History and Context: Reflections from Newfoundland
John Crosbie, the Canadian minister of fisheries, stunned Newfoundlanders on July 2, 1992, when he announced the first moratorium on the northern cod fishery, bringing to an end one of the oldest and richest fisheries on Earth. I was then teaching maritim
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History and Context: Reflections from Newfoundland Daniel Vickers, with Loren McClenachan
John Crosbie, the Canadian minister of fisheries, stunned Newfoundlanders on July 2, 1992, when he announced the first moratorium on the northern cod fishery, bringing to an end one of the oldest and richest fisheries on Earth. I was then teaching maritime history at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the news caught me entirely off guard. Though aware of the problems in the cod fishery for some years, I had not realized that things were as bad as they were—or at least I was not certain enough to do anything about it. For almost fifteen years I had been writing a book on the social history of colonial New England’s cod fishery that dealt well enough with the hard lives of fishermen but ignored entirely the possibility that the livelihood they pursued might have been in the long run unsustainable. I had concerned myself only with the way in which the profits from the fishery had been shared and had ignored entirely the process through which the fishery itself was vanishing. And although it seemed true enough that the degradation of the cod stocks had not yet begun before 1850, the period I was studying, I could not run from the feeling that I had been dealing with a problem of the second order. Remarkably, two of my most talented colleagues at Memorial—Rosemary Ommer and Sean Cadigan—were completing parallel studies of the Gaspé and of Newfoundland in the nineteenth century that also focused on the social relations of J.B.C. Jackson (eds.), Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-029-3_7, © Island Press 2011
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production in the fishery rather than the question of its ecological sustainability. Although there is no reason to be ashamed of any of these books for what they did achieve, we were in some real way fiddling while Rome burned. Once the severity of the ecological problem had been acknowledged, however, the collapse of the cod and other fisheries seemed almost certainly to be an issue with a history that was very deep. Indeed, as an historian, it strikes me as strange that anyone would dispute this. There may be terrific difficulties in the path of trying to establish how the oceans were once populated, and it is plain that the sort of detail ecologists usually demand of current research will never be possible for the distant past. But the same is true of human history. Large areas of understanding have been opened up during the last half century in territory that historians once believed was truly unknowable, and some questions to which students of the human past have produced clear answers bear a striking resemblance to the problems marine scientists address. Here is an example from historical demography. It was once thought that the history of family structure—the biomass and age-class structure of humanity—could only be told with some precision back to the period of the first national censuses around 1800. Prior to that time, anyone interested
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