| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 28, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Fished Out AGAINST THE TIDE The Fate of the New England Fisherman By Richard Adams Carey Houghton Mifflin 381pp $23 Two winters after I left college, I was broke. I lived on Cape Cod and wanted to work on fishing boats, but no one would hire me. So I borrowed money, refurbished an old motor launch, and went fishing for cod. The job was hard and didn't pay well, but it was good to be on the water, and I liked being my own boss. In later years, I went on to do other things, but I found comfort in knowing that if times got tough again, I could always make a living off the cod of Nantucket Shoals. Those days are gone for good. Over the past 10 years, the Northeast fisheries have foundered like the Andrea Doria. Richard Adams Carey's Against the Tide describes how this occurred, while delivering lyrical portraits of New England fishermen. Curiously, the industry benefited at first from being technologically backward in a nation that didn't eat much fish. Its boats couldn't catch enough to threaten the resource. But the meat shortages of World War II created a whale-size market for seafood. Then, starting in the 1950s, the State Dept., kowtowing to cold war concerns, allowed efficient foreign trawlers to overfish the U.S. continental shelf. The resulting bad press got Congress to pass a 1976 bill claiming waters up to 200 miles offshore for U.S. fishermen. But few had absorbed the lessons of overfishing. Reagan-era tax credits and big agribusiness financed efficient new trawlers. The U.S. boats depleted New England waters to the point that local landings fell from 23% of the world total in the mid-1970s to between 2% and 3% today. Carey, who worked on four different Cape fishing boats, tells what it feels like to toil in the sunset of a trade. As catches dwindle, a web of rules manage both to hamper the boats drastically and to protect the fish inadequately. The author outlines how the feds tend toward easily enforceable conservation fixes, such as capping the number of fishing permits and instituting quotas--which can be sold--on the number of fish each licensed boat can catch. This last measure in effect creates valuable private shares in public stocks of fish. When hard times hit and small fishermen drop out, their quotas get bought up by big companies. Unfortunately for small fishermen, Senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), backed by giants such as Tyson Foods Inc., is pushing for a salable-quota system in New England. Carey shows just what it will mean if the big guys take over. A system in which the small, economically marginal fishermen dominate is self-regulating: A drop in the supply of fish translates quickly into a fall in the number of boats at work, giving fish stocks time to rebound. Carey spills a lot of ink on the minutiae of gear and fisheries management, perhaps too much for some readers. But Against the Tide is worth reading for his depiction of these entrepreneurs and their threatened communities. The portraits remind us that, in resource management at least, the best solution, as well as evidence of the gravest damage, may be found in the small picture. BY GEORGE FOY _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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RELATED ITEMS Fished Out PHOTO: Cover, ``Against the Tide'' BOOK EXCERPT: Chapter One of ``Against the Tide'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
