Back to the Future: A New Policy Agenda for Fisheries Management
By Nigel Haggen
ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of fishing down marine food webs is now well documented. The 'Baseline shift' effect causes the perception of productive potential to 'ratchet down' over successive generations of fisher's and fisheries scientists. Retired fishers tales of past abundance are discounted or seen as impossible to re-attain. On a wider scale, the ocean has been a metaphor for abundance over the entire evolutionary history of our species. It is difficult for individuals, far more so for institutions, to come to terms with the reality of depleted oceans. Depletion breeds two evils: polarization among resource users and increased management cost at the very time when returns are low or negative, e.g. Canada's $3.5 billion cost after cod closure. The multidisciplinary workshops that are an integral part of Back to the Future bring Aboriginal peoples, fishers, fisheries, scientists, historian, archaeologists, managers and policy makers together to reconstruct the past. A university setting provides a neutral forum. Re-constructing past abundance provides an alternative and positive focus as opposed to fighting over allocation. A 'reflective' or ceremonial element acknowledges our changed relationship with the sea and recognizes that all sectors have valuable management information. An example is given from Hecate Strait in Northern BC where a preliminary model of the system as it might have been prior to modern industrial fishing (100 years ago) was constructed based largely on workshop input from Aboriginal people and retired fishers.
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