Whose Oceans?
An interview with H. Bruce Franklin.
H. Bruce Franklin is a US cultural historian. He played a big role in a great success that should inspire us all with great hope. His 2007 book The Most Important Fish in the Sea—and his activism—were crucial to a mass movement that partially restored the East Coast’s marine environment. The mass movement consisted of fishers as well as environmentalists, and you can see in the above image the beauty of their accomplishment.
Please click here and zoom in, so that you can see the above image in its full detail.
I was honored/thrilled to interview Franklin. See below my interview with him that I lightly edited and added hyperlinks to.
1) You’ve been writing about the sea from your first book The Wake of the Gods (1963)—which was on Herman Melville—right up to the present. Why?
We humans call this planet “Earth.” How strange! When we got our first look at the whole thing, we realized that it’s the Blue Planet, a planet of oceans. Maybe we should rename it “Water.” The earth on our planet is merely a bunch of islands, continually shifting around in that water world. The main islands are our continents, which split off from the supercontinent Pangaea, and are still forming different marine environments (for example, as the U.S. East coast slides into the Atlantic Ocean).
The seas form 71 percent of the planet’s surface, and they contain many times the volume of habitat for life that the terrestrial environment contains. For billions of years, life existed only in the seas, from which plants and animals emerged just 400 million years ago. Thus the terrestrial animals evolved from marine lifeforms, and we humans evolved from the same lineage as fish (as explained cogently in Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish). Each of us relives much of that evolution in our mother’s womb, where we floated around in a liquid environment.
So the surprise is not my interest in the sea, but why anybody would not share that interest.
2) What are the main ideas in your 2007 book The Most Important Fish in the Sea? Lawrence Buell’s blurb for your 2007 book asked this question: “How is it possible that a sizeable fish vital to the oceanic food chain and intertwined for three centuries with the cultural histories of both natives and settlers could nevertheless completely escape the notice of most Americans and within a few short years be driven to the brink of extinction for no valid reason whatever?”
Menhaden are small, bony, smelly fish that most people have never heard of. But menhaden are the keystone for the marine ecology of America’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and they have played crucial roles in America’s history.
Native Americans taught the Pilgrims how to use menhaden as fertilizer. As U.S. agriculture and industry boomed in the 19th century, menhaden were essential. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant. Hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the East coast worked feverishly in the menhaden industry. Since the Civil War, the catch of menhaden has exceeded that of all other fish put together.
Today, one company (a Canadian company)—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden “reduction industry.” Every year it sweeps billions of menhaden from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health-food supplements to lipstick.
The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for these industrial products. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them were decimated and algae created huge dead zones, such as the ones in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Most Important Fish in the Sea tells the story of the fight against the menhaden reduction industry, a fight that began in the 1870s.
Over the course of more than a century, state after state along the Atlantic coast banned the industry. However, the industry was able to get around those bans by fishing beyond the three-mile limits of state waters and by devastating Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay waters.
In 2001, Discover published my article “The Most Important Fish in the Sea” (reprinted in Natalie Angier’s The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002).
Soon a mass movement arose to protect “the most important fish in the sea,” my life became intertwined with that movement, and I found myself absorbed in the eye-opening research that led to my 2007 book, which includes the history of the movement—and of its victories—through 2006.
After many small victories, an alliance of recreational anglers and environmentalists won a stunning victory in 2020, with profound implications for other struggles to protect the environment, when the Secretary of Commerce recognized the ecological role of menhaden. I discuss this victory on pages 222–225 of the 2020 printing of The Most Important Fish in the Sea.
3) What would you change/add in a new version of your 2007 book?
In 2020, the publisher found a way for me to update the book, so I added that information about our great victory for menhaden—and about the astonishing restoration of parts of the marine environment, including hosts of whales feeding on menhaden in New York City waters. I would like to expand this update in any newer edition.
