III

On the World Stage

The Big Leagues

IN 1992, EVERYTHING seemed to be going wrong at ICLARM. Like a small business bought up by a multinational corporation, the organization had just joined the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This development agency, created in the 1970s, is supposed to be working toward a future “free of hunger” worldwide. In 2016, its annual budget was around 800 million dollars. The organization is now headquartered in Montpellier, France, and some of my French colleagues jokingly call it “CIGAR”—a reference to its hazy, opaque nature.

During the period after ICLARM became part of CGIAR, Jay Maclean was the interim director of the team in Manila, a job that turned into a two-and-a-half-year-long ordeal. “It was a very stressful time,” he remembers sadly, “so stressful that, sitting at my desk, often my neck froze.” Once the merger was complete, CGIAR installed a new administrative director, imported straight from Canada, whom Daniel described to me as “an incompetent chauvinist, a real Donald Trump.” Events rapidly confirmed this first impression after one of Daniel’s assistants was the victim of an attempted rape at work—the suspect’s identity was known, and Daniel immediately reported the incident to the director. “The new boss laughed it off, saying it wasn’t a big deal.” Very sensitive about women’s rights, Daniel called an emergency meeting of ICLARM’s senior staff, and they decided to act. The mutineers soon wrote a request asking that the new director be fired for serious misconduct and sent it to ICLARM’s board. “Instead of firing him, those idiots decided to stomp out the protest by sending us a series of ‘political commissars.’”* Roger Pullin received an official reprimand; Daniel was removed from his position as program head and demoted to the level of a simple researcher. But it was Clive Lightfoot, the easygoing sustainable-aquaculture specialist, who really became their scapegoat. He was let go based on “arbitrary accusations made up after the fact,” Daniel tells me.

Clive’s wife, who grew up in a family of Canadian union organizers, was having none of it—she studied the Philippines’ labor laws and, with Deng’s help, quickly discovered enough procedural flaws in the firing to back up a formal complaint. “Clive and his family stayed with us for two months,” Daniel recalls, “and eventually the board had to give in to the law—Clive came back to work. We won that battle, but we lost the war that followed.” Clive came through the ordeal a wounded man, however. “One day, Clive walked into my office and asked to sit down,” Jay Maclean recalls. “He told me he wasn’t feeling well, that he should probably go to the hospital. So, I said, ‘OK, I’ll walk over with you.’ It was only about five hundred meters [not even half a mile], but he told me, ‘I don’t think I can get up!’ I called an ambulance and we had to take him down the steps on a stretcher. When we got him to the emergency room, he started to vomit blood everywhere. I had never seen anything like it. They had a meter going and suddenly it stopped and he stopped breathing. Terrible time . . .” In fact, Clive was suffering from a perforated ulcer, but he pulled through.

A new administrative director came in to replace the old one. She traumatized the entire ICLARM staff, who, decades later, still lower their voices as they tell me about “the Australian lady boss—the one who worried about the color of the Post-its in our files, not the content at all!” Around that same time, according to Deng, “CGIAR was infiltrated by CIA agents whose mission was to root out communists.” For Jay, it became clear that “they wanted to change us from a research to a resource institute . . . a reflection of the Australian public service, which I knew all too well.” Roger Pullin adds: “After the change, it was never about results anymore, it was about form, management. The 1980s were good—the organization trusted us to get funding for our ideas. But afterward, the scientists who could attract lots of money were replaced by liaison officers who would sometimes get the names of the countries where we ran our programs wrong!” Tensions ran high and terror reigned. “The regular employees,” recalls Roger, “got so scared they signed horrible affidavits about their managers.” Daniel was even accused of “racism” during that surreal time in ICLARM’s history.

An audio recording survives from the period, captured by Roger during a meeting of the organization’s management committee. “I knew it would be ugly, so I taped it with a portable tape recorder without concealing what I was doing.” Among some other informative tidbits, Rainer Froese can be heard speaking up to ask the management committee if they realize what they are doing—destroying a winning team.

