishing crisis. It is a story in which every chapter is familiar, except for the last.
Like New England, Iceland found its waters being picked clean by big foreign boats. From the late 1950s to the 1970s Icelandic boats resorted to ramming frigates and slicing through trawl lines as English ships invaded their traditional fishery -- a period still referred to as the "cod wars."
And, also like New England, Iceland kicked out the foreigners and then saw its own fishermen, liberated from competition, beat down the stocks. In three years, from 1981 to 1983, the cod catch dropped from 462,000 tons to 294,000 tons -- a clear warning of an impending crash.
Then Iceland decided to try something new, setting individual quotas for fishermen, and allowing them -- like taxi owners trading medallions -- to sell their right to fish to others, if they so choose. Over time, under such a system, fishermen who aren't making good money tend to sell their right to fish to more efficient boats, and leave the business, but with a large payoff from the sale of their quota.
Among New England fishermen, the idea of transferable rights has been viewed with suspicion, especially the system used in Iceland. The fear is that a few large boats -- or a few large corporations -- would buy up all the fishing rights and consolidate in a few large ports.
Initially, this is precisely what happened in Iceland. But authorities there, seeing the risk, stepped in to create a separate quota system for smaller boats, forbidding the large boats from buying them out. And they have started a program -- temporary for now -- that gives some extra fishing rights, free of charge, to fishermen in the small towns most dependent on the trade.
Adapting to such a dramatic change in their way of life didn't come easily, as Gudrun Palsdottir and her family can attest. They live in Flateyri, a remote fishing village in northwest Iceland, and theirs was a family with every reason to give up, rather than continue to fish under the new quota system.
Tucked beneath a series of jagged peaks that rise from the Atlantic like shark's teeth, her town was plunged into crisis a decade ago when an early round of tough conservation measures forced the factory fishing trawler that many depended on for work to leave town. And then, on an October night in 1995, came a horrific avalanche that buried homes, sent cars flying hundreds of feet, and killed 20 in a close-knit community of just 500.
But instead of fleeing for the capital city and a new life, Gudrun's family bought a small, sleek fiberglass fishing boat in 1999 and is building up a thriving business in dried cod. Life is tough going in this isolated place, but Gudrun speaks with a determined optimism that is hard to find in Gloucester.
"We will push and work and push," says Gudrun, punctuating her words with determined punches to the air. "We are making a new life, and we want to bring up this village again."
What's next
Can such hopes be sowed in a place like Port Clyde, Maine, which has become the northernmost redoubt of groundfishing in New England?
There is no way to freeze time and guarantee that there will always be places like this, where a person can still pay with haddock and scallops to have his driveway plowed in the winter.
And even here, where the year-round population hovers at about 1,200 and moss-encrusted spruce trees crowd up to the rocky coast, fishermen have begun to doubt there will, in the long run, be much but lobstering left north of Portland. It is getting hard to find people to crew on boats because the pay has become so unpredictable, says local fisherman Roger Libby, whose two sons run boats.
Walking down to a wharf, the 70-year-old Libby describes his hometown, a place where million-dollar vacation homes are popping up, and the fisherman's old bargain of good money for hard work is evaporating. Libby says that he survived the Korean War and that he'll survive this, but he also admits he sometimes feels regret that he chose fishing and got his family "mixed up in this foolishness."
But New England's groundfish industry could be far more vibrant than it is now, if the fishermen and others bring a spirit of accommodation to the coming era of limits. A Conservation Law Foundation analysis shows that the fishermen are landing less than a third of the finfish and shellfish they would if fish populations were rebuilt and managed properly.
Today, for example, New Bedford is flush with money because the fishermen there bowed to the need to sacrifice for a time and allowed the scalloping beds to recover. The boom is obvious down on the docks, where boats are getting new navigational aids and fresh paint jobs. Deckhands are making $6,000 to $7,000 for an 18-day trip, and new trucks line the piers. If fishermen can resist the temptation to fish the scallops too heavily, there is no reason the good times can't continue.
When the 18 members of the New England Fishery Management Council gather next month in Peabody, their first goal will be to select a formula to end the region's chronic addiction to overfishing.
There are a host of complex options. The council will have to decide whether to begin ending the season early if too many fish are caught -- the kind of absolute quota that hasn't been used here in two decades. They will debate whether to allow fishermen to buy and sell the right to fish -- a measure, similar in spirit to what is done in Iceland, and one that has also never been used here.
But all of the most likely plans share this: an immediate future with a smaller annual catch and fewer boats on the sea. And for those who care about the New England fishing tradition, whatever the council decides will only be the first, and in some ways the easiest, step, because this crisis is not only an environmental problem, it is a people problem. Each of the key players -- regulators, fishermen, environmentalists, scientists, and politicians -- will have to end the cycle of blame, obfuscation, and greed that has scarred fishery management here for almost 30 years.
The council will have to find a way to move beyond the narrow interests that dominate its membership. Fishermen will have to help devise a plan for their own future, accepting the reality of a smaller fleet and fierce competition from abroad. Environmentalists will need to work with fishermen, instead of drowning the government in lawsuits. Scientists will need to find better ways to track the health of the fish -- and earn some measure of trust from the men who catch the fish.
Otherwise, all agree, something they love may be lost. And the refrain that echoes over and over again on New England's emptying docks may well come true: The fish will come back, but when they do, will the fishermen be gone?
End of Series
Monday, 2 July 2007
'It's all about end runs for the special interests'
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | October 28, 2003
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
Third of four parts
Nowhere has the breakdown of US fishery management been more apparent than in the work of the National Marine Fisheries Service -- the agency that oversees itThe service is supposed to be a dispassionate voice on fishing issues, acting as a check on the 18-member New England Fishery Management Council, which is tilted heavily to fishing industry members and their allies. But in reality, the service seldom forcefully challenges votes by the New England council -- or the seven other regional fishing councils around the country -- even when the local decisions appear to violate federal law.
The reason is simple: Political leaders have routinely sided with the fishermen.
"In New England fishing, it's all about end runs" for the special interests, says a high-ranking National Marine Fisheries Service employee who asked not to be identified. "If you don't get what you want locally, you go up a notch. You go to the [national head] of the service, then you go to the head of the Department of Commerce, then you go political and threaten the budget allocations. It's endemic."
A case in point is the way the service went about trying to protect the summer flounder population, from Maine to Georgia. In 1998 the service approved a proposal by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council to preserve the coveted flat fish -- a proposal that even the service's own scientists said had only an 18 percent chance of working. Two years later, an incredulous federal appeals court struck down the service's work as inadequate.
"Only in Superman Comics' Bizarro world, where reality is turned upside down," the three-judge panel wrote, " could the service reasonably conclude that a measure that is at least four times as likely to fail as to succeed" complies with fisheries law.
The signs of political pressure to go easy on the flounder fishermen were not obvious. But an analysis of the decision by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the flawed proposal was likely adopted "because of pressure from the councils and the states and because a valuable fishery was involved."
Some former service officials rise to the agency's defense, saying they have pressed for tighter rules, but they know what would happen if they press too hard: Fishermen and their political allies would fight them, and nothing would get done.
"The political pressure is too great to override," says Andrew Rosenberg, the former Northeast administrator of the fishery service. "Your choice realistically is to accept the plan or have nothing in place."
US Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Maine Senator Olympia Snowe are among those who have often gone to bat for the fishermen. But they say they intervene only out of fear that hardworking fishermen will lose their livelihoods to fish counts that are sometimes wrong, and to a fisheries law that is sometimes interpreted too harshly.
Frank and Snowe often ask officials to delay rules, reexamine the science behind them, or adopt less stringent restrictions.
"We are pushing for more accurate fish counts," says Frank, adding that he wants the government to focus harder on the loss of jobs that the new regulations could cause.
Now, as the New England council again considers tough new rules, Snowe and Frank are again asking for more economic and scientific analysis of them. Frank, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Representative John F. Tierney have written US Commerce Secretary Donald Evans to urge that any new rules be sensitive to the fishermen's needs. Snowe convened a hearing last week to examine whether the fishery service is misinterpreting the nation's fishery law.
The law in question, the Sustainable Fisheries Act, drew the support of both Frank and Snowe when it passed in 1996. But some environmentalists and federal fishery officials complain that, since that vote, the two, along with other regional political leaders, have worked to undercut the law's effectiveness.
"I know exactly what happens," says Leon Panetta, a former US representative and head of the Pew Oceans Commission, an advocacy group that mapped out a plan for ocean management. "For the broader constituency, they portray themselves as being for sustainable fisheries. But if their individual fishing community comes to them, they are going to do everything they can to protect them."
Snowe says she hasn't worked to undercut the law, but rather to see that it is enforced in the balanced way Congress intended, rebuilding fish stocks "without destroying the livelihods of fishermen."
William Hogarth, the current director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, pledges that he won't let political pressures affect his decision-making.
And in truth, he may not have a choice. Federal Judge Gladys Kessler has made it very clear that if fishery service officials fail to impose tougher limits on fishermen, she will do it for them.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
Third of four parts
Nowhere has the breakdown of US fishery management been more apparent than in the work of the National Marine Fisheries Service -- the agency that oversees itThe service is supposed to be a dispassionate voice on fishing issues, acting as a check on the 18-member New England Fishery Management Council, which is tilted heavily to fishing industry members and their allies. But in reality, the service seldom forcefully challenges votes by the New England council -- or the seven other regional fishing councils around the country -- even when the local decisions appear to violate federal law.
The reason is simple: Political leaders have routinely sided with the fishermen.
"In New England fishing, it's all about end runs" for the special interests, says a high-ranking National Marine Fisheries Service employee who asked not to be identified. "If you don't get what you want locally, you go up a notch. You go to the [national head] of the service, then you go to the head of the Department of Commerce, then you go political and threaten the budget allocations. It's endemic."
A case in point is the way the service went about trying to protect the summer flounder population, from Maine to Georgia. In 1998 the service approved a proposal by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council to preserve the coveted flat fish -- a proposal that even the service's own scientists said had only an 18 percent chance of working. Two years later, an incredulous federal appeals court struck down the service's work as inadequate.
"Only in Superman Comics' Bizarro world, where reality is turned upside down," the three-judge panel wrote, " could the service reasonably conclude that a measure that is at least four times as likely to fail as to succeed" complies with fisheries law.
The signs of political pressure to go easy on the flounder fishermen were not obvious. But an analysis of the decision by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the flawed proposal was likely adopted "because of pressure from the councils and the states and because a valuable fishery was involved."
Some former service officials rise to the agency's defense, saying they have pressed for tighter rules, but they know what would happen if they press too hard: Fishermen and their political allies would fight them, and nothing would get done.
"The political pressure is too great to override," says Andrew Rosenberg, the former Northeast administrator of the fishery service. "Your choice realistically is to accept the plan or have nothing in place."
US Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Maine Senator Olympia Snowe are among those who have often gone to bat for the fishermen. But they say they intervene only out of fear that hardworking fishermen will lose their livelihoods to fish counts that are sometimes wrong, and to a fisheries law that is sometimes interpreted too harshly.
Frank and Snowe often ask officials to delay rules, reexamine the science behind them, or adopt less stringent restrictions.
"We are pushing for more accurate fish counts," says Frank, adding that he wants the government to focus harder on the loss of jobs that the new regulations could cause.
Now, as the New England council again considers tough new rules, Snowe and Frank are again asking for more economic and scientific analysis of them. Frank, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Representative John F. Tierney have written US Commerce Secretary Donald Evans to urge that any new rules be sensitive to the fishermen's needs. Snowe convened a hearing last week to examine whether the fishery service is misinterpreting the nation's fishery law.
The law in question, the Sustainable Fisheries Act, drew the support of both Frank and Snowe when it passed in 1996. But some environmentalists and federal fishery officials complain that, since that vote, the two, along with other regional political leaders, have worked to undercut the law's effectiveness.
"I know exactly what happens," says Leon Panetta, a former US representative and head of the Pew Oceans Commission, an advocacy group that mapped out a plan for ocean management. "For the broader constituency, they portray themselves as being for sustainable fisheries. But if their individual fishing community comes to them, they are going to do everything they can to protect them."
Snowe says she hasn't worked to undercut the law, but rather to see that it is enforced in the balanced way Congress intended, rebuilding fish stocks "without destroying the livelihods of fishermen."
William Hogarth, the current director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, pledges that he won't let political pressures affect his decision-making.
And in truth, he may not have a choice. Federal Judge Gladys Kessler has made it very clear that if fishery service officials fail to impose tougher limits on fishermen, she will do it for them.
Some look for hope beyond courtroom
By Beth Daley and Gareth Cook , Globe Staff | October 28, 2003
Photographs by Bill Greene, Globe Staff
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
SEA CHANGE | THE NEW ENGLAND FISHING CRISIS
Third of four parts
GLOUCESTER -- The hissing began as soon as the slender, bookish environmentalist took her seat in the ballroom overlooking New England's most famous fishing port.
From the back of the room, grim-faced men, arms folded across their chests, drowned out Priscilla Brooks as she tried to explain why a major cut in the region's codfish catch now seems unavoidable.
"Eco-terrorist!" yelled one fisherman, his T-shirt emblazoned with the single letter "Y" -- his question for those who would place more limits on his livelihood.
"Salamander lover!" shouted another at Brooks, who works for Boston's Conservation Law Foundation, the region's leading environmental advocacy group. "Who is paying your salary?"
The confrontation at the Tavern on the Harbor last month was only the latest vivid reminder of how completely environmental activists have taken the helm in the fishing debate, and how shocking and infuriating that is to the fishermen who were once their allies. With a well-financed campaign of lobbying and lawsuits, environmentalists like Brooks have, over the last decade, forced waves of restrictions on fishing and set the stage for the still stricter limits to come. Fishermen have resisted at almost every turn, resorting to heckling, harbor blockades, and even dockside riots to make their case.
Next month, environmentalists may score a historic victory when the New England Fishery Management Council, which oversees the industry here, is expected to bow to another of their lawsuits. The council, with its six commercial fishing industry members, has been a reluctant regulator, but it has little choice now: A federal judge has already sided with the environmentalists, making it clear she will impose strict new fishing limits if regulators will not.
The impact of the new rules could be immense. By some estimates, more than a third of the 1,500 or so boats with permits to chase the region's cod and other bottom-feeding fish could be forced out of the business when the new limits take effect at the start of next year's fishing season, in May.
And so furious backstage efforts are underway to forge a last-minute compromise. Pressure to find a middle way has come from the federal judge on the case, Gladys Kessler, and from state Division of Marine Fisheries Commissioner Paul Diodati, who has convened several private negotiating sessions. The goal ia to take the future of New England fishing out of the courtroom and back onto the sea -- and to bridge the corrosive divide between those for whom a healthy environment is their workplace, and those for whom it is a cause.
But so far, their efforts have proved largely fruitless. As the Tavern on the Harbor hearing underscored, the divisions and animosity have only intensified.
As one environmentalist put it, reaching a collision-averting deal could take "a miracle."
An environmental crusader
Peter Shelley was once that sort of miracle worker, the environmental crusader who could find a way to save the fish -- and fishing.
Back in the late 1980s the longtime lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation started getting worried calls from Gloucester fishermen. The great Atlantic schools that had sustained fishing for centuries were disappearing, they told him, and the government was doing precious little about it.
Shelley, who years earlier had joined with fishermen to stop oil companies from drilling off the New England coast, decided to take up the new fight. By 1991 he had filed a trailblazing lawsuit that forced federal regulators to ratchet up protections for the cod, flounder, and haddock that were the staples of the region's fishing economy. And two years ago he helped win an even more sweeping lawsuit designed to put all the key fish species on a quicker road to recovery.
It was after that victory that Shelley, from his office in an old sardine factory in Rockland, Maine, began to fear that he and his environmental peers had gone too far. The shining spring day when the judge ordered the tough new fishing limits was supposed to be his time to celebrate. It was the climax of a 15-year struggle to put limits on a fishing fleet that had pressed the stocks of cod and other groundfish to the point of collapse, and could, without stricter rules, overfish again as the stocks gradually rebound.
Yet as he read the document, then read it again, Shelley felt only alarm. The judge had decided on a formula that fell especially harshly on small boat owners, leaving several hundred all but banned from fishing. Shelley's partners in the lawsuit, a group of ardent national environmental groups, were convinced that even those limits weren't tough enough.
