“I SMELLED A RAT,” Daniel declared.1 He had studied the North Atlantic at the request of the Pew Charitable Trusts, but his end goal with the Sea Around Us was to study fisheries on a global scale. Starting in 2000, he began examining FAO catch data on global fisheries more closely. Notwithstanding all his recent findings on the collapse of predatory fish stocks and fishing down marine food webs, the annual volume caught seemed to keep growing throughout the 1990s. In 1993, it even exceeded the symbolic limit of 100 million metric tons annually, according to the FAO. Still, pro-fishing lobbies argued repeatedly that the ocean’s resources were infinite, claiming that things were going swimmingly beneath the waves.
The Sea Around Us team was skeptical, however, and in April of 2001, Daniel mentioned his concerns to the FAO executives who had come to audit the Vancouver group’s work for the Pew Charitable Trusts. In particular, he spoke with Richard Grainger, then head of the FAO statistics department, about how the earliest world catch maps generated by Reg Watson indicated insanely high catches for Chinese waters, despite the fact that they had long been classified as overfished. “Grainger smiled knowingly: everybody in this group knew that China had been overreporting its marine catch for years,” Daniel recalls.2 He asked Grainger why the FAO didn’t simply right the ship: Grainger replied that modifying statistics supplied by member states was not part of their mission. After some discussion, Grainger did, however, “order” a study from Reg and Daniel that would estimate how much China overdeclared its catch, with the end goal of taking those figures into account. Reg Watson got to work: thanks to the information in FishBase on the species present in Chinese waters and some statistical models that allowed him to estimate their productivity, he managed to calculate how much the Chinese should have been able to catch. For 1999, it turned out to be half of what China had reported to the FAO. Ultimately, after Reg corrected the fisheries statistics from 1970 to 2000, it became obvious that global fisheries were not expanding—in fact, they had been in constant decline since 1988.
But why would there be so much statistical inflation coming out of China, when in the rest of the world, countries tend to underestimate their catch in order to cover up latent overfishing? To answer that question, Daniel recruited Lei Pang, a Chinese scientist well versed in geopolitics who had recently immigrated to Canada. Pang identified and translated numerous texts from Chinese websites. Her detective work showed that the central government was well aware of the problem of “watery statistics” (as they’re called in Chinese), an issue rooted in communist political culture. In China, promotions for administrative heads are largely based on growth in the sector they supervise, just like in Stakhanov’s Russia.* This distortion affects every sector of the Chinese economy. The theoretical energy needs of the country according to the “watery statistics,” for example, is twice the total output of all its power plants.
Reg Watson, Daniel Pauly, and Lei Pang wrote two reports based on their findings and sent them off to the FAO in the summer of 2001. “Where it would have remained accessible only to experts,” Daniel points out. “Thinking this would be interesting to a wider audience,” he continues, “Reg Watson and I also summarized the report into a shorter contribution, which we submitted to Nature.”3 It should be noted that the Sea Around Us team did not tell the FAO what they were doing. “It might have crossed the line,” Daniel admits, “but since the data was accessible to everyone already, and we had already sent our results to the FAO, I don’t think we were at fault ethically.” Yet again, Daniel’s article made it past the firewall of editors and reviewers and was published by Nature in November of 2001.4
“And that’s when the shit hit the fan,” Daniel recalls. Nature, sensing a potentially newsworthy controversy, had published the article alongside an editorial that blasted the FAO and a political cartoon that poked fun at both that venerable institution and the Chinese. After that, the FAO was ridiculed in the press for its inflexible policies, while China took flak for its outmoded administration. The media storm was all the more intense because, for the first time, Daniel called in a professional to write a press release and send it out shortly before the article appeared in Nature. He chose Nancy Baron, whom he’d met after his first publication in Science in 1998. She scrubbed the scientific jargon from their text and personally contacted dozens of science journalists to explain the study’s goals and geopolitical context. Three months after the Nature article was published, Nancy proudly presented Daniel with nearly one hundred newspaper articles (including two in the New York Times) and radio shows, mainly in North America, Europe, and . . . China. “This was especially remarkable,” Daniel points out, “given the shrinking space for science journalism following the September 11 tragedy.”5
