Louis Shalako: On Fisheries, and Sustainability. Louis Shalako.

Thursday, July 18, 2024

On Fisheries, and Sustainability. Louis Shalako.

They are going, literally, to the ends of the Earth to catch a few tonnes of fish.

Louis Shalako

Fishing and sustainability.

With global climate change, unregulated deep-sea fishing, ghost fleets and pure, unadulterated human greed, fisheries will begin to crash. It has to happen—it will happen, and it is happening.

(Please don’t tell me ‘there are too many people in the world’, as if this offers any kind of obvious solution. One which offers no support, no effort, not one iota of sacrifice, from the likes of you. I will be honest, sir, one, just one, of you is more than enough. You do acknowledge that you are assuming that you and your family will be among the last to be sacrificed.)

This will happen all too soon, and to much apparent surprise from the folks who should have known their own industry best. The cascade of effects which result from the sudden and sustained loss of so much cheap, or even ‘free’ protein (what with all that slave labour, surely the most inefficient form of labour of all, although Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis may have an opposing opinion), will have serious social consequences, in some cases leading to famine, which we more normally associate with the failure of land-based cereal crops—surely not here, but somewhere else in the world. Otherwise, we might have to do something to prevent it. A crash in fish stocks, combined with a concurrent failure of cereal crops, will be catastrophic, and no one is safe and no one will be immune from the consequences.

Naturally, it will be the poor who suffer most, and the marginalized who are saddled with most of the blame—the guys launching their boats into the surf off of West Africa, and working for four dollars a day. They and their families are really going to suffer.

I used to love the Brunswick brand kippered snacks. These were ‘kippered’ herring, and they were wonderful with mustard, perhaps a little black pepper—to pour a little liquid honey on there was something of a revelation.

My buddy Gilmore introduced them to me, and he wasn’t even a Newfie. Back then, we would experiment with peanut butter and mustard sandwiches, I kid you not. Peanut butter and pickle, peanut butter and banana. You get the idea.

And one day, they all disappeared, and you can’t get them anymore, and they have never been seen on a grocery store shelf since then.

It seems that the fishery had crashed, and herring was no longer on the menu.

In this rather privileged marketplace, Sarnia, Ontario, most people eat a little seafood on some regular basis. Yet the fish sticks have a sixteenth-inch slice of actual fish, and the rest is all breading. It has become a heavily-processed food. It ain’t exactly cheap either. I like my shrimp, I like my breaded scallops, I have a few pan-sear frozen fillets in the freezer. Truth is, they’re not very good. I fantasize about grabbing some of that wild-caught fresh pickerel off the native guys. Just when I have the money, they run out, and just when they have it, I run out…of money, I mean.

And yet, I can also buy chicken, beef, pork, any number of foods to substitute. I can get a junior cheeseburger for three and a half dollars. To us, fish and seafood is a kind of luxury, perhaps part of a balanced diet. For too much of the world, fish is a vital staple of the everyday diet. These are the folks who will be affected most.

The more privileged of us, will survive on chicken nuggets, Kraft dinner, and pizza pockets, and not only that, but we will look like it, too.

(And ketchup. Don't forget the ketchup. - ed.)

And the rest of the world ain’t much going to like it, either, going hungry, I mean.

Then there is the guy who spends thirty or forty grand on a boat, thousands on tackle, and he's a bit disappointed when he can't catch anything.

Where there is famine, there is war, revolution, the mass migration of peoples…this is what I mean by consequences.

***

BREAKING NEWS: in a heist worth an estimated $400.00, local fat guy swipes tin of sardines from food bank, uses parkour skills to escape. (Photo by Earl.)

In Maritime Canada, the cod fishery collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s. The government put a moratorium on fishing for ground-fish. A people’s whole way of life was threatened, (and Newfies are nothing if not people), and there was just a huge amount of angst. Estimates of the fishery and its productive capacity were flawed, and one would think those mostly affected, would have known better in some sense, in that catches were collapsing, even as quotas remained the same or were even increased. This is what happens when everybody in town wants some little piece of whatever action there is.

