Four Fish (20 page)

Nevertheless Ames believes that there are key, albeit tentative, biological signs of recovery occurring. This is why a new approach is necessary. Codfish
are
in fact creeping back to the old grounds; a few are showing up where before there were none at all. Ames believes that, managed correctly, within a decade the ancestral grounds could be recolonized. Perhaps they won’t rebuild to the level that his grand-father would recognize as abundant, but we can hope at least for a stock that Ames would call “an awful lot of cod.”

Thus, before we take the rebuilding goals of the Sustainable Fisheries Act as gospel, we must consider a larger historical picture and perhaps even look at it from the codfish’s point of view. If you were a codfish, you would have dreams not of retaining a tiny redoubt of your former wealth but of reclaiming your entire kingdom, a kingdom that spans the area from landfall to the continental shelf in every temperate shore of the Northern Hemisphere.

How, then, to reclaim this kingdom? Certainly not through the present management approach, Ames argues, in which a distant fisheries council in New England makes what appear to be arbitrary and careless decisions about fishing grounds with which it is only superficially familiar. Ames sees the current plan to “rebuild” only the offshore codfish fishery and then turn over the permits to large industrial fishing companies as a model that has been tried again and again over the last thirty-five years and has always led inevitably from one collapse to another. No, what Ames thinks is the key to it all is allowing fishermen themselves a voice in managing the fish their livelihood depends on, giving a voice to the small-scale, diverse, artisanal fishermen who are deeply invested in the area and the fish they catch.

“The appropriate analogy is what the United States did with its system of government at the outset,” Ames told me. “A system where federal, state, and county forms of government represent different levels of interest, all interacting with each other in a constructive way.” This is a model that has been successfully deployed with Maine’s other iconic animal: the lobster. There are now seven thousand Maine lobstermen, divided up into community units, each with intimate knowledge of and responsibility over a hyperlocal tract of ocean. Fishermen are not allowed to work an area unless they are residents, own a boat, and have evidenced a long-term commitment to their stock. And today lobster catches are booming. So much so that in 2008 the
New York Times
reported that seafood markets were experiencing a “lobster glut” and that prices were dropping by as much as four dollars a pound.

If such a system were put in place with codfish, Ames believes, the same kind of stewarded recovery could slowly take shape. But Ames also believes that simply turning out a new fleet of hyperlocal fishermen isn’t enough. What he imagines is a new
breed
of fishermen, one that is as knowledgeable about the ecosystem as it is about fishing. “I think that management’s biggest failing is that fishermen don’t have the knowledge they need to manage a complex thing like a marine coastal ecosystem,” Ames said, his voice rising in excitement. “Your right to fish shouldn’t be based on whether or not you have a suitcase of money to buy a boat—it should be based on knowledge. Your right to fish should be won or lost on your willingness to comply with credible science. It would be great if the Fisheries Service said that no one could stay in a wheelhouse unless they pass a written or oral exam on fisheries ecology. I believe this can work. I believe that knowledge can change the dynamic.”

As I listened to Ames explain all this, I realized that what he was imagining was something that has historically defined the most stable human/animal relationships. He was proposing that a stretch of territory be broken up into different lots, each with a fisherman possessing a deep, intimate knowledge of how many animals ranged around him, where they reproduced, how they were reared, how fast they grew. In such a system, a fisherman would adapt his fishing gear not just to catch more fish but to catch only the fish whose removal the ecosystem could support. And such a fisherman would stop fishing his territory not when he could no longer catch fish but rather when he observed clear biological signs that his swath of pasture needed to lie fallow.

I realized as I listened that he was proposing that fishermen, the world’s last hunter-gatherers, become herders.

 

 

 

F
ishermen as herders. I liked the idea. It seemed fair, organic, and balanced. It seemed like the kind of approach that would keep small-scale fishermen fishing and harbors working. Since fishermen are usually the people with the most intimate knowledge of fish behavior, maybe a little push in the direction of husbandry could fix the overfishing equation. Moreover, I could see the importance of having fishermen keep an anchor in the water. Humans have a way of overexploiting a resource if no one else is there to lay claim to it. An educated, thoughtful fisherman could be a guardian of sorts, someone who cherishes and understands the local ecology, someone who continues to make the ongoing argument against oil and gas exploration, or mining, or whatever else mankind will think up to exploit our coasts in the years to come.