Meanwhile, I plan to write an essay about our mass movement to protect menhaden. From 2001 to 2015, I gave numerous talks, including many to fishing clubs in various states. The club members were almost universally white men, mainly workers and skilled tradesmen. When I tried to get liberal organizations to ally with these men, the reaction was typically, “Oh, they’re just a bunch of hopeless reactionary rednecks.” Well, the marine environment is central to these men’s lives, and they want the fish to be there for their children and grandchildren.
If these men feel abandoned by liberals, whose fault is that?
4) What does the public need to understand about the difference between terrestrial environments and marine environments?
Imagine a world where the effects of gravity are so weak that you can move yourself up and down in three dimensions with less effort than it now takes you to walk or crawl in two dimensions. That may not require any great stretch of the imagination for those of us who have swum, but swimming gives us only a tiny glimpse of what life is like in a marine environment. Relatively few of the lifeforms in the ocean can swim strongly enough to resist the currents and tides, and most can at best control only their vertical movement in the water column.
The true swimmers, traditionally called nekton, are one of the three basic lifeforms of the seas, but they are in the minority.
Gravity is so weak—and currents and tides are so strong—that the vast majority of the ocean’s lifeforms just drift around without any volition of their own. These drifting plants and animals are plankton, the second basic form of marine life, and the true elemental life of the ocean.
Although we don’t have roots, we terrestrial slaves of gravity are forced to spend most of our lives attached to the ground or some other firm bottom. Even when we fly in airplanes or sail in boats, we pretty much stick to the bottom of the vessels. So we are most like the third category of marine life, the benthos, the bottom dwellers, and in that sense our closest marine counterparts are not mammals but the crabs and lobsters and snails and worms crawling around on the floor of the ocean (though even crabs and lobsters can soar off swimming at will).
Except in the few hours of our lives when we swim, we do not share much experience with the nekton—the fish, marine mammals, and other active swimmers of the seas.
The organisms most alien to our mode of life are the plankton, the animal and vegetable life that drifts with little or no control over its own locomotion. Indeed, in our environment there are few lifeforms that spend their entire existence drifting around. Unlike seawater, which is dense enough to buoy massive objects and which is filled with minerals and potentially nutritious chemicals, air does not support a massive population of drifters, like the plankton that fill the seas.
Evidently the earliest forms of fish were mainly planktivores, swilling rather than chomping their food, since no fish developed jaws until the Silurian period, also 400 million years ago. Most of the zooplankton today are themselves planktivores, consuming organisms even smaller than they are. Feeding on tiny drifting particles of life, however, does not limit size. The largest sharks—the whale shark and the basking shark—are planktivores. The blue whale—the largest known animal ever to live on our planet, more than twice the size of the largest dinosaur—is a planktivore. Though an individual menhaden is tiny compared to the giant planktivores, a school of menhaden can be heavier and far larger than a blue whale.
5) What do you like about fishing?
That’s a book-length topic. But fortunately, a great book has already been written by someone else in answer to a similar question: Blues by John Hersey (the author of that eye-opening 1946 classic Hiroshima).
Fishing is my R&R. When fishing, fishing is all that’s on my mind.
When actually catching a fish, I suppose our human predator-identity takes over.
Then for weeks after a successful fishing outing, Jane (my spouse for 65 years) and I enjoy eating the delicious and nutritious food I’ve caught and cooked.
6) What problems does recreational saltwater fishing pose?
Left unregulated, the millions of recreational saltwater fishers in the United States would alone seriously threaten the survival of many species. Fortunately, the states on the three U.S. coasts have all enacted regulations that limit recreational catches of most species of sportfish. These limits, usually arrived at by marine scientists, apply to quantity, size, fishing seasons, and fishing gear. State jurisdiction extends out to three miles from land.
Organizations of recreational saltwater fishers play an active role in forming and supporting the regulations designed to protect many species.
7) To what extent does conservation mean greater long-term profit for industry—and to the extent that it does, why does industry choose to harm marine environments?
