Of seals and sealers

Most people around the world who have heard of Newfoundland immediately associate this rock in the north Atlantic (as the locals fondly call it) with cod fishing on the Grand Banks, particularly since the collapse of the cod stocks in the early 1990s and the cod moratorium made international news and turned Newfoundland into the fishing world’s cautionary tale. But there are other species long-hunted by the local fishermen who make their living from the sea that makes international headlines every year – seals. Each year, Canada’s hunt for harp, hooded and gray seals draws the attention of animal rights protesters around the world, constantly raising questions about the future of the seal hunt as other nations around the world threaten to ban Canadian seal products and even boycott all Canadian fish.

Each year when the harbors of Newfoundland become iced-in, seals appear on the ice floes, sometimes practically walking distance from shore over the ice in addition to farther out on the “front.”

Inuit and other native peoples in Newfoundland have hunted seals for at least 4,000 years, and when Europeans first began traveling to Newfoundland for the seasonal cod fishery in the sixteenth century, the potential meat and saleable furs from seal hunting were both an incentive for permanent settlement and a means of making it through the long winters when the iced-in harbors made fishing impossible.

Increased demand for seal oil and furs in Europe led to the beginning of a “commercial” seal hunt beginning in the 1750s, and the seal hunt shifted from the former tradition of seal hunting in small open wooden boats called punts or even just walking out from land over the ice to an operation on large boats. The first wooden sailing boat headed for the seals of the distant ice floes left St. John’s in 1794 and by the mid-nineteenth-century, sealing on large boats with crews assembled from all around the island was a central part of life in Newfoundland. Even today, I met people who could tell stories of their fathers and grandfathers who were so desperate for a berth on one of these sealing ships that they would even walk to St. John’s from the outports; young boys attempted to stow away in the ships, and it was considered usual for a few to manage to avoid being caught despite the boats being scoured for stowaways before leaving port. With no fishing income in the winter, sealing became a central piece of the island’s economy – second only to cod fishing. It was hard, dirty, dangerous work – crewmen had little to eat, often not enough clothing to keep them warm on the ice, and men often got stranded out on the ice or drowned when their boat was crushed in ice or sank – but it was a necessity of life for many Newfoundlanders to get their families through the winters.

In the twentieth century, seal hunting modernized into a large-scale high-technology fishery along with the rest of the fishing industry. But in the 1960s, opposition to the Canadian seal hunt exploded among the public as a result of graphic footage of the hunt showing both the charismatic baby whitecoat seals that had long been the chief targets because of their highly-prized white fur and the startling image of red blood on white ice. Animal rights activists led protests around the world, particularly in the US and Europe, and in 1983, the European Commission banned imports of any products made from the whitecoats, cutting off 75% of the market and effectively stopping the seal hunt in its tracks. Since then, the Canadian seal hunt has changed considerably: killing whitecoats was made illegal; there are no longer any industrial-sized sealing boats, with all seal hunting now done from small inshore punts and midsize nearshore vessels; and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has put in place a host of regulations on how the seals may be killed, designed to ensure that the seals are treated humanely.

I’m no expert on seals or sealing, but it seems that the main reason people oppose the seal hunt is, well…seals are cute. The youngest baby harp seals, known as whitecoats before they shed their initial white fur, are the iconic cute baby animal with big black eyes, and somehow even though hunting for these youngest of baby seals stopped twenty years ago, the whitecoats still feature front and center in most anti-sealing media (examples of this include a popular post from this year on a vegan blog and this video from the Humane Society). I’ll admit – it’s not pleasant to see the seals being killed (in the video – I couldn’t go out and see it for myself because strict rules for the seal hunt require that anyone coming near the seals during the hunt, whether hunter, protester, or observer, have a license). But these reports are sensationalized: repeated studies by veterinarians and independent scientists have determined that the seal hunt is humane – not only has the commonly-criticized club, called a hakapik, been shown to cause seals no more suffering than certified methods for slaughterhouses, most sealers today use high-powered rifles that kill the seals cleanly and instantly.

Similarly, the rhetoric of questioning the future of the seal populations suggests the seals are endangered, despite the fact that the stocks are closely monitored by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans and strict quotas are set to determine that the hunt is sustainable – in fact stocks have been slowly increasing. As the Director of Conservation and Fisheries Advisor for the Atlantic region of WWF-Canada pointed out to me last week, the seal hunt is not a conservation issue (and thus they focus their efforts elsewhere on species that may be less charismatic but more at risk). Most Newfoundlanders point out that if seal populations were allowed to grow unchecked, they would also put even more pressure on the population of cod, one of the seals’ favorite foods, also seen as an issue in the case of seal populations in Scotland and the whale population in Iceland.(I love the painting on the boats here.)

