86 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020Harper’s Magazine is owned and published monthly by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 666 Broadway,
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panied by a self- addressed, stamped envelope. Visit our website at http://www.harpers.org.the ocean with iron-rich dung that
promotes the growth of diatoms, and
in turn the growth of krill.
The krill fishery, worth approxi-
mately $69.5 million globally, may
be sustainable, but it’s important to
consider why krill are harvested at
all. According to the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization’s 2016 as-
sessment, 90 percent of global ma-
rine resources were being fished at or
beyond their capacity. The historical
trajectory of global fishing has been
to move southward in pursuit of new
stocks as those in northern waters
are depleted. The other trend has
been to fish down the food chain:
after large predators run out, indus-
tries move on to their smaller, more
plentiful prey.
These shifts can mask the destruc-
tion of ecosystems, and are patterns
that fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly
has been intent on exposing for de-
cades. His newly collected essays,
Vanishing Fish: Shifting Baselines and
the Future of Glo bal Fisheries, are
frank, readable testimony of the
shortcomings of fisheries manage-
ment. Pauly— founder of the Sea
Around Us institute and creator of a
remarkable online cache of fish infor-
mation, called FishBase— is best
known for his concept of shifting
baseline syndrome, an attempt to ex-
plain how the world’s fisheries have
reached the brink of collapse.
Though commercial fisheries in many
countries are now required to report
detailed catch statistics to regulatory
bodies, catch data from before fifty
years ago is fragmentary, unreliable,
or nonexistent. Even less is knownabout how populous species were be-
fore they began to be fished. Without
coherent and continuous historical
data, Pauly argues, each successive
generation has only its own witness to
serve as a reference for future changes.
The decline of fish stocks over a life-
time may represent the tip of an ice-
berg of loss that stretches back hun-
dreds of years.
The greatest current stressors on
Antarctic krill are warming seas
and the retreat of ice around Ant-
arctica rather than overfishing. Sea
ice and the algae that grows on its
dimly illuminated underside provide
an essential habitat for immature
krill. Krill populations in the waters
just off the Antarctic Peninsula—
the region where sea ice has been
decreasing most dramatically—have
declined between 70 and 80 percent
since the 1970s.
In her closing chapter, Joy McCann
asks whether it is possible to cultivate
an “ocean consciousness”: “How can
we truly know a place that we cannot
inhabit?” The question is urgent on
many fronts, as the oceans change
under the pressures of industrial fish-
ing, plastics accumulation, acidifica-
tion, and warming. Pauly’s keenest in-
sights into the decline of fisheries
come because he acknowledges the
relevance of other kinds of records,
including historical anecdotes of the
kind McCann sifts through. Nicol,
too, attests that “science operates by
developing stories (we call them con-
ceptual models) about the natural
world.” These narratives help us to
keep our bearings in the world’s last
wild places. QCreated by Winnifred Cutler, Ph.D. in biology
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