Cod by Mark Kurlansky

¶ … environmental policies is very often a hazardous endeavor. Largely, this is because potential costs and benefits associated with environmental problems can only be speculated upon, rather than empirically determined. It is not clear, for instance, how much reducing a factory's greenhouse emissions will quantitatively help society; nevertheless, making good decisions regarding these issues demands that we weigh calculable figures with estimates, and sometimes, estimates with estimates. This makes the already fierce setting of environmental debates an even more perilous battleground.

Imperfect information influences individuals, environmentalists, government officials, and businesses in ways that generally require them to reach their own conclusions, and apply their unique perspectives. This unique attribute of environmental science makes it a wide-ranging field that often requires the groups involved to make informed decisions, derived from such varying disciplines as physics and physiology. Mike Kurlansky's The Cod's Tale helps to demonstrate the enormous tasks environmental scientists are faced with, as well as the substantial social implications associated with their conclusions.

Kurlansky approaches the environmental sciences from a perspective that seems at first ridiculous: he asserts that Cod have seriously impacted human history for millennia. On the surface, this claim seems dubious; however, he quickly explains how cod fishing gradually pulled the Vikings across the Atlantic, and is largely responsible for the current organization of cities and towns on the coasts of North America.

Kurlansky, through these methods, clearly establishes the codfish as a species of animal that -- unlike many other species -- needs to be protected not only for its aesthetic value, but for the practical survival of the world's fishing industry. So, as he travels through the ages vividly describing the Pilgrims and aristocratic Bostonians of the early Americas devouring salted cod, it becomes apparent that this book is far more than a history lesson from a new perspective: it is a cautionary tale for the future.

The difficulty, however, with establishing that there is an impending problem with the industry dependent upon cod is that quantitatively showing that cod have been fished near to their limit is realistically impossible. There are no truly accurate accounts of how many cod were in the ocean even a century ago, let alone attempting to estimate the levels during Viking times. To Kurlansky, this is one of the central reasons why warnings from scientists have gone, thus far, unheeded by politicians and policy makers.

'Using data from thousands of dusty fishermen's logbooks discovered in U.S. archives and museums, Andy Rosenberg and Jeff Bolster calculated there were about 1.26 million tones of cod on the Scotian Shelf in 1852. Today, there is an estimated 50,000 tones." (Moore, 2005). Such evidence is necessarily based upon speculation, and requires the scientists conducting the study to use many inaccurate and boastful accounts from fishermen as factual data. Not surprisingly, "The anecdotes don't tend to persuade policy-makers. It's harder to walk away from a detailed, qualitative study." (Moore, 2005).

So, these best efforts from current scientists have provided enough accurate data to suggest that cod populations are a mere fraction of what they were at the end of the nineteenth century: "When compared with the catches recorded in the 19th-century logbooks, the volume of cod on the shelf is less than 5 per cent of what it once was." (Moore, 2005). Kurlansky's book not only supports such information, but explains it in such a way that makes it both understandable for the layman and reveals the problems associated with such knowledge.

In this respect, The Cod's Tale is a reflection of the fact that environmental science is interdisciplinary; it takes these empirically drawn assessments of codfish populations and puts them into an economic history. Accordingly, to understand the history of cod it is essential to understand the economic trends that have dominated our continent, and in so doing, we can make inferences into how the cod have been influenced.

Still, this problem is not only relative to figures estimated from a century ago, but the effects can be seen relative to just a decade ago. In fact it is observed that, "Filipinos now serve guests species of fish that they barely considered edible a decade ago. One market trader has given up fish and taken to selling chicken instead." (Milazzo, 1998). This change in focus for fisheries has been, largely, unprofitable. Additionally, data has managed to rule out other sources of the lowering abundances of cod in our oceans.

Pollution, disease, and climate change must all be adequately understood and accurately investigated in order to come to Kurlansky's position that fishing has been the central player in the depletion of cod. "The scarcity is the result of overfishing, and it affects both poor and rich countries, polluted and unpolluted." (Milazzo, 1998). In short, the fact that cod numbers have fallen across a wide range of oceanic regions has managed to support the hypothesis put forward by Kurlansky.

Also, additional fields of research need to be utilized to rule out in order for individuals and policy makers to draw the lines between economic trends and cod abundance. Kurlansky's conclusions cannot be accepted unless evidence from bacteriologists and marine biologists also suggests that overfishing is the most significant source of cod reduction. Similarly, other such sources have been ruled out, primarily, because of the non-geographic specificity of the cod problem. Kurlansky recalls that when the French explorer Cartier first came upon the mouth of the St.

Lawrence River in 1534 there were already over a thousand Basque ships already fishing there. "But by 1992, the biomass of spawning cod off Newfoundland and Labrador had fallen to only 22,000 tones, compared with 1.6m tones 30 years earlier. America halved its fishing effort in the New England groundfish fisheries. Canada closed the Grand Banks, announcing a five-year aid package worth C$1.5 billion ($1.05 billion). The collapse has cost 40,000 jobs.