And, slowly, the fisherman-as-steward concept appears to be getting a tenuous foothold in the market. The Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association, formed in 1991, has brought together a coterie of small-scale fishermen that use low-impact hook-and-line fishing gear to harvest cod and other groundfish from unclosed areas of Georges Bank. The Association des Ligneurs de la Pointe de Bretagne is doing similar things with the remaining wild European sea bass populations off the coast of France. In 2008 the association established a self-imposed fishing ban on sea bass from February 15 to March 15, the time when the fish is spawning and at its most vulnerable.

But there are some who would argue that the herding of fish is an intermediate step and that if we want to get truly efficient and productive, we have to turn the corner from herding and move on to outright cod farming, as we have done with salmon and sea bass—an entirely controlled path in which cod are taken out of the classic multi-input natural environment and put under monocultural human husbandry. When I began to investigate this, I found yet another instance where Mark Kurlansky’s book
Cod
had a resonating impact. In a remote corner of the North Sea, a copy of Kurlansky’s book had fallen into the hands of a Scotsman with the rather un-Scottish-sounding name of Karol Rzepkowski.

If you were to search for a place where the abundance of codfish could be reborn, the Shetland Islands would catch your eye on looks alone. A tiny archipelago stranded between Scotland and Norway, the Shetlands are considered by locals to be the United Kingdom’s best-kept secret. The human population is scattered across a series of small settlements that seem drawn from the 1980s comedy
Local Hero,
where “crofters” still live in earthen huts and the treeless heath spreads out under the mild light of the midnight sun. Even the relatively populated capital, Lerwick, boasts clear green-blue waters with beautiful flowing strands of waving eelgrass.

The Shetlands have the highest per capita public investment in the United Kingdom. After oil and gas were discovered beneath near-shore waters in the 1970s, a remarkably disciplined town council forced British Petroleum to pay an uncharacteristically large portion of oil profits into the community. Given the islands’ history of resistance, it is not surprising the locals won out.

Shetlanders are renowned for their resolve and independence, characteristics that date back to the time when the islands were discovered by two Viking lords. As legend has it, the two Norse noble-men had a bet between them—whoever touched the land of the islands first would get to claim them for his own. On realizing that his boat was falling behind as they approached landfall, the trailing nobleman took an ax from his belt, hacked off his hand, and threw it to shore before the other lord could touch dry land. Needless to say, the one-armed man won.

Nowadays Shetlanders fly the Norwegian flag nearly as often as they do the Union Jack, and while technically part of Scotland, a nation that historically bridles under the oppression of English power, Shetlanders often complain of the Scottish “invaders” who arrived in their islands and subjugated them just as the English later came and subjugated the Scots.

Karol Rzepkowski is not a native Shetlander. The child of émigrés who had fled Hitler, he grew up in Edinburgh, working in his father’s Polish delicatessen. “It was a proper delicatessen,” Rzepkowski told me when I went to visit him at the charming red barn that served as headquarters of Johnson Seafarms outside Lerwick. “There were big barrels of gherkins, properly salted.” Following the demise of Europe’s communist regimes in the late 1980s, Rzepkowski went to Eastern and Central Europe in the early 1990s and started an import-export business, where he traded in “everything from used clothes to oil pipelines.” The business was a tremendous success, and after making a tidy profit Rzepkowski moved to the Caribbean, where he “semiretired” and taught scuba diving.

Rzepkowski is a frenetic person, and lolling on a Caribbean island did not suit his temperament. One day while sitting in his beach chair, he opened a book someone had given him that would catapult him out of retirement. The book was
Cod
by Mark Kurlansky. “
Cod
was the first time that I actually sat up and took notice just what an issue there was with cod in the wild today and how few there are.”

