The Good Ship UBC
The University of British Columbia (UBC) could almost be a ship, poised as it is on the promontory forming the southern shore of Burrard Inlet, the expanse of water where the Pacific Ocean bends west towards the city of Vancouver. The University’s position is appropriate given the historic relationship that this part of the world has with the ocean; Vancouver’s justly famous Museum of Anthropology located on campus reminding us that the people of this area have always been a coastal people long before the Europeans arrived, a people with an explicit relationship with the sea.
On the day I met with Dr. Tony Pitcher the good ship UBC might as well have been an ice breaker. The variation in the Arctic polar vortex that pushed colder air south over North America this winter had Vancouver in its grip, and the city that in ski season provides a not-too-distant view of snow covering the coastal mountains had itself received a layer of the stuff that had converted over the course of a few days into an evil tractionless crust coating all but the busiest roads and deep slush on city sidewalks.
The University’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries is located on the Main Mall, one of a series of broad thoroughfares that run from northwest to southeast through sprawling campus. UBC’s architecture runs the gamut but this is a modern high-tech building, precise and rational, that also houses, in a custom-designed annex, the Beaty Biodiversity Museum–its trademark Blue Whale skeleton suspended in its atrium.
I could blame the weather, but in truth I messed-up my timing and arrived at the building late, Dr. Pitcher generously made time for me anyway and offered to talk with me as we walked across campus to a doctoral thesis defense that he was scheduled to attend. The audio recording of our interview captured the sloshing of our boots in the slush as we went.
Dr. Pitcher is about as personable a human being as you could find anywhere. Friendly and jovial with an underlying intellectual gravitas that befits his role. The very picture of the kind of university professor any student would hope to encounter. His work focuses on understanding the impacts of fishing on ocean ecosystems and the development of advanced evaluation tools for use in fisheries management.
Like any good academic he moves from pleasantries to a serious conversation with accustomed ease, and we quickly got on with discussing the fine points of macro-scale ocean conservation–the relationship of fishing to the goal of maintaining and promoting the abundance of wildlife in our oceans and sustaining the ecological systems that support them.
Where some of his colleagues are pessimistic, Pitcher is an objective pragmatist and he says he is more optimistic than he used to be only a few years ago.
He talks about society being able to enjoy “the obvious financial and cultural benefits of the fisheries” while ensuring that “the natural world is not disrupted such that it prejudices the chance of your grandchildren enjoying the same thing that you did.”
“That’s clearly not been the case in the last fifty years.” He adds. But when I ask him if he thinks that true sustainability is a realistic goal he says that he thinks it is.
It’s a humanist view that is deeply rooted in scientific reality as well as the history and realpolitik of fisheries management, and the relentless technological push that has seen our ability to fish the oceans far outstrip the ocean’s ability to withstand the pressure.
He points out that fisheries management has been the subject of debate and protest since the middle ages.
Traditional fishermen in 14th and later 19th century England protested against damage and overfishing as a result of trawl fishing, an action that resulted in government investigations that came very close to imposing restrictive measures but ultimately backed away. In the the 19th century case the powers that be argued that while damage to fish stocks and the entire environment might be taking place, the first people to feel the effects would be the trawlermen, making their business untenable at that point, a ruling that illustrates the long history of government’s unwillingness to meet the complexities of these kinds of issues head-on, as well as our historic misunderstanding of how fragile the ocean ecosystem actually is.
Causes for Optimism Against a Dark Background
So where does his current optimism come from? Dr. Pitcher looks at creative fisheries management solutions from around the world including innovative practices in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Norway. Creative approaches driven by policymakers he believes are doing their best to make positive change.
“These countries are exploiting their fisheries to great effect, making lots of money, producing lots of seafood… and I think they’re trying to do it now in a much more precautionary way than they did ten to twenty years ago, which was a disaster at that time.”
He is also inspired by innovative fish auctions in Europe, where technologically driven free-market mechanisms for ensuring that independent fishermen get a fair price for their catch have helped to foster a more equitable situation for independent fishermen that has, in turn, supported more progressive management practices and more reasonable ecological outcomes.
Fishermen on the East Coast of the United States have also been turning to technology to allow them to sell a verifiable local product at a pre-arranged price.
Pitcher contrasts the innovative approaches he sees from around the world with the situation in British Columbia where he says things have not advanced much since the nineties and “the science behind the conservation of marine resources has been sequestered by big industry”.
