Delacroix's Thomas Gonzales crabs, shrimps, fishes with gill nets, even hunts and traps to support his family. As the coastal marshes of his native St. Bernard Parish disappear, Gonzales feels his way of life slipping away, a fate he shares with many others. A fishing crisis is causing monumental change in villages and seaports around world.

Day Eight: Sunday, March 31, 1996 Old fishing ways going under Quotas may save both fish and fishers Bold new 'chaos theory' says fishery experts way off track Editorial: Leadership can save our fisheries

STORMS OF CHANGE

Delacroix fisherman Thomas Gonzales knows it. He’s watched the marshes disappear. So does Thai reef fisher Pinsom Nimsuwan, his livelihood devastated by overfishing. And Jim Hart of Newfoundland, on the public dole after the cod collapsed. They know that their old fishing ways are dying. But there is hope. After tough times, Maryland’s Mike Garvilla is doing better, pulling clams from the Atlantic Ocean. So is Fumio Terasawa, a gill netter in Shichigahama, Japan. They are part of bold efforts in cooperation and innovation that may offer the last, best hope for the fishing way of life.

Old fishing ways going under

By John McQuaid,
Staff writer

About dawn most mornings, Delacroix fisherman Thomas Gonzales crosses the road from his house to the slip on Bayou Terre Aux Boeufs, where his outboard boat is tied up, and runs the 200 crab traps he and his son, Tommy, have scattered around the marsh.
  Gonzales, 58, steers the boat while Tommy, 26, stands in the bow and does the lifting. It takes him 30 seconds to hoist a trap, dump the contents into the boat, then take a piece of mullet and shove it into the bait compartment before dropping the trap back overboard.
  His father grips the crabs, measures them to make sure they meet the size minimum, and tosses them into plywood boxes.
  Some people might consider the endless repetition of pulling, dumping, baiting and dropping traps a burden. But Gonzales considers the sameness a virtue; changes in season, weather, tide and mood make it different every time. Its simplicity and continuity link the present and the past. His father, Gonzales said, spoke only Spanish and favored the seine-type nets of his Spanish ancestors.
  The rhythms of life in the Louisiana marsh echo those of small-scale fishers everywhere. Many have family roots that stretch back centuries and across oceans. Some just took to the business back when anyone could go fish. They all share intimate knowledge of the water and depend on its bounty to support themselves — sometimes to stay alive.

"It looks like in about 10 years, there will be no more fishermen here. I like being on the water. Working 9 to 5 is not something I want to do." Fumio Terasawa Japanese fisherman

  But those rhythms are being destroyed by the other thing that fishers around the world share: the global fishing crisis.
  What’s happening, fishery experts say, is the kind of change that hasn’t occurred since the dawn of civilization. Many say the future lies not with wild fish but with fish farms — a future that recalls the monumental shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture that took place about 10,000 years ago.
  ‘‘The transition from hunting and gathering took thousands of years,’’ said John Poggie, a fishery anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island. ‘‘Here, the time frame is in terms of decades, a rapid change that is causing problems for people who are suited to be fishermen and who may be poorly suited to changing, and feel a tremendous sense of loss in having to give up something they know how to do and enjoy tremendously.’’
  Wild fisheries probably will survive in some form, but they won’t look much like today’s. And the change ultimately will have broad effects on everyone. It could mean fish that taste different, are less plentiful and more expensive — and serious social upheavals if coastal areas continue degrading to the point of becoming unlivable.
  Small-scale fishers are partly to blame for their plight.
  Like big corporations, they have taken advantage of rapidly expanding markets that have injected higher profits and debts into communities that were largely self-sufficient. When fish stocks began collapsing or the market went sour, the fishers often were left high and dry.
  Everywhere in the world, fishers have the same troubles and complaints.
  Besides crabbing, Gonzales also shrimps, fishes with gill nets, hunts and traps to support himself. He keeps four pet otters in his backyard, tending to them like a doting father every afternoon. But like the rising waters of the Gulf, changes are lapping at his feet.
  ‘‘I used to go out there and there were islands and sandbars everywhere,’’ he said. ‘‘Now they aren’t there anymore. Breton Island (part of the Chandeleur Island chain southeast of New Orleans) was a jungle full of rabbits and cottonmouth. Now there’s almost nothing left there but a sandbar. I can’t use the net my ancestors brought from Spain 200 years ago. There’s more to all this than meets the eye.’’

