Keywords

1 Introduction

While it has been said that ‘the past is another country’, this should not be the case for fisheries management and its related science. Fisheries scientists’ unfamiliarity with their own history, has, according to fisheries science historian Tim D. Smith, condemned them to rediscovering basic principles in the face of repeatedly collapsing fish stocks. He has recommended that fisheries policies be based on ‘autopsies ’ of the fisheries (Smith and Link 2005: 73–87; Smith 1994: 2–3). In recent decades, fisheries biologists have recognized that fisheries biology and fisheries ecology must intertwine current science with history. Human interventions in the ocean environment, such as massive over-fishing and subsequent conservation attempts, have resulted in unforeseen chaos, not the mechanistic stability and control envisaged by early fisheries scientists (who believed that simply stopping fishing would restore fish stocks to pre-fished conditions). Projects such as HMAP (History of Marine Animal Populations) have made steps toward rectifying the missing historical dimension in fisheries science and management. Launched as one aspect of the Census of Marine Life (2000–2010), HMAP encouraged fisheries scientists and historians of science to cooperatively investigate old records to discover the historical conditions of commercial species’ populations at different stages in the development of intensive marine fisheries, and led to such works as Jeffrey Bolster’s award winning The Mortal Sea (Bolster 2012). This laudable project, however, has given scant regard to the intellectual history of fisheries science , fisheries management, and to the ideals driving government programs to assist fishermen, fishing communities , and the larger, fish-consuming public. Despite the growth of environmental awareness, there has been no critical investigation of their own ideological foundations by fisheries scientists and managers. As a result, their attempts to sustain marine resources remain operationally entangled in early twentieth century, progressive ideals based on a series of ecological and economic assumptions that were intensified when Keynesian economists also became involved in fisheries management issues.

This first section of this paper, “The eclipse of Investigatory Fisheries Science ”, explores the biological reasoning and the unfounded assumptions– especially those related to efficient exploitation and conservation of resources– that underlay the development of mathematical models in fisheries science. Early prominent fisheries biologists , such as the Englishman Michael Graham , and the Canadian Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman , clearly understood that fisheries biology primarily served economic goals, and promoted fishing policies that reflected the classical economic understanding of the (supposedly) rational exploitation of commodities and resources that held sway into the 1930s. Scientists’ mathematical models were used as tools for advising governments on measures that would enable a maximum sustained yield to be achieved, ‘rationally’ conserving the fisheries for future fishing efforts. After the Second World War governments demanded that scientists use mathematical models, which could substitute for expensive in situ fish population monitoring . Post-war fisheries scientists’ use of mathematical models to analyse and predict the dynamics of fished populations allowed the marine environment to become an abstraction, facilitated understanding between economists and fisheries scientists, and mediated the focus on economic efficiency and growth . However, as revealed in the second section, the importance of economic ideas to explain environmental phenomena in ecology would also trip up later fisheries biologists . The wise use or efficiency ideal that underlay the emerging goal of maximum sustained yield meant it was easy for the economic and conservation goals of fisheries biology to become confounded. This problem would be worsened when economists trained in Keynesian economics entered the realm of fisheries management. The third section, “The New Experts: H. Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott , Bio-economics and Fisheries Management” describes the impact of the bio-economic models created by the Canadian founders of this new economic sub-discipline, Gordon and Anthony Scott. These formed the basis for later economic restructuring of fisheries management by limiting entry to the fisheries and setting quotas, and set the agenda for ITQ fisheries management. I argue here that Scott Gordon actually owed an unacknowledged intellectual debt to Graham and Huntsman ; moreover, his analysis of, and advocacy of certain ‘rational ’ fisheries policies was based on a faulty understanding of the historic nature of different nations’ fisheries management schemes. Following Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott ’s pioneering work, many economists became involved in developing fisheries policies. I explore their lack of understanding of both the fisheries resource and the work of fisheries biologists in the fourth section: “Culture Clash: Differing World Views of Economists vs Fisheries Biologists”. The last section, “Economists in Charge”, describes the eclipse, by the early 1970s, of fishery biologists as governments’ preferred expert advisors on fisheries management. Government economists’ flawed understanding of the fisheries resource, and their activist social goals, shaped their bioeconomic models and analysis; fisheries biologists were expected to incorporate idealized economic models into their ‘fishing equations ’ to maximize economic outcomes for fishing communities and the fishery. The consequence for the discipline of fisheries science –at least in Canada–was that its practice was distorted by the superimposition of irrational economic models on predictive population models already flawed by misleading assumptions about natural fish populations.

In Canada, economists’ strong influence on fisheries policy from the 1960s onward occurred in an era already captive to larger Cold War agendas, as many governments sought ways to improve the economic yields of fisheries. In Canada these experts progressed beyond mere economic analysis; rather, their activist agenda to alleviate poverty reshaped Canadian fisheries policy. Their work amplified the progressive ideals underlying resource management to generate wealth. Ironically, the Canadian government took much longer to adopt policies based on the central insight of bio-economics: the need to limit access to the fisheries. Together with quota management this measure promised rational and efficient methods to conserve resources and to generate wealth. Today, the intellectual attraction to ideals of efficiency in natural resources management – ultimately rooted in nineteenth century German scientific forestry ideals, now largely discredited (Scott 1998: 11–22) – remains enormous. Even recent attempts in fisheries science to introduce ecosystem management for sustainable fisheries remain enmeshed in the language and thinking of early scientific management with its focus on efficiency. Their conservation goals have had, at best, mixed success, with the not-unforeseen but perverse (given the original motivation) economic consequence of concentrating certain fisheries into the hands of a few successful entrepreneurs through tools such as individual transferrable quotas.

2 The Eclipse of Investigatory Fisheries Science

Fisheries biology emerged around 1900, in an era in which resource conservation was dominated by what economic historian Samuel Hays called the ‘Gospel of Efficiency ’: nature should be conserved so as to be exploited to a maximum level to make similar quantities of resources available for future generations. I have elsewhere traced this understanding of resource conservation to its origins in German scientific forestry management, which I argue is the origin of the ideal of maximum sustained yield (MSY) in fisheries biology (Hubbard 2014: 364–378; Hubbard 2016: 78–117). The message of efficient resource use resonated during the Progressive Era in the United States, as the western frontier closed and America awakened to the limits on resources fuelling its economic expansion.

In contrast to concerns about territorial resources, the oceans were seen as a robust frontier . However, even here, evidence of depletion in inshore fisheries as early as the 1860s led to calls for fisheries restrictions in the United States and Great Britain. These fears were repudiated by followers of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), who served as a Fishery Inspector for England, and also oversaw two Royal Commissions inquiring into the effects of trawl fishing. Huxley saw most commercial fish species as being virtually unlimited, with no possibility of depletion even by the new steam trawler fishery (Hubbard 2014). Up until the Second World War a new cohort of scientists, specializing in fisheries science after the turn of the century, studied all aspects of fish life histories to understand how commercial fish, shellfish and crustacean species are affected by their environment, whether overfishing could be detected, and the causes of irregular and sometimes quite enormous population fluctuations. Early fisheries biology was highly exploratory as scientists confronted–and defended or rejected– Huxley ’s theory that the great sea fisheries were virtually inexhaustible. They divided on the question of overfishing ; British biologists E. Ray Lankester and Sir William Herdman warned that the fisheries were under stress from overfishing , while in Canada and Norway early fisheries biologists absorbed Huxley’s dictum as gospel (Hubbard 2006b: 149–163).

In 1914 Johan Hjort (1869–1948), the Director of Fisheries for Norway, created a new theoretical paradigm for fisheries investigations. His work showed that sharp drops or increases in the East Atlantic herring catches were caused not by overfishing , but by natural population fluctuations due to as-yet-unexplained variations in reproductive success from year to year, creating both exceptionally huge and also worryingly tiny year-classes. Hjort ’s work served to attenuate fears of overfishing causing poor herring catches, since these could now be linked to weak year-classes arising from unexplained conditions relating to reproduction . What especially served to de-link fishing intensity and poor catches was Hjort ’s finding that no correlation existed between the size of the spawning fish stock and subsequent numbers of young fish successfully spawned and recruited as a year-class into the population (Hjort 1914).

