by Carl Safina
Increasingly, international agreements are trying to drive out illegal fishing by certifying legal catches and closing markets to uncertified fish shipments. But it remains a serious problem, and illegal, unlicensed, or unregistered fishing boats now take a quarter of the world’s fish catch.
All the hooks, the tremendous pressure on the oceans, the illegal and uncontrolled boats lead to this: albatrosses have the highest proportion of threatened species of any bird family. The World Conservation Union considers 83 percent of albatross species “threatened,” compared to 11 percent of birds overall. Albatrosses’ worldwide total population may have declined by about 40 percent since the mid-1960s. The eminent British ornithologist John Croxall, having devoted his life to the pioneering study and conservation of seabirds, felt moved to write, “It is depressing that nearly half the albatross populations with adequate documentation are decreasing, and that most of those currently stable or increasing are recovering from past decreases.” The Australian albatross specialist Rosemary Gales wrote, “The future prospects of albatrosses are bleak.”
I respectfully disagree.
Here’s why: A lot of work is going into changing things. The birds are now reasonably secure on their islands, where once they were hunted mercilessly. The main threat now comes from longline fishing, but where longline fishing pressure has softened, some albatross populations have begun to trend upward. For example, Wanderer populations on Crozet and Kerguelen Islands in the Indian Ocean, which had plunged by more than half between 1960 and 1990, are now increasing, because many longline boats have moved away from these birds’ main feeding grounds (after depleting the Southern Bluefin Tuna they’d targeted). Antipodes Albatrosses increased from about eight hundred pairs in the late 1960s to over five thousand pairs by the mid-1990s—by far the largest known increase for any great albatross population. The Short-tailed has been increasing at 7 percent per year. Full recovery of these species could still require well over a century, and others are in trouble, but the point is this: these birds were in very bad shape, yet things have changed for the better. If good people work hard and more people join them, more of these problems can turn to progress, and progress could eventually become success.
When twenty-eight hundred people from 144 countries convened for the global conference of the World Conservation Union in 1996, it became the largest environmental event since the Rio Earth Summit. By adopting a simple resolution calling for countries to take action to reduce longline mortality to seabirds, they took the first coordinated international step toward helping birds stay off longline hooks. Representing Mark Lundsten’s fishery, the North Pacific Longline Association announced that it supported the resolution, would modify fishing techniques to help protect seabirds, and would request legal regulations requiring its fleet to use bird-deterrent practices. And after the conference, they did. Approximately seventy-five governments were officially represented and they voted overwhelmingly for the seabird resolution, with the notable exceptions of Japan and Panama. (Japan regularly undermines international conservation institutions by joining as a voting member, then using economic coercion to get other countries—most often small-island nations—to vote with them against proposals for increased protection of wildlife, particularly ocean wildlife. This is most obvious in Japan’s efforts to overturn the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling. Japan has for years killed hundreds of Minke Whales annually despite the ban and has recently begun killing Bryde’s Whales and Sperm Whales. Despite the fiction that the whales are killed for “research,” all the meat is sold commercially. In 2001 Japan fisheries official Maseyuku Komatsu got quoted in Time magazine for saying, “I believe the Minke Whale is a cockroach in the oceans.”)
The albatross resolution was the fruit of more than three years of long-labored preparatory negotiations and international meetings spearheaded by Defenders of Wildlife, BirdLife International, Environmental Defense, American Bird Conservancy, Audubon, the Antarctica Project, Greenpeace, and several other conservation groups. Among national governments, New Zealand and Australia proved particularly instrumental. Only about half a dozen key people drafted the resolution, with maybe twenty-five additional players actively promoting it—proving again Margaret Mead’s admonition “Never doubt that a small handful of people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The World Conservation Union resolution led within the next four years to further steps, including a “United Nations Plan of Action for Seabirds,” and the “International Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels.” Scientists, conservation groups, and representatives of several government agencies also formed the North Pacific Albatross Working Group, to promote research and rule making toward reducing bird kills on longlines across Amelia’s realm. In Antarctic waters, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (the commission that sets Antarctic fishing rules) reduced its member nations’ bird kills by up to 96 percent by agreeing to delay the start of the fishing season until most birds were nearly finished breeding and to use scare lines and other bird deterrents while fishing. Though that improvement is only for member countries’ boats fishing legally, and though the U.N. Plan of Action is voluntary and most countries’ responses have been sluggish so far, and though saving birds will always require the cooperation of the people on boats far from shore, the point is: all of this represents recent activity that is still gaining momentum, and there are now lights at the end of this tunnel.
As Mark is explaining, the main threat to albatrosses now, the longlines, could be solved on boats worldwide. All it takes is a willing captain—as I’m here to learn. Soon we will see what success looks like.
BAD WEATHER HAD US STUCK in the harbor for a couple of days, and Mark and his crew are savoring the luxury. Just a few years ago, all the boats competed directly for a very limited catch in a very short season, and everyone was forced to fish regardless of the weather. But now, in the wheelhouse of the Masonic, Captain Lundsten is discoursing on the works of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. Apparently, two decades as a survivor in some of the harshest fishing conditions on Earth have enhanced Mark’s ear for poetry.
