Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
It's been a wonderful, inspirational morning so far,
and to be given this opportunity to try to stitch it all together
is quite an honor.
My students often ask me,
"What is it about fish that fascinates you so?"
because I spend a lot of my time looking at New England's fisheries.
I spend a lot of time.
My work focuses on the history of New England fisheries
and its change over time.
And my students think what they think;
I don't want to know what they think of my obsession with fish,
but I look at fish as rather an indicator.
In the course of my lifetime,
I've lived with
probably one of the most stubborn and endemic environmental problems
this nation has yet to grapple with,
and that's, in particular,
that's the collapse of the Georges Bank fishery,
beginning in 1986.
I was a 16-year-old kid in high school in Falmouth, Massachusetts,
when this happened.
It was for the first time I heard people talk about it,
first time in a 150-year history of the fishery on Georges Bank,
I heard people talk about the potential
for the commercial extinction of Georges Bank cod.
1986, our landings went from - excuse me -
the spawning stock biomass went from about 100,000 metric tons of fish -
Professor Ledbetter would be interested in that -
down to about 50,000 metric tons.
But when landings, when catch, rebounded after 1986,
we went back to business as usual.
But by 1994, our spawning stock biomass
had dropped down to about one-tenth of where it had been
about a decade before.
The problem was is that while landings were turned back to what they had been,
we were fishing down the entire adult spawning stock of that fishery,
leaving us with next to nothing.
Well, in 1986, people sort of went along business as usual,
it's a momentary blip,
things came back - can't be a problem.
Well, in 1994, we realized it was a much bigger problem going on here.
And in particular, you saw fishermen,
you saw scientists, anthropologists, policy wonks, regulators, politicians
all turning to looking at every aspect of this fishery that we could identify.
We looked at the biology of the fish.
We looked at the productivity of the ecosystem.
We looked at the distribution networks on shore.
We looked at community structure amongst fishing towns.
And we looked at everything,
and still we have now, in 2011, still a fraction, about 10%,
of the spawning stock biomass on Georges Bank
that we had when I was a 16-year-old kid.
This has been my environmental doppelganger for my entire adult life.
When I say we looked at everything, there's one thing we didn't look at
that may not be apparent
to a lot of the other hardworking, intelligent, bright, smart professionals
that have tackled this problem since it unfolded in the early 1990s.
They all looked at the fishery itself.
They looked at the failure as a failure of the ecosystem or -
and I include fishermen as part of that ecosystem -
the industrial organization of the harvesting of that resource.
I'm an environmental historian, and I take a longer view at things.
I tend to look at things that change over time.
I look at larger issues that sometimes emerge as invisible to us,
but yet we take for granted every day.
And so I wonder, as I looked at this over the years,
I wonder if we've been getting the problem about the Georges Bank fishery backwards.
Rather than looking at it as an ecosystem that's failing our economic system,
I wonder if our economic system is failing our ecosystem.
And in particular, if we're trying to use an economic system -
a version of capitalism
borne out of the 20th-century mentalities that defined it -
are we using that 20th-century version of capitalism
and are trying to apply it to a 21st-century natural resource base
that is, perhaps more clearly
than any other natural resource base in this nation,
a representative of the 21st-century reality of finite natural resources?
The reality, the economic reality, we have to face up to
in the coming century.
And if so,
maybe the solution isn't trying to get fish to grow more fish -
I don't know how you'd do that anyway -
but, rather, we need to change our economic system,
change the way we pursue capitalism.
Now, I want to be clear today.
I have this really wonderful little icon that's - well, it's a little off-color.
Maybe that's why it's not up there right now.
(Laughter)
I am no fan of free-market solutions.
I am very, very leery of market solutions.
I think they have failed more often than they have succeeded,
and I think, when I read Adam Smith -
I read Adam Smith, his "Wealth of Nations,"
as a cautionary tale that has to define the invisible hand of the market
before it pummels us as it has for at least 200 years.
But I can't deny, as critical as I am
of free-market solutions in an unregulated context,
I can't deny the fact that capitalism over the last 500 years
has proved remarkably flexible.
It emerged out a feudal-market economy.
It adapted to the expansion of global trade and mercantilism
in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It accommodated the advent of industrial production.
And we've retooled it again in the 21st century
to do whatever it is we're going to call this version of capitalism today.
I think there are many different labels out there -
I'm not going to get into that.
So clearly, as financial organizations and as systems of productivity
have changed over time,
capitalism has adapted as well.