Nobody agreed on what reduced catches represented, or even how overfishing should be defined. Nevertheless, certain experts in the 1930s warned about falling commercial fish stocks, including the American fisheries scientist who inaugurated the International Pacific Halibut Commission, W.F. Thompson (1888–1975), and Scottish fisheries expert scientist E.S. Russell (1887–1954), and his protégé Michael Graham (1898–1972). Graham was later director of the Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft , England. Many other fisheries biologists , however, especially in Canada and Norway, found evidence to brush these concerns away (Schwach and Hubbard 2010; Hubbard 2006b: 149–163). Even up to 1970, the dominant perception was of a robust ocean frontier for human exploitation.

Among the earliest efforts, in the 1930s, to model the population effects of commercial fishing were those by the same scientists–Russell and Graham in Britain, and Thompson in the US–who urged the need to conserve fish stocks. Their work ushered in the new mathematical fish population modelling which dominated fisheries biology in the post-war period. In the 1940s and 1950s fisheries biologists professed – correctly – an insufficient understanding of commercial fish species to explain natural population fluctuations. But this concern was down-played as scientists sought the best models and statistical data to create ‘fishing equations ’ to determine the effects of fishing, predict stock sizes, and calculate what limits should be put on the fisheries. By the 1950s investigations to support population and fishing models had eclipsed basic fisheries biology , and were institutionalized in international bodies that coordinated national and cooperative international fisheries science and management efforts.

Mathematical population dynamics in post-war fisheries research was driven, first of all, by government demand for this style of science. This demand was remarked upon in 1947 by Canadian fisheries biologist Russell Earle (1899–1978), who also noted a new requirement for ‘fisheries management’ for a maximum sustained yield (MSY) (Foerster 1948). Both terms were recent introductions. American fisheries biologists Wilbert Chapman, William Herrington and Milner B. Schaefer piloted the demand for MSY-driven science to aid the United States’ hegemonic Cold War ambitions; Carmel Finley elucidated their role in promoting American international interests through MSY fisheries policies in All the Fish in the Sea, a superb exposition of the political context in which mid-century fisheries biology operated (Finley 2011: 117–167).

Furthermore, population modelling was endorsed by international bodies created to coordinate and direct fisheries research activities of member states. One such body was the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF), founded in 1949. ICNAF enshrined the principles of Raymond Beverton and Sidney Holt ’s On the Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations (1957),Footnote 1 with its strong emphasis on ‘stock equations’ as the basis for research activities, purportedly to promote effective fisheries management.

Quantitative approaches were also fostered by population ecology and by conservation ideals that dominated fisheries biology from the early twentieth century to the 1980s (Kingsland 1985). In turn, the use of equations to model the effects of fishing on populations aroused the interest of several economists in the 1950s, since they also used mathematical models. These individuals had a slightly different interest: they wanted to determine how best to exploit fisheries so as to let a maximum number of fishermen obtain maximum ‘rent’ from the ocean’s resources.Footnote 2 Whether these methods and goals were compatible with the conservation goals of fisheries biologists is highly questionable; however, in an era that still enshrined the ‘Gospel of Efficiency ’ or wise use of resources, it is also doubtful that economists honoured fisheries biologists ’ attempts to grapple with MSY for the basic conservation of fisheries resources.Footnote 3

3 Entangled Economic and Biological Ideas in Fisheries Biology

The efficient or wise use ideal for the fisheries not only implied resource conservation for future use, but also maximizing the efficiency of current exploitation. Such conservation is obviously a human economic activity, but because it focussed on wild marine species, this connection has often been blurred. As a case in point, the textbook used in my undergraduate fisheries biology course, Everhart and Young’s Principles of Fisheries Science , discussed MSY and fisheries management without ever once introducing the word ‘economics’ or hinting that MSY was an economic goal– a glaring omission for its undergraduate readers (Everhart and Young 1981). While economic theory lay at the heart of this conservation ideal, MSY was presented as the entirely biological problem of estimating the size of fish populations–governed by such factors as spawning success, survival, growth , reproduction , natural mortality through age, disease and predation, and finally fishing mortality. It was possible for biologists to focus only on the biological issues.

In a recent article in Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society, I attempted to clarify the muddied waters of the mid-century MSY fisheries management ideal (Hubbard 2014).Footnote 4 This economic ideal blends four completely disparate ideas and methods, and has historically been confused in people’s minds with fishing equations . The two goals are: first for efficient or wise use of resources, to conserve these for future use; and second, for a democratized maximum efficiency of current exploitation (leaving no excess fish to go to waste). These are economic ideals, as well as biological ones,Footnote 5 but the biological and economic goals contradict each other. Maximized economic extraction of fish under the MSY paradigm means fishing up to, but not exceeding, a point of diminished future yield. This is impossible to achieve given limits to accurate prediction, unknown and unforeseeable contingencies in the physical and biological environments, and fluctuations in the markets in which fishers operate. Added to these joint ideals or goals are scientific problems: measuring and quantifying fish populations demographically; and modelling fishing effects (including quantifying fishing effort) to accurately estimate MSY. Here, practitioners, I would argue, confounded two related but different activities: 1) investigating fish population dynamics to calculate MSY ; and 2) studying population dynamics for their own sake. The latter–carried out, for instance, by Charles S. Elton ’s Bureau of Animal Population in Oxford in the 1930s–emerged at the same time as scientists were developing fishing equations . Adept fisheries biologists were well aware of their discipline’s economic dimensions, but I would argue that others focussed on biological challenges and ignored the economic dimensions of their work.

At a conference several years ago when I first suggested some biologists were blind to the economic underpinnings of their population modelling, Sidney Holt (1926–) – who with Ray Beverton (1992–1995) developed highly influential fishing equations , at the behest of Michael Graham  – mildly reprimanded me: “Fisheries biology and economics have always been inseparable!” he stated.Footnote 6 This is indisputable, and I am grateful to Holt for making me ask myself if I was imagining things, and if not, how fisheries biologists could have lost sight of the economic point of population modelling. I still stand by my argument. Fisheries biologists’ focus on studies of population demographics and size estimates of exploited fish stocks obscured their work’s economic repercussions, because conservation was the goal. It became possible to see their enterprise as being for the benefit of fish and not human populations. They treated human agency in the fisheries as being external to the ecosystem. As will be seen, economists who began advising on fishery management also seem to have thought the same thing.

In deference to Holt , it must be affirmed that the fisheries biologists who developed the earliest fisheries population models (himself included) knew they were trying to solve an economic problem. The language of MSY , first used in the 1930s, emerged in response to two concerns: stock depletion and economic hardships. A declining whale catch led Hjort to introduce the optimum catch concept in a paper analysing the Norwegian whaling industry in southern oceans. He described mathematically at what level whaling could operate and still maintain future catches (Smith 1994: 214–229). Russell and Michael Graham developed mathematical models of fishing effects to respond to marked declines in the North Sea haddock fishery; their work culminated in Graham ’s Great Law of Fishing : unlimited fisheries become unprofitable. Graham noted that when the overall catch fell due to overfishing , fishermen had to expend more effort to find fewer fish. If their effort were reduced, they would spend less to catch those fish, waste less time, and their profits would increase. He referred to his ideal as a “maximum steady yield”. Spurred by concerns about fishermen’s falling earnings during the Great Depression, he advocated an overall reduction in fishing effort to allow North Sea fish populations to recover. He claimed this would not harm the yield (Smith 1994: 231–232; Graham 1935: 264–274), a vital consideration since fish provided cheap protein during the Dirty Thirties (and fish and chip shops were the only British restaurants not subject to rationing during the Second World War ). When Graham later defended his calculations and ideas, he defended them on economic grounds (Graham 1943: 158–159; Graham , 13 September 1948, MS). As he told one critic, Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman (1883–1973) in a 1948 letter, fisheries restrictions might “be justifiable...when it can be shown... fishermen would make no important sacrifice by adopting them” (Graham 1948b).

