Book Reviews: The North Atlantic Heads South

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Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean. In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean. Island Press: 2003. 175 pages (including index). $50.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.

To many involved in fisheries manage-ment, the North Atlantic Ocean is the poster child for all that can go wrong. It is overfished by even the most liberal standards. It provides a textbook case of the phenomenon known as “fishing down the food chain,” with the targeted catch moving from top predators to smaller and smaller fish. As well as any fishery on the planet, and far better than most, it testifies to the damage inflicted on a natural resource when those exploiting it are subsidized by their governments.

And it is to the North Atlantic that Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean have turned their focus in this book, the first in a planned series that will look at marine ecosystems around the world. Pauly, who is also editor of the series, is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver whose work has revolutionized the science of fisheries management in recent years. Maclean is a marine biologist based in the Philippines.

The approach taken by the book throws into reverse the trend of fisheries managers to look at their subject in smaller and smaller pieces. “This worked well at first,” they write, “but … it is now necessary to re-assemble the pieces back into a larger picture.” The promised series “will eventually reach the same global scope as the work that led to our understanding of human impacts on the atmosphere.” In another reversal of trends, Pauly and Maclean refuse to consider fish exclusively as “stock available for harvest.” Instead, they argue, fish should be considered as the wildlife they are. And, as a corollary, humans and their consumption of fish might best be regarded as the “new predator on the block.”

As predators, humans compete with the marine animals at the top of the ocean’s food chain. This may help explain the failure of some marine mammals to bounce back in numbers after the end of commercial whaling and sealing. “In the 1950s, the populations of marine mammals in the ocean were eating seven times more fish than was being caught by the fisheries,” the authors write. “This ratio dropped to about three in the 1990s as a result both of decreasing marine mammal populations and increasing fisheries catches. But when only the types of fish taken by fisheries are considered, it emerges that marine mammals are now eating about as much as we catch for our own consumption and processing into animal feeds.” Restoring the productivity of the ocean is necessary not just to allow commercial exploitation to resume at some future date, but to allow recovery of these top predators as well. “If we are serious about marine ecosystem management,” Pauly and Maclean write, “we must accept the keystone roles played by such predators in the maintenance of marine ecosystems, and this presents difficult choices.”

Those choices are described in the book’s last, and most controversial, chapter, titled “What to Do?” Here they list what must be done if the North Atlantic is to be restored to a healthy, functioning, productive ecosystem. Three steps are required, they say: reduce fish catches; transform the market; and transform the system of governance. For each step, the authors describe a series of measures. To reduce catch, for example, fleet size could be cut through vessel buy-back programs; quotas might be imposed where none now exist; and no-take areas might be established (Pauly and Maclean say 20 percent of the North Atlantic should be established as an inviolable reserve by the year 2020). As an example of a market-driven tool, they propose the elimination of fuel subsidies, which, by putting inefficient boats out of business, would achieve the same end of reducing fishing effort.

Unlike many modern texts on fisheries management, In a Perfect Ocean is readable, its arguments clear and compelling, and its message is unequivocal. Unless humans take drastic measures now to reverse the precipitous decline of the North Atlantic’s health, an empty ocean will be the legacy passed on to future generations. Those of us in the Pacific should pay heed.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 13, Number 12 June 2003

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