But that's not the only thing that changes capitalism.
When we ended slavery,
when women entered the workforce,
when we put civil rights as a top priority,
not only politically but socially and culturally,
all those changes changed the way we do business in this country.
New people with new ideas and new motivations
entered into a formal economy
in ways they had been prevented from doing so before,
and in doing so,
we've radically redefined
the way our American economic system has functioned,
just since 1866, and frankly, since World War II, again.
So capitalism doesn't respond
only to changes within the economic structure and the financial structure;
it changes to us.
As we change our value systems and our cultural attitudes,
capitalism changes with it.
In short, capitalism is us.
It's not some abstract, distant thing.
The market isn't some abstract, distant thing.
It isn't something that's beyond our control.
It's merely an academic shorthand
for a collection of behaviors and attitudes and values
that we surround the allocation of business services.
It's a remarkably wonderful tool, certainly.
I use it all the time in class.
But we tend to forget that we have the power
and have been exercising the power
to change capitalism to adapt to what we think things should be
throughout the history of this nation.
So I think that Georges Bank, the collapse of the Georges Bank fishery, in microcosm
offers us a unique opportunity,
an opportunity to try to find ways
to adapt our economic system to our ecosystem.
I think that's the 21st-century problem that we have to face.
How we're going to do that, I don't know.
The reality is that it's probably underway already.
Every time this country is faced
with very shocking, visible environmental catastrophes -
whether it's burning rivers or acid-rain scorched hillsides,
clear-cut mountain tops, strip mining -
when we see these images
of our power to do things to this world beyond any of our dreams,
we respond.
And usually in those situations, we've responded through legislation.
That legislation, in turn,
being hallmark environmentalist legislation of the 20th century,
has in turn shaped and changed and forced businesses,
many of whom were willing to change,
to change the way they do business.
And we as consumers have incurred the costs,
and we've borne those costs of a cleaner way of doing business.
So we can change this,
and we're beginning to change capitalism
to accommodate the 21st-century environmental finiteness
that we're starting to recognize as likely true.
In the marine realm, it's a little slower.
We don't see the damage that we do to the ocean.
My office is sitting right on the mouth of the Thames River,
and I look out every day, and I see beautiful ocean -
well, Long Island Sound.
It's beautiful. It's gorgeous.
It counts.
(Laughter)
It's gorgeous.
It's also, biologically compared to what it had been just a century ago,
a wasteland.
That might be a bit extreme -
there is still life in it but not nearly what it once was.
But because we can't see it, we've been slow to respond to this.
That's starting to change.
And so when I say we need to change capitalism,
I have to admit I don't have a clear blueprint on how to do it,
but other people do,
other people I've run into in the course of my fisheries work.
There's one fisherwoman out of Point Judith in Rhode Island.
Her name is Sarah Shumann.
She's an inshore fisherman out of Point Judith.
She works in the Alaskan salmon canneries.
And she's started an organization called Eating with the Ecosystem.org.
And what she does is she tries to teach, inform, educate consumers
about how to match their eating behaviors and their market decisions
with the seasonal variability inherent within our regional ecosystem.
So instead of eating the same species of fish 365 days a year,
you see what's available,
what's migrating through
on the way to the Atlantic feeding grounds off of Canada
or what's coming back
from the Atlantic feeding grounds off of Canada.
So instead of eating cod, you'd eat bluefish, herring;
you'd eat mackeral, you'd eat stripers,
you'd eat flounders
as they come inshore and offshore.
Some of these are migratory; some of these are not.
But you vary things up based upon what's locally abundant.
This is how fisherman used to fish 200 years ago.
This is not rocket science.
But we've forgotten that,
and Sarah's work is informing us and teaching us and showing us
that we can do that.
She's also telling us
how to use lesser-utilized species in ways we hadn't used before,
and frankly, if it's breaded and fried,
who cares what species of fish is in your fish and chips?
I don't.
So at the end of the day,
what I see in the Georges Bank fishery, the Georges Bank cod fishery,
is not a miner's canary.
I used to think of it as a miner's canary,
as something that was dying because our economic system
was no longer compatible with our ecosystem.
I don't see it that way anymore.
I see it as the fulcrum by which we figure out
new paths, new directions, new tools, new understandings
on how to change our economic system
to deal with what I think is the most pressing challenge
our society has for the 21st century,
and that is our finite natural resource base.
We're going to do it;
I don't know how, but smart people will.
Sarah's one of them,
and hopefully there's a few of you in here today.
Thank you.
(Applause)