“If you look at what government researchers are encouraged to do, what they’re funded to do, then you find that it’s mostly in favor of the big corporate players.”
The Will of the People
Once again we hear of a situation where the progressive management of significant swathes of Canada are held back by an outdated approach that vests a few powerful commercial players with huge influence while small independent operators are placed under enormous pressure to the detriment of communities and the environment. Its a strategy designed to make it easy on government by limiting the number of voices at the table, but it’s unjust, unhelpful in terms of achieving balanced goals, and unnecessary given the potential for today’s technology to mediate input from a multitude of sources.
He believes that better management of Canada’s oceans can only happen if and when the Canadian government grasp what the Canadian people want for the ocean areas under its jurisdiction while in the same breath conceding that the will of the Canadian people is not entirely clear. His sense is that while there is a large conservation movement in Canada there is also a significantly large portion of the population who neither know or care about the issues.
The picture I am presented with is one where solutions are available, but the gap must be bridged between current reality and potential futures by getting the issues onto the public agenda in such a way that Canada’s politicians find it worthwhile to dismantle the status-quo.
We return to a global perspective to discuss the established UN goal of having 10% of the world’s ocean fall under some kind of formal protection (Marine Protected Areas and the like), by 2020, and the goal proposed by the members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to aim for 30% by 2030–a call now backed the UK government and others including Ocean Unite. Pitcher supports this approach.
In relation to the high seas or ABNJ (Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction)–a label describing the roughly 66% of the global ocean (45% of the earth’s surface) where no single governing body holds jurisdiction, he says:
“Closing the high seas completely to fishing would have enormous benefits, but how are you going to stop Chinese vessels, or Russian vessels or Polish vessels going out into the high seas where there is no real control… so an international agreement to close the High Seas to fishing would be a huge improvement.”
But also admits that “The power of the different actors, the different players in these things is quite asymmetrical.”
For practically all of human history, the High Seas might as well be outer space for all the say that society had on what occurred there, but even on this issue, huge positive progress has been made. Last October an international agreement protecting the Arctic High Seas from unregulated fishing was put into effect, following a six year process that began with a letter signed by over 2,000 scientists, and at the time of writing, talks are underway at the UN to continue negotiations on the first treaty to protect the high seas by 2020. Not necessarily the complete moratorium that Dr. Pitcher suggests but genuine progress nonetheless.
Moving on to areas where individual governments hold sway, “Big closed areas within national EEZs” (Exclusive Economic Zones) “have taken a number of big leaps.” He points out, mentioning Chile in particular where multiple, huge MPAs have been established, covering 40% of the country’s waters, or 450,000 square miles–an area roughly the size of Texas, California and West Virginia combined–that includes the waters around Rapa Nui (Easter Island). And while there are valid concerns about how effective compliance can be established within protected areas, and results at sea level have been mixed, the Chilean example is informative. Thanks to progressive management approaches–particularly in engaging constructively with the areas indigenous population–some success is being felt despite the enormity of the challenge.
The Enormity of the Struggle
In my travels, I’ve heard die-hard cynics on all sides of the ocean ecology equation talk about the extreme power of corporate forces in shaping policy; Policy that never seems to be focused on the sort of long term aims that most rational people would agree to–safeguarding the environment while also safeguarding the economic future of the people who live in coastal communities. But Dr. Pitcher does not come across as a cynic, in fact, his optimism is powerful, visceral almost. His presentation of his point of view is as objective as you would hope to find anywhere and as rational as his daily environment–a modern university campus in one of the world’s most advanced countries. This is not a call for revolution, quite the opposite–its a call for reasonableness. A call for a system that actually works.
The strength of Dr. Pitcher’s optimism is matched only by the enormity of the struggle, a struggle described here not in melodramatic terms of good versus evil, but in terms of the history of a country blessed with massive natural wealth that has so far failed to learn from the lessons of its past, that despite its global reputation as a progressive democracy continues to cede control of its resources (and now that we understand the full extent of what is at stake with climate change) its future security and that of the world, to a lazy management system born out of greed and expediency that is morally bankrupt and technologically obsolete.
Dr. Pitcher insists that the world has turned a corner on understanding how to do resource management right, and feels sure that the solutions are out there–in existence already or just within reach. The picture he paints of ocean conservation in Canada is of a dance party where both dance partners are absent – a government who seems unwilling to do what’s necessary and a general public whose opinion is either missing or non-existent when it comes to how policy actually gets made.