Last week he was several thousand miles from here, in Massachusetts, shopping for poetry books at the Harvard Coop. He’d been brought to Boston to advise a National Research Council panel evaluating different forms of fisheries management. Mark says, “People from New England can’t seem to understand why we have fish left in Alaska. We tell them: ‘We just stick to the quota and we leave some for next year.’ They act like they can’t relate. And look at the disaster they have.”
Mark sees his fishery for Sablefish (also called Black Cod) and Pacific Halibut improving. Meanwhile, Atlantic Cod and Atlantic Halibut are spectacular casualties in the demolition derby that has been New England fishing. Populations of both species, depleted from decades of over fishing, remain on the ropes over most of their Atlantic range, at or near all-time lows off New England, the Canadian Maritimes, and across northern Europe. The human toll is depressed communities, thousands of people in once-proud fishing families who lost the livelihoods that were their means of understanding who they were, and large areas closed to fishing, with only hopes the fish will recover someday.
Mark is a leading proponent of a rather new approach to fishery management called Individual Transferable Quotas, ITQs for short. Some fisheries are still unmanaged, open to all comers and limited only by what a boat can catch. The results are typically disastrous: depletion of fish, dislocation of fishers. More and more, fisheries are managed in some way. In a typically managed commercial fishery, a total catch quota is established as a limit. When the boats collectively reach the quota, the fishery is closed for the season, for all participants. This causes each boat to try to catch as many fish as possible before the overall quota is reached and the fishing stopped. The intense competition this race creates is called a “derby.” Because all the boats are competing directl
y, fishing-industry lobbyists exert political pressure to leave the season open longer or increase the quota, resulting in overfishing and depletion.
New England and the Canadian Maritimes (and a lot of other places) largely destroyed their fisheries through simple greed. As more and more people got in, political pressures prevented fishery managers from accepting the fact that scientists kept flagging: the amount of fish was finite. More and more boats caught more and more fish—until they all started catching fewer and fewer. And finally boats and fishing businesses themselves went belly-up. In Alaska, as more and more people got in, fishery managers fiercely held the line on the number of fish caught—which was very wise—but they did so by reducing the length of open seasons to just a few days. At the most extreme, halibut “seasons” were as short as twenty-four hours, twice a year. Because these managers always understood that a fishery relies on healthy fish populations, Alaska’s most important fish populations remain robust. And nowadays, the intense competition and absurdly short seasons are a thing of the past because of the ITQ system.
With ITQs, each boat owns shares of an overall quota that is determined by scientists. Moreover, each boat owner can buy or sell (that is, can transfer) all or some of their shares. Boat owners, boat captains, and crew members can all buy and sell shares. In many other fisheries, unprofitable or marginal boats are often trapped into continued fishing to repay debts, thus continuing the political pressure to keep quotas too high. ITQs allow fishers to either sell their way out of fishing or accumulate shares. For those who stay in, consolidation means less competition, more fish to catch, and more money to earn. They are at liberty and leisure to catch their share as quickly or slowly as they wish; the race for the fish and the derbies become things of the past, memories of the bad old days.
Yet only a few fisheries are managed this way, and proposals for wider application of the approach have met considerable resistance. Critics include some conservation groups and many owner-operators. They fear excessive accumulation of shares, corporate fishing, and the end of smaller, owner-operated boats. Pointing to timber companies that have clear-cut lands they own, destroying forests for the trees—and money—they also say that ownership doesn’t intrinsically yield good stewardship. They’re right; that can happen.
But Mark rebuts their point: “They insist ITQs will lead to corporate dominance, vertical integration, and loss of owner-operators. I’m proof it doesn’t have to be that way, that it can work.” Mark says that in his fishery the system has the needed safeguard—a cap on accumulation—that has preserved the small owner-operators. It has stabilized and professionalized the crews by giving them more future security. And it has helped conserve the fish. In New England, where Mark met resistance, crews often change from one trip to the next (sometimes culled from local bars when it’s time for the boat to leave) as people drift in and out of the fishery, because the race for fish and depletion have made fishing there so unprofitable. But old habits are dying a hard death. “I can talk about success until I’m blue in the face,” Mark says exasperatedly. “They don’t listen.”
Transferable-quota management in Mark’s Alaska fishery has also made fishing much safer for boats and people. His crew members refer often to “the derby days” when fishing pressure was so intense that the fleet could catch its entire six-month quota in twenty-four hours. The competition forced boats to go fishing no matter what kind of weather, with sometimes fatal results. Nowadays, people who survived the derbies—Mark among them—often shudder at the memories. The most common description you hear these men use about the derby days is the word “nightmare.” The references are so frequent they seem to serve a therapeutic purpose, as though these men still need to just talk about it.
CLOSING IN ON HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, Mark has a smooth, full-bodied radio announcer’s voice. He’s a brown-haired, flannel-and-fleece sort of guy, with sincere, somewhat somber blue-gray eyes. He is also a large, solid man, sized to match the task of wresting a living where the greatest ocean meets the Great Land.