As for “the Australian lady,” Daniel tells me he “knew right away that she was a liar.” As much became clear during a philosophical discussion about truth. She referenced a classic Japanese film (Rashomon, the story of a murder told from four different points of view*), which, according to her, demonstrated that truth is subjective and essentially inaccessible. For Daniel, on the other hand, “that film shows that truth is accessible, but only if you aren’t afraid of it.” The conversation left him demoralized. He describes the events that followed in a few short phrases: “The first two or three weeks, she seemed friendly enough, but after that, the higher-ups must have led her to understand that she was there to do away with us. I still had two years left on my contract, but I knew it was time to go—there would have almost certainly been an ugly surprise when it came time to renew.” Daniel, whose international reputation was already fairly solid, had received a few offers over the years, namely from Duke University in North Carolina and the University of Miami in Florida. But he refused to accept a job in the United States: “When I’m in the US, I always feel like I’m holding my breath.” Europe was also too racist in Daniel’s estimation to be a good place to raise his kids. During the ICLARM crisis, the University of British Columbia (UBC )asked him to help evaluate the newly created fisheries research center in Vancouver. He made his first appearance there in 1993, flying up from California, where the Paulys were spending their Christmas vacation with Sandra’s family. “It was only a two-hour flight,” shrugs Daniel, who takes planes the way most people take the bus. “I did a presentation and Tony Pitcher suggested that I apply for a position that he’d helped create. It was for a specialist in tropical fisheries who would also train students from developing countries.”

Daniel wavered. “Before ICLARM had its crisis, I’d intended to spend the rest of my life in the Philippines, maybe retire to the seaside, in Anilao, perhaps. I liked the Philippines and the feeling was mutual.” Jay also warned him that Vancouver was a town “where nothing ever happens,” and which had been voted “the most racist city in Canada” by National Geographic in 1992. This was because of the colonialist attitudes held by a British population, which had been living there for a little over a century, toward First Nations peoples and immigrants from France, Japan, India, and most recently China. But Daniel was short on options, and, convinced he’d soon be axed from ICLARM, he accepted. His friends and colleagues weren’t far behind, leaving one by one an organization that would soon sink into oblivion after having shone so brilliantly in the 1980s. Villy Christensen returned home to Denmark in 1994, saying, “I don’t want to be the one to turn the lights out.” Jay was let go in 1996, the year his son Marlon was born, and still struggles to make ends meet as a freelance writer. Roger and Rainer held on until 1999, but they too departed, one to work as a consultant on the impact of oil spills, the other to become a senior scientist at the oceanographic institute in Kiel. Even Deng, despite her loyalty to her homeland, followed Daniel to Vancouver in 2001, leaving behind a permanent contract and the possibility of promotion within CGIAR in favor of a new life in Canada. Explaining her drastic decision, she points out, “I left because in Manila, the head of the organization was no shining star. I want to work for people who want to do something real, not just work for a salary. So, I said to Daniel, ‘I go where you go.’” ICLARM, for its part, ended up moving to Malaysia, leaving only the FishBase ladies in the Philippines under the long-distance management of Rainer, Deng, and Daniel.

It was the end of an era—probably of one of the happiest times in Daniel’s life, thanks to the loyalty and good humor of the colleagues who so often became his friends, partly because he himself doesn’t really exist outside of his work. They leaned on one another’s shoulders and shared a lot of laughs. Roger, Jay, and Rainer, the musicians of the group, put together the “ICLARM Band” with Roger on vocals, Rainer on base, and Jay on the keyboard. I saw them perform for the first time in a home video from the 1990s: good-looking Roger, largely up to rock-and-roll standards; Jay, messing around with his instrument and cracking jokes; and Rainer, in the background but very much in control of the sound tech. They liked to play blues and reggae, with some Filipino pop mixed in. As the recorded concert gets into full swing, you can catch a glimpse of the electric trio’s wives off to one side, a joyfully diverse group. For Daniel’s going-away party, Roger and the ICLARM Band sang “No ICLARM, No Cry,” their own unforgettable rendition of the Bob Marley song.

Going to work for UBC in 1994 added a brilliant line to Daniel’s CV, which already provided glowing proof of his international renown. He’d also made the strategic decision to develop his teaching skills during the 1980s. In the end, though, it was his long list of publications that won over the hiring committee: at forty-seven years old, he had more than three hundred titles to his name—an incredible feat for a scientist of his generation. He upheld his reputation as a man who was “born to write” and found himself plucked from an obscure development agency in the middle of the Pacific, far from first-world academic circles, and thrust into one of the forty most prestigious universities on the planet.