But to him, the 35-page document, written in the cool language of lawyers, read like an execution order for the people and the way of life he had set out to save.
"I was stunned," says Shelley, 56, his hair white and slightly long in the back.
It was a moment that, for him, underscored a key question for those who fight to save natural resources: How far should society go to turn back the ecological clock?
How, in this case, should one balance the need to save the fish against the needs of the fishermen?
For Shelley, whose brother-in-law once fished Pacific salmon, this was no fleeting philosophical question. Having grown up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania, helping milk the Holsteins and doing other chores, Shelley gained a deep respect for those who work the natural world.
And when he thinks of fishing families, he holds real people in mind: The Sicilian-born Gloucester woman who shared with him the family fishing lore handed down seven generations, and the Fairhaven captain who took him on a rough, but exhilarating 13-day scalloping trip on Georges Bank.
His goal in pressing the litigation had been to prod the government to do for fish what enforcement of environmental laws had done before for the air, and water, and endangered wildlife.
But as he read the judge's order that day in his office, he wondered: What have I unleashed?
"It broke the fishermen's back," Shelley says. "That wasn't what we wanted."
Seismic changes
Sitting over dinner one evening in the late 1980s, Angela Sanfilippo's husband, John, told her that the fishing seemed off.
Leaving with the morning tide, often before 3 a.m., from the pier near their brick-faced Gloucester home, he took his 68-foot dragger, the Padre Pio, to the same rocky spots where he had cast his net for two decades. But the fish weren't there.
A few months later, Angela's brother, Joe Orlando, reported that he, too, was hauling up empty nets.
"Then all the wives started seeing the paychecks go down," says Sanfilippo, longtime president of the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association, her voice lilting with the inflection of her native Sicily. "When the paycheck changes, you know something is wrong."
An unstoppable, 4-foot, 11-inch force, Sanfilippo, 53, has won millions of dollars in fishermen's aid over the years through a campaign of graciousness, determination, and, on occasion, tears directed at the region's congressmen. And so she wasn't shy in making her case after becoming convinced that something was amiss with the fish.
She first took her concerns to members of the management council. When they didn't seem eager to help, she went to an old friend, a lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation named Peter Shelley.
The two had become close a decade earlier when they joined in the crusade to keep oil rigs out of the Georges Bank fishing grounds, a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Shelley was shocked by what Sanfilippo and other fishermen were telling him now, and he agreed to help.
His decision set off a chain of events that have forced a turnaround in how the nation manages its oceans.
But it also unleashed seismic changes in New England's fishing communities, threatening their existence and severely testing the friendship between the woman from Porticello, Sicily, and the man from Bucks County, Pa., that had set the whole drama in motion.
It is remarkable that the same stretch of coast that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick more than 150 years ago and draws tourists from around the world is home to a people who are just now learning that the ocean, and the animals in it, need their care.
For more than a century, lonely voices have been warning of trouble as undersea treasures have been quietly plundered, one after another -- minerals, oil, fish. Still, it is only over the last 15 years, with a drawn-out fight over commercial fishing and now wind farming in Nantucket Sound, that managing some of the region's richest resources has drawn sustained focus.
As long ago as the 1830s, the coastal waters of the Northeast lost most of their halibut to overfishing, and by the 1860s, the stocks farther off shore were crashing, too. They have never recovered. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant created the first national Fish Commission, in part to study "the decrease of the food fishes of the seacoasts and lakes of the United States."
In this century, as boat technology rapidly advanced, scientists warned that stocks couldn't handle the pressure. By the early 1990s, New England cod -- the fisherman's bread and butter -- were heading toward disaster. But the public, and even the environmental movement, had not focused on the problem of overfishing.
"It just wasn't seen as a problem," says Andrew Rosenberg, former northeast administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. "The oceans were infinite. The public, the environmentalists even believed that. It wasn't until the fish were almost gone that anyone paid attention."
So Shelley was largely acting in a void when began his work with Sanfilippo and the fishermen by attending a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council. Sitting in a meeting room at the King's Grant Inn in Danvers, he was utterly bewildered as councilors threw around arcane acronyms like "FMSY" and offered motions and countermotions that didn't seem to go anywhere.
Frustrated, he hired a marine biologist to sit in on the meetings and explain the situation to him. She offered this simple bottom line: Too many fish are being killed.
But it soon became apparent that the council, even as it reluctantly conceded the problem, was not prepared to act. And so Shelley went to court. His 1991 suit charged that the government was ignoring its own environmental laws, threatening the long-term future of the entire fishing industry.
As news of the lawsuit leaked out, some of Shelley's fishermen friends questioned his motives. Others, who didn't know him, pegged him as a meddling outsider, a "clean fingernailed" lawyer without regard for the fate of a proud fishing tradition.
Sanfilippo, however, knew better. She had heard the complaints of friends whose fisherman husbands had to take second jobs to make ends meet. She had taken those complaints to Shelley.
And so she and her allies decided to support the Conservation Law Foundation lawsuit, the only fishing group to do so.
Shelley, meanwhile, was bracing for a long legal battle. He expected the Washington lawyers for the federal regulators to bury him in denials and demands when he sat down with them to discuss the suit.
Instead, "the lawyers just agreed with us," he recalls, shaking his head. "They said, `You're right.' "
What should be done?
Shelley's overnight success proved a kind of signal flare to environmental groups across the nation.
They had come late to the fishing crisis, having been off saving whales, seals, and other more charismatic creatures during the 1970s and early 1980s, the years when fishermen, their boats and gear ever more efficient, were turning fishing from a hunt into something more like scooping goldfish from a bowl.
But environmentalists more than made up for lost time, as national organizations and foundations such as the Ocean Conservancy and the Pew Foundation poured money and resources into New England and other regions. From 1992 to 2000, the major philanthropies that fund environmental causes increased spending on fisheries issues from $3.6 milion to more than $26 million a year, according to the Foundation Center, which tracks charitable giving.
Meanwhile, commercial fishing lawsuits by environmental groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service have proliferated across the country. Shelley's 1991 case was the first and the model; there are 34 open cases today.
"These groups are incredibly powerful," says Dennis Nixon, associate dean of the College of the Environment and Life Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. "They win lawsuits. They know how to campaign."
But the aggressiveness of some of the national groups -- like Oceana, an advocacy group funded by the Pew Foundation -- convinced some fishermen that their needs and concerns were of little account to these idealistic newcomers.
The national groups seemed particularly blase about fishermen's claims -- which were not without foundation -- that some of the fish stocks were bouncing back.
"You have to ask why," says Ed Barrett, a Marshfield fisherman. "We are paying our dues, and we're seeing benefits. And these groups don't mention it."
"We were dying," says Vito Calomo, a former fisherman and executive director of the Massachusetts Fisheries Recovery Commission, a state-funded fishing research group. "And these groups -- we didn't even know who they were -- kept beating us down."
But there is equal adamance on the other side. Eric Bilsky, a lawyer with Oceana, says New England's experience has made it clear that neither the fishermen nor their local regulators can be relied on to safeguard this natural trust.
"They aren't complying with the law," he says. "It's clear they will continue to violate the law again and again unless we file lawsuits."
But with all the intensified interest and activity, the harder question remained: The landmark lawsuit had been won. Now, what should be done?
The regulatory choices that were ultimately made and remade and remade again would be felt up and down the coast, wherever fishermen ply their trade.
Or mend their nets: Inside a narrow, dimly lit room, the wood-planked floors scruffed and faded, two Cambodian women were twisting twine as if performing the children's game "cat's cradle." With two thick pieces pulled tight across the room, each woman wove the nylon filament over and under, tying knots to create a sheet of diamonds that will be lowered into the ocean to catch fish.
In Don King's Homeward Bound shop on the way to Rocky Neck in Gloucester, the net weavers follow a tradition that is hundreds of years old, but changing quickly. As new regulations are issued, the nets made here keep changing, with bigger and bigger diamonds to let out all but the largest cod and flounder. And every time they change, all the old nets have to be tossed.
"The rules always change," says a frustrated King, a stout former cod fisherman who lost $40,000 in canceled orders and outdated nets with the last change. "It's impossible to predict a future."
A law with teeth
But even as fishermen started to chafe at the rules that grew out of Shelley's 1991 suit, an unprecedented alliance of environmental groups had formed around the idea of a greater leap forward in fishery conservation. It was this shift into environmental overdrive, in fact, that would lead to the present confrontation.
They called themselves the Marine Fish Conservation Network. Five representatives of some of the most influential environmental groups at the time -- Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon, the National Coalition for Marine Conservation, and a group that later became the Ocean Conservancy -- gathered in September 1992 to figure out how, once and for all, to save the fish off American coasts.
By 1995, the network had enlisted the help of dozens of conservation groups, and some fishermen too, such as the Maine Lobstermen's Association. And they showed some political smarts, sending pairs of advocates, an environmentalist teamed up with a fisherman, to convince members of Congress to reform the laws that govern the nation's fisheries.
"They saw these two competing constituencies coming in and had to say yes," says Gerry Leape, a founding member of the network.
In 1996, as the Gulf of Maine's cod stocks teetered near collapse, the network helped push through a bill called the Sustainable Fisheries Act. It represented a profound change. No longer would local management councils be trusted to protect the fish of their region; they'd be required to. The law said councils must act to guarantee that, within a 10-year time frame, key fish stocks would rebound.
"Everything changed then," says Bilsky. "That law was powerful and revolutionary. It had teeth."
At first, New England fishermen weren't particularly worried about the new law, believing that conservation measures already adopted here would be enough. Some said they were reassured that fishermen-friendly politicians such as Barney Frank and Olympia Snowe had voted for the law.
"We were reasonably sure we had taken care of the problem," says Barbara Stevenson, a Portland Maine boat owner and former fish council member.
Only now, as the full might of the 1996 law is finally to take effect, is it clear how wrong they were.
A devil's pact
Long before the confrontations of the last year, Angela Sanfilippo had begun to suspect that she'd been wrong to put her trust in Peter Shelley.
Once, in 1993, she had climbed onto a chair in the Gloucester High School auditorium to stare down jeering fishermen until they'd hear Shelley out. Now she found herself listening to her family when they asked if she knew what she was doing when she sided with an environmentalist. As round after round of fishing limits took hold, her husband's income declined. Her nephew went out of business. The dinner table conversation was about how the fish were coming back -- and yet the men weren't allowed to catch them.
Sanfilippo still believed that she had been right to worry about overfishing. The natural balance between fish and fishermen had been fundamentally altered, first by giant factory trawlers that vacuumed the sea clean until they were banned in the mid-1970s, and then by New England's own fishermen as the government grants enabled fishermen to boost the catching power of their boats.
But as the Gloucester waterfront reeled under the new restrictions, Sanfilippo felt that siding with Shelley and the Conservation Law Foundation may have been a devil's pact.
"I stopped trusting him," she says. "People were losing their jobs, and I thought Peter was going to make it worse. It became clear CLF was for the fish, not the fishermen."
And when Shelley, joined by three national groups, sued again in 2000 -- this time to enforce the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Law -- her dismay and anger only grew.
She was in no mood to give him another chance when she learned that Shelley, after winning his latest lawsuit, had begun to have second thoughts.
Why should she believe him now?
But he meant it.
Last spring, deeply concerned by Judge Kessler's landmark ruling, Shelley convened a diverse group of fishermen, environmentalists, and officials to plead with the judge to relax the rules. Amazingly, she did. The final reckoning has been put off until next May.
Shelley took this step on his own, without the support of the national environmental groups that had joined in the lawsuit and that wanted even stricter rules.
"To some groups, the fisheries problem is a faceless one," says Shelley. "We acknowledge the reality they are going through. We see it every day. We live among them."
He had even once gone to sea with them. In the spring of 1994, Shelley joined the crew of Thor, an 85-foot steel-hulled scalloping boat out of Fairhaven. At the time, he had been working for seven years to restrict fishing, but had never set foot on a commercial fishing boat.
Then Ellen Skaar, a fisherman's wife from Fairhaven, told him she didn't think he could possibly understand the situation if he didn't know the hardships and the rewards of fishing. Embarrassed, Shelley agreed.
The trip lasted 13 days. When the dredge opened up onto the deck, Shelley would squat with the other crew members and pick through the stones and squirming fish to find scallop shells. He learned to wedge them open with a sharp knife and slide the blade along the shell, shucking out the succulent circles of meat. The routine never ended, day and night; Shelley took breaks only to eat or catch some sleep below deck.
"Fishermen work hard," Shelley says, "and they withstand tremendous danger."
Sanfilippo and her group were among those who refused to sign on to the compromise Shelley had talked Judge Kessler into. But his boldness in breaking with the national environmental groups nevertheless impressed his old friend.
In March, she ran into Shelley at a fisheries meeting in Maine. He looked her straight in the eye.
"Well, Angela, are you going to hug me or slap me," Shelley asked.
Angela paused. Then she hugged him.
And the two, if no longer close, now find themselves among those in the middle, desperately battling for compromise in advance of next month's vote on the future of the fishery.
They are in their own separate ways seeing the need for fishermen and environmentalists to look beyond their culture clash to an agreement that might conserve fish and fisherman, both.
At a hearing in Portland several weeks ago, Shelley seemed almost contrite as he tried to explain his mindset.
"Sitting and listening . . . you could not hear the real world of fisheries and not be affected by it," a weary Shelley said, visibly moved. He went on to say that tougher rules are needed, but that his goal is to save the small-boat fishermen.
Unknown to Shelley, Sanfilippo was quietly strategizing that week with the same goal in mind -- saving the small-boat fleet. And she was distraught as she rose to speak after the fishermen had heckled Shelley's colleague Priscilla Brooks at the hearing last month.
The tiny fisherman's wife looked around the room. The fishermen were stern-faced. So were the environmentalists.
"There must be a better way," she said.
Tomorrow: New England fishermen face their future
Photographs by Bill Greene, Globe Staff
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
SEA CHANGE | THE NEW ENGLAND FISHING CRISIS
Third of four parts
GLOUCESTER -- The hissing began as soon as the slender, bookish environmentalist took her seat in the ballroom overlooking New England's most famous fishing port.
From the back of the room, grim-faced men, arms folded across their chests, drowned out Priscilla Brooks as she tried to explain why a major cut in the region's codfish catch now seems unavoidable.
"Eco-terrorist!" yelled one fisherman, his T-shirt emblazoned with the single letter "Y" -- his question for those who would place more limits on his livelihood.
"Salamander lover!" shouted another at Brooks, who works for Boston's Conservation Law Foundation, the region's leading environmental advocacy group. "Who is paying your salary?"
The confrontation at the Tavern on the Harbor last month was only the latest vivid reminder of how completely environmental activists have taken the helm in the fishing debate, and how shocking and infuriating that is to the fishermen who were once their allies. With a well-financed campaign of lobbying and lawsuits, environmentalists like Brooks have, over the last decade, forced waves of restrictions on fishing and set the stage for the still stricter limits to come. Fishermen have resisted at almost every turn, resorting to heckling, harbor blockades, and even dockside riots to make their case.
Next month, environmentalists may score a historic victory when the New England Fishery Management Council, which oversees the industry here, is expected to bow to another of their lawsuits. The council, with its six commercial fishing industry members, has been a reluctant regulator, but it has little choice now: A federal judge has already sided with the environmentalists, making it clear she will impose strict new fishing limits if regulators will not.
The impact of the new rules could be immense. By some estimates, more than a third of the 1,500 or so boats with permits to chase the region's cod and other bottom-feeding fish could be forced out of the business when the new limits take effect at the start of next year's fishing season, in May.
And so furious backstage efforts are underway to forge a last-minute compromise. Pressure to find a middle way has come from the federal judge on the case, Gladys Kessler, and from state Division of Marine Fisheries Commissioner Paul Diodati, who has convened several private negotiating sessions. The goal ia to take the future of New England fishing out of the courtroom and back onto the sea -- and to bridge the corrosive divide between those for whom a healthy environment is their workplace, and those for whom it is a cause.
But so far, their efforts have proved largely fruitless. As the Tavern on the Harbor hearing underscored, the divisions and animosity have only intensified.
As one environmentalist put it, reaching a collision-averting deal could take "a miracle."
An environmental crusader
Peter Shelley was once that sort of miracle worker, the environmental crusader who could find a way to save the fish -- and fishing.