Mark grew up in Colorado and earned a baccalaureate degree in English. “After college, I wanted to go either to the Southwest or Northwest. My girlfriend, Teru, wanted to be near the ocean. So, ocean is what I got. Plus a wife. I started graduate school part-time, and got a job at a Seattle shipyard. But I couldn’t handle academic politics, and I couldn’t sit and read all day. I didn’t drop out or anything, just never showed up for the third quarter.
“I liked the shipyard’s manual labor. It was good training for owning a boat like this. Halibut boats had the reputation as the real professionals, the guys who went up to Alaska and really fished. While I was doing some welding on a halibut boat I asked the captain for a job, and wound up fishing with him for about six years in the late seventies. During that time, the fishery got real crowded. It turned into hell. It got so miserable and difficult in the derbies, I almost quit four times. I had my little speech to the boss all rehearsed. But I’m glad I didn’t.
“By the time I bought this boat, I pretty much knew what I was doing. But no matter how much you know, it’s a shock to go from the deck to the wheelhouse. By luck, I bought this boat just as Japanese boats got kicked out of the federal waters. We were one of the first to go after Sablefish, and with the Japanese out, the market just went up like this”—he gestures with his hand—“and so did fish abundance. But guys saw how well we were doing, and after a year or two everybody was fishing Sablefish. The derbies got incredible. God, it was horrible.”
Mark led the charge for, and finally got, a federally administered transferable quota system for both Sablefish and Pacific Halibut. That put the derby fishing out of its misery.
Mark sees improvement in every aspect of the fishery. In the derby days, almost twice as many boats chased halibut in Alaskan waters as do today. “In the derbies, lots of boats would set their gear in the same area. The first day you’d have great big fish. And the second day you’d get about a third of what you had the first day, and the third day you’d have about a sixth. A lot of the gear was cross-laid, got chafed on each other; a lot of stuff broke off. It was a mess. Everyone lost expensive gear. Sad to say, a lot of hooked fish got left on the bottom.
“Now,” Mark continues, “we do everything systematically, with a pattern; it’s way more efficient. Now we have our fish to ourselves. We don’t see anybody else fishing around us, and we have high catch rates all the way through. And we’ll actually fish about fifty days between mid-April and mid-August. It’s so much better now.”
For many, it comes down to money. In the last derby year, a crewman earned $25,000 to 40,000. Fast money in a short time, to be sure (very short if you drowned because you felt forced to fish in bad weather), but the pay was declining as competition increased. Nowadays, full-share (a pay level usually attained after a couple of seasons) for a crew member on a union longline boat is usually $80,000 to over $100,000. These guys are the beneficiaries of some of the best, most conservative fisheries management in the world. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than most.
ALASKA’S SEWARD HARBOR IS RIMMED with snow and mountains slumping steeply into the water. Eagles grip pilings and sailboat masts. Ravens croak from the roofs. Black-legged Kittiwakes and gulls row buoyantly through the heavy air. A couple of swimming seals, several murres, and a Sea Otter all author chevrons upon the misty water. The docks sleep a couple hundred boats, including small-scale commercial vessels and the sailboats of people from Anchorage. And tour boats. It’s too cloudy and foggy to see right now, but we are near Kenai Fjords National Park and its gleaming glaciers. In the last decade or so this place has gone from being entirely a fishing town to becoming largely a tourist town, where ice, wildlife, and mountains mean money.
The crew and I walk to a restaurant that has an excellent harbor view, with more eagles coursing outside the windows. The restaurant walls are hung copiously with big fish, including a ten-foot Pacific Halibut that weighed over 360 pounds. Es
sentially giant predatory flounders, Pacific Halibut get considerably bigger than even this panel-sized monster. Atlantic Halibut once grew bigger still—to 700 pounds.
Half the restaurant customers are tourists, half are fishermen. Fishermen are sitting mostly at the bar, the tourists mostly at tables. We’re mostly fishermen, but we sit at a table.
The waitress tells us that the special today is salmon. Mark says, “Hmm—probably the early-spring Kings from Yakutat. They had thirty or forty thousand pounds.”
Mark’s five-man crew includes Tim Henkel, Callahan McVay, Jim Fitzgerald, Shaun Bailey, and David “Mac” McArthur.
Tim Henkel, the most senior of Mark’s crew members at forty-four, has been with Mark twelve years and is capable of skippering if Mark is forced to miss a trip. He is an athletically built man with thinning short hair, a blackish beard, and wire-rimmed glasses.
Tim came of age in Seattle’s university district. Seattle—and the world—were a bit different in the late 1960s. Starbuck was just a character in Moby-Dick; the words micro and soft didn’t connote enormity, power, and profit; and the term high-tech was almost invariably followed by the word weapons. At that time the “U district” was the hippie hotbed, complete with riots, summertime park love-ins, and Vietnam War protests. Tim says, “We had a lot of wild times.”