This is not to say that Newfoundlanders have had no faults in the history of the sealing industry. Overhunting has been a serious problem in the past when the hunt was unregulated: as early as 1800, the walrus population in the Gulf of St. Lawrence had been hunted to extinction and the harp and gray seal populations were diminished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most Newfoundlanders I’ve talked to have little sympathy for the anti-sealing protesters in any capacity, responses to any mention of Greenpeace and Paul Watson ranging from shaking heads to wishes of unpleasant fates, but the most nuanced view I’ve heard was in a short story written by a man I met along the harbor in Tilting in Fogo Island.

I met Roy Dwyer, a sealer himself, as he was cleaning out his own small boat (in the picture above) after going out sealing, and I went over to his house with him to buy a copy of the book he just recently published. In his story “The Cardigan,” two young people (the narrator and Barb), ask an old-time sealer, Uncle Pete, about the protesters.

“You must really hate Greenpeace,” Barb interjected.
“No, not at all, my dear. They just sounded an alarm. The seals were getting scarce but nobody would face up to it.”
“But that doesn’t excuse them,” I said, “for portraying Newfoundlanders as barbarians.”

Uncle Pete later says,
“In a way it wouldn’t hurt to have a little bit of Greenpeace in all of us.”

But he also confronts a protester on the ice, saying,
“What do you know about our way of life? Here at the edge of the world, outside of your world, these hands, our hands, battle sea, ice and storm to make a living. You say our hands are soaked in blood but it’s the sea’s blood and at times our own blood and it’s been that way for generations.”

For me, this illustrates my major problem with the anti-sealing protesters, a sentiment I’ve also heard from many people I’ve met here: it’s not so much the opposition to the hunt that is so offensive, but the fact that they give the local people and their culture no credit either for the importance of their sealing traditions or for the genuine efforts they have made both towards conservation and making the hunt itself more humane. Most, in fact, know little about the hunt at all: this girl I met demonstrating against the Canadian seal hunt on the streets of Edinburgh admitted to me that she knew very little about the hunt beyond the information on the flyer she was distributing.

This girl, at least, was a steadfast vegan consistent in her opposition to all use of animal products as food or fur; many people here have pointed out the hypocrisy of decrying the death of seals to provide food and fur for humans when they wear leather, eat chicken and steak (or even lamb and veal – babies!). As a vegetarian myself, I’m not going to be eating any seal flipper pie (as intrigued as I am by the concept) and I don’t plan on buying a seal-fur coat…but I see far more reason to protest the average meat-producing factory farm than the seal hunt.

I went through some of the archived Canadian Broadcasting Company coverage of the seal hunt, and some of the comments from the 1970s and 1980s point out some of the same major flaws in the anti-sealing movement that I see today. In 1977, Richard Cashin of the Newfoundland Fishermen, Food and Allied Workers' Union told CBC that "this is a social, economic and political question about the sealing," saying that the protests were also pushing for Newfoundlanders to give up their rural lifestyle for an urban, modernized, high-technology world – the kind of society that doesn’t like to associate images of bloody animals with the food they buy from the supermarket (a trend I’m not a big a fan of, as I’ve written about before). He says, "I think...that the soul of this province would suffer, if you came down to me in your gross hypocricy, eating meat and wearing other furs, and said you were imposing your morality on me” and forcing me to give up sealing. "If today you take the seal away from me, tomorrow you'll take the cod, the next day the lobster, the next day my right to live in a small village, and you'll put me up in your crime-infested central Canadian cities in areas where you yourself have been unable to come to grips with the problems of your society and it is much easier to get concerned about the problems of distant provinces." Indeed, many of the online comments I’ve read opposing the seal hunt suggest (in often none-too-pleasant terms) that the sealers should go move to the cities “like everyone else” and should catch up with the rest of “civilized” society. Although I wouldn’t quite equate the situation of Newfoundlanders with Canada’s indigenous people, but comments like these illustrate where Cashin was coming from when he said, "if you want to do with us as you did with the Indians, then do it."

In addition to these defenses of Newfoundland traditional culture, generally belittled or completely overlooked in criticisms of the seal hunt, another important question is why the seals have drawn so much attention at all. In 1982 debates in Britain, Ken Collins, a Scottish MP and Chairman of Parliament’s Environment Committee, pointed out, "over 5 million people have submitted signatures on [seals]...when we've debated hunger, when we've debated the torture and the misery of many people across the world, the letters have not appeared, and I think that that is a reflection of the values sometimes that our society has I'm afraid...I think we have to express just a little degree of doubt about the values of those that will weep tears for seals in Canada...and yet will quite heartlessly condone the policies of those who will continue the policies of those that will continue the catalog of torture and misery and poverty and indeed death of people in just as distant and just as deprived parts of the world." Many people here are intensely cynical about the motives of the animal rights protesters, saying that they focus on the seal hunt because the tear-jerking images bring in the money to fund their organizations. I’m not one for cynicism, but I must admit that even within a legitimate animal rights agenda, I see little reason to focus on the hunt of a non-endangered wild species as part of a rural society’s long-held lifestyle when there are plenty of endangered species and farm animals who live and die in far worse conditions.