Back in the late 1980s the longtime lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation started getting worried calls from Gloucester fishermen. The great Atlantic schools that had sustained fishing for centuries were disappearing, they told him, and the government was doing precious little about it.
Shelley, who years earlier had joined with fishermen to stop oil companies from drilling off the New England coast, decided to take up the new fight. By 1991 he had filed a trailblazing lawsuit that forced federal regulators to ratchet up protections for the cod, flounder, and haddock that were the staples of the region's fishing economy. And two years ago he helped win an even more sweeping lawsuit designed to put all the key fish species on a quicker road to recovery.
It was after that victory that Shelley, from his office in an old sardine factory in Rockland, Maine, began to fear that he and his environmental peers had gone too far. The shining spring day when the judge ordered the tough new fishing limits was supposed to be his time to celebrate. It was the climax of a 15-year struggle to put limits on a fishing fleet that had pressed the stocks of cod and other groundfish to the point of collapse, and could, without stricter rules, overfish again as the stocks gradually rebound.
Yet as he read the document, then read it again, Shelley felt only alarm. The judge had decided on a formula that fell especially harshly on small boat owners, leaving several hundred all but banned from fishing. Shelley's partners in the lawsuit, a group of ardent national environmental groups, were convinced that even those limits weren't tough enough.
But to him, the 35-page document, written in the cool language of lawyers, read like an execution order for the people and the way of life he had set out to save.
"I was stunned," says Shelley, 56, his hair white and slightly long in the back.
It was a moment that, for him, underscored a key question for those who fight to save natural resources: How far should society go to turn back the ecological clock?
How, in this case, should one balance the need to save the fish against the needs of the fishermen?
For Shelley, whose brother-in-law once fished Pacific salmon, this was no fleeting philosophical question. Having grown up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania, helping milk the Holsteins and doing other chores, Shelley gained a deep respect for those who work the natural world.
And when he thinks of fishing families, he holds real people in mind: The Sicilian-born Gloucester woman who shared with him the family fishing lore handed down seven generations, and the Fairhaven captain who took him on a rough, but exhilarating 13-day scalloping trip on Georges Bank.
His goal in pressing the litigation had been to prod the government to do for fish what enforcement of environmental laws had done before for the air, and water, and endangered wildlife.
But as he read the judge's order that day in his office, he wondered: What have I unleashed?
"It broke the fishermen's back," Shelley says. "That wasn't what we wanted."
Seismic changes
Sitting over dinner one evening in the late 1980s, Angela Sanfilippo's husband, John, told her that the fishing seemed off.
Leaving with the morning tide, often before 3 a.m., from the pier near their brick-faced Gloucester home, he took his 68-foot dragger, the Padre Pio, to the same rocky spots where he had cast his net for two decades. But the fish weren't there.
A few months later, Angela's brother, Joe Orlando, reported that he, too, was hauling up empty nets.
"Then all the wives started seeing the paychecks go down," says Sanfilippo, longtime president of the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association, her voice lilting with the inflection of her native Sicily. "When the paycheck changes, you know something is wrong."
An unstoppable, 4-foot, 11-inch force, Sanfilippo, 53, has won millions of dollars in fishermen's aid over the years through a campaign of graciousness, determination, and, on occasion, tears directed at the region's congressmen. And so she wasn't shy in making her case after becoming convinced that something was amiss with the fish.
She first took her concerns to members of the management council. When they didn't seem eager to help, she went to an old friend, a lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation named Peter Shelley.
The two had become close a decade earlier when they joined in the crusade to keep oil rigs out of the Georges Bank fishing grounds, a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Shelley was shocked by what Sanfilippo and other fishermen were telling him now, and he agreed to help.
His decision set off a chain of events that have forced a turnaround in how the nation manages its oceans.
But it also unleashed seismic changes in New England's fishing communities, threatening their existence and severely testing the friendship between the woman from Porticello, Sicily, and the man from Bucks County, Pa., that had set the whole drama in motion.
It is remarkable that the same stretch of coast that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick more than 150 years ago and draws tourists from around the world is home to a people who are just now learning that the ocean, and the animals in it, need their care.
For more than a century, lonely voices have been warning of trouble as undersea treasures have been quietly plundered, one after another -- minerals, oil, fish. Still, it is only over the last 15 years, with a drawn-out fight over commercial fishing and now wind farming in Nantucket Sound, that managing some of the region's richest resources has drawn sustained focus.
As long ago as the 1830s, the coastal waters of the Northeast lost most of their halibut to overfishing, and by the 1860s, the stocks farther off shore were crashing, too. They have never recovered. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant created the first national Fish Commission, in part to study "the decrease of the food fishes of the seacoasts and lakes of the United States."
In this century, as boat technology rapidly advanced, scientists warned that stocks couldn't handle the pressure. By the early 1990s, New England cod -- the fisherman's bread and butter -- were heading toward disaster. But the public, and even the environmental movement, had not focused on the problem of overfishing.
"It just wasn't seen as a problem," says Andrew Rosenberg, former northeast administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. "The oceans were infinite. The public, the environmentalists even believed that. It wasn't until the fish were almost gone that anyone paid attention."
So Shelley was largely acting in a void when began his work with Sanfilippo and the fishermen by attending a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council. Sitting in a meeting room at the King's Grant Inn in Danvers, he was utterly bewildered as councilors threw around arcane acronyms like "FMSY" and offered motions and countermotions that didn't seem to go anywhere.
Frustrated, he hired a marine biologist to sit in on the meetings and explain the situation to him. She offered this simple bottom line: Too many fish are being killed.
But it soon became apparent that the council, even as it reluctantly conceded the problem, was not prepared to act. And so Shelley went to court. His 1991 suit charged that the government was ignoring its own environmental laws, threatening the long-term future of the entire fishing industry.
As news of the lawsuit leaked out, some of Shelley's fishermen friends questioned his motives. Others, who didn't know him, pegged him as a meddling outsider, a "clean fingernailed" lawyer without regard for the fate of a proud fishing tradition.
Sanfilippo, however, knew better. She had heard the complaints of friends whose fisherman husbands had to take second jobs to make ends meet. She had taken those complaints to Shelley.
And so she and her allies decided to support the Conservation Law Foundation lawsuit, the only fishing group to do so.
Shelley, meanwhile, was bracing for a long legal battle. He expected the Washington lawyers for the federal regulators to bury him in denials and demands when he sat down with them to discuss the suit.
Instead, "the lawyers just agreed with us," he recalls, shaking his head. "They said, `You're right.' "
What should be done?
Shelley's overnight success proved a kind of signal flare to environmental groups across the nation.
They had come late to the fishing crisis, having been off saving whales, seals, and other more charismatic creatures during the 1970s and early 1980s, the years when fishermen, their boats and gear ever more efficient, were turning fishing from a hunt into something more like scooping goldfish from a bowl.
But environmentalists more than made up for lost time, as national organizations and foundations such as the Ocean Conservancy and the Pew Foundation poured money and resources into New England and other regions. From 1992 to 2000, the major philanthropies that fund environmental causes increased spending on fisheries issues from $3.6 milion to more than $26 million a year, according to the Foundation Center, which tracks charitable giving.
Meanwhile, commercial fishing lawsuits by environmental groups against the National Marine Fisheries Service have proliferated across the country. Shelley's 1991 case was the first and the model; there are 34 open cases today.
"These groups are incredibly powerful," says Dennis Nixon, associate dean of the College of the Environment and Life Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. "They win lawsuits. They know how to campaign."
But the aggressiveness of some of the national groups -- like Oceana, an advocacy group funded by the Pew Foundation -- convinced some fishermen that their needs and concerns were of little account to these idealistic newcomers.
The national groups seemed particularly blase about fishermen's claims -- which were not without foundation -- that some of the fish stocks were bouncing back.
"You have to ask why," says Ed Barrett, a Marshfield fisherman. "We are paying our dues, and we're seeing benefits. And these groups don't mention it."
"We were dying," says Vito Calomo, a former fisherman and executive director of the Massachusetts Fisheries Recovery Commission, a state-funded fishing research group. "And these groups -- we didn't even know who they were -- kept beating us down."
But there is equal adamance on the other side. Eric Bilsky, a lawyer with Oceana, says New England's experience has made it clear that neither the fishermen nor their local regulators can be relied on to safeguard this natural trust.
"They aren't complying with the law," he says. "It's clear they will continue to violate the law again and again unless we file lawsuits."
But with all the intensified interest and activity, the harder question remained: The landmark lawsuit had been won. Now, what should be done?
The regulatory choices that were ultimately made and remade and remade again would be felt up and down the coast, wherever fishermen ply their trade.
Or mend their nets: Inside a narrow, dimly lit room, the wood-planked floors scruffed and faded, two Cambodian women were twisting twine as if performing the children's game "cat's cradle." With two thick pieces pulled tight across the room, each woman wove the nylon filament over and under, tying knots to create a sheet of diamonds that will be lowered into the ocean to catch fish.
In Don King's Homeward Bound shop on the way to Rocky Neck in Gloucester, the net weavers follow a tradition that is hundreds of years old, but changing quickly. As new regulations are issued, the nets made here keep changing, with bigger and bigger diamonds to let out all but the largest cod and flounder. And every time they change, all the old nets have to be tossed.
"The rules always change," says a frustrated King, a stout former cod fisherman who lost $40,000 in canceled orders and outdated nets with the last change. "It's impossible to predict a future."
A law with teeth
But even as fishermen started to chafe at the rules that grew out of Shelley's 1991 suit, an unprecedented alliance of environmental groups had formed around the idea of a greater leap forward in fishery conservation. It was this shift into environmental overdrive, in fact, that would lead to the present confrontation.
They called themselves the Marine Fish Conservation Network. Five representatives of some of the most influential environmental groups at the time -- Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon, the National Coalition for Marine Conservation, and a group that later became the Ocean Conservancy -- gathered in September 1992 to figure out how, once and for all, to save the fish off American coasts.
By 1995, the network had enlisted the help of dozens of conservation groups, and some fishermen too, such as the Maine Lobstermen's Association. And they showed some political smarts, sending pairs of advocates, an environmentalist teamed up with a fisherman, to convince members of Congress to reform the laws that govern the nation's fisheries.
"They saw these two competing constituencies coming in and had to say yes," says Gerry Leape, a founding member of the network.
In 1996, as the Gulf of Maine's cod stocks teetered near collapse, the network helped push through a bill called the Sustainable Fisheries Act. It represented a profound change. No longer would local management councils be trusted to protect the fish of their region; they'd be required to. The law said councils must act to guarantee that, within a 10-year time frame, key fish stocks would rebound.
"Everything changed then," says Bilsky. "That law was powerful and revolutionary. It had teeth."
At first, New England fishermen weren't particularly worried about the new law, believing that conservation measures already adopted here would be enough. Some said they were reassured that fishermen-friendly politicians such as Barney Frank and Olympia Snowe had voted for the law.
"We were reasonably sure we had taken care of the problem," says Barbara Stevenson, a Portland Maine boat owner and former fish council member.
Only now, as the full might of the 1996 law is finally to take effect, is it clear how wrong they were.
A devil's pact
Long before the confrontations of the last year, Angela Sanfilippo had begun to suspect that she'd been wrong to put her trust in Peter Shelley.
Once, in 1993, she had climbed onto a chair in the Gloucester High School auditorium to stare down jeering fishermen until they'd hear Shelley out. Now she found herself listening to her family when they asked if she knew what she was doing when she sided with an environmentalist. As round after round of fishing limits took hold, her husband's income declined. Her nephew went out of business. The dinner table conversation was about how the fish were coming back -- and yet the men weren't allowed to catch them.
Sanfilippo still believed that she had been right to worry about overfishing. The natural balance between fish and fishermen had been fundamentally altered, first by giant factory trawlers that vacuumed the sea clean until they were banned in the mid-1970s, and then by New England's own fishermen as the government grants enabled fishermen to boost the catching power of their boats.
But as the Gloucester waterfront reeled under the new restrictions, Sanfilippo felt that siding with Shelley and the Conservation Law Foundation may have been a devil's pact.
"I stopped trusting him," she says. "People were losing their jobs, and I thought Peter was going to make it worse. It became clear CLF was for the fish, not the fishermen."
And when Shelley, joined by three national groups, sued again in 2000 -- this time to enforce the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Law -- her dismay and anger only grew.
She was in no mood to give him another chance when she learned that Shelley, after winning his latest lawsuit, had begun to have second thoughts.
Why should she believe him now?
But he meant it.
Last spring, deeply concerned by Judge Kessler's landmark ruling, Shelley convened a diverse group of fishermen, environmentalists, and officials to plead with the judge to relax the rules. Amazingly, she did. The final reckoning has been put off until next May.
Shelley took this step on his own, without the support of the national environmental groups that had joined in the lawsuit and that wanted even stricter rules.
"To some groups, the fisheries problem is a faceless one," says Shelley. "We acknowledge the reality they are going through. We see it every day. We live among them."
He had even once gone to sea with them. In the spring of 1994, Shelley joined the crew of Thor, an 85-foot steel-hulled scalloping boat out of Fairhaven. At the time, he had been working for seven years to restrict fishing, but had never set foot on a commercial fishing boat.
Then Ellen Skaar, a fisherman's wife from Fairhaven, told him she didn't think he could possibly understand the situation if he didn't know the hardships and the rewards of fishing. Embarrassed, Shelley agreed.
The trip lasted 13 days. When the dredge opened up onto the deck, Shelley would squat with the other crew members and pick through the stones and squirming fish to find scallop shells. He learned to wedge them open with a sharp knife and slide the blade along the shell, shucking out the succulent circles of meat. The routine never ended, day and night; Shelley took breaks only to eat or catch some sleep below deck.
"Fishermen work hard," Shelley says, "and they withstand tremendous danger."
Sanfilippo and her group were among those who refused to sign on to the compromise Shelley had talked Judge Kessler into. But his boldness in breaking with the national environmental groups nevertheless impressed his old friend.
In March, she ran into Shelley at a fisheries meeting in Maine. He looked her straight in the eye.
"Well, Angela, are you going to hug me or slap me," Shelley asked.
Angela paused. Then she hugged him.
And the two, if no longer close, now find themselves among those in the middle, desperately battling for compromise in advance of next month's vote on the future of the fishery.
They are in their own separate ways seeing the need for fishermen and environmentalists to look beyond their culture clash to an agreement that might conserve fish and fisherman, both.
At a hearing in Portland several weeks ago, Shelley seemed almost contrite as he tried to explain his mindset.
"Sitting and listening . . . you could not hear the real world of fisheries and not be affected by it," a weary Shelley said, visibly moved. He went on to say that tougher rules are needed, but that his goal is to save the small-boat fishermen.
Unknown to Shelley, Sanfilippo was quietly strategizing that week with the same goal in mind -- saving the small-boat fleet. And she was distraught as she rose to speak after the fishermen had heckled Shelley's colleague Priscilla Brooks at the hearing last month.
The tiny fisherman's wife looked around the room. The fishermen were stern-faced. So were the environmentalists.
"There must be a better way," she said.
Tomorrow: New England fishermen face their future
Mistrust between scientists, fishermen mars key mission
By Gareth Cook and Beth Daley , Globe Staff | October 27, 2003
Photographs by Bill Greene
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
Second of four parts
FALMOUTH -- From the lightly swaying deck of his 98-foot trawler, Matt Stommel points out the scene of the crime, lit now in the deep orange of approaching sunset.
Stommel's boat, the Nobska, is docked on the Woods Hole waterfront here, with an easy view of the government laboratory charged with counting New England's fish. It was from this perch, Stommel recalls, that he watched as workers marked a steel cable from an aging research vessel, the Albatross IV, on a freezing day in the winter of 2000.
What he saw that day filled him with a skipper's disgust.
The cable was one of the pair that secure the Albatross's fish net, yet the workers weren't checking to be sure the length of the cables matched up. Stommel immediately understood the risk: The Albatross could be dragging its net through the water lopsided, catching fewer fish and leading scientists to conclude that the fish need fiercer protection -- even though Stommel, like other fisherman, believes they are all rebounding.
For the next two years, Stommel pleaded with scientists to check the cables and even offered to pay for the test himself. Last fall, the center admitted he was right, throwing into doubt the ship's population counts and drawing fury from New England's fishermen.
