Shifting Baselines

The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries

Jeremy B.C. Jackson,Karen E. Alexander,Enric Sala

• Éditeur: Island Press
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781610910293
• Sujet: Biowissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Umweltschutz

Shifting Baselines explores the real-world implications of a groundbreaking idea: we must understand the oceans of the past to protect the oceans of the future. In 1995, acclaimed marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term "shifting baselines" to describe a phenomenon of lowered expectations, in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal. This seminal volume expands on Pauly's work, showing how skewed visions of the past have led to disastrous marine policies and why historical perspective is critical to revitalize fisheries and ecosystems.Edited by marine ecologists Jeremy Jackson and Enric Sala, and historian Karen Alexander, the book brings together knowledge from disparate disciplines to paint a more realistic picture of past fisheries. The authors use case studies on the cod fishery and the connection between sardine and anchovy populations, among others, to explain various methods for studying historic trends and the intricate relationships between species. Subsequent chapters offer recommendations about both specific research methods and effective management. This practical information is framed by inspiring essays by Carl Safina and Randy Olson on a personal experience of shifting baselines and the importance of human stories in describing this phenomenon to a broad public.While each contributor brings a different expertise to bear, all agree on the importance of historical perspective for effective fisheries management. Readers, from students to professionals, will benefit enormously from this informed hindsight.

PART I

The Problem Defined

In the three introductory essays, Carl Safina, Rashid Sumaila and Daniel Pauly, and Randy Olson frame the fisheries crisis in human terms. Safina poses the epistemological questions. Why is the past important? Is history like memory? Does it provide a necessary context for decision making? If this is true, does it follow that institutions ignorant of their history behave like people with impaired memory, confronting recurring dilemmas as entirely new? Can and should knowledge of the past influence modern marine science and policy, and in what way?

Sumaila and Pauly look to the future and predict that, unless behavior changes, humankind will continue on the “march of folly” of fisheries. Using Barbara Tuchman’s famous metaphor, they show how knowledge of the past, ignored in the past, established pernicious fisheries policies that actually worked against the best interests of the majority of people and exhibited a venal indifference to the well-being of future generations.

Olson’s approach is utilitarian. His forum is mass media, his audience the digital generation. People must be convinced to modify their behavior if the oceans are to be restored, and the stakes are too high to rely on message alone to convince them. Packaging the message is equally important in the digital media age. Using case studies, he explains which media campaigns worked, which didn’t work, and why. Then he outlines how to effectively communicate marine science to the public.

A marine scientist by training, Safina’s most recent professional publications have been on the need to add teeth and resolve to fisheries management, and his celebrated books have instilled concern about the ocean’s condition in a wide general audience. Here his essay takes a deeply personal approach to shifting baselines. Most academic scientists move about like gypsies and have missed witnessing firsthand the slow, but profound changes taking place almost everywhere. In a memoir of the Long Island shore he has known since childhood, Safina confronted the process in his own lifetime. He reminds us that the importance of place is not only abstract, scientific, and historical but also intimate and tangible. The small scale resonates most clearly with human experience, and the individual is still a fulcrum that can shift the world.

Sumaila and Pauly advance economic theories of resource allocation that advocate fair distribution to future generations and undercut policies that support overfishing worldwide. As an economist, Sumaila has worked on natural resource allocation and policy development all around the world. Pauly has published widely in all areas of fisheries science, but increasingly has focused attention on the role of fisheries in providing food and self-sufficiency to poor and marginalized people, particularly in Africa and Asia. Like Voltaire, he is known for distilling fundamental concepts into a few memorable words. The authors framed their essay around a historian’s memorable words and employed citations that marshal an impressive array of scientific and economic papers as evidence. Tuchman would be amused to find her historical concept supported by so many statistical models. Yet the point of the essay is not the past, but the future. We inherited damaged marine ecosystems because we are the heirs of past bad planning. Sumaila and Pauly challenge us to do better for future generations by implementing policies that history and science have shown may be successful.