Clinging to what's left of a legacy, the children of a Lafitte fisherman and their friends use a burned-out shrimp boat as a makeshift diving platform. Around the world, from the Gulf to Thailand to Japan, the children of many fishing families are abandoning the trade in search of an easier life.

No fish to catch
  But Gonzales has it easy compared to former cod fisherman Jim Hart, who lives in a shingled house cantilevered into a hill on Fogo Island, a weather-beaten outcropping of rock, blue lakes and fir trees off the northeast coast of Newfoundland.
  Like the Louisiana marsh, it’s a beautiful setting for fishing, with one big difference: There are no fish.
  Overfishing has all but wiped out the northern cod that sustained the region for generations. Cod fishing is banned. Hart, 35, is a lost and bewildered man. He and his family live on a temporary government aid package, and he is trying to figure out how to cash in a worthless boat, leave Fogo Island and start over when most people his age are starting to come into their own.
  Rising from a seat in his kitchen, he took a frozen cod — one of two he had filleted, salted and wrapped in a plastic bag in his freezer — and cradled it in his hands.
  ‘‘I’m afraid to eat ’em now,’’ he said.
  Gonzales would also identify with the gill netters of Shichigahama — a small, well-scrubbed fishing port on a sparkling blue bay about 200 miles northeast of Tokyo.
  In coastal Japan, key species of flounder have been declining for 30 years. In the past decades Japan’s big offshore fleets, expelled from distant waters when nations set up 200-mile limits, returned and fished down the flounder population even further.
  Despite attempts to repopulate the seas by seeding them with baby flounder cultivated in tanks, the aging fishers of Shichigahama are working harder for less and their children are abandoning the trade.
  Fumio Terasawa, 60, a gill netter with a ready smile, gold teeth and a booming laugh, worked on an offshore trawler until 1977, then decided to get his own boat. He said catches were good until a few years ago, but he’s determined to keep fishing until he’s 70. After he returns from fishing, he and his wife spend the afternoon repairing tears and picking debris from the nets in a shed near his boat.
  ‘‘I like being on the water. Working 9 to 5 is not something I want to do,’’ Terasawa said. His son grew bored in Shichigahama because there was nothing to do but fish; he works as a salesman in nearby Sendai. ‘‘There’s no future in this, and he knew it,’’ Terasawa said. ‘‘It looks like, in about 10 years, there will be no more fishermen here.’’

History marches on
  Fishers and experts say these communities are out of sync with the times.
  ‘‘This is a case in which a socially desirable structure — small family fishing operations in coastal communities — no longer fits the economic realities of the latter 20th century,’’ said Nova Scotia fishery consultant Trevor Kenchington. ‘‘Unlike family farms, where a change in crops could increase economic yield, overall production is beyond human control.
  ‘‘So, in controlling this, what are the choices? If we limit technology, fishermen are left as rural poor. If we limit entry, then major operators will concentrate wealth and traditional communities erode. If we reject such limits, fish disappear.’’
  Most economic activity takes place on land, where property values fluctuate slowly and environmental change tends to be slow. Fishers operate on the sea, where property rights rarely exist, and quick environmental and economic shifts can enrich them or drive them out of business in a season or two.
  ‘‘Farmers have been socially and economically anchored in the land, which they didn’t always own, but usually did or had some kind of common lease agreement,’’ said Michael Orbach, an anthropologist at Duke University. ‘‘But in fishing, there is no carved-out piece of the natural resource or the environment that is protected.’’
  The upside to the lack of protection is supposed to be freedom. But that has hurt fishing communities even more. Managers blame open access in fisheries for the oversized fleets, overfishing and economic inefficiency that plague fishing everywhere. And the regulations they have installed to compensate have removed much of the freedom.
  Managers say further restricting access is the only way to save fisheries, from shrimp in the Gulf to Newfoundland cod — and that means a lot fewer people will be fishing.
  In the long run, managers say, only ‘‘professional’’ fishers defined by some bureaucratic yardstick will be allowed to fish. Anyone trying to break into the business will have to wait for somebody else to get out.