"The biggest problem is not the trawl wire," said Stommel, a ruddy, brown-haired man who is one of the region's most successful fishermen. "The biggest problem is that nobody there knew it."
The episode, dubbed "trawlgate" on the docks, still casts a long shadow over New England's imperiled fishery. It was the bleakest turn yet in a critical but failing relationship -- between fishermen and fish scientists -- that must find a new foundation in trust if the fishing industry is to thrive again.
It is the scientists who decide whether fish populations are reviving, findings that ultimately dictate how many fish can be caught. Their work will be the key next month, when severe cutbacks in the groundfish catch are debated by the New England Fishery Management Council, and perhaps voted into effect.
Yet the fishermen trust the scientists almost not at all.
It is more than a culture clash, though it is that. It is a battle over "data" of the sort fishermen know well -- the seeming bounty of fish coming up in their nets -- and what looks to them like flawed guesswork by strangers to the sea, guesswork anointed as science. And scientists, weary after years of criticism, have resisted working with the fishermen, cutting themselves off from the people who, in their way, know the ocean better than anyone.
And so, instead of fusing their expertise, the two groups have maintained an angry standoff that has left the government to decide the fate of the fishery without the best information in hand.
But both sides can agree on this: It has proved a lot harder to count cod than to catch them.
The scientific population estimates, developed in the Woods Hole facility, never claimed to be exact. But for years they were good enough for what they were used for: sounding the alarm as fish stocks obviously dropped.
Predicting the future
Now, however, as some fish species show signs of coming back, the scientists face a far more daunting task: predicting the future.
For each of 19 different stocks of groundfish (cod and flounder and others that feed near the ocean bottom), the scientists must decide whether the population will recover within 10 years -- the definition, under federal law, of an adequately managed fishery.
The predictions they come up with will ultimately determine whether whole fleets of fishing vessels go to sea or remain in port, tied up. Yet the government uses a needlessly slow, technologically backward system for gathering fishery data, throwing a fog of doubt around the scientists' predictions.
The antiquated Albatross IV, placed in service in 1963, is their crucial ocean-going research tool, but it is a cranky break-down prone vessel that has urgently needed replacement for at least a decade. A replacement ship won't be ready until 2006.
And scientists don't know precisely where fishermen are fishing, or how many dead fish fishermen throw overboard, because the government has not hired enough on-board observers. Only 5 percent of the boats now carry such inspectors. In some other American fisheries, inspectors ride on every boat.
Scientists get reports on the number of fish brought to port and they do some of their own test trawls -- hence the "trawlgate" controversy. But to understand what is happening on the water, scientists must rely in large measure on logbooks filled out by the fishermen themselves. These "vessel trip reports" are considered a joke among many fishermen and are notoriously unreliable: One fisherman's entry indicated he was pulling up cod somewhere in rural upstate New York.
And these reports, like most other fishery data, are kept on paper, rather than filed electronically, meaning it takes months before the information is compiled and usable. By the time a forecast is ready, it is already out of date.
The risks of the science being wrong, for scientists and fishermen alike, are tremendous. In the early 1980s, Canadian scientists were predicting flush times ahead for cod fishermen. By the time they discovered errors in their method, a few years later, the cod population was crashing.
In the last 11 years, some 40,000 people have lost their jobs in a region built on fishing. And earlier this year, the Canadian government declared an end to commercial and recreational fishing of cod off Newfoundland.
It is, for fishery scientists, the ultimate cautionary tale.
"It is the fishery parable" says Steven Murawski, the biologist who oversees federal fish population estimates in the northeast. "We think about it all the time."
Murawski, 52, and Stommel, 51, are different in many ways. Murawski spends much of his time working in a cramped office; Stommel is mostly on the open waters. When Murawski describes the fishing problem, he speaks evenly and carefully; Stommel can fly into a rage.
But they share many things. Fascinated by the water since their youth, they both live in Woods Hole, a small village on Cape Cod. Their children attend the same schools. Murawski, the scientist, once worked on a commercial fishing boat. Stommel, the fisherman, is the son of a world-renowned oceanographer.
So, as "trawlgate" has played out in public and as the historic collision between fish counts and fishermen looms, these two men have been talking. In brief chats on Water Street or long conversations on the phone, they talk about currents and cod, ocean adventures of the past and the next round of government regulation.
They talk about fishing. They talk about science. They talk about how things might be different between the two.
Getting to know the cod On Stellwagen Bank, a stretch of shallow ocean that arcs between Cape Cod and Cape Ann, a cod's life unfolded. From above, clumps of sediment and organic material fell like snow. Just below lay a range of boulder reefs, with rocks scattered like huge misshapen marbles. In another area, swaths of pink and greenish-brown anemones rose from the sand like stands of lost cacti.
It is in alien seascapes like this, up to 600 feet below the surface and in temperatures as cold as 37 degrees, that New England's cod make their home.
On land the demand is to know, with certainty, how many fish are left in the waters, and how many there will be. But answering such questions requires getting to know cod. And this ancient animal, with its thick speckled body and glassy eyes, has proved an elusive acquaintance, even for specialists.
The Stellwagen habitat, captured with a robotic underwater camera, provides a glimpse of the sheer enormity of the challenge.
The fish are always on the move; there isn't one cod ecosystem but a nearly infinite number of overlapping ecosystems. And for all of modern man's mastery of land and space, the ocean off our shores remains a vast, untamed place that scientists concede they don't know nearly enough about.
"This is not farming," says Peter Auster, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut who studies fish habitat. "We are hunting wild animals."
New England became a world fishing capital because of its uncommon underwater geography. Beneath the monotonous waves, several large banks rise above a deep basin cut by glaciers, reaching within 100 feet of the surface. One of the banks, Jeffrey's Ledge -- now a prime fishing spot -- was actually an island or part of the beachy coast during the last ice age. From the North, the cold Labrador current brings a rich stream of nutrients to Georges Bank, where it meets warm waters from the Gulf Stream.
At this intersection, tiny plankton thrive as in few other places on the planet, providing food for larval fish. The submerged banks are lush, filled with an encyclopedic array of sea life, from microscopic copepods, which look like so many tiny spacecraft, to the powerful blue whale. This is where the cod, flounder, and other bottom-hugging fish that humans hunt live.
Scientists know quite a lot about how and why cod thrive in such settings, eating herring and sand eels and anything else that will fit in their mouths for three years until they reach 4 pounds or more -- big enough to be caught in some fishermen's nets. But what scientists don't know is critical: How many young will the fish have? How many will survive to maturity? How rapidly, in short, will the population rebound?
It is much easier to predict how fast human populations will grow. Demographers know, for example, that in the United States, woman, on average, will have two children.
Fish aren't nearly as predictable.
When spawning season comes in late winter, cod gather by the hundreds of thousands. Each female releases a shiny column of millions of eggs into the murky water. If even a small number of the eggs in each column survives into adulthood, the population will blossom; if the average number of survivors drops even slightly, the population crashes.
As the fragile eggs drift downward, virtually everything in the water affects their chances. Temperature shifts can kill them. So can the lack of rocks, coral, or other places to hide on the bottom -- nooks and crannies that are often flattened by trawling gear. Predators, including other cod, eat them.
Because the scientists know little about how to balance these shifting factors, they are left to guess how many fish will be hatched based on how many mature fish they believe there are now. Theirs is a variation on the weatherman's lament: Guessing at tomorrow, based on what happened today. The further into the future they try to forecast, the more likely it is they will get it wrong.
The difference is that few would rely on the prediction of the weather in Boston 10 years from now. But judges and regulators and, above all, fishermen must live by what fish forecasters predict.
And the margin of error is huge. One prediction estimates that there will be 260,000 metric tons of cod on Georges Bank by 2019, if there is a substantial cut in fishing. That would be a huge increase from the 30,000 tons today -- and a promise of a thriving fishery. But the scientists concede those figures could be way off. There could be as much as 360,000 tons or less than 200,000. On such estimates, a way of life hinges.
And there are still other sources of scientific uncertainty. Some researchers believe that decades of heavy fishing may have changed the underwater environment so much -- sea bottoms ravaged by trawling gear, cod stocks so depleted that other species take over their niche -- that cod populations will never be able to recover.
"The sea floor gets dragged over with these nets again and again -- it is like clear-cutting," says Chris Zeman, New England Fisheries Program Counsel for Oceana, an environmental group. "We have serious problems with these fishing boats wrecking the sea bottom and fish habitat."
A fishery's collapse The disaster in Newfoundland is a waking nightmare for those who make their living counting fish, and for those whose livelihood relies on their work.
Scientists believe the cod collapse there was likely caused by a variety of sources, including overfishing. But some now believe they erred, too, by relying too heavily on what fishermen were hauling up -- rather than their own independent surveys.
Fishermen, they think, may have been catching more fish because the cod had huddled together in a last-gasp effort to save themselves. And those huddled masses filled the fishing nets, allowing the cod population to crash while scientists believed everything was fine.
The Newfoundland fishermen's nets went from bulging to empty, almost overnight. If full-scale fishing ever resumes, it won't be for decades, Canadian officials predict. The seafarers who began plying their trade there a century before the Mayflower have shuttered their coastal cottages and moved on.
No one is saying now that New England's fishery is so immediately threatened. But the uncertainty in the scientists' figures can go both ways: It is possible that the fishermen are correct, and the future is brighter than it seems, but it is also possible that disaster could sneak up on New England. We count our groundfish largely as the Newfoundlanders did.
And we know as little about how man-made changes in the underwater environment may affect the fish, and do little with what we do know. Biologists have shown that fish survival is affected by damage from fishing gear or small shifts in water temperature and salinity. But such factors are not built into the government's models.
At the heart of the problem, say many analysts, is a lack of money for scientific research. The National Marine Fishery Service is charged with managing 932 stocks of fish in US waters. Yet for 695 of these, the agency has so little scientific information that scientists do not even know if the species are overfished.
All of the work now done on the oceans -- 70 percent of the planet's surface -- constitutes just a little over 2 percent of federal research funding. And those research efforts are scattered all around the government, with no system for setting research priorities, though there is talk of one.
"If you make a comparison to the Department of Defense, they do everything from basic research to building tanks, but in ocean science there is nothing like that," says Penelope Dalton, a former director of the agency and now vice president of the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education, a nonprofit organization based in Washington. "Fishery research is like a black hole in the government."
This gap in basic knowledge is plain to Jason Link, a government scientist at Woods Hole, who is trying to puzzle out what valued species of fish eat and what eats them. It is just a first, baby step toward understanding the dynamics of predator and prey that shape fish populations.
Yet even these preliminary findings are so impenetrably complex that Link jokingly calls a graph he made of the results a "horrendogram."
This is the conundrum: Scientists set out to understand a fish, and realize they have to understand an ocean.
"You wonder why people keep hitting their heads on this problem when we will probably never be able to solve it," says Ione Hunt von Herbing, a marine biologist at the University of Maine. "But what else are we going to do?"
`A terrific distrust' Not far from where the Nobska is docked at Woods Hole, in a brown brick building designed to withstand a hurricane, government workers do the best they can to coax uncooperative witnesses to testify.
On the first floor of Woods Hole's Northeast Fisheries Science Center, a tiny herring lies dead and frozen on a counter, its mouth agape. But behind its glistening eyes are tiny ear bones that pop out with the glinting twist of a scalpel. And on the ear bones are faintly darkened circles, like growth rings on a tree, that indicate how many winters the fish has endured.
In another room, the age of each fish is entered into a computer, along with clues such as its weight and where it was caught. The computer takes all this information and, using sophisticated mathematical techniques, predicts the population's current size, and where it is headed.
The work done here is considered some of the best of its kind in the world, scientists say. These scientists have been carefully tracking fish for decades, giving them a stronger base of knowledge and experience to work from than biologists working in most of the world's other fisheries.
Yet the work is seriously hampered because the scientist don't have a firm fix on one of the biggest variables: what the fishermen are up to. Instead, the scientists take data from twice-yearly trawls, then painstakingly analyze them -- a process that can take a year or more -- to look for signs that fish populations are changing.
These estimates are what the New England Fishery Management Council uses to make its decisions.
"It is like driving your car with ropes attached to the steering wheel while lying in the trunk," said Doug Hopkins, a consultant for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and until recently a council member. "Until we have a system that tells us how many fish we are killing every year, we are not going to be able to manage the fishery."
Except for illegal catches, scientists know what fishermen bring to port, but they must rely on logbooks for information about where the fish was caught, and what other fish were killed and dumped overboard.
Yet nowhere is the evidence more clear of fishermen's suspicion of scientists than in the blue-covered logbooks that are stuffed, water-stained, in nooks of fishermen's pilothouses. Since 1994, fishermen must report how much of each species they catch -- even those they throw overboard -- and give the data to the government.
Fishermen say they dutifully reported where they had been fishing until the fishing council began closing portions of the sea based largely on the what the fishermen were reporting.
"They took all the information we gave them and used it against us," said Paul Cohan, a Gloucester gill-netter. "They closed every place we said we fished. This is a great debate in the industry over what to report. There is terrific distrust."
Sometimes fishermen honestly report how many fish they caught, but lie about where, so that their favorite fishing grounds won't be closed. Some fishermen, taking sarcastic aim at the entire process, deliberately record coordinates that place their catch in forests or in the rolling hills of Vermont.
This atmosphere of suspicion and deceit has created the need for more on-board government observers to monitor the catch. That would be an expensive step -- the government now spends $3.6 million to put observers on just 5 percent of New England groundfish boats. In the Gulf of Alaska, for example, every fishing trip by a large boat has an observer, paid for by the fishermen. But here, fishermen say they are too close to bankruptcy to pay.
Moving the goalposts What little trust there was between fishermen and scientists took another blow in 2002, when scientists came out with new population targets for the region's fishing stocks. Fishermen were stunned -- some of the new targets were twice the old ones -- and would take that much longer to reach. The scientists said that as some fish were starting to recover after decades of overfishing, it was clear that the populations could grow larger than they had suspected -- an explanation that sounded to fishermen a lot like moving goalposts, mid-game.
"We were getting close to where they wanted to be with the fish," says said Portland boat owner Bob Tetrault. "We were almost there, and they suddenly say it wasn't enough."
The mistrust between fishermen and scientists has created a vicious cycle.
If fishermen didn't mistrust the scientists, the scientists would have better logbook information to work with. The scientists would also know more about what exactly fishermen are seeing and sensing out at sea -- all of which could inform a more accurate portrait.
Scientists "are regularly criticized by fishermen for not knowing the data that fishermen refuse to give them," says Andrew Rosenberg, who is the former northeast administrator of the National Marine Fishery Service.
Yet many fishermen believe in their hearts that the science is not a quest for truth, but a weapon used to attack them.
In February of last year, for example, a group of fishermen, including Matt Stommel, went to the Boston offices of the Conservation Law Foundation to try to reach some kind of new understanding.
The foundation had just won a major lawsuit in which a judge agreed with its contention that the government had not done enough to solve the region's overfishing problem. The foundation was hoping to convince fishermen to work with it on a compromise plan to cut back fishing. The fishermen were there to convince thefoundation that harsh new regulations were not needed.
James M. Knott Sr., a longtime lobsterman, told the foundation representatives that he had seen dire predictions for lobster populations just before their number took off. And he told them he has been seeing more cod in his lobster traps -- a sign of bounty -- than he can ever remember.
"I put my first lobster trap in the water in 1942," said Knott. "I have never seen as many cod in my traps as I do now."
Stommel told Douglas I. Foy, then the head of the foundation and now Chief of Commonwealth Development in the Romney administration, that he could prove that the science that formed the basis of the judge's decision was wrong. Stommel recalls Foy telling him: "I don't care if the science is wrong."
Foy denies saying that but says he was frustrated that the fishermen were denying the problem's existence and focusing on the science, instead of trying to join in a cooperative solution to overfishing. He reminded them that the judge's ruling was based on "the best available science."
"I was pretty hot after that meeting," Stommel says. "Yes, this is the best available science, and that is a damn shame."
Forging a relationship In October of last year, the Albatross IV set out from Woods Hole with some unusual guests amongst its crew: fishermen.
The fishermen, Stommel among them, were invited on board to observe as the scientists tested the effects of fishing with the infamous uneven trawl wires. Another fishing boat, the 80-foot Sea Breeze, out of Newport, R.I., also joined the testing mission, fishing alongside the Albatross as it made its trawls. Depending on whom you ask, the trip went well -- or disastrously.