Now a filmmaker, Olson was once a marine biologist. His first film, Lobstahs, was about lobster fishing and fishermen in the Gulf of Maine. Since then he has worked with Jeremy Jackson on the short film Re-Diagnosing the Oceans and on the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project, using humor to communicate to the public the alarming state of the oceans. His recent films, Flock of Dodos: The Evolution–Intelligent Design Circus (2006) and Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy (2008), and his book Don’t Be Such a Scientist (2009) use edgy humor to criticize scientists and science foundations for failing to effectively communicate with the public on issues of critical importance. His productions don’t look like business as usual, and he has drawn scathing rebukes from many in the scientific establishment for his brash, irreverent approach—although never for his science. Olson explains why innovative public communication is vitally important for the future of the oceans and challenges the establishment to get with the program.

Chapter 1

A Shoreline Remembrance

CARL SAFINA

Orienting Memories

Well over forty years ago—I was about five—my father drove us from Brooklyn to Long Island for a day of picnicking and fishing at a coastal state park. At one point, my mother bravely walked me into the edge of a gull colony. A city girl from Manhattan, she must have been almost as frightened as I, because I remember her squeezing my hand and holding her hat down as the birds—seemingly the size of condors—swooped in with menacing threat calls and the close whoosh of wings. I was terrified. But then suddenly at my feet, there was an amazing bowl of grass and feathers cradling three astonishing, huge speckled eggs. It was my first brush with something wild, and it filled me with a sense of mystery and magical potential. Before the escalating agitation of the great birds forced my mother and me to beat a prudent retreat, that nest made a lifetime impression.

Years later I began a decade of studying terns just down the beach from that same colony, and I visited the gulls regularly. When I began research toward my Ph.D. in ecology, I ran my boat each morning past the same island the gulls nested on and the very shoreline my mother had led me along.

For more than twenty years, I lived only about four miles from that gull colony, and each morning when I walked the mile from my home to the bay I saw that gull island. No one else in my professional world stayed in a single place for so long. Everyone went from home to college to graduate school to post docs to jobs.

I did most of these things, but just by chance, I never moved very far. During this lifetime in one place, I noticed changes in abundance of fish and other creatures. The fish I hunted for food and fun—striped bass, flounders, sea bass, sharks, marlin, tunas, plus sea turtles—all seemed in a continuous ebb tide of excessive catch and population decline. Fishermen I knew were grumbling, but virtually no one in the scientific community and not a single environmental group was talking about changes in fish populations.

Learned, sophisticated people, it seemed, just didn’t stay in one place long enough to see changes over time. Funding agencies wanted results, not pointless, repetitive long-term monitoring studies. Other ecologists were obsessed with “hypothesis testing”—preferring to guess rather than patiently observe—a quicker route to “getting papers” and getting promotions.

But for the simple reason that I stayed put long enough to gain a place-based personal history, I witnessed the diminishment of my natural world. First it saddened me, then angered me, then outraged me to action. My approach to fishing changed and my career as scientist took a different direction. I wanted to tell everyone how drastic these changes had been. Personally witnessing history made me appreciate time’s great orienting power. Time constantly transforms space. Like tide, it waits for no one.

Why the Past Is Important

Everything is on the way to becoming different, but in nature conservation, the past is the only rational guide to a better future. This is not true in medicine or electrical engineering or communications, where the past offers little insight on future developments. But we have diminished every realm of nature—forests, fishes, corals, climate—so thoroughly that almost no controls are left for comparison. The past must often become the control site.