The only trouble is when the pie keeps shrinking…

Just yesterday, at a conference of ministers of provinces and territories, the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador not very politely asked the federal government to butt out of provincial affairs, specifically in regards to the fishery…it’s not that they are incompetent when it comes to managing the fishery. No, the real problem is that it is part of the commons, and of course it must be destroyed as quickly as possible, for the greatest possible benefit of the smallest number of ‘taxpayers’ and ‘stakeholders’, in the shortest possible time. And it will happen.

Oh—and this is when they’ll be bitching and whining, pissing and moaning, and wondering why the federal government—and the ‘taxpayers’ and ‘stakeholders’, i.e., all the other Canadians whose only real interest is to eat a bit of seafood once in a while, aren’t stepping up to the plate in our good, old-fashioned, highly-despised but still indispensable, socialist manner and help a poor old guy, not very bright, but something of a cultural icon, ah, out.

Ladies and gentlemen—the fisherman, an icon. Sacrosanct and beyond reproach, right.

And tell me it isn’t true.

It is also probably true, that for too many years and for too many people, fishing represented cheap food and cheap protein and cheap profits. It was a cheap and easy way to make a living, with romantic images of some Newf in a dory, hanging out baited lines and hooks, pulling up a few ground-fish, (bottom-dwellers - ed.), cod and halibut and the like, just like The Old Man of the Sea, and don't forget all of them National Film Board documentaries, all of which were a kind of feel-good propaganda in their own right. And one day, it was all gone.

***

Just trying to snag a salmon for the free bait...

Years ago, a guy called Swimmy and I went down to the banks of Cow Creek in Bright’s Grove, Ontario. We were out for a crop-tour, and he was interested to see if the trout were running, which happens in the autumn in the Great Lakes, as opposed to springtime for Pacific salmon, for example. (Check this fact, Louis. – ed.)

We weren’t fishing, we were just having a look. It seems guys would try and catch the run, and they would use the triple hook lures and stuff to snag spawning adults. They would drag them ashore and smash them on the head, and then cut out their guts, and take the roe—fish eggs, ladies and gentlemen, and that way, they could dry them out, save them in baggies and film canisters, and get themselves a couple of dollars’ worth of ‘free’ bait.

Swimmy and I found a few dead fish, but we didn’t see any live ones in there, and one sort of has to consider that a fairly small run of lake trout had been wiped out at the breeding grounds.

Funny thing was, no one ate those fish—all they wanted was the bait, the eggs, ladies and gentlemen.

Various species run at different times, ladies and gentlemen...

***

The Bluewater Anglers have a hatchery, right on the waterfront by the water pumping station at the ‘mouth’, which is actually the effluent of Lake Huron, (it’s going out and not coming in), of the St. Clair River. (They call it the mouth, otherwise they'd have to admit it's the asshole). They raise and release thousands of fingerlings each year. It is a way of giving something back to the lake, the river, and the sport they love. That part seems all right. Yet one wonders what would happen if they stopped. Would the sport fishery in Lake Huron and the St. Clair River simply collapse? One would hope not, as this is kind of serious stuff. One also wonders how the commercial industry sustains itself, or how it hopes to do so, if they are not putting something back into the system…you know, when a simple tin of salmon is four or five dollars, perhaps even more for the premium brands in high-end grocers, it really should offer some kind of a clue.

So, do we honestly believe that China needs to claim or conquer some obscure underwater reef or shoals hundreds of kilometres outside of their legally-recognized economic zone. Which just happens to be within, the economic zone of some other nation, for example the Philippines. Of course not—it’s not about security or sovereignty. It’s about claiming cheap protein as their own. It’s about feeding one-point-four billion people cheaply, and remaining in power as the sole and only source of authority, and stability, in a country that will quickly become a powder keg as soon as the costs really begin to skyrocket.

This would also have consequences.

And our local commercial fishery, our local sport anglers would bristle with indignation, at the suggestion that they weren’t doing everything in their power, in order to sustain an industry and a sport they so profess to love.

That's probably true of the provincial government as well, and now MPP Bob Bailey, Conservative, is bristling with indignation. Well, you have earned it, sir.

As for myself, I like to express an opinion once in a while, for example, when I mentioned the challenges of reforestation here in southern Ontario.

END