Scientists didn't find much evidence that the lopsided net had caught much less than one properly set. "Trawlgate" seemed overblown. But the fishermen said they saw a host of problems on board, including poor seamanship and unskilled fishing. For one thing, they said, the Albatross' nets seemed prone to tangling, making them less likely to catch and keep the fish.
To the fishermen, the voyage seemed like little more than a superficial attempt to allay concerns about the lopsided trawls.
"This was not about science," Stommel says. "It was about appearances."
Emotions that day were perhaps especially raw because the painful "trawlgate" reminder came as fishermen and scientists were starting to see the need -- indeed, the necessity -- of working together.
"Talking over a coffee and charts in the wheelhouse, I think we can learn a lot from each other," said a chastened Murawski, who Stommel believes is genuinely interested in forging a better relationship with fishermen.
Fishermen and scientists are working together on ideas for improving the government's surveys when New England gets a replacement for the aging Albatross. Currently, the Albatross samples at random locations, but the fishermen are helping to make a list of fixed locations where they see fish congregate.
The government is also expanding cooperative research: One idea is to tag cod, like ornithologists tag birds, to study where they move through their lives.
There are also less formal efforts afoot.
Murawski asked Stommel into the science center for a few days of training in how scientific fish population models work. Stommel recently gave Murawski a copy of "Come Aboard the Draggers," a book about the exploits of early New England fishermen.
Both men know the work they are doing now doesn't just hold meaning for them and the fishing village they call home. Both are working to leave something to the next generation. One of Stommel's children once visited the wharf with her school class to learn about fishing. The group spent the morning with Murawski, the afternoon with Stommel.
"I was amazed at how clued in they were to the fact there are no bad guys and good guys," Murawski says. "This stuff isn't black and white."
Tomorrow: The fishermen vs. the environmentalists
Photographs by Bill Greene
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
Second of four parts
FALMOUTH -- From the lightly swaying deck of his 98-foot trawler, Matt Stommel points out the scene of the crime, lit now in the deep orange of approaching sunset.
Stommel's boat, the Nobska, is docked on the Woods Hole waterfront here, with an easy view of the government laboratory charged with counting New England's fish. It was from this perch, Stommel recalls, that he watched as workers marked a steel cable from an aging research vessel, the Albatross IV, on a freezing day in the winter of 2000.
What he saw that day filled him with a skipper's disgust.
The cable was one of the pair that secure the Albatross's fish net, yet the workers weren't checking to be sure the length of the cables matched up. Stommel immediately understood the risk: The Albatross could be dragging its net through the water lopsided, catching fewer fish and leading scientists to conclude that the fish need fiercer protection -- even though Stommel, like other fisherman, believes they are all rebounding.
For the next two years, Stommel pleaded with scientists to check the cables and even offered to pay for the test himself. Last fall, the center admitted he was right, throwing into doubt the ship's population counts and drawing fury from New England's fishermen.
"The biggest problem is not the trawl wire," said Stommel, a ruddy, brown-haired man who is one of the region's most successful fishermen. "The biggest problem is that nobody there knew it."
The episode, dubbed "trawlgate" on the docks, still casts a long shadow over New England's imperiled fishery. It was the bleakest turn yet in a critical but failing relationship -- between fishermen and fish scientists -- that must find a new foundation in trust if the fishing industry is to thrive again.
It is the scientists who decide whether fish populations are reviving, findings that ultimately dictate how many fish can be caught. Their work will be the key next month, when severe cutbacks in the groundfish catch are debated by the New England Fishery Management Council, and perhaps voted into effect.
Yet the fishermen trust the scientists almost not at all.
It is more than a culture clash, though it is that. It is a battle over "data" of the sort fishermen know well -- the seeming bounty of fish coming up in their nets -- and what looks to them like flawed guesswork by strangers to the sea, guesswork anointed as science. And scientists, weary after years of criticism, have resisted working with the fishermen, cutting themselves off from the people who, in their way, know the ocean better than anyone.
And so, instead of fusing their expertise, the two groups have maintained an angry standoff that has left the government to decide the fate of the fishery without the best information in hand.
But both sides can agree on this: It has proved a lot harder to count cod than to catch them.
The scientific population estimates, developed in the Woods Hole facility, never claimed to be exact. But for years they were good enough for what they were used for: sounding the alarm as fish stocks obviously dropped.
Predicting the future
Now, however, as some fish species show signs of coming back, the scientists face a far more daunting task: predicting the future.
For each of 19 different stocks of groundfish (cod and flounder and others that feed near the ocean bottom), the scientists must decide whether the population will recover within 10 years -- the definition, under federal law, of an adequately managed fishery.
The predictions they come up with will ultimately determine whether whole fleets of fishing vessels go to sea or remain in port, tied up. Yet the government uses a needlessly slow, technologically backward system for gathering fishery data, throwing a fog of doubt around the scientists' predictions.
The antiquated Albatross IV, placed in service in 1963, is their crucial ocean-going research tool, but it is a cranky break-down prone vessel that has urgently needed replacement for at least a decade. A replacement ship won't be ready until 2006.
And scientists don't know precisely where fishermen are fishing, or how many dead fish fishermen throw overboard, because the government has not hired enough on-board observers. Only 5 percent of the boats now carry such inspectors. In some other American fisheries, inspectors ride on every boat.
Scientists get reports on the number of fish brought to port and they do some of their own test trawls -- hence the "trawlgate" controversy. But to understand what is happening on the water, scientists must rely in large measure on logbooks filled out by the fishermen themselves. These "vessel trip reports" are considered a joke among many fishermen and are notoriously unreliable: One fisherman's entry indicated he was pulling up cod somewhere in rural upstate New York.
And these reports, like most other fishery data, are kept on paper, rather than filed electronically, meaning it takes months before the information is compiled and usable. By the time a forecast is ready, it is already out of date.
The risks of the science being wrong, for scientists and fishermen alike, are tremendous. In the early 1980s, Canadian scientists were predicting flush times ahead for cod fishermen. By the time they discovered errors in their method, a few years later, the cod population was crashing.
In the last 11 years, some 40,000 people have lost their jobs in a region built on fishing. And earlier this year, the Canadian government declared an end to commercial and recreational fishing of cod off Newfoundland.
It is, for fishery scientists, the ultimate cautionary tale.
"It is the fishery parable" says Steven Murawski, the biologist who oversees federal fish population estimates in the northeast. "We think about it all the time."
Murawski, 52, and Stommel, 51, are different in many ways. Murawski spends much of his time working in a cramped office; Stommel is mostly on the open waters. When Murawski describes the fishing problem, he speaks evenly and carefully; Stommel can fly into a rage.
But they share many things. Fascinated by the water since their youth, they both live in Woods Hole, a small village on Cape Cod. Their children attend the same schools. Murawski, the scientist, once worked on a commercial fishing boat. Stommel, the fisherman, is the son of a world-renowned oceanographer.
So, as "trawlgate" has played out in public and as the historic collision between fish counts and fishermen looms, these two men have been talking. In brief chats on Water Street or long conversations on the phone, they talk about currents and cod, ocean adventures of the past and the next round of government regulation.
They talk about fishing. They talk about science. They talk about how things might be different between the two.
Getting to know the cod On Stellwagen Bank, a stretch of shallow ocean that arcs between Cape Cod and Cape Ann, a cod's life unfolded. From above, clumps of sediment and organic material fell like snow. Just below lay a range of boulder reefs, with rocks scattered like huge misshapen marbles. In another area, swaths of pink and greenish-brown anemones rose from the sand like stands of lost cacti.
It is in alien seascapes like this, up to 600 feet below the surface and in temperatures as cold as 37 degrees, that New England's cod make their home.
On land the demand is to know, with certainty, how many fish are left in the waters, and how many there will be. But answering such questions requires getting to know cod. And this ancient animal, with its thick speckled body and glassy eyes, has proved an elusive acquaintance, even for specialists.
The Stellwagen habitat, captured with a robotic underwater camera, provides a glimpse of the sheer enormity of the challenge.
The fish are always on the move; there isn't one cod ecosystem but a nearly infinite number of overlapping ecosystems. And for all of modern man's mastery of land and space, the ocean off our shores remains a vast, untamed place that scientists concede they don't know nearly enough about.
"This is not farming," says Peter Auster, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut who studies fish habitat. "We are hunting wild animals."
New England became a world fishing capital because of its uncommon underwater geography. Beneath the monotonous waves, several large banks rise above a deep basin cut by glaciers, reaching within 100 feet of the surface. One of the banks, Jeffrey's Ledge -- now a prime fishing spot -- was actually an island or part of the beachy coast during the last ice age. From the North, the cold Labrador current brings a rich stream of nutrients to Georges Bank, where it meets warm waters from the Gulf Stream.
At this intersection, tiny plankton thrive as in few other places on the planet, providing food for larval fish. The submerged banks are lush, filled with an encyclopedic array of sea life, from microscopic copepods, which look like so many tiny spacecraft, to the powerful blue whale. This is where the cod, flounder, and other bottom-hugging fish that humans hunt live.
Scientists know quite a lot about how and why cod thrive in such settings, eating herring and sand eels and anything else that will fit in their mouths for three years until they reach 4 pounds or more -- big enough to be caught in some fishermen's nets. But what scientists don't know is critical: How many young will the fish have? How many will survive to maturity? How rapidly, in short, will the population rebound?
It is much easier to predict how fast human populations will grow. Demographers know, for example, that in the United States, woman, on average, will have two children.
Fish aren't nearly as predictable.
When spawning season comes in late winter, cod gather by the hundreds of thousands. Each female releases a shiny column of millions of eggs into the murky water. If even a small number of the eggs in each column survives into adulthood, the population will blossom; if the average number of survivors drops even slightly, the population crashes.
As the fragile eggs drift downward, virtually everything in the water affects their chances. Temperature shifts can kill them. So can the lack of rocks, coral, or other places to hide on the bottom -- nooks and crannies that are often flattened by trawling gear. Predators, including other cod, eat them.
Because the scientists know little about how to balance these shifting factors, they are left to guess how many fish will be hatched based on how many mature fish they believe there are now. Theirs is a variation on the weatherman's lament: Guessing at tomorrow, based on what happened today. The further into the future they try to forecast, the more likely it is they will get it wrong.
The difference is that few would rely on the prediction of the weather in Boston 10 years from now. But judges and regulators and, above all, fishermen must live by what fish forecasters predict.
And the margin of error is huge. One prediction estimates that there will be 260,000 metric tons of cod on Georges Bank by 2019, if there is a substantial cut in fishing. That would be a huge increase from the 30,000 tons today -- and a promise of a thriving fishery. But the scientists concede those figures could be way off. There could be as much as 360,000 tons or less than 200,000. On such estimates, a way of life hinges.
And there are still other sources of scientific uncertainty. Some researchers believe that decades of heavy fishing may have changed the underwater environment so much -- sea bottoms ravaged by trawling gear, cod stocks so depleted that other species take over their niche -- that cod populations will never be able to recover.
"The sea floor gets dragged over with these nets again and again -- it is like clear-cutting," says Chris Zeman, New England Fisheries Program Counsel for Oceana, an environmental group. "We have serious problems with these fishing boats wrecking the sea bottom and fish habitat."
A fishery's collapse The disaster in Newfoundland is a waking nightmare for those who make their living counting fish, and for those whose livelihood relies on their work.
Scientists believe the cod collapse there was likely caused by a variety of sources, including overfishing. But some now believe they erred, too, by relying too heavily on what fishermen were hauling up -- rather than their own independent surveys.
Fishermen, they think, may have been catching more fish because the cod had huddled together in a last-gasp effort to save themselves. And those huddled masses filled the fishing nets, allowing the cod population to crash while scientists believed everything was fine.
The Newfoundland fishermen's nets went from bulging to empty, almost overnight. If full-scale fishing ever resumes, it won't be for decades, Canadian officials predict. The seafarers who began plying their trade there a century before the Mayflower have shuttered their coastal cottages and moved on.
No one is saying now that New England's fishery is so immediately threatened. But the uncertainty in the scientists' figures can go both ways: It is possible that the fishermen are correct, and the future is brighter than it seems, but it is also possible that disaster could sneak up on New England. We count our groundfish largely as the Newfoundlanders did.
And we know as little about how man-made changes in the underwater environment may affect the fish, and do little with what we do know. Biologists have shown that fish survival is affected by damage from fishing gear or small shifts in water temperature and salinity. But such factors are not built into the government's models.
At the heart of the problem, say many analysts, is a lack of money for scientific research. The National Marine Fishery Service is charged with managing 932 stocks of fish in US waters. Yet for 695 of these, the agency has so little scientific information that scientists do not even know if the species are overfished.
All of the work now done on the oceans -- 70 percent of the planet's surface -- constitutes just a little over 2 percent of federal research funding. And those research efforts are scattered all around the government, with no system for setting research priorities, though there is talk of one.
"If you make a comparison to the Department of Defense, they do everything from basic research to building tanks, but in ocean science there is nothing like that," says Penelope Dalton, a former director of the agency and now vice president of the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education, a nonprofit organization based in Washington. "Fishery research is like a black hole in the government."
This gap in basic knowledge is plain to Jason Link, a government scientist at Woods Hole, who is trying to puzzle out what valued species of fish eat and what eats them. It is just a first, baby step toward understanding the dynamics of predator and prey that shape fish populations.
Yet even these preliminary findings are so impenetrably complex that Link jokingly calls a graph he made of the results a "horrendogram."
This is the conundrum: Scientists set out to understand a fish, and realize they have to understand an ocean.
"You wonder why people keep hitting their heads on this problem when we will probably never be able to solve it," says Ione Hunt von Herbing, a marine biologist at the University of Maine. "But what else are we going to do?"
`A terrific distrust' Not far from where the Nobska is docked at Woods Hole, in a brown brick building designed to withstand a hurricane, government workers do the best they can to coax uncooperative witnesses to testify.
On the first floor of Woods Hole's Northeast Fisheries Science Center, a tiny herring lies dead and frozen on a counter, its mouth agape. But behind its glistening eyes are tiny ear bones that pop out with the glinting twist of a scalpel. And on the ear bones are faintly darkened circles, like growth rings on a tree, that indicate how many winters the fish has endured.
In another room, the age of each fish is entered into a computer, along with clues such as its weight and where it was caught. The computer takes all this information and, using sophisticated mathematical techniques, predicts the population's current size, and where it is headed.
The work done here is considered some of the best of its kind in the world, scientists say. These scientists have been carefully tracking fish for decades, giving them a stronger base of knowledge and experience to work from than biologists working in most of the world's other fisheries.
Yet the work is seriously hampered because the scientist don't have a firm fix on one of the biggest variables: what the fishermen are up to. Instead, the scientists take data from twice-yearly trawls, then painstakingly analyze them -- a process that can take a year or more -- to look for signs that fish populations are changing.
These estimates are what the New England Fishery Management Council uses to make its decisions.
"It is like driving your car with ropes attached to the steering wheel while lying in the trunk," said Doug Hopkins, a consultant for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and until recently a council member. "Until we have a system that tells us how many fish we are killing every year, we are not going to be able to manage the fishery."
Except for illegal catches, scientists know what fishermen bring to port, but they must rely on logbooks for information about where the fish was caught, and what other fish were killed and dumped overboard.
Yet nowhere is the evidence more clear of fishermen's suspicion of scientists than in the blue-covered logbooks that are stuffed, water-stained, in nooks of fishermen's pilothouses. Since 1994, fishermen must report how much of each species they catch -- even those they throw overboard -- and give the data to the government.
Fishermen say they dutifully reported where they had been fishing until the fishing council began closing portions of the sea based largely on the what the fishermen were reporting.
"They took all the information we gave them and used it against us," said Paul Cohan, a Gloucester gill-netter. "They closed every place we said we fished. This is a great debate in the industry over what to report. There is terrific distrust."
Sometimes fishermen honestly report how many fish they caught, but lie about where, so that their favorite fishing grounds won't be closed. Some fishermen, taking sarcastic aim at the entire process, deliberately record coordinates that place their catch in forests or in the rolling hills of Vermont.
This atmosphere of suspicion and deceit has created the need for more on-board government observers to monitor the catch. That would be an expensive step -- the government now spends $3.6 million to put observers on just 5 percent of New England groundfish boats. In the Gulf of Alaska, for example, every fishing trip by a large boat has an observer, paid for by the fishermen. But here, fishermen say they are too close to bankruptcy to pay.
