Sooner shall all the hummocks on Summerhouses land hop up to heaven and all the bogs sink down to bottomless bloody hell than I shall renounce my independence and my rights as a man.Bjartur of Summerhouses of HalldĂłr Laxnessâ Independent People (1946)
Bjarturâs Metamorphosis
Some place far away from the night crawlers and bohemia of ReykjavĂk âs infamous nightlife scene in a rural Icelandic fishing community , situated in the remote rural Westfjords . After a restless winterâs night just below the Arctic Circle our main characterâwe shall call him Bjartur (âthe brightâ) after the tragic hero of Summerhouses from HalldĂłr Laxnessâ epic novel1âdecides to get up around 3:30 a.m. and evaluate whether or not the weather conditions will finally allow him to follow his occupation as an independent fisher.2 For the past fourteen days, strong westerly winds up to 30 metres per second have produced giant swells rolling into the fjord, making it virtually impossible to put out the hand-baited longlines on his small ten metre-long coastal fishing vessel. The struggle with the weather is nothing new for Bjartur who grew up in the harsh Arctic environment . The villagers are continuously confronted with the omnipotence of nature and the constant potential for disaster louring from the ocean and the mountains that embrace the fjord. Especially during wintertime when the sun disappears behind the mountains from November until February, and blizzards can cut off the village from the rest of civilisation for days. Bjartur knows that one can never influence the forces of nature, and although most city dwellers visiting the Westfjords in the summer cannot imagine living in a remote place like this, for Bjartur it is just his way of life, being his own master on his small boat,3 a childhood dream that eventually came true. The web of relations and practices through which Bjartur sails today, however, has changed dramatically in the past 30 years, and with it also the discourses and practices that constitute Bjartur as independent coastal fisher.
Not only Laxnessâs stubborn small-scale farmer, but also our independent small boat fisher reminds us of the struggle for independence that is deeply inscribed in the cultural semantics of the small island state that was settled by Norwegian tax refugees around 850 AD. As far back as Bjartur can remember it has been his childhood dream to make a living on his own boat based on hard but honest work at sea, just as his family and ancestors have done over the generations. Being born just a few years after the first major crisis of the Icelandic fishing industry in the 1960s when the herring fisheries collapsed, Bjartur grew up in a time when small boat fisheries were being rebuilt on the cod - and lumpfish fisheries that were mainly a seasonal, though widespread business in local communities. In those days, however, large stern trawlers brought prosperity and wealth to rural coastal areas all around the country. As a consequence of unregulated fisheries and increasing capture capacity, however, fishing pressure grew too high and fish stocks started dwindling by the beginning of the 1980s. As an emergency measure, access to the fishing grounds that used to be a commons of the Icelandic people was closed. Consequently, a quota system, which allotted relative amounts of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) based on historical catch records was implemented on a trial basis in 1984. As a result, the fish stocks literally became privatised overnight, and it did not take long for vested interests to secure the emergence of a market on which rights to future catches, called Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs ), could be traded just like any other asset from the early 1990s.
Bjartur âs family and most of the other members of the community in the Westfjords soon began to fear that this development would be detrimental for the rural areas of the country. A market-based system, the main concern was, could adversely affect the countryside by giving a competitive advantage to big capital holders around the capital region. Nevertheless, during his teenage years Bjarturâs community was thriving as two larger longline vessels provided many jobs, and it was still common for locals to run their own small coastal vessel as part of their seasonal full- or part-time occupation. Soon, Bjartur started helping out as deckhand on his parentâs small coastal vessel during his school holidays, which remainedâas were all coastal vessels below 15 metres in lengthâwidely protected from the regulatory framework of the ITQ system. After graduating from school, Bjartur finally attended navigation school in ReykjavĂk to becoming a captain himself and later made it to first mate on a large fishing vessel. But even though the pay was extraordinarily good, life on board a huge swimming metal box that included long trips away from home and his girlfriend soon reminded him of his childhood dream of being independent and his own master on a small fishing vessel based in his home community.
Recent developments in the fishing industry made this development even more attractive to him: the emergence of fish auctions in the late 1980s gave independent coastal fishers a much better standing and higher prices per kilo as they have liberated them from the power of the local processors . On the other hand, legal loopholes allowed large-scale investors to buy into the coastal fleet and start operations, ironically leading to a revival of the coastal fisheries . Hence, it was just a matter of time before the government started to implement stricter regulations, and many coastal fishers who had not been fishing much lately on their own vessels feared losing their right to fish as catch quotas were allocated based on historical catch rights with the implementation of the mother ITQ system in 1984. It was therefore about time for Bjartur to quit his job and start to pursue his dream on his parentâs old wooden fishing vessel.
With increasing capitalisation and professionalisation of the coastal fleet , many of the newer vessels were able to fish all year round, and above all, the efficiency of state of the art capture technologies increased season by season. As expected, it was just a matter of time before the government adopted new regulations for the coastal fisheries . As a consequence, the regulations started moving successively towards the market-based rationale of the ITQ system, going from a period of a limited numbers of days at sea for each vessel to a fully-fledged coastal ITQ system for all vessels under 15 metres. Eventually, in 2004 fishing rights could be fully transferred or leased between small boats , independently from a vesselâs homeport and geographical location.
Based on their historical catch records, Bjartur and his family were allotted a relative quota share that literally overnight turned them into members of a privileged class with access to the nationâs most valuable resource, being totally free to decide whether they wanted to buy more quota or sell out of the industry. In contrast to others from the community , however, the latter option was out of the question for Bjartur and his family with regard to what they have built up over the years. And besides that, it seemed that fishing on small boats had never been as comfortable before: in contrast to the olden days of âderby styleâ fishing, in which small boat owners had to race against their competitors at sea, making them extremely vulnerable to taking risks in bad weather, the limitation of fishing rights had already secured the catch for the season; Bjartur simply needed to decide when to put to sea and harvest it until his quota for the season was used up.
Today, Bjartur and his family consider themselves lucky as they have so far managed to keep their independent business afloat. And in contrast to the hot air created by the financial alchemists in the capital region, the fish remained not only relatively abundant and real in the sea, but also brought in fresh foreign currency in the booming export industryâthe main reason why Bjarturâs sister decided to move back from the financially devastated capital region to the Westfjords to find a job in the fishing industry after the 2008-financial crisis. In the neighbouring village, the economic success of the coastal fisheries has even lead people to talking about a âsmall boat revivalâ (see Image 1.1), which was also the main reason which attracted my scholarly interest in this otherwise remote and desolated place on earth. But is it really only the stubbornness and hard work of Bjartur and his rural fellows at sea that accounts for their s...