There's a lot of information out there, a lot more than I've included here, but if you want more information, I suggest as places to start:
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada
Canadian Geographic, Sealing Timeline
CBC Archives on Sealing

A Tale of Saltfish

It has been another long hiatus since my last update, mostly spent in enjoyable wanderings getting the feel of Newfoundland – from the rugged geology and rocky coastlines to the incredibly friendly people to the excellent traditional music on the radio (a blend of seafaring ballads and chanties, Irish tunes, and something uniquely Newfoundland). After two leisurely weeks with Ada exploring St. John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador and both the oldest and easternmost city in North America, and a week visiting beautiful, friendly and very fishery-oriented Fogo Island, I’m now back in St. John’s, settling in a bit for the last weeks of my long adventure. The places I’ve been deserve telling of their own, but for now what I really want to write is an experiment in…food blogging.

This, of course, is not a food blog, but I remember that quite a while back, my favorite food blogger mentioned that she would write something about bacalao and never got around to it. So, inspired by having the past and present world of bacalao all around me, I thought I’d try to pinch hit.

Bacalao, of course, is cod. Dried, salted cod to be specific. Although even today, there is no word in Spanish for fresh cod – it has to be specified as fresh bacalao. This may seem strange in an age where fish is flown around the world to arrive fresh to markets tens of thousands of miles away, but in the days when cod was a major staple food and item of trade, the only way to ship it was once it had been preserved for travel.

I picked up my saltcod in Bergen, Norway, where it goes by the name klippfisk. Bergen came to prominence in the Hanseatic age as an important trading center, and in those days most of the warehouses on the famous Hanseatic wharf at Bryggen were full of stockfish and klippfisk.

(Today, Bryggen is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site and most of the buildings contain gift shops, restaurants, and museums.)

Having already tasted traditional Norwegian preparations of cod, I took the opportunity while in Bergen to try the dish simply known as “bacalao,” the traditional Spanish and Portuguese preparation of saltfish, no doubt introduced to Norwegians by the many foreign traders who come to buy their fish. (Even recipes on Mexican websites say that Norwegian saltfish is the best quality, and worth paying extra for.)

So I went to one of the restaurants along the historic wharf in Bryggen, decorated in proper Bryggen cultural-heritage style with old wooden ships, paintings of ships, and ropes, blocks, and other odds and ends taken from ships. Norwegian businessmen were enjoying lunch and plenty of Norwegian beer (only Norwegians enjoy Norwegian beer because everyone else is still too hung up on the price).

And I ordered myself a lunch portion of bacalao.

It tasted rather like a stew, with the fish cooked along with tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and a faint hint of spiciness, although not too much, since the Norwegian palate is generally not accustomed to very spicy foods. It was good, particularly with good French bread.

So good that I decided to embark on my own culinary adventures with bacalao. So I went across the street to the seafood store in town and bought myself my own kilogram of klippfisk to bring with me on my journey from Bergen to St. John’s.

Even though I didn’t cook my Norwegian klippfisk in Norway, Newfoundland is also an ideal place to experiment in cooking saltfish, since the original European explorers chose to settle on this rock in the harsh Atlantic climate not for its beauty but for its cod, which was both traded and eaten at home salted and dried for most of the island’s history as both the Newfies’ staple food and as the “Newfoundland currency” as proclaimed on an early stamp.

In downtown St. John’s, murals and statues speak to the importance of catching, preparing, and selling saltfish in the town’s history.

And on my trip out to Fogo Island, I had the chance to see some of Newfoundland’s best-preserved fishing stages, used for “making” the fish – the process of salting and drying the cod after it was brought back ashore.

So it was in the most appropriate of circumstances that I made my first-ever homecooked saltfish into bacalao. The process started the night before, since saltfish needs to soak for about 24 hours to rehydrate the fish and get rid of some of the saltiness. Although not all directions call for it, I also changed the water in the morning to make sure to get rid of enough of the salt.
Here’s the recipe I used, loosely adapted from a number of versions found online:

• half a kilogram of klippfisk
• 1 large or 2 small cans of peeled, cut tomatoes (whatever’s handy will do, just note that the more runny your canned tomatoes, the more watery your finished product will end up, determining whether it seems more like soup or stew)
• half of a large white onion, chopped
• a lot of garlic, (in my mind, the more the better), around 4 to 6 cloves, half as whole cloves and half pressed or cut fairly finely
  
• half a cup of olive oil
• a small jar of green olives (around a cup)
• a sliced red pepper
• a jar of chiles in vinegar (or if, like me, you can’t find chiles, whatever hot peppers are in the store)
• 6 small potatoes, about 2 cups

You'll want to start with two pots on the stove - one with water to boil the potatoes, and a second one (the one everything will end up in at the end) with olive oil in the bottom. While the potatoes boil, heat the olive oil with half of the garlic, still as whole cloves, until the garlic is brown. Once the garlic seems entirely browned, discard it - now the olive oil has extra garlicy taste.