Moving the goalposts What little trust there was between fishermen and scientists took another blow in 2002, when scientists came out with new population targets for the region's fishing stocks. Fishermen were stunned -- some of the new targets were twice the old ones -- and would take that much longer to reach. The scientists said that as some fish were starting to recover after decades of overfishing, it was clear that the populations could grow larger than they had suspected -- an explanation that sounded to fishermen a lot like moving goalposts, mid-game.
"We were getting close to where they wanted to be with the fish," says said Portland boat owner Bob Tetrault. "We were almost there, and they suddenly say it wasn't enough."
The mistrust between fishermen and scientists has created a vicious cycle.
If fishermen didn't mistrust the scientists, the scientists would have better logbook information to work with. The scientists would also know more about what exactly fishermen are seeing and sensing out at sea -- all of which could inform a more accurate portrait.
Scientists "are regularly criticized by fishermen for not knowing the data that fishermen refuse to give them," says Andrew Rosenberg, who is the former northeast administrator of the National Marine Fishery Service.
Yet many fishermen believe in their hearts that the science is not a quest for truth, but a weapon used to attack them.
In February of last year, for example, a group of fishermen, including Matt Stommel, went to the Boston offices of the Conservation Law Foundation to try to reach some kind of new understanding.
The foundation had just won a major lawsuit in which a judge agreed with its contention that the government had not done enough to solve the region's overfishing problem. The foundation was hoping to convince fishermen to work with it on a compromise plan to cut back fishing. The fishermen were there to convince thefoundation that harsh new regulations were not needed.
James M. Knott Sr., a longtime lobsterman, told the foundation representatives that he had seen dire predictions for lobster populations just before their number took off. And he told them he has been seeing more cod in his lobster traps -- a sign of bounty -- than he can ever remember.
"I put my first lobster trap in the water in 1942," said Knott. "I have never seen as many cod in my traps as I do now."
Stommel told Douglas I. Foy, then the head of the foundation and now Chief of Commonwealth Development in the Romney administration, that he could prove that the science that formed the basis of the judge's decision was wrong. Stommel recalls Foy telling him: "I don't care if the science is wrong."
Foy denies saying that but says he was frustrated that the fishermen were denying the problem's existence and focusing on the science, instead of trying to join in a cooperative solution to overfishing. He reminded them that the judge's ruling was based on "the best available science."
"I was pretty hot after that meeting," Stommel says. "Yes, this is the best available science, and that is a damn shame."
Forging a relationship In October of last year, the Albatross IV set out from Woods Hole with some unusual guests amongst its crew: fishermen.
The fishermen, Stommel among them, were invited on board to observe as the scientists tested the effects of fishing with the infamous uneven trawl wires. Another fishing boat, the 80-foot Sea Breeze, out of Newport, R.I., also joined the testing mission, fishing alongside the Albatross as it made its trawls. Depending on whom you ask, the trip went well -- or disastrously.
Scientists didn't find much evidence that the lopsided net had caught much less than one properly set. "Trawlgate" seemed overblown. But the fishermen said they saw a host of problems on board, including poor seamanship and unskilled fishing. For one thing, they said, the Albatross' nets seemed prone to tangling, making them less likely to catch and keep the fish.
To the fishermen, the voyage seemed like little more than a superficial attempt to allay concerns about the lopsided trawls.
"This was not about science," Stommel says. "It was about appearances."
Emotions that day were perhaps especially raw because the painful "trawlgate" reminder came as fishermen and scientists were starting to see the need -- indeed, the necessity -- of working together.
"Talking over a coffee and charts in the wheelhouse, I think we can learn a lot from each other," said a chastened Murawski, who Stommel believes is genuinely interested in forging a better relationship with fishermen.
Fishermen and scientists are working together on ideas for improving the government's surveys when New England gets a replacement for the aging Albatross. Currently, the Albatross samples at random locations, but the fishermen are helping to make a list of fixed locations where they see fish congregate.
The government is also expanding cooperative research: One idea is to tag cod, like ornithologists tag birds, to study where they move through their lives.
There are also less formal efforts afoot.
Murawski asked Stommel into the science center for a few days of training in how scientific fish population models work. Stommel recently gave Murawski a copy of "Come Aboard the Draggers," a book about the exploits of early New England fishermen.
Both men know the work they are doing now doesn't just hold meaning for them and the fishing village they call home. Both are working to leave something to the next generation. One of Stommel's children once visited the wharf with her school class to learn about fishing. The group spent the morning with Murawski, the afternoon with Stommel.
"I was amazed at how clued in they were to the fact there are no bad guys and good guys," Murawski says. "This stuff isn't black and white."
Tomorrow: The fishermen vs. the environmentalists
A once great industry on the brink
After tough choices avoided, future bleak
By Beth Daley and Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | October 26, 2003
First in a four-part series
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
PORTLAND, Maine -- In the veiled blue of the sinking twilight, Knoep Nieuwkerk is guiding the 38-foot Hannah-Jo homeward, past the Portland Head Light, when two of his crewmen begin what seems an act of madness: tossing gleaming, freshly caught cod back into the sea.
One by one the fish hit the water, and slide to the ocean floor, dead. The 400 pounds of cod Nieuwkerk's crew dump that day would have earned them $600, at least, at the next day's Portland fish auction. Yet days spent fighting wind and waves often end this way, with the New England fisherman's most despised ritual.
The government allows small boat fishermen to catch only 500 pounds of cod per day and requires them to toss any extra overboard before they reach shore. The rule is supposed to protect the fish, but fishermen often can't help but catch too much cod as they scour the sea, meaning that every year more than three million pounds of fish are squandered in the name of saving the fishery.
Fishermen say the government won't even let them donate their catch to charity, though they have begged.
"It really makes no sense," Nieuwkerk says. "The fish are dead either way."
If a single word describes what has happened to the once-proud tradition of fishing in New England, it is this: Waste.
Twenty-seven years ago, the federal government seized control of the region's fishing industry in a bid to save it, then presided over its collapse, as the number of fish in one of the world's richest fishing grounds fell to historic lows. Tough choices were avoided -- like enforcing firm annual limits on the catch. And foolish choices were subsidized: the expansion and modernization of a fishing fleet that may now be three times too big for the fishery to sustain.
Instead of forcing the fleet to shrink, the government has deployed a bewildering array of half-measures -- like the 500-pound cod limit. Many local fishermen are living like Nieuwkerk, risking their lives on the open seas, yet finding it harder and harder to earn a living. And now many must face the possibility of a future without fishing at all.
Fed up with the failure of fishermen and their regulators to act, a federal judge has ordered the government to drastically reduce fishing in the region's waters. Next month, the council that oversees fishing here will meet to decide just how to do that. As early as next spring, New England's signature industry could be radically diminished -- a Draconian comeuppance for decades of indecision.
It is a sad, surprising turn that the first men who plied New England waters could have scarcely imagined. When European fishermen came upon the stretch of Atlantic off what is now called Cape Cod, the waters churned with schools of fish. New England's fleet of great wooden schooners -- nearly 800 of them in Boston and Gloucester combined -- were soon the envy of the world. In New England, cod was king. Enriched by a West Indies trade of fish for molasses, boat owners were referred to as the "codfish aristocracy."
Yet the story of how a great industry was laid low is not, as many assume, primarily a tale of unbridled fishermen's greed, unless Nieuwkerk's dream of helping his three kids get a start in life can be called greed. It is, instead, a familiar story of modern times: Technology has transformed the hunt at sea much as it has revolutionized agriculture and warfare, putting enormous power -- such as Nieuwkerk's GPS locator and nylon nets -- within easy reach.
But neither fishermen nor their regulators reacted to the change. The result has been an entirely avoidable, man-made disaster. These increasingly powerful boats have beaten down many stocks of groundfish -- the cod, flounder, and other species that feed near the ocean bottom. Although some species have begun to show signs of revival, the industry remains locked in economic depression, threatening the kind of collapse that has wiped out Newfoundland's fishing industry.
The risk is not to the regional economy -- once the engine, fishing is now, outside of a few ports, a small business here -- but more to regional identity. Surviving the loss of a few thousand jobs along the coast is imaginable in a way that New England without fishing -- home to the bean but not the cod -- is not.
And so the decisions made in the coming weeks will be among the most pivotal in the more than three centuries of our iconic industry. Yet setting a new course for fishing in New England is not as simple as picking one of the five complex options to be debated next month, options that include the kind of strict catch quotas that New England, unlike some other North American fisheries, has largely avoided.
If there is to be a solution that works -- one that does not just set new rules but creates a climate in which they will be accepted and obeyed -- it can't come from the government or courts alone, veterans of the conflict agree. The present dilemma is very much the result of a clash of cultures between three very different groups of people -- scientists, environmentalists, and fishermen -- whose interests and passions have collided time and again at the water's edge, building a deep well of distrust that has worsened and sustained the crisis.
It falls to scientists to determine how many fish are left -- and thus how many can be caught -- yet the ways of these ancient animals are difficult to plumb. Counting fish has proved a profoundly difficult thing to do. Most fishermen believe the scientists are not up to the task; indeed, some have even actively sabotaged the fish counting effort that ultimately will govern whether they have work or not.
Environmentalists have also played a crucial role, filing lawsuits that have moved the government to forcefully intervene to stop overfishing. But their idealism has come at a price: the imperiled livelihood of hundreds of fishermen and their families. Environmentalists increasingly see the need to find a middle way, balancing advocacy for the fish with compassion for those who catch them.
Finally, there are the fishermen themselves. Many are focused, naturally enough, on survival. But to survive as a group, this band of individualists will have to come to consensus on a gut-wrenching fact: Some must go.
"In the past, it's been a complete disaster," says Vaughn Anthony, a retired National Marine Fisheries Service scientist who has watched the crisis build over more than 30 years. "But we have a chance for a magnificent fishery again."
The killing machines
They appeared like giant sea creatures in the 1960s, pushing through the frigid Atlantic just a few miles off New England's coast.
And, in a sense, they were monsters. With their football-field-size nets, the 400-foot ships were nearly perfect fish-killing machines. Called "factory trawlers," they came from the Soviet Union, Japan, and other nations to scour fish from international waters and then fillet and freeze everything right on board. The boats were so efficient, fishermen swore that the seagulls that followed them in search of food starved to death.
"After the trawlers came, if you happened to be somewhere when they descended on you, two days later there were no fish," says Jake Dykstra, a white-bearded 82-year-old Rhode Island fisherman. "We didn't believe it could happen."
Before the trawlers, Dykstra and his peers had little reason to think of fish as anything but an unlimited resource. Even after the government stepped in to seize control of the nation's fisheries from these giant boats in 1976, fishermen continued to see the ocean as eternally able to rejuvenate itself.
For Dykstra, as for many, the equation was simple: Rough work for a decent living. And it was very rough work.
Dykstra, who started fishing when he was eight, has constant pain in his knees from decades of kneeling on a pitching deck, picking fish from his net. Today he can't stand for long. But he loved being on the open water catching scup and butterfish, and he also loved the money. Fishing bought Dykstra a boat, a house, and a good life.
"It was what I knew," Dykstra says. "But it also paid."
Yet the fishery he knew was already diminished from its glory years. Before the arrival of modern boats, New England's waters were even richer, and the fish were huge. Some legends say fish were so plentiful, it was hard for a small boat not to bump into 3-foot-long cod; one fish, caught in 1895, weighed over 200 pounds. Today, the average size of cod on the Scotian Shelf, a stretch of Atlantic off Nova Scotia, is 6.5 pounds. In the 1850s, it was 20 pounds.
New England became an international hub of the trade in cod cured with salt, a signature food item before the invention of refrigeration. Cargo ships brought loads of salt here from as far away as Sicily and left heavy with salted cod caught in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for destinations around the world. These were the "salt bankers" described in Rudyard Kipling's "Captains Courageous."
The cod became a symbol of prosperity in New England, with its image carved in the woodwork of wealthy merchants' mansions. A carved wooden cod still hangs in the Massachusetts State House.
And so there had seemed little cause for worry when the foreign trawlers steamed into view. The fish might be smaller than they once were, but the nets were full. Thus, the early reception was friendly. The trawler captains were mostly interested in herring, mackerel, and squid -- species New Englanders snubbed. When local swordfishing boats ran out of live bait, East German captains would happily dump a load of herring on their decks.
But between 1963 and 1974, New England's groundfish declined by almost 70 percent, according to US government statistics. So many trawlers were on the water, Dykstra remembers nights at sea lit up like Times Square.
Dykstra, then president of the Point Judith Fishermen's Cooperative Association, Rhode Island fishermen who collectively processed and marketed their catch, suggested a one-sentence law: No one but US fishermen could fish within US waters.
It took more than 50 pages to finally say it, but in 1976, Congress passed a bill now known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. The law, which claimed all fishing rights within 200 miles of the American coast, took effect in 1977.
The foreign trawlers were kicked out, and American fishermen had the fishing to themselves -- and, before long, a new problem.
High times in Boomtown
By the late 1970s, the tired, old Italian fishermen playing cards and drinking beer in Gloucester's St. Peter's Club were sitting up straight at the conversations they overheard.
Fishermen were talking about making money again. St. Peter's was the unofficial headquarters of Gloucester's fishing community, a rectangular building on Main Street with a worn bar on the first floor. Photographs of sailors and their boats lined the walls, and a 600-pound stone statue of St. Peter -- the patron saint of fishermen -- rested on a pedestal nearby. For years St. Peter's was where fishermen went to complain about the trawlers and the bad fishing.
Now, the fishermen were clanking mugs together and boasting about steel-hulled boats and newly painted pilothouses. They took daily bets on who would bring home the biggest catch.
With the foreign trawlers gone, and with government assistance pouring in, an irrational exuberance had taken hold. Landings of cod and other fish shot up, and the money poured in.
"The times were high," remembers Vito Calomo, who finished building a new steel-hulled boat, the Italian Gold, in 1980. "Fishermen wanted to have bragging rights. Their chest would come out like they won the Olympics, and it was all about who could catch the most fish the fastest."
The US Commerce Department and other federal agencies had begun trying to rebuild and modernize New England's aging fleet, with loan guarantees, even before the foreign trawlers left. But with foreign competition gone, opportunity beckoned. New tax laws gave lucrative credits to people investing in boats, drawing in money from bankers, businessmen, and others riding high in the go-go 1980s.
The boom hit everywhere. Off Portsmouth, N.H., a Badger's Island boat-building company arranged "package" deals for investors to take advantage of loan guarantee programs: If they built a boat, the company would provide a bona fide captain to catch the fish.
In New Bedford, fishermen remember bank officers in shiny shoes coming down to the docks to woo them into taking out loans. The construction of new groundfishing boats in the northeast tripled in just three years, peaking in 1979 with the launch of 176 vessels.
It was easy to be swept up in the excitement. In Virginia, a businessman named John Hastings and four partners took the tax credits and built the Virginia Gentleman, an 83-foot steel hulled boat in an Alabama boatyard. A government loan guarantee secured a low-interest rate.
Vito Seniti, an Italian immigrant, purchased the Virginia Gentleman for $425,000 in 1986, with the help of the government loan.
"When I bought the Virginia Gentleman, the government called me, and they said, `We'll even give you another boat,' " remembers Seniti, who still fishes. "They wanted you to fish."
These were killer boats. Armed with modern electronics; powerful diesel engines; and sturdy, efficient trawls, they could take many more fish than the previous generation of vessels. One marine economist estimated the productivity of the average groundfish boat increased by 10 percent annually between 1977 and 1982.
The number of fish being landed at New England ports soared. Between 1976 and 1982, the amount of Georges Bank cod landed jumped from about 15,000 metric tons to a high of more than 39,000 metric tons -- about 60 million servings -- worth more than $60 million in 2002 dollars. In 2001, fishermen landed 10,635 metric tons of cod from Georges Bank.
Standing between the growing army of fishermen and the fish stocks was a government group called the New England Fishery Management Council. Created by the Magnuson Act, the council was charged with deciding what restrictions are needed to ensure that fishermen don't overfish.
But the majority of the council is made up of fishermen -- not a group with an interest in raising a caution flag, particularly in flush times. It was a self-defeating formula for preserving the fishery. And, soon enough, the signs of defeat were unmistakable.