Meanwhile at the FAO, Richard Grainger and his team seethed. Oddly enough, though, they did not reveal to the press that they were the ones who had ordered Watson and Pauly’s study—but they did throw the Sea Around Us team’s reports out the window and instead published a long-winded response on the FAO website. The document did not call into question the essential fact that certain fishing-related statistics supplied by national governments are fatally inaccurate, however. The Chinese response, on the other hand, was more ambivalent. The Beijing bureaucrats initially admitted the problem but, likely embarrassed by all the media coverage, soon retreated into denial, a position relayed by the state-run press agency. “We received some nasty emails, which tended to elaborate on the official position, as reported by the Xinhua News Agency,” Daniel recounts.6 “The saddest of these private communications was from the director of a biochemistry laboratory, who wrote that the reason Chinese fishermen have ‘big catches’ is because they work hard, as opposed to Africans who don’t, etc. Clearly, we still have a long way to go.”7 Chinese reactions from outside the government were more nuanced, but the Taiwanese media jumped at the chance to torment their communist brothers—a particularly provocative article in the Liberty Times bore the title “China, a Nation Good at Statistical Falsification.”
“As the preceding exchanges illustrate,” Daniel concludes, “the relationship between science and policy (and politics!) can be very tense. In the case of the FAO, politics clearly trumped science, not out of malice on the part of the scientists, of course. Most fisheries scientists—and probably most other scientists working on natural resource exploitation—work in government agencies and are expected to remain silent, even in the face of obvious conflicts of interest.” Daniel points out that it is therefore university-based scientists who must take up the important responsibility of keeping the public informed, because they are often able to speak more freely. “The public’s need to know,” he insists, “also extends to ‘scientific’ matters.” 8
The Chinese fisheries incident proved disastrous for the already strained relations between Daniel and the FAO, but it also cemented his international reputation. He had become indispensable: soon, Nature9 and then Science10 both commissioned synthesis reports on the sustainable development of fisheries and their future, which gave Daniel a space to develop his own ideas about the current state of marine resources and how they could be used to build a better world.
DANIEL’S FIRST TEN years in Vancouver forged his international career and his reputation as a whistleblower. Away from the spotlight, however, he was leading a double life, pursuing a captivating, secret, and all-consuming affair. His enchanting and domineering muse? None other than Charles Darwin, for whom Daniel nursed an intense passion.
It all started in Peru in the late eighties, while Daniel was working on the sequel to his book on the Humboldt Current. He remembered that Charles Darwin had passed through the region during his famous trip around the world aboard the Beagle between December 1831 and October 1836. Darwin had collected a few anchoveta specimens that would later be described under the scientific name Engraulis ringens and identified as the keystone of the coastal marine ecosystem of the South American coast, from Ecuador to Chile. Daniel decided to spruce up his volume with an epigraph from Darwin and began poring over everything the man had written. He never found the right quote—Darwin actually wasn’t that interested in the anchoveta—but his foray into this long-dead scientist’s world proved to be a voyage of no return.
Plunging into the account of the Beagle’s voyage, he discovered a sympathetic and perceptive Darwin who, though he hadn’t yet formulated his theory of evolution, spoke intelligently about current events and the major issues of his time. “I realized that Darwin was an abolitionist and that many of his biographers had ignored that side of him despite the fact that he developed his ideas on the subject at length in The Voyage of the Beagle. Of course, my reading of Darwin reflects my own obsessions, but it’s unbelievable that the fight against slavery is never mentioned in conjunction with the name Charles Darwin, even though his whole family was abolitionist.” During his studies in Edinburgh, the young Darwin learned the art of taxidermy from John Edmonstone, an African born into slavery in British Guiana. “I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man,” wrote Darwin, who was unsurprisingly sickened by the colonialist, slaveholding societies he encountered in South America. Much later, in 1871, Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, a treatise that traced the common evolutionary history of every human being on the planet at a time when his European contemporaries were using racial supremacy to justify their colonial policies. “Of course, Darwin’s ideas fascinated me,” Daniel tells me, “but as I read on, I got to know him as an extraordinarily sensitive and likable human being. That’s not often the way with famous men—usually, when you get beneath the surface, you discover a monster.”