The commercial fishing industry has the same motivation as almost all capitalist industries, companies, and even small businesses: profit. The quest for profit tends to override concern for the environment, the health of the public, the well-being of workers, etc. But most of these entities have enough sense to avoid killing the goose that lays their golden egg. However, in the case of wild saltwater fish, nobody owns their golden egg. Here the only solution is regulation.
Federal jurisdiction over commercial fishing extends out to 200 miles from shore and is governed by the Commerce Department, mainly through the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Federal efforts to stop overfishing and rebuild fish stocks have had some limited success.
But of course most of the world’s seas are far beyond U.S. jurisdiction. In that oceanic vastness, the slaughter of whole species goes on with terrifying efficiency.
8) Your 2007 book gives quotes from the 1600s about how many fish there were and about what an incredible utopian resource these marine environments offered to us. To what extent could our marine environments recover to that state, given optimal policies?
An interesting question. It’s hard to imagine restoring most of what we destroyed to that wondrous environment. For example, the spawning salmon that once filled the rivers and streams of New England can’t reappear because spawning salmon return to the water in which they were spawned and it’s been many, many decades since any salmon were spawned in those waters.
In The Most Important Fish in the Sea, I predicted that if we kicked the menhaden-reduction industry out of New Jersey and New York waters, we would see a huge resurgence of both menhaden and the prized fish that feed on them. Well, that prediction came true.
What I did not predict was what happened next. My first inkling came in 2015 while fishing on a boat in lower New York Harbor. Suddenly, less than a hundred yards from the boat, a humpback whale leaped out of the water with panicked menhaden escaping from both sides of its huge mouth.
In the book, I had marveled at a 17th-century sketch of whales in New York Harbor. Today, whale-watching tours and drone videos of whales feeding on menhaden are a routine part of the seascape adjacent to the harbor. So improbable restoration may indeed be possible.
In 2017, Carl Safina, a respected observer of the natural world, was astounded at the restoration of the marine environment off the south coast of Long Island: “This isn’t the ocean I’ve known all my life. This is a new and improved, revitalized coast, returning to abundance.” Safina attributes this miracle to menhaden and the movement to restore this “Most Important Fish in the Sea.”
One optimistic factor is the incredible fecundity of many species of fish, such as menhaden. Give these fish a chance, and maybe they will be able to come back. Alas, there are other species that don’t begin to spawn until many years old—some of these species are already extinct or doomed to extinction.
Of course, all the damage we are presently doing makes any hope of restoration look like a mirage. Massive bottom trawlers scoop up all life near or on the seafloor, leaving behind vast flat deserts of sand, mud, and stone. Gillnets and miles-long lines with baited hooks slaughter sea turtles, mammals, and any fish lured by the bait. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the Mississippi River drainage basin and the fifty rivers flowing into Chesapeake Bay create lethal dead zones in what were once paradises of marine life. Mammoth mid-ocean islands of discarded plastic smother life indiscriminately. Climate change is helping to kill coral reefs off Australia, manatees in Florida, and gray whales along the California coast.
So the task for now is to stop polluting and looting our ancestral home.
9) To what extent do we not know what natural marine environments even look like? Maybe the science on marine environments emerged after radical transformation/depletion/damage had already occurred.
Before electronic media dominated the world, or even before photography existed, people devoted lots of time and energy to writing descriptions of the world and recording precise records, including the logbooks of ships. And our scientists are doing wonders to construct a picture of the marine environment in time and space. We’re learning more and more about the past, including the evolution of marine life, and the dimensions of marine life, including its strange forms in those hydrothermal vents in the deepest parts of the oceans.
So yes, I believe that we now have a pretty good picture of the marine environments that have been damaged by our wholesale looting from the 18th century on through the present. I also believe we have much to learn about both the past and present of our planet’s seas.
10) What books about the marine environment should people read?