According to Roger Pullin, “Vancouver was the best possible place for Daniel to end up.” Daniel, however, was not ready to uproot his family from Manila, where his children were in school and his wife had a good job. He negotiated the right to work in Vancouver during the seven months of the Canadian school year and spend the rest of his time in Manila, near his family and ICLARM, where the dreaded “political commissar” (maybe not so bad after all?) tolerated his presence. “That’s how I was able to finish my work in Manila, mostly as a consultant on the FishBase project,” Daniel remarks matter-of-factly.

In Vancouver, instead of starting out as an associate professor waiting for tenure, Daniel was recruited as a full professor right off the bat. In fact, Canada turned out to be a little more civilized than he initially thought—the university had an affirmative action program for visible minorities designed to increase the diversity of its staff. “At first, it really weighed on me,” admits Daniel, who didn’t crow over his new position, “because that way of moving up in the world is risky. For me, though, it was another reason to keep working like crazy, so no one could say I wasn’t worthy.”

Thus began five decisive years in Daniel Pauly’s career, much of which he would spend up in the air over the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Vancouver and Manila. In Canada, he lived on the UBC campus, a peninsula surrounded by the Strait of Georgia and what remains of the old-growth forest with its giant Douglas and grand firs, some of which are nearly 200 feet tall and more than four hundred years old. The average annual temperature there is 11°C (51°F), compared with 28°C (82°F) in Manila, and it rains half the time, sometimes for a month straight. Daniel had moved into a tall apartment building just a hop, skip, and a jump from the fisheries research center, which was housed in old, ramshackle huts. Totally immersed in his work as usual, but now far from his family and friends, Daniel gradually isolated himself: “It’s a bad habit—I love silence, even more than I love music. So sometimes, I’d spend days, especially on the weekends, shut up at home where no noise could get to me. It was at that time that I started to get tinnitus.” These symptoms were likely the result of stress caused by overwork and an existence that Daniel later described as “torn between two scientific worlds: that of theory and that of the application of science to problems in the real world.” Though he quickly stipulated that “these tensions proved to be creative ones.”1

IN MANILA, DANIEL spent time with scientists from other research centers associated with CGIAR, particularly agronomists from the International Rice Research Institute. He noticed that they didn’t hesitate to analyze rice production on a global scale, whereas fisheries research was still largely a local or, at best, regional affair. With help from Villy Christensen, Daniel decided to “rectify this shortcoming by reviewing the state of, and potential for, catches of fisheries for the entire world,” arguing that this was only logical “since fish were a globally traded commodity.” 2

Feeding the world—that was a serious occupation for agronomists, especially since the creation of the Club of Rome in 1968, which led to the publication of The Limits to Growth, a founding document of the political ecology movement. That same year, Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University published an explosive pamphlet entitled The Population Bomb to inform the public of the consequences of exponential human population growth. In the years after that, the couple attacked the problem of estimating how much of the world’s natural resources were being consumed by humans. In 1986, they partnered with Peter Vitousek, also of Stanford, and Pamela Matson of NASA to estimate the proportion of energy produced by plants (using the sun’s rays) that was being appropriated by humans worldwide.3 The team reached the unsettling conclusion that during the latter half of the 1980s, humanity had consumed 35 to 45 percent of the products of photosynthesis. For the oceans, on the other hand, Vitousek and his colleagues estimated a much lower percentage (only 2.2 percent) and concluded that “human use of marine productivity is relatively small . . . It is unlikely to prove broadly catastrophic for oceanic ecosystems.”4

Daniel and Villy were intrigued but skeptical. They agreed, however, that calculating the mass of phytoplankton needed to feed all the inhabitants of the world’s fisheries would indeed be an excellent way to illustrate humanity’s impact on marine resources. They began by using the Stanford team’s calculations, considerably revising their methods along the way. For instance, Vitousek and his colleagues had based their work on an “average fish” with a trophic level of three, as if every fishery on the planet only captured a single species with a single, uniform diet. As we saw earlier, the trophic level of phytoplankton and algae is equal to one (as they are the foundation of the ecosystem), that of herbivores is equal to two, and predatory fish who eat herbivores have a trophic level of three. In reality, though, the trophic level of an exploited species can vary between 2.1 (in the case of mussels and other bivalves) and 4.2 (for bluefin tuna, swordfish, and other superpredators).