Control sites are important. In tropical and subtropical seas, the U.S.-owned uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and Palmyra Atoll are among few control sites left. Recent studies compared relative weight or biomass of big versus small fishes between the main Hawaiian Islands, the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, and Palmyra. The results: the weight of big, carnivorous fishes was only 3 percent of the entire fish community around the main Hawaiian Islands, but was 54 percent in the remote Northwest Hawaiian Islands, and even more around Palmyra Atoll. Even greater differences have been found when scientists surveyed the extremely remote Kingman atoll in the Line Islands—here, top predators comprised 85 percent of reef fish biomass. I’ve been to many of these places and the difference is profoundly striking—and a bit scary because of the abundance of big sharks. My book Eye of the Albatross relates my impressions of the amazing numbers of tuna and sharks around Midway Atoll—closed to fishing for half a century.

On the basis of the main Hawaiian Islands alone, no living person could have described the changes and no hypothesis could have been tested. So what of the rest of the world? We have no untouched Newfoundland to compare with the one we’ve fished for centuries.

The past is our only marker, orienting us in a trackless sea to the receding coast of our origins. Nature has no hope in the absence of history. But wringing information out of the past is problematic because scientists generally weren’t around to document what was happening. Yet I want to ask whether ecologists overestimate this difficulty, insisting on standards of proof higher than necessary to get at the truth.

In other fields people seem to have less trouble accepting historical writings and authoritative anecdote. No one seems skeptical about what Europeans wore in the fifteenth century, or what their farm animals were like, or how Christopher Columbus’s ships were built, though that information didn’t come from scientists’ clipboards.

So why does it seem unsatisfactory and unconvincing when we read Ferdinand Columbus’s description that “in those twenty leagues, the sea was thick with turtles so numerous it seemed the ships would run aground on them and were as if bathing in them.” Bathing in turtles? Surely, that can’t be accurate!

We accept as credible Francisco Pizzaro’s description of contact with the Incas but view as untrustworthy or even dismissible the notion of Caribbean turtles so locally dense during the 1600s that one Edward Long wrote, “It is affirmed that vessels which have lost their latitude in hazy weather have steered entirely by the noise which these creatures make in swimming.” Both are equally anecdotal, yet even I will admit more skepticism about nonscientists’ natural-history observation. I wonder why this is, and whether there is really proper justification for it.

If we are going to dismiss the writing of eyewitnesses, we should have better reason than the unconscious assumption that the world started on our first day of graduate school.

Many ecologists observe that the great drawback of historical information is that it was not scientifically, systematically collected. This is generally true, but not absolutely true. The scientific method is the most powerful toolkit, but it is not the only systematic way of acquiring information. For example, astronomy and the study of plate tectonics lack the formal scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, and control groups. Yet these are sciences because science is the systematic pursuit of true facts that characterize existence.

Those explorers, traders, ship captains, and merchants who wrote the observations that historians now study were not scientists. Yet they were systematically pursuing something. They were motivated to keep track, to record observations. In an era before widespread professional science, their pursuit of new knowledge was often protoscientific. We can easily see a systematic approach in the record keeping of ship captains like Captain Robert Fitzroy of the Beagle (who kept better records of the origin of finch specimens than his young naturalist Charles Darwin) and Captain Charles Scammon, who meticulously documented the gray whales he nearly exterminated.

Science studies the messy, noisy, nonquantified world around us, selects things to focus on, and polishes its observations until the truth begins to shine through. Scientific observation, thought, discourse, and analysis can also be applied to material gathered and written by nonscientists. Historians are trained to think this way, yet ecologists seem unduly suspicious.

Yes, we should be suspicious of all sources of information. The world abounds in Trojan horses. Whaling and fishing captains often falsified their logbooks (especially as restrictions grew) and this has come to light spectacularly in several cases. Explorers had motive to hyperbolize their discoveries so their next expeditions could be funded. (Even scientists, despite greater efforts toward objectivity, can also be unconsciously affected by the funding imperative.) But not all historical information suggests great abundance. Some records speak of scarcity, and this further suggests reliability.

So scientists ought to at least be curious and not dismissive about the writings of seafarers who were dependable enough for investors of the day, competent enough to find their way to the edge of the earth and back, and thorough enough to systematically exterminate much of what they found. They got the first glimpses of a world that w...