Daniel began writing, in his way, a declaration of love for Charles Darwin: he went looking for every sentence Darwin had ever written about fish and published them all in a volume called Darwin’s Fishes: An Encyclopedia of Ichthyology, Ecology, and Evolution. His starting point was, of course, the resemblance between “Darwin’s finches” and “Darwin’s fishes.” Indeed, it is often said that the different species of finch he saw in the Galápagos sparked the idea of the evolution of species. Though this isn’t strictly true, “Darwin’s finches” has become a popular saying, and the evolution of the little feathered creatures is still the subject of extensive research today.11 Daniel—initially as a joke—decided that Darwin’s fishes were just as important as his finches. Over several years, he read everything Darwin had ever written—over six million words in twenty-nine volumes, plus copious correspondence.12 Darwin became his refuge, the personal project that he could develop at his own pace without having to worry about an army of partners whose shortcomings and delays often drove him to distraction. He worked in his secret garden early in the morning and on weekends, especially during his first few solitary years in Vancouver. The dock-front cafés near downtown became his favorite haunt. “I would eat brunch while reading the New York Times Sunday edition. Once I was well-fed and well-informed, I would tackle Darwin.”
Ultimately, Daniel collected 45,000 of Darwin’s words on fish and put them together in the form of a “dictionnaire amoureux,”* accompanying each entry with a commentary of his own devising. It took him seven years to finish the first, nearly complete, version. In 2000, he presented the results of his labor to a few colleagues during a conference held, quite appropriately, at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galápagos. “We were blown away, especially because Daniel had accomplished such a huge task alongside his normal research,” recalls Coleen Moloney, who was present for the conference.
Next, Daniel used his growing notoriety to convince an editor to publish his somewhat eccentric project. The monument Daniel had built to Darwin’s glory finally saw the light of day in 2004. Its preface, written in typical Paulyesque style, deserves to be cited at length: “Many sections of this book read like laundry lists,” he writes. “I have attempted to cover this up, mainly through levity, the result being that this book will probably irritate serious scholars, but still bore students to tears.” And further on: “I have emphasized the few errors I found, both because Charles Darwin is such a worthy target, and because without such emphasis, this book may be perceived as a hagiography.”13 Joseph Nelson of the University of Alberta described it as “an adventure in learning.” I ask Daniel if it sold well: “I prefer not to know,” he sighs, “it’s too depressing.”
Daniel’s book about Darwin was not destined to become a bestseller. He also continued to be frustrated by the indifference of his colleagues toward his favorite hypothesis about the surface area of fish gills limiting the fishes’ size—a subject on which he still published regularly. Unlike everyone else, he considered his work on the environmental impact of fisheries to be nothing more than an exercise in methodology. These were, however, the advances that would see him covered in glory—even if they were not sufficiently conceptual for his own taste.
* Russian miner Aleksey Stakhanov was the founder of the Stakhanovite movement, a Soviet workers’ movement that began in the 1930s and that aimed to increase worker productivity in order to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist economic system.
* Dictionnaire amoureux: A literary genre invented in France in the early twenty-first century, a dictionnaire amoureux is made up of a series of short articles, usually arranged in alphabetical order (hence the name dictionnaire, or “dictionary”). They are not designed to be reference volumes, but rather collections of subjective essays on a given subject (hence the adjective amoureux, “in love”). (TN)