Rzepkowski returned to Scotland, settling in the Shetlands, and thoughts of cod stayed in his head. In the early 2000s he answered an advertisement in a newspaper for Johnson Seafarms, a salmon aquaculture operation that needed a new manager. While he had no experience in fish farming, he had the idea to convert the operation over to cod farming, for he saw in cod an opportunity to grab the public’s attention. “Cod is a new species to aquaculture,” he told me. “The public is very aware of issues of the wild cod fisheries, so it’s easier to actually feed the information about our product to the public. It has made our product much more high-profile.”

Rzepkowski set about transforming Johnson Seafarms into a kind of living experiment on the validity of replacing a threatened wild species with an aquacultured version
.
And in order to show that these cod were as natural as possible, Rzepkowski decided to isolate all the things that had been criticized about industrial salmon farming and purge them from his process. Whereas Norwegians were trying to apply the model they had developed for salmon by investing millions of dollars in creating breeding lines to selectively create a highly productive race of cod, Rzepkowski refused to do any selective breeding at all. “I don’t think it’s a wise idea, especially when you’re starting off with a new species and a new industry to launch headfirst into trying to create Super Cod. Why? Cod is super anyway. We don’t need to turn it into Super Cod.”

In addition to eschewing selective breeding, Rzepkowski chose to raise cod in accordance with organic standards that had been established by the Scottish Soil Association. Included within these standards was a ream of animal-welfare laws that required cod be granted the “five freedoms” as set out by Britain’s Animal Welfare Council in 1992. These included freedom from overcrowding, freedom from hunger and thirst, freedom from disease, freedom to live life as close as they would have lived it had they been wild, and freedom from fear, distress, and mental suffering
.
Whereas some of Rzepkowski’s competitors tried to dissuade cod from chewing their way out of their net pens by coating nets with unpleasant-tasting paints, Rzepkowski gave his cod chew toys
.

But even with these strict standards being applied, the people at Johnson’s still found themselves slaves to a hard-to-replicate wild system. In nature, cod tune their behavior to the dramatic changes in sunlight that occur over the course of the year at the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. If it is the dark “halcyon days” of January that compel sea bass to spawn in the Mediterranean, in the North Sea it is the late-June solstice and the days of the
simmer dim
(the midnight sun in Shetland dialect) that cause a photosensitive organ in the cod’s brain to trigger the release of gonadotropic hormone. This hormone makes cod stop growing and instead devote their energy to the growth of eggs (roe) and sperm (milt). The roe and milt develop throughout the fall and on into the depths of winter when the sun disappears from the sky entirely. Then, in January, as the first traces of spring sunshine penetrate the North Atlantic depths, the cod begin congregating in balls so tight that a single trawler, were it to locate them, could scoop up an entire school in a few drags. Soon the cod begin to form spawning columns, sometimes three hundred feet high, swarming around one another and choosing their mates.

This wild cod bacchanalia is an annual ritual that Europeans have come to rely upon. Today in most of Europe, two-thirds of all cod are eaten during the three-month spawning migration when the
skrei torsk,
or “wandering cod,” the last truly healthy stock of wild cod in Europe, swim from the Barents Sea to the Norwegian fjords and the Scottish estuaries. This huge wild spawning migration presents a considerable problem for a would-be cod-farming entrepreneur. For if you are a cod farmer you must figure out a way to make your cod available when wild cod are scarce. And in order to do that, you must try to trick cod into spawning year-round so that there will always be a crop of cod reaching marketable size in any given month. At Johnson Seafarms this trick was achieved by artificially changing dawning of the midnight sun.

“Those fish over there are in the past, and those over there are in the future,” a pleasant young man with a hoop earring who was managing Johnson’s broodstock told me. In the breeding area of Johnson’s, the cod had been separated into twelve different tanks, each one representing the light and photoperiod of a different month of the year. Since cod tune their spawning to the amount of daylight they receive each day, the staggering of light made it possible to have at least one group of cod spawning every month. Thus while wild cod might be available for only a few months out of the year, farmed cod could conceivably be available during all the months when wild cod can’t be found.