Review: Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse

Review: Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse By Dean Bavington Bavington, Dean. Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. 186pp. ISBN 9780774817486. US $35.95, paper, acid-free. Dean Bavington's Managed Annihilation is a cautionary tale for our times. Western style management, mediated by state bureaucracies and economic rationality, may administer natural resources into oblivion. Bavington argues that this is precisely what happened with the Newfoundland cod fisheries collapse, made official in 1992. The basic problems were these: fisheries managers did not understand the behavior of fish, they did not understand the behavior of humans, and they did not understand the relationships between fish and humans. Yet they continued to manage as if they did. Bavington traces part of the history of cod fishing in Newfoundland and describes the shifts from subsistence fishing to small scale mercantilism to market-based fishing economies and large scale exploitation. Over a 400 year period of small scale fishing, fishermen caught about 50 million ton of cod. Over a 90 year period of industrial fishing leading up to the collapse of the fishery, fishermen harvested the same tonnage. Unlike subsistence fishermen, however, industrial harvesters fished year round and targeted all cod, including spawning and pre-spawning fish, as well as cod's prey such as squid and capelin. Between 1960 and 1992, 99.9 percent of the cod's spawning biomass had been eliminated. It is difficult to imagine a starker instance of managerial failure. The primary focus of Managed Annihilation is on the conceptual and practical inconsistencies of modern industrial fishing, which was ushered into being with the help of fisheries science, new politically expedient management regimes, and emerging global economies. Fisheries science gave us the idea maximum sustainable yield, based on population estimates and models of population structure that were, simply, wrong. These estimates and models, however, provided managers with the illusion that they could manage cod population fluctuations and harvest sustainably. Economics gave us the idea of maximum economic yield, based on the assumption that industrial fishermen were rational economic actors intent on maximizing profits, but not to the extent of catching all of the available fish and thereby undermining their own industry. This idea was also wrong. …