Failed leadership
  Government agencies in the United States and elsewhere failed to anticipate the crisis. Even once they recognized what was happening, they often botched the job of maintaining fish stocks and economically healthy fishing fleets. That has many people wondering whether governments are capable of managing the big transition going on — or whether they must undergo a transition of their own.
  Scientists exist in a world of computer models of fish stocks and economic behavior, while the fishers who must ultimately cope with their decisions live in a completely different world. This is a recipe for conflict and political gridlock.
  At the National Marine Fisheries Service, 1,570 employees are natural scientists, 31 are economists, and two are anthropologists, specialists in fishing communities rather than fish. None has experience in commercial fishing.
  ‘‘The old myth was that you manage fish,’’ said Ray Hilborn, a University of Washington fishery scientist and co-author of a book on uncertainty in fishery science and management. ‘‘You don’t manage fish at all, you manage people. We’ve still got a long way to go.’’
  This situation has begun to change. Many fishery experts are encouraging a move to more co-management — the idea of building a consensus for good science and long-term conservation from the ground up rather than imposing it from above.
  ‘‘People have to get out on boats and into people’s kitchens. They’re going to have to learn to go into the fishermen’s homes, shut their mouths and listen to what they have to say,’’ Kenchington said.
  One example can be found in Japan, where a cooperative system of fishery management is centuries old.
  In Shichigahama, the gill net cooperative consists of 60 boats, most about 50 feet long, each with a narrow beam and a high cockpit. They operate within a tight regulatory structure overseen by the state and federal governments, but negotiate the details themselves.
  The gill netters compete with a bigger trawl fleet. Fifteen years ago, when landings dropped noticeably, conflicts began. Trawlers began fishing illegally at night, and often ran over the gill nets. But the gill netters got together with the trawlers and hammered out an agreement still in force today.
  They divided the fishing ground into a grid of rectangles. Trawlers and gill netters take alternate rectangles on the map, and the rules for fishing are quite precise: a limit of 14 nets per area, marked with numbered, color-coded flags, spaced 600 meters apart.

‘Perfect fall guy’
  The Japanese have a tradition of cooperation. Elsewhere, managers say, better decision-making has to evolve out of balky systems. There are some signs of hope in the United States, where the system is decentralized, and its management councils are supposed to take all interests into account — though it often hasn’t worked out that way.
  On the Pacific Coast, many organizations of fishers and boat owners have long histories, political clout, and an eye on the long term. As a result, the fisheries are better-managed, though hardly free of conflict. On the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the situation is less rosy: Many fishers are small-scale owner-operators who don’t like organizations to begin with.
  ‘‘They’ve been totally ineffective politically because they’re spread out, they’re never around when there are meetings, and going to meetings goes against their instinct for individuality,’’ said Joseph Garland, a Gloucester, Mass., writer working on a history of fishing in New England. ‘‘The fisherman is a perfect fall guy, and he, predictably, plays into it.’’

Survival of fittest
  Fishers must face hard realities, but adaptability also is part of the fishing culture. In coastal Thailand southeast of Bangkok, pollution and overfishing have left little for the trawlers from the fishing port of Bangsarea. These days, young people go to work in the factories and tourist resorts that dot the coastline.
  ‘‘Thirty years ago, everyone respected you if you were a fisherman, because you were a rich man,’’ said Pinsom Nimsuwan, 48, who owns two boats.
  Pinsom has not given up on fishing. Instead, he has helped build artificial reefs made of used tires and concrete not far offshore, and he’s always looking for new ways to attract fish. ‘‘It’s very difficult to find fish now,’’ he said. ‘‘With the reefs we’ve built, we have good volume of fish and pretty good size.’’
  But many fishers will have to adapt to lives out of fishing. Programs to help with retraining in New England and Canada, however, have had mixed results: It has been hard to move people into new jobs because they must adjust to not just a career change but also big change in every aspect of their lives.
  ‘‘If I’m forced to go, well then I’ll go. But I hope I never have to go,’’ said Lafitte inshore fisherman Troy Schultz, 31. ‘‘I don’t know if I could have somebody over me telling me, you got to do this, you got to do that.
  ‘‘I know what I got to do with fishing. When the season comes around for shrimp, I know I got to get my boat ready for shrimp. When the season comes around for the winter and we start fooling with crabs, I know I got to take the shrimping stuff off and put my crab traps out.
  ‘‘I do it at my own pace, my own time. Nobody tells me when to go, when not to go. As long as you go about what you’re doing, everything works out fine. I just don’t want to ever have to do anything else if I don’t have to.
  ‘‘We just trying to fight for something we believe in. This is a heritage place down here.’’