Add the tomatoes, cut garlic, and onion to the oil and mix will. Heat until everything reaches a boil and cook for a minute on a low simmer before adding the fish. Break the saltfish into pieces as you add it to the pot. After you’ve finished adding the fish, dump in the red pepper and olives. You can also add some of the vinegar from the chiles or hot peppers if you like spiciness – I used a couple of tablespoons, but you should taste it to check. Mix everything together and boil until everything is hot and the fish seems cooked, but not overcooked, which takes around 15 to 20 minutes. While it cooks, take your boiled potatoes, which should be done by now, and cut them into slices.

When the bacalao mixture is fully cooked, remove it from the stove and add the potatoes. It should look something like this:Serve it with the peppers or chiles on top. Very good with French bread. Also good with philosophical musings about the significance of saltfish throughout history and throughout the north Atlantic. Mmm, tasty.

Nine Months Out

From where I left off in the Lofoten Islands, one of the most gorgeous places I have been this year,

I took a long and scenic trip south on "Hurtigruten," the coastal steamer ("the world's most beautiful voyage),

a train-bus-boat trip from Bergen to Oslo through Norway's longest and most famous fjord and on two of the most famous and impressive railway lines,

and a long and not-so-scenic airplane journey from Oslo via London (Heathrow's new terminal 5) and Newark,

I have finally arrived in St. John's, Newfoundland for the final segment of this year of travel. I must say, it's a little weird to be back on this side of the Atlantic. In any case, here I give you my third official quarterly report for the Watson Foundation as a bit of a wrap-up of what I've been up to these past few months before I plunge ahead into the last leg of my trip.

I left off at the end of my last report saying that having spent most of my first six months learning about policy and science but seeing the fishing itself mostly from the outside, I planned to focus this stage of my project on getting to know the views of fishermen and their communities. I can say now, having had the chance to visit small, fishery-dependent communities and spend time with fishermen and their families in Scotland and Norway, getting to know these people and places has been the highlight of my past three months. I saw inshore crab fishing with creels – one of the few fisheries still left largely unregulated – in the Orkney Islands; I met a northern Irish skipper waiting for a replacement part for his engine in Lerwick harbor in the Shetland Islands, not only a major fishing area but also an important port for fishing boats in the North Sea that run into bad weather or technical problems; I went to a meeting of prawn (Norway lobster, or Nephrops) fishermen in Fraserburgh in northeast Scotland discussing how to modify their nets to reduce cod bycatch with scientists from Fisheries Research Services in Aberdeen; I spent a week in Peterhead, the largest whitefish port in Britain, staying with a skipper and his wife and getting to know their family and town; I talked with fishermen from small west coast prawn trawlers as they mended their nets on the docks when the bad weather kept them in port; I shared a traditional Lofoten Islands Easter dinner of boknafisk (made from cod that has been hung to dry for two weeks, the beginning of the process of preparing stockfish) with the family of a coastal gill net fishermen in Ballstad in northern Norway.

Although I was still an outsider looking in on the fishery, I did get to see the places and meet the people who live in and on the fishery and they were tremendously welcoming and generous in sharing their time and knowledge. Their stories about how their towns and fishing fleets have been forced to adapt to changes in both fish stocks and management policies, their passion for where they live and what they do, and their broader view of fisheries not as a separate entity to be studied but as something woven into the pattern of their lives, was the reminder I needed of why I wanted to study cod in the first place and why I care in the first place about the bureaucratic tangle of rules trying to keep fishing sustainable.

During my week in Peterhead, the closest I have felt to any of the communities I have visited, I was struck by their sense of history and tradition in their towns and in the larger fishing industry. I spent the morning after I arrived in town at the Deep Sea Fishermen’s Mission talking with retired fishermen over tea about their days in herring boats following the fish from Lerwick up in Shetland down to Great Yarmouth in England, and then returned to the Mission in the evening for the Ladies Meeting to sing hymns with nautical themes and hear the older women’s stories about their younger days as herring girls following the boats along the coast to gut and pack the fish. The skipper and his wife I stayed with showed me the video of the launch of their boat, the Budding Rose – an event they described as equally important to a wedding in the life of a fisherman – with footage of the whole family and their friends in their best clothes and the boat being blessed and let down the ramp into the water to the playing of a lone piper. This skipper’s twin brother took me along to a local elementary school where he taught a lesson about the fishing industry complete with muster drills and practice net-mending, one of the many ways he has stayed active in maintaining the fishing traditions of his family and community even after retiring from fishing. And so even though the business of fishing was certainly an important aspect of life in Peterhead, when I talked with the fishermen about the effects of the policies that have drastically reduced the fleet, they didn’t talk about money but about the people are leaving and the loss of families with over a century of fishing history. And this experience is representative of the passion I have found for fisheries in so many of the communities I have visited: the stories I heard, whether in Peterhead or in the Gaelic-speaking Hebrides on the west coast of Scotland or in the villages of the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway, told of fishing as a way of life, not just as a way of making a living.