Huntsman , the first full-time director (1919–1934) of the Atlantic Biological Station at St. Andrews , New Brunswick, also exemplifies the strong economic understanding of early fisheries scientists; as University of Toronto professor, he assisted his colleague, Harold Innis –then Canada’s leading economic historian–when Innis was writing his magisterial history: The Cod Fisheries (1938). Huntsman also aided Innis ’ protégé, Ruth Fulton Grant, with her own comprehensive economic analysis: The Canadian Atlantic Fishery (1934).

It is important to note that economic theories influenced the ecological sciences from the start. Charles Darwin ’s discovery of the mechanism for evolution, natural selection, was inspired by reading Thomas Malthus ’s economic essay On Population, which highlighted human competition for scarce resources. His Origin of Species introduced the ‘economy of nature’; his studies of species’ relations to their environment pioneered the science of ecology. Indeed, ecology was consciously modelled on economics. In 1869, German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), coined and defined the term ‘ecology’ as “the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature”, relating each species with its inorganic and organic environment (Marchant 2007: 177–178).

Economic ideas in ecology can be obvious or very subtle. For example, the ecological niche concept, introduced by British population biologist Charles Elton (1900–1991) in 1927, equated an organism’s ecological niche with a human profession and its role in a community, thus utilizing an economic definition (Golley 1993: 79). Oscar Elton Sette (1900–1972) of the US Bureau of Fisheries in 1943 described an unfished sardine population as filling an ‘ecological niche’ in which natural fluctuations from death on average equal births, and intra-population competition leave “the population...in equilibrium ” (Smith 1994: 245). The idea that an environment’s populations naturally tend to a state of equilibrium echoes economic theories that dominated from 1870 to 1930.

The study of market equilibrium was pioneered by French economist Léon Walras (1837–1910), who investigated how shifting consumer preferences affected intricate relationships between prices and quantities. Walras believed suppliers made adjustments to meet increasing or lowered demands due to shifting consumer preferences, making markets tend toward a state of equilibrium . As shifts continue, new equilibria will develop in a balance of supply, demand, costs of production, and trends created by people’s attempts to maximize their own satisfaction. Walras developed “a complex mathematical model” to “specify the exact conditions under which” an equilibrium might be achieved (Fusfeld 1990: 83). One of Walras’s followers, Cambridge professor of political economy Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), elaborated this into a theory that economic forces such as supply and demand tended to a partial equilibrium (the equilibrium being dependent upon what conditions were present), referred to by American economists in the twentieth century as ‘Marshallian equilibrium ’ (Hart 2014). Marshall was strongly influenced by Darwinian theory but also by progressive ideals, and hoped to make economics an instrument to assist the poor (Buchholz 1989: 149–52, 166–168). He became “the dominant figure in British and American economics” from around 1890 until 1925 (Staley 1989: 178). He used the fishing industry as a case study to argue that a system of free markets tended to maximize individual benefits: costs of production would be pushed to the lowest possible level, given the price of maintaining capital goods and other production factors, by the forces of competition, which would lead to the enlargement of some firms and the withering of others (Roncaglia 2005: 360–361; Buchholz 1989: 154–55).

Underlying Walras and Marshall ’s economic theories was the idea that resources and commodities would be rationally exploited. Ever since Adam Smith, important economic theorists have assumed that economic behaviour is rational behaviour, since individuals seek to maximize their economic benefits (Lagueux 2004: 31–51, 2010: 32–36). Producers will produce goods at the lowest possible cost consistent with meeting levels desired by consumers . As individuals maximize their personal benefits, society as a whole will benefit. Yet the classical economists, in dealing with general principles, missed the contradictory evidence of history, because they ignored the particular and local changes that human activity wrought on the natural environment. As Matthew McKenzie illustrates in his recent study on Cape Cod fisheries, Clearing the Coastline, fishers in competition in a capitalist system will capture and sell more fish than the market can bear, driving down prices and hurting their own bottom line. This happened in the weir or pound fisheries of Cape Cod in the nineteenth century. Because fishermen are competing, they will not restrict their catch. The consequences of flooded markets and poor prices are threefold: poorer, less-capitalized fishermen using older fishing techniques suffer materially; new markets have to be found; and fisheries depletion raises the cost of fishing. New markets open up because lower prices enable new uses. In Cape Cod, surplus fish were marketed to the reduction industry for agricultural fertilizers for the inland market (McKenzie 2010: 88–110). None of this contradicts Marshall ’s theories. The system was rational in that the weir owners– capitalist investors who never even had to set eyes on a weir– continued to make healthy profits, but in terms of fishermen’s wages and the loss of future human sustenance from these fisheries, there was no rationality .

4 The new Experts: H. Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott , bio-Economics and Fisheries Management

Unable to see the slow long-term decline in the fisheries from their mid-century perspective, both Huntsman and Michael Graham incorporated a rational , Marshallian economic understanding into their analyses of fishing activity. Both assumed that if fish populations become too small to remain commercially viable, fishermen will stop fishing them because the cost of catching fish would be driven upward to the point of economic loss. Once fishermen abandoned the fishery, the populations, they believed, would rebound.

Neither scientist anticipated the economic theories of John Meynard Keynes (1852–1949), another Cambridge graduate and later professor, who was Marshall ’s most outstanding student. Keynes, inspired by the Great Depression’s market failure s and especially the problem of mass unemployment , became a great opponent of his teacher’s free-market ideals. He advocated government intervention, subsidies , and managed markets to stabilize the aggregate economy (Gordon 1991: 579–588). In fisheries this translated to intensive subsidies to alleviate mass unemployment , through assisting in the purchase of capital goods (boats, nets, fish processing plants) that would drive up participation and thus employment in the fishing industry.

The prominent Canadian economist, H. Scott Gordon , whose ideas profoundly changed Canadian fisheries management from the late 1950s onward, was trained in Keynsian economics. Keynes ’s ideas also inspired Stewart Bates , an economist who became Deputy Minister of Fisheries in the Department of Marine and Fisheries from 1947–1954. Bates and Gordon jointly promoted the industrial development of Canada’s Atlantic fisheries, government subsidies to the industry, and wealth redistribution (Gough 2007: 223–225; Parsons 1998: 17–18). Their agenda was reinforced by policy emerging from the United Nations. There the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch– who founded the sub-discipline of econometrics, and in 1970 received the first Nobel Prize in Economics–had become in 1947 the chairman of the United Nations Economic and Employment Commission. He “used this position to promote his vision of economics: the aim of science should be to prevent unemployment and conflict and, consequently, to ensure a rational distribution of resources and wealth” (Louçã 2007: 18). This agenda had an enormous impact: in Canada and other North Atlantic nations, fishing boats and fleets received subsidies for conversions and larger vessel construction (Hubbard 2012: 145–7). The message to Canadian policy-makers from the UN (an entity to which they gave great credence), was echoed within Canadian bureaucracy and academia. Canadian fisheries biologists , as will be seen, were told to become part of this new sociological and economic programme even as they struggled with new environmental pollution issues and problems with resource management .

Gordon (1924-), despite the brevity of his involvement with Canadian fisheries issues, profoundly affected Canadian and international fisheries conservation policy and thus the policy goals for fisheries science . Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Dalhousie University in 1944 and studied Keynesian economics as a graduate student at Columbia University and at McGill University. After graduating in 1946, Scott Gordon worked in the Fisheries Prices Support Board established by the Deputy Minister of Fisheries, Stewart Bates , upon taking office (Bates 1944: 135). In 1948 he was hired as Assistant Professor of Economics and founded the Department of Economics at Carleton University in Ottawa; as its first Chair (at the age of twenty-four!), he built “a solid research-oriented academic unit”.Footnote 7 He continued to consult for the Department of Fisheries after entering academia.

In 1951, Gordon began his economic study of Canada’s Atlantic fisheries, and particularly addressed what he identified as the shortcomings of fisheries biologists ’ population models, and the trawler question. His interest was facilitated by the fact that both fields dealt in statistical models. In 1954 his highly influential “The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery” appeared in the Journal of Political Economy. This article was seminal to the field of renewable resource economics and served as a foundation for bio-economics.