So Daniel and Villy set up a model of an exploited ocean which, instead of being a huge bathtub filled with a single fish species, consisted of six major types of ecosystems (coastal, ocean, coral reef, freshwater, et cetera), inhabited by thirty-nine “model” species of exploited marine organisms of various trophic levels. The duo also used forty-eight Ecopath-type models covering all the world’s aquatic regions to recalculate the proportion of energy that moves up from one trophic level to the next. They concluded that the proportion of energy transferred is only 10 percent on average. This might seem incredible, but in fact, only about 10 percent of the energy contained in a population of phytoplankton is available to the fish that feed on them—the rest is lost in the transfer process. As a point of comparison, consider transformers that convert 220 volts from the electric grid into the 10 or 12 volts used by our computers, which then lose a huge portion of their electrical energy to heat, explaining why our devices tend to overheat.

Next, the Pauly-Christensen team dug into the FAO data concerning the annual catches of the world’s fisheries, adding the volume of bycatch (organisms that are caught but then thrown back, because they don’t correspond either to the needs of the market or the regulations in place). Based on these total catch figures, they estimated the quantity of phytoplankton necessary to feed the thirty-nine “model” exploited species they had identified. Their calculations indicate that, on average, 8 percent of the productivity of the world’s oceans is now being absorbed by fisheries—almost four times as much as Vitousek and his team had estimated. Even more incredible is the fact that, though the environmental impact calculated by Pauly and Christensen in the open ocean was still fairly low (2 percent), it goes up to 35 percent in coastal areas. The study implied that the planet’s fisheries, which had been flirting with the symbolic figure of 100 million metric tons caught annually, were unsustainable in the long term—precisely the opposite of what most experts claimed. They had effectively torn a hole in the persistent myth of infinite ocean resources.

Proud of the results, and rightly so, Daniel presented their research at the annual meeting of the British Ecological Society in Manchester in 1994, where it was received as “the most important and disturbing piece of information from the whole conference.” 5 Daniel hit it off with Sir (now the late Lord) Robert May, one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century theoretical ecology, who was soon to be chief science advisor to the British government and president of the Royal Society in London. Since Sir Robert (who prefers to be called Bob) was part of the “establishment,” Daniel started the conversation with a direct attack, which didn’t so much as ruffle his British colleague’s amused good humor—they got on splendidly after that, and Bob encouraged Daniel to submit his work to Nature, the gold standard in Old World scientific publishing. “Already done!” Daniel answered impishly. Nature would in fact evaluate the article and publish it after a few minor revisions on March 16, 1995. To top it all off, the journal commissioned and published a commentary by John Beddington, another distinguished British ecologist, who after dissecting Daniel and Villy’s work failed to find any weak points.

At forty-nine years old, Daniel had published his first big hit in a first-class scientific journal. The article quickly became one of his top ten most influential publications. “I was mighty pleased when this contribution appeared and basked for a few days in the afterglow of colleagues’ congratulations (such as you get when you first publish in either Nature or Science),” he says. This state of exaltation wouldn’t last long, however—in the world of research as in the world at large, the higher your star rises, the more you expose yourself to criticism. “I was soon brought back to earth by a tersely worded message from the editor of Nature,” Daniel wrote later on. His Canadian colleagues had written to the journal in London questioning some of Daniel and Villy’s calculations relative to the all-important transfer of energy between trophic levels—criticism that required a response. Daniel made his arguments and defended their work inch by inch—fortunately, the study’s major conclusions survived this trial by fire, and Nature did not publish the critique.*

A few years later, the ecologist Stuart Pimm, a specialist of the environmental crisis and mass extinctions, reviewed Daniel and Villy’s calculations in his book The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth (a title that seems to denote a healthy ego). Although they used slightly different methods, Pimm came to the same conclusion as Daniel and Villy. “I can’t tell you how happy we were to survive that audit,” remarks Daniel. Stuart Pimm gave a slightly different explanation for his work: “Why did I repeat the calculations? I didn’t believe them . . . It is nothing personal. I do not believe my estimate(s) any more than I do theirs. Scientists are suspicious, critical nitpickers who are always ready to abuse their friends and colleagues verbally and in print over such differences.” 6