Right now in Scotland, the future is looking hopeful for most of the fishermen who have kept their boats and quotas and stayed in the industry. The Scottish fishing fleet has been particularly hard-hit over the past decade, with about 60% of the boats being “decommissioned” – sold for scrap and removed from the fleet as part of a government program to reduce the size of the fishing fleet and readjust the overall fishing capacity of the industry to match the reduced quotas available as the EU attempts to rebuild the North Sea’s cod stocks. For the boats that are left, though, this has meant less competition for the fish available, and with the decline in illegal or “black” fishing that had been paying the bills for fishermen who didn’t have enough quota to pay their expenses, fish prices have risen considerably and enabled the boats to get more profit from their catches. Now that the situation seems to have stabilized, the industry has been working to improve its image among the public, from voluntary programs such as a Responsible Skipper’s Scheme where the boats pledge to comply with health, safety, and environmental regulations, applying for Marine Stewardship Council certification for North Sea haddock and Scottish prawn (Nephrops) fisheries, and even showing British television-viewers just what it takes to get fish on the table as a few fishing crews have become minor celebrities as part of the popular BBC series Trawlermen (rather like a British version of Deadliest Catch). Scotland has also been proactive among European states responding to the tightened regulations around cod, putting in place real-time closures where any area found to have a high proportion of juvenile cod is immediately closed for fishing and a conservation credits scheme that encourages skippers to try new net plans and fishing strategies that reduce their cod catches and discard rates by rewarding them with extra days at sea for fishing. Unlike a few years ago, when most fishermen say their outlook was mostly gloom and doom, they see that the decommissioning is over and the fish stocks are recovering and are optimistic that they can continue to make a living from fishing.

The worry, however, is that with the ability to buy and sell quotas, the next few years could see a continued decrease in the number of boats fishing as large companies buy up more and more of the quota, reducing the size of the fleet and putting many small ports out of business. The boatyard owner in Mallaig, on the west coast of Scotland, told me he had been discouraging his son from getting a job in boatbuilding because he doesn’t see it as an industry that will last throughout his son’s lifetime. In larger ports like Peterhead, plans for future expansion rely on the large pelagic boats and oil tenders rather than on the smaller skipper-owned whitefish vessels. Many middle-aged fishermen today are the last in a line of fishing heritage that stretches back more than a century. Already, skippers have found fewer and fewer young people in Scottish fishing towns deciding to get jobs in fishing, and nearly all the boats I saw all around the coast of Scotland had hired at least one Filipino crew member to fill the gap.

For some of the kids growing up in fishing towns today, it is simply the lure of more reliable pay in the oil industry or a land-based job that keeps them from fishing. A more intractable deterrent for young people, however, is that high quota prices – literally the price of the right to fish – have made it nearly impossible for a young man could start out as a crewman and eventually save up enough to buy and skipper his own boat. When most of the current skippers began fishing, all they needed was a boat and a fishing license, and when the quota system was introduced, they were given a quota for free based on their “historical” fishing patterns. With the additional startup cost today with the quota system in place, only young people coming from a fishing family with a chance to inherit a boat and quota have the chance to make it to the position of skipper within their lifetimes. With so few opportunities for the next generation of fishermen, a west coast Scottish skipper predicted that as the current generation of skippers retires, they will sell off their quotas to those few families who have stayed in the industry until all the fish is being caught by “five millionaires.”

In Norway, rural fishing communities are also losing their young people to jobs on land and in larger towns. It is not so obvious as in Scotland, since the Norwegian coastal fleet has been able to maintain better wages for the crew than in Scotland, helped both because the Barents Sea cod stock that comes to spawn around the Lofoten Islands is doing well and because small boats going out for daytrips have lower expenses for fuel and maintenance than the Scottish trawlers. So far the coastal boats in northern Norway don’t seem to have had trouble finding Norwegian crew members (although on the large boats in the southwest, this may not be the case – I met a Polish fisherman in Bergen looking for work on a long-liner who had found many large companies looking for crew). With only four months of experience, the young man fishing as the only crewmember with the skipper on the Iversen Jr told me that he was making plenty of money and saw fishing as a good job. And even while still in school, young people are encouraged to see the fishing industry as a lucrative line of work, as the job of cutting the tongues off the fish heads before they are hung up to dry is traditionally kept for children, who can make up to two hundred kroner (about $38) an hour.

