IT HAS TAKEN me two years to write the biography of Daniel Pauly, which I completed while also working on my own research. In that time, Daniel has added fifty titles to a list of publications that already included five hundred, leading me on a wild goose chase in which new texts appeared faster than I could read them. His work, already cited 64,000 times, has since attracted 13,000 new citations, confirming his status as one of the most influential authors in the history of the marine sciences. He also received seven more distinctions between 2016 and 2017 (making forty in all), including the French Légion d’honneur. Radio-Canada named him scientist of the year in 2016, and he acquired Canadian nationality. His new passport only appeared, however, after a few administrative hurdles: Daniel had to provide precise dates of all the times he had exited or entered Canada over the previous ten years, along with documents to back them up.
His seventy-second birthday come and gone, Daniel doesn’t seem keen on retirement, even if, as Sandra points out, “When he insists on working over the weekend, he’s exhausted by Wednesday.” Daniel doesn’t direct a dozen PhD students at a time anymore, as he did in the 1990s and 2000s, though he does teach and give conferences all over the world. In the last two years, he has been to India, China, Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia and Tahiti, Norway, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, the Galápagos, and South Africa. “With his profile, Daniel should be named a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations,” his friend Kostas Stergiou tells me.
But superheroes are solitary, and Daniel is no exception. During the months I spent at his institute in Vancouver, I was surprised to find him isolated. After many years of sheltering in prefabricated buildings, the Institute for Oceans and Fisheries has moved into a shiny new building, a concrete structure with a large entryway and suspended walkways worthy of a shopping mall. The students are crowded into a forest of cubicles, while Daniel and the other researchers occupy individual hundred-square-foot offices. I’m just a friendly bird lover, and everyone is very cordial with me, but the tension is palpable. The leading lights of marine science don’t speak to each other, are hardly ever around for coffee breaks, and their students don’t mix. Daniel explains to me that a “process of alienation” led him to distance himself from most of his colleagues and some members of his own team. I would add that he has long overshadowed other scientists of his generation, and that his almost-Stakhovite work ethic has generated some resentment. “Daniel has always put his work before everything,” Philippe Cury tells me, “including friendship.” Jennifer Jacquet adds, “Daniel doesn’t need other people in order to function.” And it’s true that he mostly lives his life in the hundred square inches of his computer screen and on the pages of the books he continues to devour at lightning speed.
But everyone agrees that since his stroke, Daniel has become more tolerant, affectionate, and empathetic. And this still-unwrinkled septuagenarian is lucky—Sandra watches over him daily, Deng Palomares is as loyal as ever, and Cornelia Nauen keeps an eye on him from afar. When he is at the office in Vancouver, Sandra joins him for lunch every few weeks with William Cheung, Rashid Sumaila, and their wives. “We go for dim sum,” says Daniel, for whom the pleasures of the table are still of capital importance. Over lunch, he regales his friends with a few monologues on the most recent scientific discoveries he has spotted in Science and Nature, which he still consults religiously. These rare social gatherings give Daniel much-needed breathing room, a port in a sea of troubles.
In 2014, the Pew Charitable Trusts cut off the funding that had made the Sea Around Us a model for fisheries research around the world. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation* picked up the slack in 2015, but the Sea Around Us found itself with a much lower budget and a lot less control over its activities. Deng Palomares made frequent trips to the foundation’s headquarters (fortunately located in nearby Seattle) to defend her team’s interests and explain that scientific research doesn’t always advance at the speed of a microprocessor. Despite her efforts, though, the Sea Around Us’s financial situation worsened in 2016, and Daniel was forced to let many of his teammates go. “There were fifteen of us,” Deng says nervously, “but now there will just be me, Daniel, and three assistants. Daniel hasn’t played the political game in Canada,” she adds, “which says something about his integrity, but it also comes at a cost for people like me, who still don’t have permanent positions.”