If Pauly and Christensen’s analyses proved difficult reading for ordinary folk, their general conclusions were, to the contrary, quite revealing and accessible to the general public. For the first time in Daniel’s career, the news media covered his work, alerted by a press release from the editors of Nature at the time of the article’s publication. The information they presented would be read around the world, most notably in the British newspaper the Guardian, which presented the study’s general conclusions and discussed the geopolitical consequences of a widespread shortage of marine resources. Of course, it’s always somebody else’s fault, and the English journalist pointed a finger at the Spaniards with their “19,000 boats and 85,000 men,” who as a nation consume “40 kilograms [88 pounds] of fish per head per year,” concluding: “The Spaniards have emerged as the ‘villains’ of the Atlantic war.” Nevertheless, the reporter had the integrity to add that the debate is complicated and that “the lesson from the plankton calculations published today is that this is a war nobody can win.”

Daniel would learn from this same episode that once information falls into the hands of the news media, scientists usually lose control over how it is used—and to what end. For example, the Associated Press published an article that presented the study correctly, but the journalist, after consulting a scientist employed by the fishing industry, included the following quote by way of conclusion: “Here in the United States, the more urgent issue is whether we can continue to feed exploding populations of marine mammals, such as seals and sea lions, which are competing for seafood with human beings.” 7

This first article in Nature and Daniel’s compatibility with Bob May would soon prove doubly advantageous: later in 1995, Daniel received an email from Oxford, one of the first electronic messages ever to arrive in his inbox. The dispatch came from Bob, then one of the advisors to a journal called Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE), which publishes syntheses and opinion pieces about the great scientific questions of the hour in ecology and the evolutionary sciences. One of the writers Bob had solicited for an article had thrown in the towel, and he needed a stand-in, pronto. Daniel accepted his invitation, producing a page of text in a flash, the very same day.8

As he told it in his TED talk9 many years later, this short column allowed him to express a “tiny, little idea,” something that could be “explained in one minute.”

In his 1995 text, Daniel begins by discussing the context in which he will develop his “little idea.” Fisheries are a global disaster for three reasons: (1) Fishing fleets are heavily subsidized and two or three times larger than required to optimally exploit available resources. (2) Discarded bycatch, which isn’t taken into account in the global catch figures (officially ninety million metric tons per year worldwide at the time), means that the actual catch is even larger. (3) Of the 260 fish stocks monitored by the FAO, the majority fall into the following three categories: collapsed, depleted, or in recovery. The solution is to manage global fisheries in a way that allows stocks to regenerate and grow large enough to support sustainable exploitation.

However, Daniel also identified a problem that has more to do with cognitive psychology than ecology:

Each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species.

Daniel calls this problem “the shifting baseline syndrome”—a little idea that quickly spread around the world and even made it into the dictionaries.

In fact, this concept applies to a great many environmental problems. For example, when he was ten years old, my father spent the summer of 1941 in the French seaside town of Palavas-les-Flots. When he tells the story of his three-month stay there, he describes wandering through a wild paradise of sandy dunes between the lagoon and the Mediterranean Sea. Today, it pains him to see the concrete-covered coastline crowded with jet skis—conditions that hardly seem to repulse the tens of thousands of younger tourists who flock there happily each year. Speaking more generally, the shifting baseline syndrome explains a lot of intergenerational conflicts as well: what was normal for our grandparents is no longer accepted as normal by their children or grandchildren, for better or for worse. Younger generations, for instance, are astounded to learn that their parents were allowed to smoke absolutely everywhere (doctors even did it in their offices), or that, if you wanted to hear from your sweetheart or faraway relatives, you’d have to wait several days for the mailman to bring you a letter. And so the baseline will keep shifting into the future: in a few decades, it will likely seem crazy to us that in 2017, nearly half of the 38 million automobiles on the road in France ran on diesel, creating a serious air pollution problem and leading to one of the biggest public health scandals of the early twenty-first century.