In this paper Gordon asked why, in most ‘mature’ fisheries, fishermen tend to be poor, generating small or virtually no profits in return for their effort and investments. He defined this situation as the bionomic equilibrium , which occurs when total revenue equals total cost, and concluded “no sustainable economic rent will be generated in an open access fishery” (Reed 1991: 219). The solution was to move to a controlled-access fishery  – in other words, one over which access to the fishery was controlled by some owner or authority.Footnote 8 If this did not occur, in an expanding fishery, more fishermen would enter the fishery so long as they could earn some cash surplus to their expenses and opportunity costs , until the bionomic equilibrium is reached.

Gordon ’s ideas did not go unchallenged. A year later, in the same journal, “The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership” was published by Anthony Scott (1923–2015) an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Scott’s epigrammatic critique situated him as the co-founder of bioeconomics (Anonymous 2015). He demonstrated that Scott Gordon ’s analysis of resource management had missed a vital feature: while “long run considerations of efficiency suggest that sole ownership is a much superior regime to competition ... in the short run...there is little difference between the efficiency of common and of private property ” (Scott 1955: 117). If the sole owner took over an entire existing fishery fleet (and no technological upgrades) for only one season , he would run it exactly as open access competitors would, and generate a similar output, including the marginal product of labour equalling the price of labour (Scott 1955: 121). Ownership needed to be ensured over the long term, to enable planning how to maximize returns, treating fishery resources as assets to be managed both for the short-term (“to maximize the present value”) (Scott 1955: 122) and for the benefit of the future (and of future generations) (Munroe 2004).

Gordon ’s and Scott’s articles changed resource economics , forming “the foundation for the field of renewable resource economics ” (Munroe 2004: 2). According to the Association of Environmental and Resources Economists (AERE) , “Most environmental and resource economics textbooks today have a section based on these two articles. More than 50 years since their publication people still cite the papers”; indeed “their insights are now ‘common knowledge ’”, “so fundamental that they become part of our daily thinking” (Cameron 2006: 1). I have little doubt, however, that many fishery managers’ citations of Gordon ’s paper were rote and uncritical.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, Gordon ’s and Scott’s papers were “the pioneering work on socially efficient management of renewable resources […]” (Cameron 2006: 1– my italics). My italics highlight the emphasis on – ‘social’ efficiency , which should be kept in mind in the following critique of the erroneous foundations of Gordon ’s reasoning.

Two fundamental problems undermine Gordon ’s understanding of fisheries economics, and created major problems for later Canadian fisheries management. The first problem was his belief in the robustness of fish stocks . He was not concerned that overfishing might reduce the number of fish spawned and recruited, and was unaware that continued intensive overfishing led fish stocks to collapse catastrophically. The second problem was his equating industrialized fishing with rational , efficient economics. He was deeply averse to restricting fishing technology, an approach that historically has assisted in sustaining fisheries for future exploitation.Footnote 10

This aversion to restricting efficient technologies is expressed in “The Trawler Question in the United Kingdom and Canada”, published in 1951 in The Dalhousie Review, which reflected insights from Gordon ’s year spent in the Fisheries Prices Support Board. He was perplexed by past Canadian fisheries policy. Increased demand for fish during the First World War had led to trawler construction in Canada in 1918. Yet the Canadian government had virtually outlawed steam trawling on Canada’s Atlantic coast in the 1930s when traditional line and dory fishermen protested that the new steam trawlers would wipe out their fisheries. Why outlaw this efficient fishing technology, while Britain had refused a similar ban following vigorous protests by line fishermen? The Royal Commissions of 1863–66 and 1883–85 had investigated charges that trawling depleted the fisheries; Huxley , their chairman, famously found the trawl fisheries to have minimal effects on the fisheries. Huxley ’s findings were credited with preventing a British ban on trawlers, but Gordon argued that steam trawling really continued simply because British trawlers were competing in the international fisheries of the North Sea . It made no sense to restrict trawling given the British fishing resource was a “sea that was the common property of all the nations of Western Europe... [t]he folly of any action to restrict British fishing was therefore apparent. The palpable impossibility of getting international agreement for the prohibition of trawlers among so many nations was also clear” (Gordon 1951: 126). On the other hand, Canada’s long coastline allowed the illusion that a trawler ban would prevent overfishing , despite foreign steam trawlers fishing extensively both outside and inside Canada’s three mile limits. Thus the line fishermen won the ban they demanded. Gordon interpreted the line fishermen’s quest for a trawling ban as being due to fears that steam trawlers would glut the market, leaving them unable to compete. Only during the Second World War did international demand for fish and growing prosperity finally end opposition to trawling .

Gordon had no knowledge, however, of the negotiations behind the British ‘support’ of steam trawling . In fact British scientists and technocrats who participated in the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES ) desired general fishing restrictions for the plaice fishery, for example, but were ordered to oppose these owing to the political strength wielded by the trawler men, due in part to their importance to British naval policy (Rozwadowski 2002: 66–67). The opposite policies of the British and Canadians were both politically , not scientifically-rationally motivated; they were equally dictated by the goals of self-interested groups. Also, contrary to Gordon ’s beliefs, steam trawlers had also been restricted in another North Sea fishing country, namely Norway. In 1939 Norway only had 3 trawlers in operation in its coastal fisheries, as did the Canadian Atlantic fisheriesFootnote 11 Norwegian restrictions on steam trawling and landing steam trawlers’ catches were due to the strong tradition of fishermen’s collective control of fishing, rule through local fishing districts, and their opposition to steam trawling (Jónsson 2007, 2006). Norwegian fishing districts had an excellent record of local control to restrict effort and maintain the fishery at a healthy level. This was notably the case in the Lofoten region following an 1890 amendment of the Lofoten Act of 1816 (Pomeroy and Berkes 1997; Jentoft and Kristoffersen 1989). Ignorant of British motivations and Norwegian fisheries governance and restrictions, Gordon viewed the Canadian restriction as uniquely irrational . Given that both Britain’s unrestricted steam trawl fishery and Canada’s and Norway’s trawler restrictions were due to political pressure, Gordon ’s assumption of a ‘rational ’ British trawler policy is undermined. With no access to Norwegian and British policy documents, his ‘rational ’ economic analysis was based on an imagined scenario.

He similarly dismissed fears of stock depletion as misdirection by selfishly motivated line fishermen – the ‘irrational ’ (because technologically backward and inefficient) sector of the fishery. It bears mentioning that in the 1950s the prodigious Grand Banks groundfish fisheries were expanding on a breathtaking scale, with apparently no end in sight. “The weight of biological evidence having reduced the potency of some of the old arguments [by line fishermen] against overfishing , opposition has centred more and more on the claim that the grounds are overexploited and the trawler is accused of this” (Gordon 1951: 122). Gordon rather savagely argued that prohibiting steam trawling to prevent overfishing would stop “the operation of the more efficient catching units” which, while it would reduce the catch “is not a method that would have anything to recommend it. Economically it is similar to solving an unemployment problem to set men at digging holes and filling them up again” (Gordon 1951: 122).

What makes Gordon ’s paper of 1954, “Economic Theory of a Common Property Resource”, remarkable was his willingness to engage leading theories and ideas in fisheries biology , especially Milner B. Schaefer’s surplus production model (about which more later). With a mere year’s experience in the Fisheries Prices Support Board, his consulting work for Bates , and his economics background, he deemed himself expert enough to admonish fisheries biologists for shortcomings in their work. He was critical of biologists’ tendency “to treat the fisherman as an exogenous element in their analytical models” (Gordon 1954: 128). As Tim D. Smith notes, he complained that “the behavior of fishermen is not made into an integrated element of a general and systematic ‘bionomic’ theory” (Smith 1994: 335). But while he essentially criticized fisheries biologists for not being economists, he also failed to acknowledge their impressive economic understanding, and was quite happy later to champion economists’ takeover of fisheries biologists ’ role in helping to formulate government fisheries policies. Perhaps it is true early fisheries biologists did not flesh out economic insights in papers replete with economic jargon, but it was hard to pursue these in the face of multitudinous unresolved biological issues.