In its first decade of "saving" New England groundfish, the government allowed the overall population to drop by a stunning 65 percent. By 1989, even the reluctant council had to admit there was a problem, declaring cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder overfished, but did little about it.
At Gloucester's St. Peter's Club, fishermen started talking again about disappearing fish. Some blamed it on unusually cold water. Quietly, a few began seeing the wisdom in limits on the catch, as painful as that would be.
As St. Peter looked on, the debates raged over. But the peeling paint on boats down at the state pier and the rattling trucks in the parking lot told the real story: There were barely enough fish to make a living.
"We got scared," Calomo says.
Spreading the misery around
On March 9, 1994, a group of angry fishermen tore through the Gloucester waterfront, tipping over cars and tossing fish off a truck. Two days later several hundred New Bedford fishermen made their way from Leonard's Wharf to the local federal building, throwing rocks and setting off the kind of orange smoke devices used to declare an emergency at sea.
Up and down the New England coast that month, protests roiled virtually every major fishing port. The reason? The council had finally decided to act, announcing limits on the number of days fishermen would be allowed to go to sea. The restrictions were the first in a series of increasingly stringent measures, each one ratcheting up the outrage of fishermen, but each still inadequate to address the dilemma.
The council's choice was and remains to spread the misery around, tightening limits on everyone, instead of addressing the fundamental problem: There are too many boats, a fleet of 1,500 in a fishery that can sustain perhaps 300-400 full-time boats.
"The council has never made the hard cuts it needs to," says Andrew Rosenberg, the former northeast administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency which overseas the nation's fisheries. Rosenberg used to call his job "a thousand ways of saying you're killing too many fish."
Quotas are the rule in most well-managed fisheries. In Alaska, for example, the pollock catch -- the single largest in the world -- closes down when the annual limit is reached.
But here, after one early experiment with annual catch quotas triggered rage and cheating by fishermen, the council has relied on what is known as "effort control."
It is, simply put, a way to set limits on the catch by making fishermen less efficient. First, a target for the catch is set, based on scientists' estimate of what the fishery can sustain. Then the council decrees limits on how many days boats can fish, what kind of gear they can use, and when they must throw fish back.
Nieuwkerk, for example, is allowed to go after groundfish only 70 days each year on the Hannah-Jo, and he must use a net with a wide mesh that allows smaller fish to escape.
But effort control hasn't worked because the council has refused to set limits that are strict enough. And when the fishermen catch more than the target for the year, as they have routinely in recent years, the council has done little about it. In the 1996 fishing year, for example, the fleet caught nearly four times the amount of Georges Bank cod it was supposed to. In 2001, they were still catching more than twice the target.
"We only have those targets because the government says we have to," says one council member who asked not to be identified. "We don't like them."
As the council has dithered, the perils of inaction have been spotlighted outside our waters. In April Canadian officials banned both commercial and recreational cod fishing off Newfoundland, acknowledging that efforts to turn around their collapsed stocks had been a total failure. And a number of scientists have called for a total ban on cod fishing in the North Sea, saying that the population is so threatened it could go the way of Canada's stocks.
Beginning in the 1990s, Congress did attempt to reduce the number of boats in the New England fleet. But because the effort was driven by the desire to help struggling fishermen rather than encourage them into another line of work, it wound up having little impact on fleet size.
Congress spent $24 million buying back boats from fishermen and then ordered their destruction. But other boats quickly took their place on the water, according to a report by the General Accounting Office.
In 1996, Vito Seniti's Virginia Gentleman met its end in a gritty marina underneath the Fairhaven-New Bedford bridge. The government that helped pay to build it bought it back and ordered it destroyed.
"It killed me," Seniti says. "Everything on that boat was new."
Today the council can point to some successes. Yellowtail flounder in Georges Bank is thriving; haddock and winter flounder are staging a solid recovery. The council has totally rebuilt the scallop population, bringing an economic boon to New Bedford.
"I have been critical of the council myself," says Tom Hill, the council's vice-chairman. "But we have achieved some great successes."
But many fish species show little sign of bouncing back. A number of fish stocks are still near the lowest level they have ever been. And there is still this fact: Twenty-seven years after the government stepped in to revive the groundfish stocks, there are about the same number of groundfish -- and a lot fewer cod.
'Something is wrong'
Cranking in his third string of gillnets in roiling seas 43 miles off Portland, Nieuwkerk guided a monkfish down a deck chute to crewman David Barthelmey, who sliced the fish and threw its entrails to a waiting flock of seagulls. A cod came next, then a pollock, then a flounder.
Fishing is the only work that Nieuwkerk, a blond man with powerful arms, has ever known. The son of a Dutch psychiatrist, he began fishing as a child, escaping from sailing on his family's boat to go down to the Cape Porpoise dock in Kennebunkport and fish.
He chose fishing as his life's work in high school and painstakingly worked on boats, saving a little each week, to buy his first boat 21 years ago.
"I just don't know," Nieuwkerk says now, "what is going to happen."
Part of the allure of fishing is the stark independence of the life, of man and net, and the dangerous sea. But now Nieuwkerk's fate is tied up with a cast of characters he has never met.
There is Steve Murawski, a bearded man who once worked a swordfish boat out of Gloucester, but who now directs government scientists' efforts to count New England's fish from a crowded office in Woods Hole. There is Peter Shelley, a lifelong environmentalist who has lost some of the early idealism of his youth and now worries that some of his colleagues are going too far.
And there are others, too, who may have bits of wisdom to offer him: Gudrun Palsdottir, the matriarch of a fishing family in a tiny Icelandic village, where experiments with quotas are having some effect. Or Luis Ribas, a Portuguese-born fisherman who is convinced he has a novel way to save the fish and save the fleet -- even as he can't afford to insure his two old wooden boats.
For Nieuwkerk, and for all fishermen, there are many reasons to be angry right now. They love the ocean, and depend on it, yet environmentalists accuse them of wanting to exploit it. They find their lives and livelihood controlled by scientists who speak, sometimes patronizingly, in the detached language of statistics. Over the coming year, they feel they are going to be punished -- and many put out of business -- by a government that utterly failed to do its job.
In Portland, or any other fishing community, it is not uncommon to see the bumper sticker: "Commercial fishing is not a crime."
On a recent fishing trip, Nieuwkerk had to turn back early as the weather soured. The waves were 9 feet high, but the real danger was a wind that ripped around from southwest to northeast in a half-hour. Nieuwkerk's boat, little more than a pilothouse and an open deck with a thigh-high railing and three bunks below, was getting a vicious tossing. A coffee cup fell off a chair and rolled across the pilothouse floor. Cod, hake, pollock, and flounder sloshed in a long white freezer at the back of the boat.
In the warmth of the pilothouse, Nieuwkerk contemplated the mad world he has found himself in. It is a world in which he must throw dead cod back into the sea. It is also a world in which the fish seem to be coming back, but fishermen are about to be ordered to fish even less, or maybe not to fish at all.
"There is so much more cod out there than ever before, but the scientists say there still isn't enough," Nieuwkerk says as he gazes out at the relentless march of steel-gray waves. "Something is wrong."
Tomorrow: Counting cod, courting controversy
-------
'It's what I know. I'm not going to do anything else.'
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | October 26, 2003
It was the middle of another freezing night, with icicles hanging from the pilothouse roof, when Captain Bill Sherman found what he'd been looking for: an enormous school of fish gliding along the ocean floorWithin an hour, Sherman and his four-member crew had hauled up a giant net overflowing with silver-gray haddock and dumped a whopping $20,000 catch onto the frigid, pitching deck.
It was the kind of thrilling, and lucrative, moment that fishermen live for.
But it followed several tedious days of the comparatively fruitless fish-hunting that fishermen also know well. Sherman's Curlew II didn't score another monster haul during a six-day trip that traversed 500 miles of sea last winter.
That blend of bonanza and boredom is the life the 50-year-old Fairhaven man has chosen, the only job he's ever had.
"It's what I know," says Sherman, a brawny man who admits he does, at times, get sick of the vagaries of the fishing life. But, he quickly adds, "I'm not going to do anything else."
Sherman and the crew of his 80-foot deep-water dragger are typical of the hundreds of fishermen who stick by New England's original trade despite the hardships and obvious hazards of a job that has claimed 112 lives in the Northeast in the last 10 years.
Like generations of fishermen dating back to the first European seafarers, the crew of the Curlew II endure the risks, and the loneliness of long absences from home and family, sustained by the dream of next big catch.
This is not a line of work for those with tender stomaches, or thin skin. Foul weather is almost the rule as far from shore as Sherman likes to fish. Icy waves regularly crash over the deck -- and sometimes over the pilothouse -- as the five men cycle through shift after shift.
"When we go on the boat, we have to have faith in the boat, in the skipper, and faith in the crew," says Ernest Hamblin, 62, whose father and grandfather also fished. "It's a bond."
It's hard work, but there are small comforts. Crewman Lester Benner, the designated cook, prepares two solid meals a day -- meat, rarely fish -- in the ship's galley. The crew can sometimes take a break for a couple of hours after the net is lowered to drag along. At such times there is often a cluster around the VCR in the wood-paneled stateroom. Sherman is particularly fond of the Joe Pesci comedy "Gone Fishing."
When the net comes up, writhing with hundreds of fish of several different species, the real work begins. After gutting the fish on deck, the crew places flounder and other flat fish in baskets to be stored while more precious cod and haddock are washed, and slid down a chute into the ice-filled fish hold. The fish slosh at their feet, and blood stains the men's boots and clothes. Gulls hover nearby, awaiting their share.
It can be an isolated and frightening world -- one where the crew is almost entirely on its own if something goes wrong. If anything breaks down -- and it often does -- it is Sherman or one of the crew members who must needle-mend the fishing net or repair the winch. Last year, Sherman had to snuff out a minor fire in the engine room.
By the time the ship reaches port, groaning with 35,000 pounds of fish, the men are drained. They hire others to unload the catch onto a waiting truck, then go home to sleep for up to 15 hours as their fish is sold at the Boston Fish Pier auction to buyers from New York.
The trip can often yield $30,000 worth of fish -- more if it's winter and the prices are high. After expenses, which can run as much as $7,000 per trip, the boat owner gets half of the profit, while Sherman and his crew split the rest.
"It's always a gamble," says Benner, who lost an index finger when he was struck by a 300-pound piece of fishing gear. "You might not catch fish. And you have to put up with the weather. But I get away from the rat race, and it's quiet and beautiful out there."
"My wife," he also jokes, "says the only reason we've been married 20 years is because I'm never home."
By Beth Daley and Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | October 26, 2003
First in a four-part series
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Award for Excellence in Ocean Science Journalism - 2005, Print
PORTLAND, Maine -- In the veiled blue of the sinking twilight, Knoep Nieuwkerk is guiding the 38-foot Hannah-Jo homeward, past the Portland Head Light, when two of his crewmen begin what seems an act of madness: tossing gleaming, freshly caught cod back into the sea.
One by one the fish hit the water, and slide to the ocean floor, dead. The 400 pounds of cod Nieuwkerk's crew dump that day would have earned them $600, at least, at the next day's Portland fish auction. Yet days spent fighting wind and waves often end this way, with the New England fisherman's most despised ritual.
The government allows small boat fishermen to catch only 500 pounds of cod per day and requires them to toss any extra overboard before they reach shore. The rule is supposed to protect the fish, but fishermen often can't help but catch too much cod as they scour the sea, meaning that every year more than three million pounds of fish are squandered in the name of saving the fishery.
Fishermen say the government won't even let them donate their catch to charity, though they have begged.
"It really makes no sense," Nieuwkerk says. "The fish are dead either way."
If a single word describes what has happened to the once-proud tradition of fishing in New England, it is this: Waste.
Twenty-seven years ago, the federal government seized control of the region's fishing industry in a bid to save it, then presided over its collapse, as the number of fish in one of the world's richest fishing grounds fell to historic lows. Tough choices were avoided -- like enforcing firm annual limits on the catch. And foolish choices were subsidized: the expansion and modernization of a fishing fleet that may now be three times too big for the fishery to sustain.
Instead of forcing the fleet to shrink, the government has deployed a bewildering array of half-measures -- like the 500-pound cod limit. Many local fishermen are living like Nieuwkerk, risking their lives on the open seas, yet finding it harder and harder to earn a living. And now many must face the possibility of a future without fishing at all.
Fed up with the failure of fishermen and their regulators to act, a federal judge has ordered the government to drastically reduce fishing in the region's waters. Next month, the council that oversees fishing here will meet to decide just how to do that. As early as next spring, New England's signature industry could be radically diminished -- a Draconian comeuppance for decades of indecision.
It is a sad, surprising turn that the first men who plied New England waters could have scarcely imagined. When European fishermen came upon the stretch of Atlantic off what is now called Cape Cod, the waters churned with schools of fish. New England's fleet of great wooden schooners -- nearly 800 of them in Boston and Gloucester combined -- were soon the envy of the world. In New England, cod was king. Enriched by a West Indies trade of fish for molasses, boat owners were referred to as the "codfish aristocracy."
Yet the story of how a great industry was laid low is not, as many assume, primarily a tale of unbridled fishermen's greed, unless Nieuwkerk's dream of helping his three kids get a start in life can be called greed. It is, instead, a familiar story of modern times: Technology has transformed the hunt at sea much as it has revolutionized agriculture and warfare, putting enormous power -- such as Nieuwkerk's GPS locator and nylon nets -- within easy reach.
But neither fishermen nor their regulators reacted to the change. The result has been an entirely avoidable, man-made disaster. These increasingly powerful boats have beaten down many stocks of groundfish -- the cod, flounder, and other species that feed near the ocean bottom. Although some species have begun to show signs of revival, the industry remains locked in economic depression, threatening the kind of collapse that has wiped out Newfoundland's fishing industry.
The risk is not to the regional economy -- once the engine, fishing is now, outside of a few ports, a small business here -- but more to regional identity. Surviving the loss of a few thousand jobs along the coast is imaginable in a way that New England without fishing -- home to the bean but not the cod -- is not.
And so the decisions made in the coming weeks will be among the most pivotal in the more than three centuries of our iconic industry. Yet setting a new course for fishing in New England is not as simple as picking one of the five complex options to be debated next month, options that include the kind of strict catch quotas that New England, unlike some other North American fisheries, has largely avoided.
If there is to be a solution that works -- one that does not just set new rules but creates a climate in which they will be accepted and obeyed -- it can't come from the government or courts alone, veterans of the conflict agree. The present dilemma is very much the result of a clash of cultures between three very different groups of people -- scientists, environmentalists, and fishermen -- whose interests and passions have collided time and again at the water's edge, building a deep well of distrust that has worsened and sustained the crisis.
It falls to scientists to determine how many fish are left -- and thus how many can be caught -- yet the ways of these ancient animals are difficult to plumb. Counting fish has proved a profoundly difficult thing to do. Most fishermen believe the scientists are not up to the task; indeed, some have even actively sabotaged the fish counting effort that ultimately will govern whether they have work or not.
Environmentalists have also played a crucial role, filing lawsuits that have moved the government to forcefully intervene to stop overfishing. But their idealism has come at a price: the imperiled livelihood of hundreds of fishermen and their families. Environmentalists increasingly see the need to find a middle way, balancing advocacy for the fish with compassion for those who catch them.
Finally, there are the fishermen themselves. Many are focused, naturally enough, on survival. But to survive as a group, this band of individualists will have to come to consensus on a gut-wrenching fact: Some must go.
"In the past, it's been a complete disaster," says Vaughn Anthony, a retired National Marine Fisheries Service scientist who has watched the crisis build over more than 30 years. "But we have a chance for a magnificent fishery again."
The killing machines
They appeared like giant sea creatures in the 1960s, pushing through the frigid Atlantic just a few miles off New England's coast.
And, in a sense, they were monsters. With their football-field-size nets, the 400-foot ships were nearly perfect fish-killing machines. Called "factory trawlers," they came from the Soviet Union, Japan, and other nations to scour fish from international waters and then fillet and freeze everything right on board. The boats were so efficient, fishermen swore that the seagulls that followed them in search of food starved to death.
"After the trawlers came, if you happened to be somewhere when they descended on you, two days later there were no fish," says Jake Dykstra, a white-bearded 82-year-old Rhode Island fisherman. "We didn't believe it could happen."
