Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [59]
In 1989, faced with government indifference, Martin and the Inshore Fisheries Association decided to sue the government in the hope of getting an injunction against bottom dragging. They charged that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans was not following environmental assessments. The court ruled against an injunction, saying it would have a negative impact on the economy and force National Sea’s plant in St. John’s to close down for several months a year.
Martin has since observed environmental campaigns against whale and seal hunting, such as those by Greenpeace, and he regrets having gone to court at all. “Mc-Donald’s was the biggest buyer [of the draggers’ catch]. We should have had a campaign against McDonald’s. We weren’t very sophisticated,” he said.
That the government was not listening to the inshore fishermen is an understatement. The government was euphoric about Atlantic cod stocks and the future of the fisheries. Catches were rising, and fishermen who could not meet their quotas of redfish were given supplemental quotas of cod to make up the difference. A government task force under Senator Michael Kirby was charged with assessing the future of Atlantic fisheries. Much of its report was devoted to finding new markets for all the fish that was going to be caught by the new Canadian groundfishing fleet.
Canadians have never been fish eaters. Even Newfoundlanders and Nova Scotians do not eat large quantities of fish. This is also true of Americans, including New Englanders. But the U.S. population is so large that there is always a potential for expansion. According to the Kirby report, Americans consume 233 pounds (105.8 kilos) per person of red meat in a year and only 4 pounds (1.8 kilos) of groundfish. The report estimated that over the next five years, Canadian groundfish catches would increase by 50 percent, and if somehow American per capita groundfish consumption could be increased by a mere .1 percent, the U.S. market could absorb all of the Canadian surplus.
In reality, catches were increasing not from an abundance of fish but because the efficiency of a modern trawler fleet made it possible to locate the sectors with remaining cod populations and systematically clean them out. In retrospect, this seems obvious, but it must be remembered that during Newfoundland’s long history of fishing, the migratory cod periodically disappeared from certain sectors only to reappear in others. Almost every year that records were kept, there were some areas of Newfoundland or Labrador where the cod stocks had nearly vanished. In some years, only one area failed. The years 1857 and 1874 were notable because there were no failing grounds. In 1868, almost all sectors experienced a failure in the stocks. But they would always show up somewhere the following year. Despite cries of alarm, these failures had never resulted in the disappearance of cod but had only been caused by temporary shifts in migratory patterns, perhaps in response to temperature changes. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Canadian government assumed that Newfoundland waters were again experiencing this well-known phenomenon. Ralph Mayo, a marine biologist for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service who studies Georges Bank from the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, laboratory, calls this “the perception problem.” He said, “You see some cod and assume this is the tip of the iceberg. But it could be the whole iceberg.”
Furthermore, the Kirby report was still being influenced by Huxley