Looking at Michael Graham ’s paper on “Overfishing and Optimum Fishing”, Gordon comments: “its emphatic recognition of the economic criterion, would lead one to think that the economic aspects of the question had been extensively examined during the last half-century”. He concludes: “But such is not the case” (Gordon 1954: 125). Gordon failed to acknowledge that Graham ’s ‘Great Law of Fishing ’, which stated “fisheries that are unlimited become unprofitable” (Graham 1943: 153), succinctly stated the fundamental basis of his entire bio-economics theory: that economic rents in an unrestricted fishery would be unsustainable.Footnote 12 Graham and Gordon differed in that Graham only attributed reduced revenues as being due to overfishing , leading fishermen to increase fishing power (invest in new equipment) or travel further to find fish. Gordon instead saw reduced revenues as arising from a number of economic factors, including wasteful fishing and glutted markets–like the situation described by Matthew McKenzie in his history of the weir fisheries of Cape Cod (see above).

Gordon acknowledged that both Graham and Huntsman recognized diminishing economic returns when fishermen had to invest more to catch fewer fish. He also acknowledged they both saw overfishing might have more than one cause: overfishing could be due to declining fish stocks, for example, or more fishermen chasing the same number of fish. He recognized that Huntsman even defined overfishing depletion in economic terms: “Where the take in proportion to the effort fails to yield a satisfactory living to the fishermen” (Gordon 1954: 125). Gordon then, condescendingly, and without evidence, alleged that when Huntsman argued “the highest take is not necessarily the best ”, he did not understand the significance of his own statement (Gordon 1954: 125). This is nonsense. Huntsman himself commented, in the sentence before the one quoted by Gordon : “The take should be increased only as long as the extra cost is offset by the added revenue from sales. Not only markets but possibility of other employment will determine when and how rapidly the accumulated stock of fish should be taken by industry” (Huntsman 1949: 170).

Gordon ’s article also engaged with a scientific debate earlier stoked by Huntsman , who demanded a watertight definition of, and methods for determining, overfishing . Scott Gordon must have read the influential proceedings of the 1947 “Symposium on Fish Populations” organized by Huntsman , published as a much-reprinted—and even profitable!—issue of the Bulletin of the Bingham Oceanographic Collection.Footnote 13 At this symposium, Martin D. Burkenroad , then chief biologist of the North Carolina Survey of Marine Fisheries, was goaded by Huntsman into firing the first salvo of the Thompson-Burkenroad debate. Burkenroad (and Huntsman) questioned W.F. Thompson’s position that fisheries declines in the Pacific halibut fishery were due exclusively to over-fishing. Thompson, as director of the International Pacific Halibut Commission, defended the severe fishing restrictions he had imposed as being responsible for their recovery. Gordon took the Huntsman -Burkenroad side: that natural fluctuations instead may well have caused the Pacific halibut fisheries’ improved state after fishing closures, resulting in an improved catch-per-unit of effort. Gordon argued that Huntsman ’s critique of other scientists’ understanding of overfishing had not received the respect it deserved. He then used logical examples drawn from economics, equations and graphs to show why Huntsman , and earlier, H.M. Kyle, the German fishery biologist, were correct to argue that catch-per-unit effort indexes “are not adequate measures of population change” (Gordon 1954: 138).

Why did he enter this debate? The answer can be seen in his rejection of the problem of overfishing , following an elegantly succinct but thorough summary of the history of scientists’ treatment of this question from Huxley onward. It turns out Gordon trusted the findings of several Royal Commissions on trawl fishing (chaired by Huxley) that found no evidence for overfishing . Recent investigations, however, render these commissions’ findings suspect, contaminated by Huxley ’s disregard of or disdain for evidence of declining catches (Schwartz 2013, and personal communication; Hubbard 2014). Blithely unaware of these failings, and bolstered by Huntsman ’s skepticism,Footnote 14 Gordon treated the problem of fisheries depletion as a virtual non-sequitor: it was absurd to reduce the catch for conservation purposes since this would require introducing inefficiency (so irrational in the economic world view!) to do so. He cited Burkenroad ’s observation that “the purpose of practical policy is for man, not fish” with approval (Gordon 1954: 127).

5 Culture Clash: Differing World Views of Economists vs Fisheries Biologists

By challenging fisheries biologists on their own territory, Gordon had staked a claim for economists in fisheries issues. Resource economists took notice. This resulted in a roundtable discussion on fisheries economics in Rome under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1956, attended by both Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott . They were joined by fifteen other economists and two observers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy (the FAO), and Hong Kong. Most were academics. Only three were employed by governments as fisheries economists, namely W.C. MacKenzie who served in Canada’s Department of Fisheries (Gordon 2008);Footnote 15 and from the Hague, G.J. Linesch, director of Fisheries, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and D.J. Van Dyk, director of the Marketing Board for Fishery Products . Also present was P.E. Popper, Chief of the Economics and Statistics Branch of the Fisheries Division of the FAO in Rome (Turvey and Wiseman 1957).

In subsequent years many more government economists would attend FAO fisheries economics meetings, but at the 1956 meeting, convened to design measures to improve fisheries economies , there were few such individuals. It is important to note that these new fisheries experts, who emerged in the wake of Gordon ’s virtuosic paper, had a quite different take on fisheries problems from fisheries biologists . So divergent were their perspectives that they had utterly disparate definitions of common terms. ‘Overfishing ’, for example, for economists meant a state of affairs in which reduced profitability was occurring, while biologists understood it to mean, loosely, a substantial and harmful reduction in size of a fish population through fishing. This effected a culture clash which rendered their interests unintelligible to each other.

This culture clash was well illustrated during the 1956 economics round table. Even the economists themselves had dissimilar and even clashing goals–some wanted to improve the living standards of fishermen, whilst others were more concerned about how fisheries could boost the overall economy through improved products (eg. better refrigeration for fish stored for several weeks after capture in distant-water fisheries) and improving consumer prices. H. Zoeteweij of the Economics Division of the International Labour Office in Geneva, Switzerland was concerned that the already classic papers by Gordon and Anthony Scott ignored price fluctuations and engaged too much in the domain of fisheries biologists , viz. the economic effects of fish stock reductions (Turvey and Wiseman 1957: 3). The comment that best illuminates the cultural divide with fisheries biologists was Zoeteweij’s observation:

[t]he demand for a ‘sustained maximum yield’ from a given fish stock has been repeated ad absurdam. The term puts too much emphasis on the naturalistic romantic approach to the fisheries and it puts man and his needs too much in the background. If the purpose of our activities is to benefit man (i.e. producers and consumers) then a steady quantity is certainly not a realistic target. (Zoeteweij 1957: 2; my italics)

Gordon did not disagree: “In guiding government policy, the economist’s objective must be to make society better off, not merely the fishermen. He must be an economist in respect of fisheries, not on behalf of them” (Turvey and Wiseman 1957: 61). As I have argued elsewhere (Hubbard 2014), MSY was not designed for the benefit of fish, but of man–even economists appear to have missed the economic basis of fisheries biology !

Gordon , however, was on the same page as Zoeteweij: “we must beware the romanticism that has coloured public discussion of this problem and the narrowness of view which, all too often, has characterized the approach of fisheries biologists in this matter. The task of the fisheries economist, like that of other economists, is to contribute to the general welfare of society” (Gordon 1957: 68). Their goal should be to remedy problems that had arisen through conservation measures such as those by W.H. Thompson’s International Pacific Halibut Commission, which had led to a wildly inefficient fishery. While the fishery was closed most of the year, during its short season an increasing number of participants raced to catch halibut. The expanded fleet “now catches in a few weeks a quota of halibut that formerly took several months. The industry is heavily over-capitalized and its potential net returns are dissipated by higher costs” (Gordon 1957: 69). Only G.M. Gerhardsen – a professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business– objected: “It was necessary to understand the fishery, the nature of the sea, inability to see the resource, and so on. Co-operation with biologists and others was more profitable than isolation” (Turvey and Wiseman 1957: 13).