Despite this, however, the overall demographics of Norway’s fishing population show a dramatic dropoff in the number of young people going into fishing as a career. Like in Scotland, this is the first new generation that will face the additional cost of purchasing quotas if they want to skipper their own boats, making fishing less attractive as a career than as a short-term job. (While technically the quotas are attached to vessels and have to be re-approved by the government if the vessel is sold, leading the Norwegian government to claim that they have not privatized the fishery, vessels are advertised on the market with and without fishing quota and people pay a lot of money for the quotas. The fisherman in Ballstad in the Lofoten Islands who took me out on his coastal gill netting boat, the Iversen Jr, told me that about 90% of what he paid for the boat was for the fishing quota, not the value of the boat itself.) Of course, decreased interest in fishing careers is not necessarily the fault of fishing policies – many people I talked to point instead to a globalized world where children grow up with television and internet that introduces them to allure of big cities that are not available in rural fishing communities, others point to a more education-focused culture that sends young people away from home to finish school and prepares them for white-collar jobs rather than for fishing. Whatever the reason, however, fishing communities – whether in Norway or Scotland or indeed any of the places I have visited – are in for drastic changes if retiring fishermen end up selling their fishing quotas not to younger fishermen in the local area following traditional fishing methods but to larger fishing companies in other parts of the country, literally selling away the community’s rights to fish.

And this brings me to what has remained the nagging problem in the back of my mind in thinking about the quota-based management systems that I have seen so far this year (and though each country runs the system a little differently and only Iceland has openly named the system one of individual transferable quotas, Denmark, Scotland, and Norway in addition to Iceland all have systems that allow fishermen to buy and sell the right to fish). Should these countries really be giving the right to catch fish – to use a public natural resource – to private individuals, to be bought and sold on the market like any other commodity? (Of course, most countries – and particularly those like Norway and Iceland with a strong legal and cultural tradition of considering fish a free resource for the entire public – argue that rights have not in fact been given away, just temporarily granted. But when selling a quota is providing the money to buy a new house or car, when people cannot afford to purchase the quota necessary to fish, it seems clear to me that whether the rights are temporary or permanent on paper, they have closed public access to fishing for all of those who were left out of the initial allocation of fishing rights determined based on “historical” fishing during a short reference period – which of course left out all future generations who were not yet around to be fishing – unless those who were left out of the initial allocation have the money to purchase for themselves the right to fish.)

In Iceland, the representatives of large fishing companies holding large proportions of the quotas argued that private individuals or companies with a large share in the quotas have a stronger stake in maintaining the resource, contributing to conservation goals as a means of maximizing profit from the national fish resources. But this model assumes that money – the net profit to be made from a nation’s fish stocks, the maximum price received by fishing at the level of the “maximum sustainable yield” – is the end goal of a nation’s fishing policy. But is that necessarily the only desirable goal? Fish is not just money (despite the Norwegian saying as the fish dry in Lofoten that you can smell the money in the air) – it is also food, nature, culture, tradition. Having had the privilege to meet many of the people in fishing communities in the eastern North Atlantic, when I think of the value of fish I think of the families who have shown incredible kindness by inviting me into their homes, the skippers who have taken the time to show me their boats and fishing methods, the scientists working alongside the fishermen to develop better fishing gear technology, the fish buyers who arrive at the markets every morning to purchase the day’s catch at auction, the “Mission Men” providing moral and financial support for those who deal with the day-to-day risks of bringing fish to the table. With whole communities centered around fish resources, decisions should not be left up to a select group of people as a small “special interest” issue but considered by the whole of the public, all of whom have a stake in determining how we value and use natural resources.

And so, I have come to realize over the past months that that the “big picture” is much bigger than just fisheries. Protecting cod isn’t just about a funny-looking species of groundfish – because if that was the only reason to care about cod, it would long ago have gone the way of all the non-cute-and-fuzzy species under pressure from human activities. Although having spent four years learning to think like a geologist did not teach me much about fisheries, my tendency to think about broad questions of “the environment” in a geologic time scale informs how I see humanity’s relationship with natural resources: in the scheme of things, the world will go on if we depopulate the fish stocks that humans eat for food – new species will take their place, the ecosystem will evolve…and anyway, most of these species wouldn’t outlast the creation of the next supercontinent just a few tens of millions of years down the road. On a human timescale, however, depopulation of fish stocks means the loss of a piece of nature upon which many people and cultures depend. Sustainable fishing is about sustaining things people value that have grown up around cod: it’s about maintaining an ecosystem that can support fisheries-dependent economies, allow coastal communities to maintain their culture and traditions, and provide healthy food for the world’s growing population. Thinking about the wider contexts in which people value fisheries has made me consider much larger issues: what sort of food sources should we use to feed the world’s growing population? What is the place of traditional rural cultures in a globalized, technically-advanced world? How should a nation allocate finite natural resources among its population?