According to the German sociologist Dietmar Rost, who wrote a whole book about Pauly’s concept and its tremendous ramifications, the main cause behind the shifting baseline syndrome is “a loss of historical depth.”10 To fix this problem, we must to learn how to stay in touch with the past while continuing to move forward. In the 1995 article he wrote for Bob May, Daniel dresses down fisheries biology for its collective amnesia, citing as a counterexample the science of astronomy, which “uses ancient observations (including Sumerian and Chinese records that are thousands of years old).” He goes on to urge his colleagues to take into account the observations of elders and ancestors, which until recently were relegated to the status of anecdotes. To illustrate this point, Daniel tells the story of Villy Christensen’s father, a Danish fisherman who “reported being annoyed by the bluefin tuna that entangled themselves in the mackerel nets he was setting in the waters of Kattegat in the 1920s” when a market had not yet developed for that particular species. “This observation is as factual as a temperature record,” Daniel argues, “and one that should be of relevance to those dealing with bluefin tuna, whose range now excludes much, if not all, of the North Sea.”

Daniel wasn’t the only one to have noticed a shift in baselines or to have suggested taking historical observations of marine resources into consideration, as anecdotal as they might seem. The idea was obviously circulating at the time, but he expressed and summarized it in a particularly eloquent fashion. His main source of inspiration was a 1984 book by Farley Mowat titled Sea of Slaughter.* Mowat, who passed away in 2014 a few days short of his ninety-third birthday, was a naturalist with the soul of a poet. At nineteen, he left his native Canada to fight in World War II and returned home from the Italian campaign with a case of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder that made him strongly averse to the violence perpetrated by mankind. Perhaps best known for his book Never Cry Wolf—adapted into a film with the same title—and his other writings about the Great White North, he is the author of forty books, mainly devoted to environmental causes and nature in Canada. An idol for environmental activists (Sea Shepherd named one of their ships after him) and ridiculed by academics who say that his lyrical prose lacks objectivity, Mowat, in Sea of Slaughter, provides a detailed and thoroughly researched analysis of the destruction of Eastern Canada’s marine resources over the last five centuries.

Millions upon millions of birds, terrestrial and marine mammals, and billions of fish flourished in that lush coastal region before the arrival of Europeans. Going species by species, Mowat tells the story of a massacre of epic proportions, using historical texts and oral accounts from a vast network of informants spread from Cape Cod to the Labrador coast. The book reads like a thriller and leaves behind an unforgettable image—that of a bloodbath whose victims included seals, walruses, whales, polar bears, cod, and marine birds (such as the great auk, the northern equivalent of Antarctic penguins; unable to fly to safety, they were slaughtered by the tens of thousands and eventually went extinct in the mid-nineteenth century).

Thanks to Farley Mowat, we can imagine the incredible richness of these waters in the past—waters so dense with life that you could almost cross the ocean by jumping from the back of a large cod to a baleen whale, and so on, all the way to the other side. His writing also helps us understand the relative poverty of those same waters today, where only a small portion of the formerly abundant and diverse species of large vertebrates remain. In the late 1980s, Canadian fisheries scientists jeered at Farley Mowat’s work, calling his historical analysis a fantasy. Those same experts, though, were also forced to announce the permanent closure of the Newfoundland cod fishery on July 2, 1992. That very fish had changed the course of history,11 its stocks considered for centuries to be inexhaustible. The sudden shutdown of this fishery, which, with better management, could have gone on functioning indefinitely, put thirty thousand people—12 percent of Newfoundland and Labrador’s population—out of work overnight. A quarter century later, the cod stocks still haven’t recovered sufficiently to allow the commercial fishery to be reopened.