As for fish populations, Gordon said “the essential biological fact about the effects of fishing on stock numbers was that the reproductive capacity of fish was very, very high”; moreover, statistics showed that “the size of a fish population was not related to the number of potential spawners. The effect of fishing was not on spawning but on average age” (Gerhardson 1957; Turvey and Wiseman 1957: 77). These remarks indicate the deep direct influence of Huxley , reinforced through Huntsman . Huntsman, a strong ‘Huxleyite’ (Hubbard 2006b: 149–63), was among the first fisheries biologists to analyse the effects of fishing on fish populations, and concluded that the main effect was removal of older fish, which he assumed would improve growing conditions for younger fish (Hubbard, 2016: 102, 106–9). Gordon here echoes Huntsman ’s conclusions, and betrays his conviction that since the fisheries were inexhaustible, economists could treat the problem of generating wealth, employment and other benefits from the fisheries without concern for the fish populations themselves.

Anthony Scott , who was acquainted with fisheries biologist Milner B. Schaefer (1912–1970), had a more nuanced understanding of the effects of fishing on fish populations. Before the conference he and Schaefer met to discuss an as-yet-unpublished paper by Schaefer. He accepted Schaeffer’s argument that “a rate of landings...in equilibrium with a certain population is the same as the natural [growth ] of that population in the absence of fishing effort” (Scott 1957: 48, footnote 5).Footnote 16 Scott agreed that “if more effort is applied to a fishery” this might cause greater expense or inconvenience to every member of the fishery and a reduced fish stock or ‘population effect’ (Scott 1957: 47). However, like Schaefer he dismissed the long-term effects of overfishing :

A forest....is replaced slowly by nature, so that forest owners can decide upon a rate of cutting that will give them the best combination of timber, cost and timing....So it is with the fishery.Footnote 17 The stock of fish at any time is in the process of growing. Its growth (caused by its own reproductive force, which exceeds its natural death rate) would be indefinite if it were not that food shortages, physical habitat limitations and predators slow down the absolute time rate of growth as total population increases: eventually they prevent further growth . If any of these limiting factors increases in intensity, the population is depleted, then begins to grow more vigorously toward its previous size (Scott 1957: 47).

J.A. Crutchfield raised an objection. An Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Washington in Seattle –notable for its School of Fisheries Science –he argued that overfishing ’s effect in shrinking a fish population “might disturb the ecological balance so that it might not be possible [for the population] to return to the original position on the ogival [population] curve” (Turvey and Wiseman 1957: 60). But this comment got little regard–except, presumably, from Gerhardson, who did not speak up.

Scott’s real interest was fluctuations in demands for labour and fish or fish products . It is worth mentioning here that while Gordon moved to Indiana University and eventually switched his focus to the history of economics and science, Anthony Scott contributed to fisheries economics almost to the end of his life. From 1968 to 1972 he served as Canadian Commissioner of the International Joint Commission, which manages fisheries and other resources under the U.S.-Canada Boundary Water Treaty; and from 1971 to 1975 he served as Advisor to the Environment Directorate of the OECD in Paris. (“In memory of Professor Emeritus Tony Scott”, 2015). In 2010 he contributed a chapter, “New Directions in Fishery Management”, for a World Bank publication: The Political Economy of Natural Resource Use: Lessons for Fishery Reform. (Scott 2010: 1–17).

Generally, the economists at the 1956 round table sought ‘rational ’ solutions for problems like market fluctuations, the condition in which commodities arrived at the market, capitalization costs, the cost of actual fishing, and the cost in time of fishing. They endorsed factory ships which could adequately freeze fish at sea, recently introduced by the British and USSR, although it was felt that the public response to frozen fish needed study. (Turvey and Wiseman 1957: 16–17). What is remarkable about this meeting is their huge lacuna in understanding of the very nature of MSY as an economic objective, however it was arrived at. By arguing this goal was in place for the benefit of fish, they missed the fact that fish in fact do not benefit at all from being fished. MSY is an economic construction. Yet this misunderstanding was to reverberate through the fisheries policies of governments in the decades thereafter.

6 Economists in Charge

Scott Gordon ’s incursion into fisheries economics and the interest it raised was soon followed by government fisheries divisions’ hires of economists in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. But economists’ roles varied in these fisheries administrations. In England, the Whitefish Authority under the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF) had hired two economists by the 1960s. Their role was simply to provide sound economic analysis for different fisheries management scenarios. For example, Mr. C.I. Meek prepared an economic justification for the UK’s policy to support ICNAF ’s proposed introduction of a ‘total allowable catch ’ (TAC) in the northwest Atlantic . By 1965 researchers in ICNAF ’s Norwestlant programme, led by Beverton, realized that nets with a minimum mesh size could not prevent overfishing and stock depletion. Great Britain, Canada and a few other ICNAF member countries called for a TAC to be allocated to each country. Meek’s report, “Economic Effects of Conservation ”, advised that in addition to fish population fluctuations, “[t]he ‘common property nature of the resource, in itself, causes both inefficient exploitation and, in most cases, excessive effects” (Meek 1966). Meek admitted that given the “present state of the biological and economic arts, and the complications caused by mixtures of species and different gears and methods’ it was impossible to assess how effective TAC measures would be; results would ‘depend upon negotiation between national interests” (Meek 1966).

One economic insight Meek shared with the MAFF bureaucracy was that “any restriction of effort below the equilibrium point will cause operators to have excess earnings, in some cases very substantially so” (Meek 1966). The fisheries resources available would increase, allowing an increased catch per unit of effort, and greater economic efficiency . But his concern–and it was shared by Canadian economists– was that licensed fishermen exploiting fisheries at levels less than MSY would reap disproportionate rewards, or “excessive earnings”, as Meek put itFootnote 18 This was a motive to keep the fisheries at MSY. Beyond that disquieting insight, it is perhaps telling that in another context, the outcomes he predicted for a restriction of access to the fisheries took Australian fisheries biologist Anthony Harrison by surprise. Harrison was responsible for figuring out how to rescue Australia’s failing abalone fisheries in the late 1960s. He introduced licenses in the early 1970s, and then reduced the number of licenses year-by-year. He failed to foresee the inevitable effect. With fewer fishermen, each fisherman enjoyed a greater catch than before, although the overall catch was markedly reduced. Profits soared. The remaining fishermen were willing to pay progressively larger license fees. License-holders then sold their ownership to retire in wealth. By the 1990s abalone licenses cost in excess of a million dollars each and were owned by Japan ese consortia; the actual Australian abalone fishermen were mere employees (Harrison, personal communication). Mid-twentieth century fisheries biologists were naive as to the effects of limiting entry , but economists were not.

Meek advocated a limited number of short-term licenses to allow fisheries managers to adjust the fishing effort to fisheries conditions. He also advocated “by means of fiscal provisions” (Meek 1966), removing “from the industry substantial excess earnings and if this is done by means of licenses, will imply an official view about the proper rate of return on capital in the industry” (Meek 1966). G. Campleman, the White Fish Authority’s principal economist, also condemned potential excess earnings. “Any successful attempt to restrict the fishing below present levels should result in increased and excess earnings to operators”. Indeed “operators will continue to enjoy excess earnings which, in itself, is a bad thing... any successful system of regulation must involve a firm control over the effort and some form of mopping up excess earnings, either by the issue of expensive licences to fish, or by a form of levy” (Campleman 1965; my italics).