My experience so far this year has been richest when I find myself thinking about these larger questions and looking at what I am seeing and doing as broadly as possible. With all the technical complexity of trying to decipher fisheries regulations, not to mention the frequent day-to-day slog of trying to figure out the logistics of what I’m doing and where I’m going next, I sometimes find myself getting bogged down in the minutiae of my project. But for me, the real beauty of the Watson Fellowship is that I don’t have to sort out all the details or limit my scope to questions I can neatly answer, and that there is no separation between things that are and are not relevant to this year’s experience – everything can relate back to what I am learning, both about fisheries and the larger questions they inform. I find lessons about the reasons people value fishing and connections to larger questions about the place of fishing in today’s society in all manner of surprising places: an example of people’s strong ties to rural communities and the importance of a sustainable food supply in meeting a couple who moved back to the wife’s childhood home in the Lofoten Islands to start an organic farm, or insight into the importance of fishing heritage in Scottish culture listening to a ballad about the end of the steam drifter era in an Edinburgh folk music pub, or an illustration of the personal significance of cod in Norway in the embroidered cod on the dress of the woman sitting behind me at the church service on Easter Sunday. Learning about fisheries not just as something I am studying but as part of an overall experience, I also see the big picture questions of how and why people value fish – their overall experience of fisheries – as the place to start any discussion of how to ensure that fisheries management continues to sustain not only the fish resources at their base but the reasons that people care about fish in the first place. It’s not an answer to solve the problems of the cod fisheries in the north Atlantic (which, surprise surprise, is not something I could do in a year), but taking the time to think about these questions in a larger context does frame my perspective in thinking about how to manage natural resources – and I still have the rest of my life to spend looking for answers.

From Sea to Stockfish: Lofoten’s Coastal Cod Fishery

Every year, for as long as people have lived in northern Norway, the winter has been a time for fishing. In January, the Barents Sea cod stock swims south from the coast of Finnmark to spawn along the coast of the Lofoten Islands, just north of the Arctic Circle on the Norwegian coast. From January through April, coastal fishermen from Lofoten – and many visiting fishermen from all along the Norwegian coast (and increasingly also foreign sports fishermen, attracted by the lure of catching a record-breaking cod, perhaps as part of the World Cod Fishing Championships, described very nicely here) – set out in small day boats to catch the spawning cod as they come close to shore. Many people I met over the past six months had recommended that I go see the Lofoten fishery and I was curious to see the traditional inshore fishing fleet for myself, so even though I hadn’t initially included it is my plans for the year, I headed to Ballstad, a fishing village of just under a thousand people in the southern end of the Lofoten Islands, for a week in the middle of the peak cod fishing season in the end of March.

I arrived on the ferry the night before Easter, in the middle of Lofoten’s biggest snowstorm and coldest night of the year so far, to discover that – being the night before Easter – there were no buses running and no shops open for the next two days. Luckily, Mary Ann and Børge, the couple who own the rorbu (fishermen’s cabin – initially built around Lofoten to house fishermen visiting for the winter cod season, now mostly run as tourist accommodation for the summer months) I was staying in took pity on me and my poor planning (somehow I had just brought a jar of peanut butter as food) by inviting me for Easter dinner with their family. They made a Lofoten specialty called boknafisk, made from cod left out to dry on the fish drying racks for fourteen days, served along with potatoes and peas and a bacon and butter sauce. It was wonderful to have the chance to share a holiday meal with a local fishing family (in addition to running the rorbuer, Børge is a commercial fisherman on a coastal gill netter), and very tasty fish too.

Although I had not considered whether it would be a good idea to spend Easter in small Lofoten town (not normally celebrating Easter myself and all), it turned out to be a wonderful opportunity to get to see the normal life of the community – including the place of cod in local culture. Since everything in town was closed for Easter, I did what seemed the normal thing to do – go to Easter services. Since I had never actually been to an Easter service before, I couldn’t tell you the difference between Norwegian and American Easter traditions. But the church – a 102-year-old red and green painted wooden cathedral with lots of stained glass and sunlight – was lovely and the music, hymns accompanied by an organ, trumpet, and choir, was beautiful, and I really enjoyed watching the service unfold (and even could mostly tell what was going on, with the help of explanations and translations by the woman I sat with).

The best part, though, were the families baptizing their babies as part of the service – which there were quite a lot of, since Norwegian families tend to all get together for Easter and so the baptisms wait until the whole family can be back at home. This was exciting first of all because it was fun to see all the babies in their lacy baptism dresses and little hats (I had also never seen a baptism before), but also because I got to see the mothers’ traditional Norwegian dress costumes. I didn’t take any pictures (even though plenty of people brought cameras and took pictures of the baptisms, I’m used to thinking of religious events as technology-free, and anyway it seems disrespectful to me to take pictures during a service, so I left my camera at home). But you can get the idea of what they look like here. The Lofoten costume is a blue floor-length dress and vest-like jumper top embroidered with flowers, worn along with a matching embroidered purse attached on the side and a cape used instead of a regular coat when going outside. My favorite, though, was the design worn by the woman sitting behind me: under an embroidered picture of two Viking ships heading towards the sun was an anatomically-correct cod, and on closer consideration I also noticed that her purse, rather than being embroidered, was decorated by silver charms in the shape of a cod covered over by a piece of green mesh with a silver clasp at the top in the shape of a fishing boat such that the purse looks like the boat has caught a net full of fish. Just in case I was wondering, cod is pretty important to Lofoten.