Following Farley Mowat’s example, a number of ecologists have become interested in the history of fishing activities. Their goal, as Daniel explains it, is “to evaluate the true social and ecological costs of fisheries.”12 Protagonists abound. Though my choices are almost certainly biased, I will only mention two of them here. The first is Jeremy Jackson, a researcher who grew up on the East Coast of the United States, where he graduated from Yale in 1971. A towering, ponytail-wearing, earring-sporting character, Jackson initially became a world-class specialist in the evolutionary biology of coral reef dwellers. His work centered on Jamaica: “It was really a lot of fun for about ten years,” he told the audience of his 2010 TED talk.13 “The coral reefs [in Jamaica] were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life . . . Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen.” The reef was destroyed, but Jackson and his colleagues published a paper in Science predicting it would come back quickly because “we know that hurricanes have always happened in the past.” “And we got it all wrong,” he adds tersely, “and the reason was because of overfishing.” Indeed, the longtime absence of reef fish and the disappearance of sea urchins had led to the proliferation of seaweed and jellyfish, reducing both the coral’s growth and the diversity of its forms. Jamaican coral reefs have, to this day, still not recovered from Hurricane Allen.

After that, Jackson immersed himself in the archives, studying the tragic history of the colonization of the Caribbean—and Jamaica specifically—in an attempt to imagine what those marine environments were like in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He concluded that sea turtles, manatees, and monk seals must have been extraordinarily abundant and that they had a strong impact on the way Caribbean reefs and seagrass beds functioned. For example, there were an estimated 50 to 150 million green sea turtles living along the tropical coasts of the Americas before Europeans arrived. We can imagine the carnage that followed, not only to feed the sailors, but also the slaves they marooned on resource-poor islands. With an average individual mass of 450–650 pounds, these green sea turtles had a total biomass greater than that of the entire human population of the United States today.14 Large marine animals have disappeared or dwindled into insignificance compared with the tens of thousands of individuals who lived before them. “Studying . . . reefs today is like trying to understand the ecology of the Serengeti by studying the termites and the locusts while ignoring the elephants and the wildebeest,” Jackson concludes. Most significantly, he showed that the fish stocks available to the inhabitants of Jamaica were decimated during the mid-nineteenth century, whereas serious scientific studies of fisheries only began a century later. This obviously creates a shifting baseline problem, because “everyone, scientists included, believes that the way things were when they first saw them is natural.”15

And so, starting in the 1990s, Jackson made the transition from evolutionary sciences specialist to historical ecology guru. Perhaps most importantly, he brought together nineteen American researchers at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara with the goal of collecting all available information on the historical impact of fisheries. They used data from studies in paleontology, history, and ecology concerning both seaweed and coral-reef-covered coastal ecosystems and estuaries over periods ranging from a few decades to 125,000 years. Jackson and his colleagues concluded that “overfishing of large vertebrates and shellfish was the first major human disturbance to all coastal ecosystems examined” and “pollution, eutrophication, physical destruction of habitats, outbreaks of disease, invasions of introduced species, and human-induced climate change all come much later than overfishing in the standard sequence of historical events.” The authors also noted that “the timing of ecological changes due to overfishing in the Americas and Pacific closely tracks European colonization and exploitation in most cases. However, aboriginal overfishing also had effects, as exemplified by the decline of sea otters (and possibly sea cows) in the northeast Pacific thousands of years ago.” In closing, they remark that “the historical magnitudes of losses of large [marine] animals and oysters were so great as to seem unbelievable based on modern observations alone . . . The shifting baseline syndrome is thus even more insidious and ecologically widespread than is commonly realized.”

Jackson and his colleagues’ incendiary article made the cover of Science when it came out on July 27, 2001, causing a media frenzy by shattering two persistent illusions: one, the perception that the effects of overfishing were recent and limited to certain regions, and two, the myth of the pre-Columbian “ecological Indian” who lived in harmony with marine life in the Americas and Oceania.16 Very politically incorrect at the time of its publication, the paper has become a classic of marine ecology, inspiring thousands of researchers around the globe.

One of the most eminent of these is Heike Lotze. I met Heike in 1993 at a pub on the German island of Sylt on the North Sea. We were both master’s students at the time and we swapped ideas over some beers. Heike was in a funk: “I study seaweed—no one cares about that,” she told me with a pout worthy of Jeanne Moreau. Primary research without any connection to the real world was not Heike’s cup of tea, though, and she soon found a solution. Moving to Canada to escape the false meritocracy and latent sexism of German academic circles, she developed an interest in the historical ecology of marine environments and became a world-renowned specialist in her discipline. Today, she is a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. I knew Heike to be tireless and extremely meticulous in her work, so I kept close tabs on her career. She began with the Bay of Fundy in Canada, a body of water known for having the highest tidal range on the planet. For her thesis on the area, she assembled two hundred years of archeological and historical data, painstaking work that would mostly confirm the picture already drawn by Farley Mowat—and give it more “academic” substance. She also showed that overexploitation of marine resources, habitat destruction (caused by hydroelectric dams, coastal construction, dredging, et cetera), and various sorts of pollution come together to create a deadly cocktail for marine life. She reached the conclusion that her study area in the Bay of Fundy, where life had been so abundant in the past, “shows the most common signs of degradation found in highly impacted coastal areas worldwide.”17