The sea has inspired some of the greatest literature created by our species, and one could spend a lifetime reading just a small portion of it. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, published in 1851, and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, published exactly a century later in 1951, are essential classic texts. No matter how many times you read Moby-Dick, you will learn more the next time. Looking back from the 21st century, remember that the first forms of industrialized looting of the sea were 19th-century Yankee whaleships, floating industrial factories whose purpose was to turn the most majestic creatures of the sea into commodities to be sold for profit. Moby-Dick, among its multiple other dimensions, is still our best picture of early industrial carnage of the marine environment. The Sea Around Us, a spectacular bestseller, introduced Americans and peoples around the world to the macro-history of the sea and to then-current marine science. The book was published shortly after the end of World War II, whose undersea warfare had greatly increased our knowledge of the ocean’s depths. The later books I’m about to suggest all owe much to The Sea Around Us (as some of them acknowledge).
One of today’s leading champions of the sea is oceanographer and undersea explorer Sylvia Earle. Her wide-ranging The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One is a fine introduction to the threats to the world’s marine environment and possible ways to save what’s left. The Netflix documentary Mission Blue, featuring Earle, is a useful companion to the book.
Activist and journalist David Helvarg’s Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness gives a wealth of information and insight about the battles waged to protect America’s various marine environments from their corporate and government enemies. Helvarg is the founder of Blue Frontier, which helps coordinate ocean-friendly efforts worldwide.
Charles Clover’s The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat gives an accurate—and thus scary—vision of commercial fishing methods worldwide and the rapidly depleted seas they are leaving in the wake. To turn this outgoing global tide, he stresses the responsibility of governments to regulate fishing and to establish large marine reserves as well as the responsibility of individuals to make conservation-minded decisions in the fish they choose to consume. A documentary film was made from the book in 2009 and updated in 2017.
In his Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, Paul Greenberg fears that people alive today may be the last to feast on commercially available wild fish. Examining the fate of four main fish—salmon, tuna, European sea bass, and the cods (including pollock)—he foresees a future dependent, for better or worse, on fish farming. Cod and other members of the order Gadiformes (haddock, hake, pollock) are “whitefish.” Their meat has very little “fishy” taste (I regard them as tasteless), which explains their popularity and role as industrial fish, including their presence as packages of frozen fish sticks and breaded fillets in supermarkets. But they are good candidates for fish farms. Hence the advent of two forms of easily farmed whitefish, both freshwater fish: tilapia, originally from the Nile, and Pangasius, a Vietnamese catfish sold as “basa,” “tra,” “swai,” or as various other names. By 2011, tilapia and Pangasium were numbers five and six in the top ten U.S. food fish.
Whole libraries of books have been written about specific species of marine life. A standout example is Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. Cod tells the tragic and revealing history of a fish thought to be inexhaustible, now reduced to just one percent of what their population was when the Pilgrims landed on what is still called Cape Cod. Cod begins long before the Pilgrims, when first the Vikings and then the Basques secretly hunted cod in the frigid waters of the north Atlantic.
A much happier story is told by Dick Russell in Striper Wars: An American Fish Story, which shows what dedicated activism can accomplish, even against formidable foes. When striped bass faced threats to their survival as a viable wild species, a wonderful alliance of conservationists and recreational fishers waged a thrilling, protracted, and ultimately victorious campaign to save and restore this iconic fish. One landmark achievement of the campaign was getting the federal government to intervene—as a result, it is still illegal to catch striped bass in federal waters.
11) To what extent is “environmentalist” a dirty word among people who fish for a living, what explains the dislike of that word, and what’s a better word to use instead of “environmentalist”?
Many recreational fishers I fish with also regard “environmentalists” as enemies. But like many commercial fishers, most of them think of themselves as “conservationists.” There’s a long history of distinctions between these terms. To oversimplify wildly, environmentalists tend to think about preserving and restoring a natural environment; conservationists tend to think about using it.
The difference was clearly defined when New York City in 2001 offered to give New Jersey a thousand decommissioned subway cars for ocean-reef building. These cars have been stripped of everything but their steel frames and thoroughly cleaned of any toxic substances. New Jersey’s recreational fishing organizations and diving clubs supported the offer with unbounded enthusiasm. Why?