The next morning, I went out fishing with Børge on his boat, the Iversen Jr, to see how the coastal fishermen in Lofoten catch their cod.

Børge fishes nine months out of the year and catches a quota of 44 tons of fish (mostly cod, and other species such as haddock and saithe, which are measured for small boats like his in terms of cod-equivalents). He fishes with gill nets, which are set on the ocean bottom and “soak” for a day, collecting the fish that and the day I went out with him he was picking up fish from three sets of thirty nets each that he had set the day before. It was a very good day for fishing: by the end of the day we came back with 1,400 kilos of fish, Børge’s best catch so far this season. Obviously, I am good luck.

Here is the boat in the harbor - time to go fishing!

And after just a half-hour steam, we are on the fishing grounds (pretty gorgeous, huh?). This is another small gill-netting boat much like the Iversen Jr fishing alongside us. Note the sail, used not to actually move the boat but to help stabilize it against the wind, and the flag and buoy, marking the beginning of the net they are about to haul.
Børge soon locates the buoy marking his first set of nets and soon is hauling the net back aboard with all the fish that have been caught over the past day. The fish and net are pulled up by an automatic hauler, leaving Børge and his single crewmember free to just work untangling the fish and the net.

As the net comes in, it has to be untangled and stowed in the compartment aft, ready to be set again once all the fish have been removed - as Børge told me, we also need something to do tomorrow.
Both fishermen work to extricate the big fish from the net, using a tool that is both capable of gently untangling and of ripping apart the net to free the fish.

Once freed from the net, they quickly kill the fish by cutting at the gills, using the sharp end of the same tool used for detangling.
Most of the catch are big cod, but there are also occasionally haddock and plaice, which they also keep unless they are juveniles (which they try to free carefully before throwing them back), and crabs like this one, which although edible they mostly do not keep, but bang against the side of the boat to crush and get them out of the nets.

After they have finished removing all the fish from the net, and while it is being set back out for the next day's fishing, they remove the fish heads and guts, leaving just the portion that will be hung up to dry to make stockfish.

After hauling up the fish from all the nets and setting them back in the water to catch the next day's fish, we head back to harbor to land the fish to the small fish factory that will dry the fish to make Lofoten's signature product - stockfish. Known as tørrfisk in Norwegian, and sold as "bacalao de Noruega," mostly to Italy, this transformation of the cod is what makes Lofoten's cod fishery world-renowned.

At the factory, they use a crane to haul the fish off the boat.
In the factory, any fish that the crews didn't get a chance to head and gut on the boat are prepared onshore. Note that rather than discarding all the offal, the roe - the female's pouches full of pink eggs - and the livers are saved to eat. Another choice piece used in Lofoten cooking, the cod's tongue is cut from the heads by a young boy - this is traditionally a job saved for young people as their first introduction to the fishing industry.From the factory, the fish are put into fish boxes and onto tractors and taken out the fish racks to be hung to dry.There were crews out hanging fish all the time while I was in Ballstad, and I stopped to watch on group hang up a batch of fish.
Along, as it so happened, with an English television film crew producing a short spot on the Lofoten fishery. Yet another testament to the world-wide reputation of the Lofoten cod fishery.The men were working in pairs: one man on the tractor picks up the fish (bound together as a pair), and then hands up to another up near the top of the racks who hangs it over a wooden pole.As this worker explained to us, each rack can hold tens of thousands of fish, and hanging the entire catch to dry is a full time job during the winter fishing season - they work all hours of the day, from early in the morning when the boats are heading out until ten and eleven at night. They also keep busy the rest of the year, since after the fish is done drying in June it needs to be taken back down, sorted based on its quality, and then prepared for export.
The drying racks are found in seemingly every bit of free space on the islands part of the incredibly picturesque scenery of Lofoten.
Most people even had a few fish hanging to dry on the side of their houses, providing their own supply of stockfish for the coming year.
Here's what the drying fish looks like up close.
And the heads, also dried, and mostly sold to Africa (some are also bought by the Norwegian government and given to the poor in developing countries as government aid).
I thought it was pretty cool to be able to walk around and watch the fish drying. So much fish!
And, to finish off the experience and see the process from start to finish, I also had the chance to taste some proper Norwegian cod. In addition to the boknafisk I had with Mary Ann and Børge's family on Easter, they also invited me the night I went out fishing on the boat to eat some of the fresh fish catch prepared in classic Norwegian style - boiled fish and roe served with potatoes, carrots, butter and liver sauce. An excellent end to a fantastic chance to see Lofoten's coastal cod fishery, a continuation of centuries of fishing tradition that will hopefully last for centuries to come.