Daniel seems to be running out of reasons to stay in Vancouver, that artificial, bourgeois paradise, where his team is beginning to shrink. His children live far away, as does his French family, so he often hits the road, thanks to an impressive network of allies all over the world who are always happy to take him in. “I was talking to Daniel on the phone, and he told me he didn’t want to go to the office anymore,” Jennifer Jacquet recalls. “I could not believe it—I’d never heard Daniel say he doesn’t want to go to work. I spoke to my boss, and I said, ‘Do you think we could bring Daniel here?’” No sooner said than done—Daniel and Sandra spent three months in Manhattan in the fall of 2016.
I join them there for Thanksgiving, rushing out of Kennedy Airport, determined not to be late for the dinner Sandra has planned—an Arkansas-style chateaubriand. We are happy to see each other, but Sandra warned me ahead of time: “Daniel is very tired—recent events have taken a lot out of him.” Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States two weeks earlier. “It’s like a kick in the pants,” Daniel tells me. Always a loyal reader of the New York Times, he has stopped paying attention to the news. “There aren’t any bright futures anymore,” the Baby Boomer concludes sadly. Daniel has fallen back on different reading materials, and I notice during my visit that he has made a valiant effort to fill up the bookcase in their temporary home, mostly with science fiction. “If it’s set in space with big spaceships, I love it!” he tells me, his eyes sparkling momentarily.
I crash on the Paulys’ couch, setting my alarm for 6:00 AM—which just leaves me time to shake myself awake before Daniel strolls into the living room, laptop under his arm. He puts the kettle on (“My modest contribution to breakfast,” he grumbles) and dives into his email. As he wolfs down his bacon, toast, and fruit, Daniel launches into a conversation on string theory before moving on to astrophysics. If you’re planning to eat breakfast with Daniel Pauly, I suggest doing some intellectual warm-up exercises first. Our conversation continues as the day wears on, with an outing to Daniel’s favorite Italian restaurant, where he shows me how to hold a piece of pizza in one hand “like a real New Yorker,” then a walk among the famous chess players of Washington Square Park.
“In three months, Daniel and Sandra barely set foot outside of that one square kilometer,” sighs Jennifer Jacquet. Daniel wrote yet another book, helped out with a study showing the link between illegal fishing and modern slavery,* and taught classes for American students who were only too happy to meet a living legend. Then the lifelong wanderers set off for California to spend the holidays with Sandra’s family, where they were joined by Angela, Ilya, and their partners. “And it’s crazy, he still does not fly business,” Jennifer exclaims, “despite his height, his age, and his health.” I tell her that I will quote her on that, but I don’t think anyone will believe me.
In 2017, the Paulys were invited to Australia for a happy occasion: Dirk Zeller, Daniel’s teammate for the last twenty years and the artisan behind many a statistical reconstruction, finally landed a professorship at the University of Western Australia. “It was about time—Dirk is well past fifty,” comments Daniel, who enjoyed the indolent, Mediterranean atmosphere of Perth. “They loaned me a very nice apartment, and Sandra was able to come along.” Daniel’s morale slowly improved, especially when he learned that Dirk Zeller would be opening a local branch of the Sea Around Us thanks to the University of Western Australia, which had agreed to become one of the funders of FishBase. Better yet, he met a millionaire philanthropist who knows a few billionaires determined to do something good for the oceans. “The Sea Around Us’s financial situation will be better in 2018,” he tells me, radiant. In Vancouver, Deng can breathe a little easier—they might be able to bring back some of her colleagues who were let go in 2016.
Things are looking up for the fish as well, at least in some regions. I called Didier Gascuel to check in on the health of French fisheries. Didier explains that the patient had been sickest in the late 1990s: overfishing was everywhere, yields were down despite the subsidies, and the increased price of fuel made the sector even less profitable. Quite a few fishers threw in the towel, a large number of big fishing boats were retired, and the pressure eased. As a result, French fisheries have recovered somewhat in the last few years, particularly in the English Channel and on the Atlantic coast, even if the situation in the Mediterranean, where the sardine stocks have collapsed, remains worrisome. The European Union has not been as effective when it comes to managing its fisheries as certain Northern European countries. Norway is the best in its class for marine fisheries, though it does have one small advantage: climate change is causing the North Atlantic to warm noticeably, and fish in the Norwegian and Barents Seas love the milder temperatures. Overall, if we are to believe Didier Gascuel, countries in the Global North are doing their best to rebuild their fisheries and improve their management. Ray Hilborn and his gang are not, therefore, entirely wrong when they declare the state of the world’s fisheries satisfactory—they are just blinded by a situation unique to the United States. Further south, the disaster continues to unfold off the coast of Africa and, generally speaking, in all the tropical countries, especially in Southeast Asia.
