[Could an Aussie enlighten us on the property rights design on this one?]
A Tale of Two Fisheries
As New Englanders overfish their way to ruin, Australians have profited by
becoming conservationists.
By JOHN TIERNEY
John Sorlien, a lean, sunburned fisherman in rubber overalls, was loading
his boat along the wharf at Point Judith, R.I., not far from the spot where
the "Tuna Capital of the World" sign stood three decades ago. Back then, you
could harpoon giant bluefins right outside the harbor. Today, you would have
a hard time finding one within 20 miles. Since the early 1970's, the tuna
have declined -- along with cod, swordfish, halibut and so many other
species in the ruined fisheries of the Northeast. Sorlien, like the other
fishermen in this harbor just west of Newport, is surviving thanks to New
England's great cash crop, lobsters, but he wonders how much longer they'll
be around. "Right now, my only incentive is to go out and kill as many fish
as I can," Sorlien said. "I have no incentive to conserve the fishery,
because any fish I leave is just going to be picked by the next guy."
Like the men who wiped out the buffaloes on the Great Plains in the 19th
century, Sorlien is a hunter-gatherer who has become too lethal for his
range. He is what's known in the business as a highliner -- a fisherman who
comes back with big hauls -- but every season the competition gets tougher.
When he got started 16 years ago, at the age of 22, he used a small boat and
set traps within three miles of shore. These days, he doesn't even bother
looking in those waters, which fishermen now refer to as "on the beach." He
has graduated to a 42-foot boat and often goes 70 miles out to sea for
lobsters, which can mean leaving the dock at midnight and not returning
until 10 the following night. Each year, he has had to go farther and haul
more traps just to stay even.
Solien was starting the season on this May morning by loading hundreds of
the traps onto his boat, the Cindy Diane. The four-foot-long steel cages,
each baited with a dangling skate fish, would spend the next eight months at
sea. Sorlien would be tending 800 of them in all. On a typical day, he would
haul 300, sometimes 400, up from the ocean floor to remove lobsters and
insert fresh bait. As he stacked one 40-pound trap after another on deck, it
was easy to see why he and so many other lobstermen have back problems. "My
chiropractor says he can always tell when it's lobster season," Sorlien
said.
The chiropractor is treating the consequence of what fishery scientists call
"effort creep." Over the years, as Sorlien got a bigger boat and gradually
doubled the number of his traps in the water, other lobstermen were doing
the same. It was an arms race with no winners and some definite losers: the
lobsters. Their life expectancy plummeted. "Lobsters used to live for 50 or
75 years," recalled Robert Smith, who has been lobstering at Point Judith
since 1948. "When I started, it was not unusual to get a 30-pound lobster.
It's been 20 years since I got one that was even 20 pounds." Last year, the
biggest one he caught was four pounds, and that was an anomaly. Most
lobsters don't even make it to two pounds. Biologists estimate that 90
percent of lobsters are caught within a year after they reach the legal
minimum size at about age 6.
"If you translate that to the human population," Sorlien said, "it means
that our industry is relying almost entirely on a bunch of 13-year-olds to
keep us going. That doesn't seem too healthy. If we get some kind of
environmental disruption that interferes with reproduction one year, we'll
end up with nothing to catch for a whole season. We just go from year to
year not knowing what to expect. I don't have a clue what kind of year this
will be for me. It's like we're backing up to the edge of a cliff
blindfolded, and we don't know if we're 50 feet away or have two wheels over
the edge."
full article at
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000827mag-fisheries.html