But what about the history of other coastal areas? Heike began by returning to Germany for a few years to do a synthesis on the Wadden Sea. This area, lauded by Erskine Childers in his novel The Riddle of the Sands, stretches from the Netherlands to Denmark and has a total surface area about half the size of Massachusetts. Made up of a labyrinth of islands as well as sand and mud flats constantly pounded by the tides, it is one of Europe’s last wild regions, a harsh coastal zone on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Using her now-proven method, Heike assembled data covering the last two thousand years, exploiting neighboring countries’ archives, archeological reports, and various scientific publications. Her conclusions were as follows:

Humans have interacted with the Wadden Sea since its origin 7,500 years ago. However, exploitation, habitat alteration and pollution have strongly increased since the Middle Ages, affecting abundance and distribution of many marine mammals, birds, fish, invertebrates and plants. Large whales and some large birds disappeared more than 500 years ago. Although still of high natural value and global importance, the Wadden Sea is a fundamentally changed ecosystem.18

Indeed, who remembers the fact that gray and right whales were still abundant in those waters during the Middle Ages, as they were along many European coastlines?

Back in North America, Heike joined Jeremy Jackson’s work group in Santa Barbara with the goal of coordinating a synthesis on the history of seven estuaries in the United States (including the Bay of San Francisco), two Canadian estuaries (including the Saint Lawrence), and three European seas (the western Baltic, the Wadden Sea, and the northern Adriatic) over periods ranging from several hundred to several thousand years. The sources they used were once again extremely varied, including lists of species whose bones had been found by archeologists in ancient rubbish heaps, sailors’ accounts, ships’ logs from whalers and fishermen, old nautical charts, even ancient art and old photographs, but also more recent studies of population size and genetic characteristics. Based on every area studied, the conclusion was overwhelmingly unanimous: “Exploitation stands out as the causative agent for 95% of species depletions and 96% of extinctions.” And more specifically, “most mammals, birds, and reptiles were depleted by 1900 and declined further by 1950.” When it comes to recent conservation efforts, Heike and her brilliant colleagues offer only lukewarm assurances: “Conservation efforts in the 20th century led to partial recovery of 12% and substantial recovery of 2% of the species, especially among pinnipeds, otters, birds, crocodiles, and alligators. Large whales, sirenians,* and sea turtles, however, remain at low population levels.”19

Soon after, Heike and her partner Boris Worm wrote an even more ambitious report based on every historical study they could dig up on anything over a meter long that swims in the ocean: fish, whales, seals, sea turtles—a whole subset of species referred to as “marine megafauna.” These 256 studies show that exploited populations have lost 89 percent of their historical numbers on average.20 For instance, interviews with fishermen aged fifteen to fifty-five in the Gulf of California showed that older interviewees could name five times more species of fish and four times more areas where fish used to be abundant, and which are now overfished.21 Over a longer period of time, archeological excavations show that overexploitation by the Maori caused the distribution of southern fur seals in New Zealand to be reduced by 90 percent prior to the arrival of Europeans.22 Here was a huge pool of data that not only confirmed the politically incorrect hypothesis of Jeremy Jackson and his colleagues, but also fought against the shifting baselines that were hiding the truly dilapidated state of marine ecosystems.


* A facetious reference to a type of political officer responsible for ensuring the ideological purity of the Soviet armed forces. (TN)

* Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (1950) won an Oscar for best foreign film and a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

* The critique was nonetheless published in Fisheries Oceanography in 1995; see Pauly, 5 Easy Pieces, 16–17.

* Farley Mowat, Sea of Slaughter (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984).

* Manatees and dugongs.

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