That is why Daniel continues to insist, as he always has, that it is essential to look at the future of fish and marine ecosystems on a global scale. The international NGO Oceana is the number-one advocate of this point of view, backed by powerful American organizations including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation. Daniel’s ties to this sphere are close and long-standing—he is, quite logically, on Oceana’s board. Andy Sharpless, Oceana’s executive director, explains their approach: “We went to see the Chinese ambassador in Geneva . . . We said, ‘We have a bad history, as a planet, in managing the oceans; they are collapsing.’ And he said, ‘We have a billion people in China, they’re very hungry, we’re gonna feed them.’”* Andy took the blow in stride and came back swinging in 2013 with a book titled The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World.† His arguments are largely based on the work of Daniel Pauly, William Cheung, and Rashid Sumaila: By 2050, there will be nine billion people on Earth. Agriculture will still provide much of our food, though often at the cost of biodiversity and terrestrial ecosystems. The environmental impact of well-managed marine fisheries, on the other hand, is negligible and the nutritional quality of fish far superior to that of other kinds of meat. Currently, 750 million poor people live in countries with access to marine resources, while our overfished oceans can barely feed 450 million people per year. If we managed the world’s marine resources more effectively, we could feed 700 million people, and if we eliminate reduction fisheries,‡ that figure could rise to over a billion people. The actions that would need to be taken to rebuild fish stocks are well known: quotas must be respected, reproduction sites protected, and marine reserves created; and fisheries must be made more selective in order to reduce collateral damage. Andy Sharpless has said it over and over again: “The basic facts of what you need to do to produce an abundant ocean have been proven . . . you get the fish back, [and] you get them back in five or ten years—this is not some academic abstraction.”
Environmental NGOs have lobbied successfully in countries all over the world. I asked Didier Gascuel about the Mediterranean bluefin tuna, the subject of an impressive battle between NGOs, politicians, and fishing executives that has led to stricter regulations. According to Didier, “The stock is coming back quickly, that’s almost certain. The NGOs saved fishing by forcing the industry to take the necessary steps. But the fishing sector is as insatiable as ever, and the most recent quota increases are ill-advised.”
The myth of inexhaustible ocean resources has finally been shattered: overfishing is a media phenomenon, so obvious it cannot possibly be ignored. Daniel has become the ocean’s great whistleblower, an exceptional individual who—in a scientific community shackled by economic interests—dared to stand up and tell the public about the impending doom of fish populations, even at the risk of angering many of his colleagues. But life has not made Daniel Pauly “like everybody else.” Exclusion gave him all the courage he needed.
* Established by the cofounder of Microsoft.
* According to the study in question, residents of the European Union are thirteen times more likely to eat fish caught by enslaved fishers when the products are imported from developing countries. This kind of modern slavery is common on African, Asian, South American, and even Russian fishing boats. See: David Tickler, Jessica J. Meeuwig, Katharine Bryant, Fiona David, John A. H. Forrest, Elise Gordon, Jacqueline Joudo Larsen, Beverly Oh, Daniel Pauly, Ussif R. Sumaila, and Dirk Zeller, “Modern Slavery and the Race to Fish,” Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (2018): 4643.
* Oceana, “Andrew Sharpless,” oceana.org/about-oceana/people-partners/executive-committee/andrew-sharpless.
† Coauthored with Suzannah Evans, with a preface by Bill Clinton.
‡ As we have seen already, reduction fisheries take small pelagic fish that could be eaten by humans and use them to feed farmed fish.