Before the trawlers, Dykstra and his peers had little reason to think of fish as anything but an unlimited resource. Even after the government stepped in to seize control of the nation's fisheries from these giant boats in 1976, fishermen continued to see the ocean as eternally able to rejuvenate itself.
For Dykstra, as for many, the equation was simple: Rough work for a decent living. And it was very rough work.
Dykstra, who started fishing when he was eight, has constant pain in his knees from decades of kneeling on a pitching deck, picking fish from his net. Today he can't stand for long. But he loved being on the open water catching scup and butterfish, and he also loved the money. Fishing bought Dykstra a boat, a house, and a good life.
"It was what I knew," Dykstra says. "But it also paid."
Yet the fishery he knew was already diminished from its glory years. Before the arrival of modern boats, New England's waters were even richer, and the fish were huge. Some legends say fish were so plentiful, it was hard for a small boat not to bump into 3-foot-long cod; one fish, caught in 1895, weighed over 200 pounds. Today, the average size of cod on the Scotian Shelf, a stretch of Atlantic off Nova Scotia, is 6.5 pounds. In the 1850s, it was 20 pounds.
New England became an international hub of the trade in cod cured with salt, a signature food item before the invention of refrigeration. Cargo ships brought loads of salt here from as far away as Sicily and left heavy with salted cod caught in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for destinations around the world. These were the "salt bankers" described in Rudyard Kipling's "Captains Courageous."
The cod became a symbol of prosperity in New England, with its image carved in the woodwork of wealthy merchants' mansions. A carved wooden cod still hangs in the Massachusetts State House.
And so there had seemed little cause for worry when the foreign trawlers steamed into view. The fish might be smaller than they once were, but the nets were full. Thus, the early reception was friendly. The trawler captains were mostly interested in herring, mackerel, and squid -- species New Englanders snubbed. When local swordfishing boats ran out of live bait, East German captains would happily dump a load of herring on their decks.
But between 1963 and 1974, New England's groundfish declined by almost 70 percent, according to US government statistics. So many trawlers were on the water, Dykstra remembers nights at sea lit up like Times Square.
Dykstra, then president of the Point Judith Fishermen's Cooperative Association, Rhode Island fishermen who collectively processed and marketed their catch, suggested a one-sentence law: No one but US fishermen could fish within US waters.
It took more than 50 pages to finally say it, but in 1976, Congress passed a bill now known as the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act. The law, which claimed all fishing rights within 200 miles of the American coast, took effect in 1977.
The foreign trawlers were kicked out, and American fishermen had the fishing to themselves -- and, before long, a new problem.
High times in Boomtown
By the late 1970s, the tired, old Italian fishermen playing cards and drinking beer in Gloucester's St. Peter's Club were sitting up straight at the conversations they overheard.
Fishermen were talking about making money again. St. Peter's was the unofficial headquarters of Gloucester's fishing community, a rectangular building on Main Street with a worn bar on the first floor. Photographs of sailors and their boats lined the walls, and a 600-pound stone statue of St. Peter -- the patron saint of fishermen -- rested on a pedestal nearby. For years St. Peter's was where fishermen went to complain about the trawlers and the bad fishing.
Now, the fishermen were clanking mugs together and boasting about steel-hulled boats and newly painted pilothouses. They took daily bets on who would bring home the biggest catch.
With the foreign trawlers gone, and with government assistance pouring in, an irrational exuberance had taken hold. Landings of cod and other fish shot up, and the money poured in.
"The times were high," remembers Vito Calomo, who finished building a new steel-hulled boat, the Italian Gold, in 1980. "Fishermen wanted to have bragging rights. Their chest would come out like they won the Olympics, and it was all about who could catch the most fish the fastest."
The US Commerce Department and other federal agencies had begun trying to rebuild and modernize New England's aging fleet, with loan guarantees, even before the foreign trawlers left. But with foreign competition gone, opportunity beckoned. New tax laws gave lucrative credits to people investing in boats, drawing in money from bankers, businessmen, and others riding high in the go-go 1980s.
The boom hit everywhere. Off Portsmouth, N.H., a Badger's Island boat-building company arranged "package" deals for investors to take advantage of loan guarantee programs: If they built a boat, the company would provide a bona fide captain to catch the fish.
In New Bedford, fishermen remember bank officers in shiny shoes coming down to the docks to woo them into taking out loans. The construction of new groundfishing boats in the northeast tripled in just three years, peaking in 1979 with the launch of 176 vessels.
It was easy to be swept up in the excitement. In Virginia, a businessman named John Hastings and four partners took the tax credits and built the Virginia Gentleman, an 83-foot steel hulled boat in an Alabama boatyard. A government loan guarantee secured a low-interest rate.
Vito Seniti, an Italian immigrant, purchased the Virginia Gentleman for $425,000 in 1986, with the help of the government loan.
"When I bought the Virginia Gentleman, the government called me, and they said, `We'll even give you another boat,' " remembers Seniti, who still fishes. "They wanted you to fish."
These were killer boats. Armed with modern electronics; powerful diesel engines; and sturdy, efficient trawls, they could take many more fish than the previous generation of vessels. One marine economist estimated the productivity of the average groundfish boat increased by 10 percent annually between 1977 and 1982.
The number of fish being landed at New England ports soared. Between 1976 and 1982, the amount of Georges Bank cod landed jumped from about 15,000 metric tons to a high of more than 39,000 metric tons -- about 60 million servings -- worth more than $60 million in 2002 dollars. In 2001, fishermen landed 10,635 metric tons of cod from Georges Bank.
Standing between the growing army of fishermen and the fish stocks was a government group called the New England Fishery Management Council. Created by the Magnuson Act, the council was charged with deciding what restrictions are needed to ensure that fishermen don't overfish.
But the majority of the council is made up of fishermen -- not a group with an interest in raising a caution flag, particularly in flush times. It was a self-defeating formula for preserving the fishery. And, soon enough, the signs of defeat were unmistakable.
In its first decade of "saving" New England groundfish, the government allowed the overall population to drop by a stunning 65 percent. By 1989, even the reluctant council had to admit there was a problem, declaring cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder overfished, but did little about it.
At Gloucester's St. Peter's Club, fishermen started talking again about disappearing fish. Some blamed it on unusually cold water. Quietly, a few began seeing the wisdom in limits on the catch, as painful as that would be.
As St. Peter looked on, the debates raged over. But the peeling paint on boats down at the state pier and the rattling trucks in the parking lot told the real story: There were barely enough fish to make a living.
"We got scared," Calomo says.
Spreading the misery around
On March 9, 1994, a group of angry fishermen tore through the Gloucester waterfront, tipping over cars and tossing fish off a truck. Two days later several hundred New Bedford fishermen made their way from Leonard's Wharf to the local federal building, throwing rocks and setting off the kind of orange smoke devices used to declare an emergency at sea.
Up and down the New England coast that month, protests roiled virtually every major fishing port. The reason? The council had finally decided to act, announcing limits on the number of days fishermen would be allowed to go to sea. The restrictions were the first in a series of increasingly stringent measures, each one ratcheting up the outrage of fishermen, but each still inadequate to address the dilemma.
The council's choice was and remains to spread the misery around, tightening limits on everyone, instead of addressing the fundamental problem: There are too many boats, a fleet of 1,500 in a fishery that can sustain perhaps 300-400 full-time boats.
"The council has never made the hard cuts it needs to," says Andrew Rosenberg, the former northeast administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency which overseas the nation's fisheries. Rosenberg used to call his job "a thousand ways of saying you're killing too many fish."
Quotas are the rule in most well-managed fisheries. In Alaska, for example, the pollock catch -- the single largest in the world -- closes down when the annual limit is reached.
But here, after one early experiment with annual catch quotas triggered rage and cheating by fishermen, the council has relied on what is known as "effort control."
It is, simply put, a way to set limits on the catch by making fishermen less efficient. First, a target for the catch is set, based on scientists' estimate of what the fishery can sustain. Then the council decrees limits on how many days boats can fish, what kind of gear they can use, and when they must throw fish back.
Nieuwkerk, for example, is allowed to go after groundfish only 70 days each year on the Hannah-Jo, and he must use a net with a wide mesh that allows smaller fish to escape.
But effort control hasn't worked because the council has refused to set limits that are strict enough. And when the fishermen catch more than the target for the year, as they have routinely in recent years, the council has done little about it. In the 1996 fishing year, for example, the fleet caught nearly four times the amount of Georges Bank cod it was supposed to. In 2001, they were still catching more than twice the target.
"We only have those targets because the government says we have to," says one council member who asked not to be identified. "We don't like them."
As the council has dithered, the perils of inaction have been spotlighted outside our waters. In April Canadian officials banned both commercial and recreational cod fishing off Newfoundland, acknowledging that efforts to turn around their collapsed stocks had been a total failure. And a number of scientists have called for a total ban on cod fishing in the North Sea, saying that the population is so threatened it could go the way of Canada's stocks.
Beginning in the 1990s, Congress did attempt to reduce the number of boats in the New England fleet. But because the effort was driven by the desire to help struggling fishermen rather than encourage them into another line of work, it wound up having little impact on fleet size.
Congress spent $24 million buying back boats from fishermen and then ordered their destruction. But other boats quickly took their place on the water, according to a report by the General Accounting Office.
In 1996, Vito Seniti's Virginia Gentleman met its end in a gritty marina underneath the Fairhaven-New Bedford bridge. The government that helped pay to build it bought it back and ordered it destroyed.
"It killed me," Seniti says. "Everything on that boat was new."
Today the council can point to some successes. Yellowtail flounder in Georges Bank is thriving; haddock and winter flounder are staging a solid recovery. The council has totally rebuilt the scallop population, bringing an economic boon to New Bedford.
"I have been critical of the council myself," says Tom Hill, the council's vice-chairman. "But we have achieved some great successes."
But many fish species show little sign of bouncing back. A number of fish stocks are still near the lowest level they have ever been. And there is still this fact: Twenty-seven years after the government stepped in to revive the groundfish stocks, there are about the same number of groundfish -- and a lot fewer cod.
'Something is wrong'
Cranking in his third string of gillnets in roiling seas 43 miles off Portland, Nieuwkerk guided a monkfish down a deck chute to crewman David Barthelmey, who sliced the fish and threw its entrails to a waiting flock of seagulls. A cod came next, then a pollock, then a flounder.
Fishing is the only work that Nieuwkerk, a blond man with powerful arms, has ever known. The son of a Dutch psychiatrist, he began fishing as a child, escaping from sailing on his family's boat to go down to the Cape Porpoise dock in Kennebunkport and fish.
He chose fishing as his life's work in high school and painstakingly worked on boats, saving a little each week, to buy his first boat 21 years ago.
"I just don't know," Nieuwkerk says now, "what is going to happen."
Part of the allure of fishing is the stark independence of the life, of man and net, and the dangerous sea. But now Nieuwkerk's fate is tied up with a cast of characters he has never met.
There is Steve Murawski, a bearded man who once worked a swordfish boat out of Gloucester, but who now directs government scientists' efforts to count New England's fish from a crowded office in Woods Hole. There is Peter Shelley, a lifelong environmentalist who has lost some of the early idealism of his youth and now worries that some of his colleagues are going too far.
And there are others, too, who may have bits of wisdom to offer him: Gudrun Palsdottir, the matriarch of a fishing family in a tiny Icelandic village, where experiments with quotas are having some effect. Or Luis Ribas, a Portuguese-born fisherman who is convinced he has a novel way to save the fish and save the fleet -- even as he can't afford to insure his two old wooden boats.
For Nieuwkerk, and for all fishermen, there are many reasons to be angry right now. They love the ocean, and depend on it, yet environmentalists accuse them of wanting to exploit it. They find their lives and livelihood controlled by scientists who speak, sometimes patronizingly, in the detached language of statistics. Over the coming year, they feel they are going to be punished -- and many put out of business -- by a government that utterly failed to do its job.
In Portland, or any other fishing community, it is not uncommon to see the bumper sticker: "Commercial fishing is not a crime."
On a recent fishing trip, Nieuwkerk had to turn back early as the weather soured. The waves were 9 feet high, but the real danger was a wind that ripped around from southwest to northeast in a half-hour. Nieuwkerk's boat, little more than a pilothouse and an open deck with a thigh-high railing and three bunks below, was getting a vicious tossing. A coffee cup fell off a chair and rolled across the pilothouse floor. Cod, hake, pollock, and flounder sloshed in a long white freezer at the back of the boat.
In the warmth of the pilothouse, Nieuwkerk contemplated the mad world he has found himself in. It is a world in which he must throw dead cod back into the sea. It is also a world in which the fish seem to be coming back, but fishermen are about to be ordered to fish even less, or maybe not to fish at all.
"There is so much more cod out there than ever before, but the scientists say there still isn't enough," Nieuwkerk says as he gazes out at the relentless march of steel-gray waves. "Something is wrong."
Tomorrow: Counting cod, courting controversy
-------
'It's what I know. I'm not going to do anything else.'
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | October 26, 2003
It was the middle of another freezing night, with icicles hanging from the pilothouse roof, when Captain Bill Sherman found what he'd been looking for: an enormous school of fish gliding along the ocean floorWithin an hour, Sherman and his four-member crew had hauled up a giant net overflowing with silver-gray haddock and dumped a whopping $20,000 catch onto the frigid, pitching deck.
It was the kind of thrilling, and lucrative, moment that fishermen live for.
But it followed several tedious days of the comparatively fruitless fish-hunting that fishermen also know well. Sherman's Curlew II didn't score another monster haul during a six-day trip that traversed 500 miles of sea last winter.
That blend of bonanza and boredom is the life the 50-year-old Fairhaven man has chosen, the only job he's ever had.
"It's what I know," says Sherman, a brawny man who admits he does, at times, get sick of the vagaries of the fishing life. But, he quickly adds, "I'm not going to do anything else."
Sherman and the crew of his 80-foot deep-water dragger are typical of the hundreds of fishermen who stick by New England's original trade despite the hardships and obvious hazards of a job that has claimed 112 lives in the Northeast in the last 10 years.
Like generations of fishermen dating back to the first European seafarers, the crew of the Curlew II endure the risks, and the loneliness of long absences from home and family, sustained by the dream of next big catch.
This is not a line of work for those with tender stomaches, or thin skin. Foul weather is almost the rule as far from shore as Sherman likes to fish. Icy waves regularly crash over the deck -- and sometimes over the pilothouse -- as the five men cycle through shift after shift.
"When we go on the boat, we have to have faith in the boat, in the skipper, and faith in the crew," says Ernest Hamblin, 62, whose father and grandfather also fished. "It's a bond."
It's hard work, but there are small comforts. Crewman Lester Benner, the designated cook, prepares two solid meals a day -- meat, rarely fish -- in the ship's galley. The crew can sometimes take a break for a couple of hours after the net is lowered to drag along. At such times there is often a cluster around the VCR in the wood-paneled stateroom. Sherman is particularly fond of the Joe Pesci comedy "Gone Fishing."
When the net comes up, writhing with hundreds of fish of several different species, the real work begins. After gutting the fish on deck, the crew places flounder and other flat fish in baskets to be stored while more precious cod and haddock are washed, and slid down a chute into the ice-filled fish hold. The fish slosh at their feet, and blood stains the men's boots and clothes. Gulls hover nearby, awaiting their share.
It can be an isolated and frightening world -- one where the crew is almost entirely on its own if something goes wrong. If anything breaks down -- and it often does -- it is Sherman or one of the crew members who must needle-mend the fishing net or repair the winch. Last year, Sherman had to snuff out a minor fire in the engine room.
By the time the ship reaches port, groaning with 35,000 pounds of fish, the men are drained. They hire others to unload the catch onto a waiting truck, then go home to sleep for up to 15 hours as their fish is sold at the Boston Fish Pier auction to buyers from New York.
The trip can often yield $30,000 worth of fish -- more if it's winter and the prices are high. After expenses, which can run as much as $7,000 per trip, the boat owner gets half of the profit, while Sherman and his crew split the rest.
"It's always a gamble," says Benner, who lost an index finger when he was struck by a 300-pound piece of fishing gear. "You might not catch fish. And you have to put up with the weather. But I get away from the rat race, and it's quiet and beautiful out there."
"My wife," he also jokes, "says the only reason we've been married 20 years is because I'm never home."
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