Unlike Campleman and Meek, Canadian fisheries economists were not appointed to offer economic analysis; they were economic activists. Both Gordon and the Deputy Minister of Fisheries Stewart Bates strongly favoured industrial development. They saw the Canadian Atlantic as having missed the industrial revolution in the fisheries, begun in the nineteenth century British steam trawler fishery.Footnote 19 The Canadian Atlantic fisheries were underdeveloped, inefficient, and profoundly irrational . During the 1950s, sail-powered boats and dories from the Maritimes and Newfoundland were attempting to compete on the Grand Banks alongside British, Soviet and Spanish factory trawlers. Bates had earlier chaired a commission examining the state of the Canadian Atlantic fisheries. When Bates became the Deputy Minister of Fisheries in 1947 he used the information published in his Report on the Canadian Atlantic Sea Fishery (1944), to back his initiatives for fisheries development and modernization policies. Both Bates and Scott Gordon emphatically favoured government intervention to subsidize fisheries development, and both preferred large, established fishing firms over independent small enterprises. Bates’ programme directed the industry towards the frozen fish trade for domestic and US consumption, and subsidized the creation of large firms and centralized frozen seafood processing and production (Wright 2001: 43–47). Gordon ’s work economically justified this programme. Bates also demanded the mathematical population dynamics and scientific ‘fisheries management’ fisheries biologist that R.E. Foerster noted as a new objective in the Canadian fisheries (see above).

Governments wished in part to bring their fisheries into the twentieth century; traditional fisheries reflected centuries-old practices, not modern, industrial states (Barrett 1984: 81). Similarly, in the US Deep South, modernization to separate agriculture from remaining peasant practices was also occurring (Daniel 2005: 7). The need to compete internationally, however, was the main driver of government intervention: fish captured by traditional fisheries was too expensive to market in competition with the products of industrialised fishing. The implications of industrial fishing for fish stock collapses went largely ignored by governments, economists, and most scientists in the North Atlantic . Paul A. Hirt , in his history of US forestry policy, A Conspiracy of Optimism, explained how American resource management policy had been warped by Cold War objectives. In an effort to outshine the Soviet Union and impress Third World client states, US policy pulled out all the stops in resource development and industrial productivity, to show the enormous advantages of a free-market democracy for individual well-being (Hirt 1996). Carmel Finley has documented the effects of US government subsidies for constructing industrial fishing fleets in the US, Japan , and elsewhere (Finley 2011: 73–5, 107–9; Finley 2017). This had knock on effects in other countries. In Norway, Hjort , following the Second World War , was able to set Norway on track to rebuild and modernize its fleet, to increase efficiency (See Schwach 2004). In Europe the quest for efficiency was also due to the needs of post-war reconstruction and the challenges it faced in rebuilding its food supplies.

By the 1960s, for the first time, Canadian scientists in the Fisheries Research Board referred to Canada as underdeveloped. Peter Larkin described Canada as “not one of the world’s most developed countries’” (Larkin 1975) in a letter to Fisheries Research Board Chairman J.R. Weir in 1975 and urged Canadian development of its own fisheries resources. One does not see this kind of economic labelling in reports and correspondence prior to 1960, not even during the Great Depression. What changed was the new social, economic and political reality of the Cold War , and in Canada’s case, enormous self-doubt following Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s order in 1959 to cancel the Avro Canada CF–105 Arrow programme, a project that had produced the world’s then-most advanced fighter jet.Footnote 20 Not only was the programme cancelled, but all prototypes were destroyed. Wracked by an inferiority complex with regard to the United States, Canadians also experienced identity issues, and worried about their post-colonial status and largely resource-based economy. These general and specific trends pushed Canada, like Norway, to begin an industrial revolution in the Atlantic fisheries just as the groundfish fisheries peaked in productivity and began their steep and thus far lasting decline.

To forward this industrial revolution, Canadian fisheries biologists were admonished by administrators within the Department of Fisheries to take account of economic issues and political trends in their science. This did not mean classic Marshallian analytical economics, but rather interventionist, neo-Keynesian economics. Neo-Keynesian policy insisted that governments should intervene to improve employment and industry. In Canada the crisis that justified policy changes was a high unemployment rate. In response to nine per cent unemployment rates in 1959, and ten per cent unemployment rates in 1961, Canada changed its fisheries policies to turn the fisheries into a ‘make-work’ project. Under reformed economic ideals, seasonal fishermen could fish for fifteen weeks and receive unemployment benefits the rest of the year. Federal economists wrote papers supporting and justifying social engineering experiments. Families were subsidized to leave the fishing outports through the Newfoundland Fisheries Household Resettlement Program of 1965. Economists and planners “envisioned several thriving communities...that would stimulate economic activity in surrounding areas”–but unfortunately “the anticipated spin-off jobs never materialized, and unemployment in the so-called growth centres hovered around 20%” (Candow 1997: 150).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, scientists working for the Fisheries Research Board of Canada were ordered to embrace both economic and social considerations in their work. In 1973 the Board’s scientists were ordered by upper level bureaucrats to pay attention to “the economic and political trends in the international sphere that impinge on the management and development of the renewable and non-renewable resources for both commercial and recreational use in Canada” (Fisheries Research Board 1973: 5). They were also urged to engage an “emerging consensus... for ‘rational ’ resource management , i.e. controlling intensity of fishing on a socially optimal basis” (Fisheries Research Board 1973: 6) Their strategic planning was also to incorporate business organization, market diversification , and “regional disparities, i.e. variations in economic stress, in degree of dependence on fishery resource use, in economic efficiency and the like” (Fisheries Research Board 1973: 7). To strengthen Canada’s scientific position at the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea , which was then considering extending national waters to 200 nautical miles, the Fisheries Research Board was ordered to put a greater emphasis “on social sciences and economics. As fisheries resources are more heavily exploited, management will lean more heavily on social and economic analysis [including]... employment problems [...]” (Fisheries Research Board 1973: 7). Scientists acknowledged ruefully that “In essence, the days of cowboys and Indians are soon to be over in the world’s oceans, and only those who are organized to harvest fishes will achieve economic rationalization ” (Fisheries Research Board 1975).

It must here be emphasized that these new marching orders were given at the time the federal government, dissatisfied with the research output of Canadian fisheries biologists , was dismantling the Fisheries Research Board and concentrating control of the research stations into the hands of upper level bureaucrats in the shifting configurations of central government. This era also marked a backlash against scientific technocrats – area specialists serving as life-long civil servants, who were seen as usurping the power of elected government representatives. A policy was put in place to switch senior managers to fresh portfolios every five years (Gough 2007: 290). Reflecting these changes, the Department of Fisheries was transformed into the Department of Fisheries and Forestry , then shifted under the portfolio of Energy, Mines and Resources, briefly emerging as Fisheries and Environment Canada, and finally re-emerging as the newly configured Department of Fisheries and Oceans, all between 1968 and 1977. The focus at the federal level was developing a scientific policy for Canada, one that fit into its larger national policy, which for fisheries was summarized by the Fisheries Research Board as “to make fisheries as economically rewarding as possible as rapidly as socially possible within the restraints of ecological prudence” (Fisheries Research Board 1975).

At one meeting of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada in 1974, scientists were told that Canada’s political requirements for the upcoming Law of the Sea conventions were not being met: one criticism was that the Board’s “social and economic research” was “generally weak and characteristically ad hoc”; social science research was needed to evaluate “changing lifestyles and their impact on employment in fisheries...with a view to suggesting techniques of ensuring manpower requirements [including]...problems of retraining for older fishermen”. The Board statistics were inadequate “for this kind of research...Opinion and sentiment should be augmented by information and analysis”. (Fisheries Research Board 1974a: 2–3). The Board’s chairman’s 1975 annual report stated:

Dramatic changes were...taking place in the approach to fisheries and aquatic sciences. In the search for new practical knowledge, attention was shifting from studies of single species to ecosystems, from descriptive mapping to dynamic modeling... from natural science to fulfilment of societal needs, from unidisciplinary to interdisciplinary approaches (Weir 1975: 1–2).

Economists’ contempt for the basic biological focus of fisheries science and the role of MSY was reflected in these changes; they were designing centralized Canadian fisheries science policies to emphasize “a socially-defined optimum sustainable yield as a more appropriate concept’ that would be ‘in harmony with science policy shifts and shifts in perceptions of resource management problems [...]” (Fletcher 1976: 27; also Fletcher 1977).