New Jersey’s coastal waters are mainly flat sand (similar to New Jersey’s marvelous beaches), which does not host many forms of fish, except for those ambush predators that burrow in sand, such as fluke (summer flounder), or those prowling predators (such as rays and sea robins) that search the bottom for hiding prey. Any structure in this expanse is like an oasis in the Sahara. A pile of rocks, an oyster reef, a bed of clams, the underwater parts of a pier—all harbor life. Every wreck of a ship, including the freighters torpedoed by Nazi U-boats off the Jersey coast in World War II, teems with life, including hordes of many kinds of fish. Thus steel subway cars, stripped and clean, are ideal forms for artificial reefs.
But New York City’s offer was fiercely opposed by some New Jersey environmentalist organizations, who argued that dumping subway cars into the sea would turn the ocean into a junkyard. In other words, they wanted to preserve the natural environment. Fishers and divers wanted to use the environment.
NYC’s subway program went on until 2010. The opposition made New Jersey lose out on the original offer, but eventually it got hundreds of the 2500 donated cars. The rest went to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.
The subway-car reefs have become homes to many forms of marine life, as you can see in videos about the program. And if you scroll down to the comments on the article, you’ll see the same arguments that were waged in 2001 between the preservers and users of the environment.
12) Why is “structure” important, and what do you think about this 2020 piece? Every fisher apparently knows that fish often prefer “structure”.
Think like a fish.
If you are a prey fish, what do you seek? Someplace to hide. Preferably where there are also delicious things to eat, such as worms and algae and mussels.
If you are a predator fish, what do you seek? Someplace to lurk. Preferably where there are a lot of prey fish to eat.
In San Francisco Bay and in the ocean outside the San Francisco Bay area, the most consistent fishing is in the waters of the Farallon Islands, 30 miles out into the Pacific from the Golden Gate Bridge. 376 species of fish have been identified in the Farallons’ waters. Why?
Because of structure. Mariners sometimes call these islands the “Devil’s Teeth Islands,” referring to their treacherous underwater shoals. Every time I’ve been on a big party boat to the Farallon Islands, the boat has caught its limit of ten rockfish per person, as well as a good number of the hideous-looking (but great to eat) lingcod that prey on the 14 species of rockfish and on the other animals foraging on that rocky bottom.
In the Gulf of Mexico, what is the mecca to which recreational fishing boats zoom? To the best structure: the undersea parts of the offshore oil platforms.
So yes, offshore wind-turbine farms will provide wonderful structure for marine life. The fish and other animals that live amid these wind turbines will have some protection from the commercial fleets that loot the seas, since the rows of turbines will impede the big trawlers and the boats trailing miles-long fish lines.
13) How can people participate in activism to protect—and restore—the marine environment?
There are many ways to join in this vital work, including working with any of the multitude of organizations already on the job. I already mentioned Blue Frontier—its website maintains a directory of over 1400 “Blue” organizations, many of which engage with marine conservation.
All three U.S. coasts have Baykeepers and Soundkeepers dedicated to protecting and restoring specific bodies of coastal waters. A few typical examples are: Puget Soundkeeper, San Francisco Baykeeper, San Diego Coastkeeper, Mobile Baykeeper, Tampa Bay Waterkeeper, Narragansett Baykeeper, and Buzzards Baykeeper. Some of these baykeepers hire full-time workers; some have interns; and most recruit and organize volunteers.
Fishing clubs and diving clubs, although mainly concerned with their recreational activities, often devote part of their meetings and projects to environmental issues. While living in New Jersey, I belonged to the Raritan Bay Anglers Club. While organizing for menhaden, I spoke to many clubs, from New England to Virginia. The clubs were essential to the movement for menhaden.
Coastal Conservation Association is a broad-based organization with local chapters in every coastal state.
Perhaps the most adventurous organization is Greenpeace. Although the marine environment is only one of the fronts they work on, they have been leaders there. I have a long passage in The Most Important Fish in the Sea about Greenpeace’s fabulous work for menhaden.
Great article! Learned a lot from it.👍