While fisheries biologists were excoriated for not being economists or sociologists, fisheries economists were given a free ride despite not understanding the challenges faced by fisheries biologists . Government economist C.L. Mitchell’s 1974 economic report “Canada’s Fisheries at the Crossroads: Some Policy Issues” was prepared to assist forecasts of Canadian fisheries management policies requirements within the future 200 mile EEZ regime. In this report he lamented “a lack of rationalization throughout the industry: in most cases, there has been a misallocation of the factors of production, a lack of progressive and competitive attitudes, and an over-abundance of marginal fishing and processing operations”. He pontificated: “Surely fisheries are managed not for fish but for people, not just fishermen and fish processors but for Canadians...?... [but] maximum sustainable physical yields ignore the wants, needs and welfare of Canadians — only the fish benefit” (my italics). In consequence, he argued that “resource and industrial development policy must...bring about a more rational exploitation of Canada’s fisheries...to develop a better and more efficient industry” (Mitchell 1974: 5–6). His comments echo the beliefs expounded by the economists at the FAO round-table meeting eighteen years earlier.

On the Atlantic coast fisheries biologists ’ responses were muted: they did not have the insights into their own history to argue that their pursuits had been in aid of economic goals all along. While food production for the world’s growing populations had been the “main objective of science in the harvest management system”, now—in light of an emerging glut in North American food production (Hayes 1973: 142)—the new goal was to become “an optimum sustainable yield ”. This concept included “a social objective of enhancing the lives of fishermen and of preserving cultural identity”, and implied “the need to extend the food objective to include a socio-cultural objective” (Fletcher 1976: 27). Canadian fisheries science , then, had to add socio-cultural and economic objectives to their environmental objectives. However, they were out of their depth; senior scientists used to applying the biological, biochemical, and oceanographic sciences were unable to grapple with this brave new world of social engineering It is not to be expected that biologists or oceanographers tasked with monitoring the Grand Banks fisheries, then under the combined onslaught of the world’s fishing superpowers (Japan and the USSR, to name but two), were happy with this state of affairs. One complained:

...senior managers and policy makers recite... the doctrine of ocean management and its benefits to Canada... The research scientist is cognizant of the costs and responsibilities involved, and he sees also that the positions being postulated are far in advance of the capability of the Canadian ocean research community and their science and technology. He can visualize the role he must play as the scientists and resource manager; but he does not see the necessary man-years for the preparatory work or the research (Fisheries Research Board 1974b: 36).

These scientists also were unhappy that they had no “voice in the deliberations” (Fisheries Research Board 1974b: 36). This is the context in which Peter Larkin (1924–1966), the provocative former director of the Pacific Biological Laboratory (1963–66), whose dissertation was supervised by population ecologist Charles Elton , and who understood acutely the economic goals of MSY , penned his famous “An Epitaph for the Concept of Maximum Sustained Yield”. The ‘epitaph’ itself reads:

  • Here lies the concept, MSY,

  • It advocated yields too high,

  • And didn’t spell out how to slice the pie,

  • We bury it with the best of wishes,

  • Especially on behalf of fishes,

  • We don’t know yet what will take its place,

  • But we hope it’s as good for the human race (Larkin 1977: 11).

Contrary to some interpretations of Larkin ’s article, Larkin did not intend it to be a (premature) obituary of classic MSY. As Kevin M. Bailey, author of Billion Dollar Fish, observes, MSY has been resurrected in US fisheries policy, as it has elsewhere (Bailey, 2013: p. 145). Larkin instead was responding to policies that saw fish as serving economic ends and economics serving social ends, “and therefore the objective should be to get a maximum sustained yield of social benefits” (Larkin 1977: 7). In recent years, economists had been “trying to put dollar signs on all sorts of social activities and, in some instances, they have even deluded themselves into thinking they have succeeded” (Larkin 1977: 7) a reference to economists’ habit of referring to fish as capital. He continued: “From all this sugary murk there crystallized, like fudge, the concept of optimum yield, in which optimum is whatever you wish to call it” (Larkin 1977: 8). He observed, moreover, the nebulous definition of optimum sustained yield “doesn’t say anything about sustaining anything” (Larkin 1977: 8). Clearly not a fan of MSY, Larkin realized that swirling economists and their preferred social optima into the recipe for fisheries management – whether through total allowable catches, individual transferrable quotas, or other methods of ‘slicing the pie’– would neither further the goals of sustaining the fisheries nor of maximizing social benefits.

Larkin was not, of course, alone in recognizing that economists were just adding to the confusion of fisheries management. In 1976, well after economists had consolidated their position in government resource departments, Colin W. Clark , a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia , published Mathematical Bioeconomics: The Optimal Management of Renewable Resources (Clark 1976). He argued that economic models are worthless if the underlying biological models were wrong: economists had to pay attention to the resource’s uncertain nature. Clark’s insights no doubt reflected the massive shift in weltanschauung of the 1970s, resonating the message of Rachel Carson ’s Silent Spring (1962). The fragility of the earth in the face of the human technological onslaught, be it by polluting chemicals, the testing of nuclear bombs, soil erosion, expanding urban centres, or overfishing , had finally penetrated the technological and economic certitude of industrial nations, although it would take decades for resource policies to reflect this shift. In the meantime, however, government policies diluted any effective fisheries management for any form of sustainability. In Canada, as elsewhere, scientists were just another policy voice, now much lower on the policy ladder to economists and social scientists, tasked with preparing for the conservation of fisheries resources post-1980 in the new 200 mile EEZ , but with insufficient funding for their enormous task.

7 Conclusion

It took a decade or so, and the catastrophic collapse of the Grand Banks groundfish stocks in 1992 – ending what had been historically one of the world’s greatest fisheries – for fisheries policies to finally reflect, to a limited extent, the real vicissitudes of nature under human exploitation. The demand that Canadian fisheries biologists engage in solving social issues has shifted, in the wake of the still-ongoing groundfish fishing moratorium (first imposed in 1992), to a still-challenging, but more science-appropriate agenda: working together with fishers and their traditional ecological knowledge , to try to co-manage the fisheries for optimal environmental as well as economic outcomes. Unlike economists, fisheries biologists ’ main professional focus from the outset had been striving to understand the status of commercial fish populations and to predict future trends in the context of global concerns about world hunger. However, early fisheries biologists– whether they were concerned about overfishing , like Russell, Thompson, Graham , Holt and Beverton, or concerned about improving the fisheries, like Huntsman and Burkenroad , or using them to support wider national geopolitical ends, like Chapman and Schaefer– had some view of the economic as well as biological goals they were serving; unlike later fisheries biologists , they had the ‘luxury’ of being involved in developing fisheries policies. This changed in the 1960s, when some western governments sought to consolidate control over the fisheries and to use them to promote welfare and other progressive social agendas, offering an opening for new experts to help shape fisheries policies, such as the resource economists who emerged following Scott Gordon and Anthony Scott ’s pioneering foray into bio-economics. Fisheries biologists in this era were pro-industrial development but did not share the specific socially progressive agenda of the economists who dominated the fisheries policy considerations of Canada and some other nations in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

The similarities between the fisheries biologists and economists was a shared dedication to creating a rational and efficient fishing industry–goals that remain in place to this day, even in the new context of ecosystem-based management– without, however, consideration (until after the 1992 collapse of the Grand Banks cod stocks) of the true ecological and even economic dimensions of what a rational fishery should be. The circumstances of Cold War -related expectations of progress and growth by Western governments and society reinforced fisheries scientists’ and economists’ dedication to the ideals of an efficient and industrialized economy, regardless of their opinions regarding the Cold War itself. When their combined sciences formed the base of government policies the ineluctable results were a centralized, streamlined, industrialized fishery run by a small cadre of firms supporting only a tiny population of fishers (Wright 2001) – and in the end, in many cases, only a tiny population of fish also. The shared use of models and numbers to represent fish, populations, markets, demand and performance erased both the fish and the people whose lives were at stake, and the result was that in the period between 1945 and 1992, few, if any, experts were in fact speaking for either the fish or the fishers.