CalCOFI Reports, Vol. 23, 1982 - California Cooperative Oceanic ...

McEVOY: SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND THE 20TH-CENTURY FISHING INDUSTRYCalCOFI Rep., Vol. XXIII, 1982SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY FISHING INDUSTRYARTHUR F. McEVOY’The 1981-82 California Sea Grant College Programdirectory includes two projects devoted to the historyof public policymaking for the fisheries.’ This indicates,I think, a new and salutary trend in the studyand management of natural resources in the publicdomain. Long isolated in their various specializations,scientists and scholars interested in natural resourceshave, since the 1960s, begun to look across disciplinaryboundaries for new perspectives on problems thatdraw their common concern. They have also begun toexamine their own role in the making of policyanalyzingthe ways in which scientists and otherscholars, successfully or not, have tried at variousstages in our history to contribute their expertise todeveloping government policy for resource use.For students of law and society, J. Willard Hurst ofthe University of Wisconsin Law School set the examplein 1964 with the publication of his monumentalstudy of the role of law in the history of the Wisconsinlumber industry.2 Hurst’s work moved beyond themore typical, doctrinal study of legal change toanalyze the ways in which law worked in society, bothas an instrument and as a measure of social change.Harry N. Scheiber of the School of Law at the Universityof California, Berkeley, is likewise well knownfor his studies of property law and police power, and iscurrently completing a major work on the developmentof natural resource law in Calif~rnia.~ My ownwork on law, ecology, and economic development inthe California fisheries builds on the foundation laidby Hurst, Scheiber, and others, and accords the resourcesthemselves their rightful places as independentagents of historical change.Clearly, natural resources are more than merecommodities to be brought into the market as technologyand demand dictate. They have histories of theirown: they influence the course of human affairsthrough their independent dynamism and through theircharacteristic responses to human activities. In muchthe same way as Hurst and his followers have changedthe study of law and society, several historians since1970 have begun to move away from the traditionalemphasis in environmental studies on intellectuals ’ideas about their natural surroundings. These historiansare making an effort to understand (1) how theecology of natural resources affects their use and (2)the development of social institutions governing thatuse .4*Department of History. Northwestern University. 633 Clark Street, Evanston. Illinois 60201‘Please see “Literature Cited,” at the end of this paper, for all numbered references.Among natural scientists, Ciriacy-Wantrup set asimilar example in a 1952 text on resource conservation,defining conservation as a dynamic processinfluenced by social, economic, and political institutionsas much as by the character of the resourcesthemselve~.~ More recently, Richard A. Walker admonishedus not to forget that we do not address resourcepolicy questions innocent of history, politics,or of “commitments to pre-existing threads of ideologypassed down from those who have grappled withsimilar problems before. ”6 Walker trenchantly observedthat effective resource management requiresthe understanding and manipulation of the humanprocesses that lead people to use nature in particularways, as well as of the physical and biological processesthat we try to harness to our advantage.’Fishery science also has begun to take these issuesseriously. The awakening here began soon after WorldWar 11, when economists interested in the “commonproperty” problem pointed out that fishery depletionwas as much a matter of economic institutions as itwas one of biology or population dynamics.* TheFisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976(FCMA) institutionalized this awareness by mandatingthe harvest of socially and economically optimizedyields (OY) from the stocks under its view.9 Unlikethe earlier, more “objective” concept of maximumsustainable yield (MSY), OY is by itself a slippery andill-defined standard for policy, but it does oblige lawmakersto make explicit decisions about social andeconomic concerns-to look at the human side of resourceuse-when they set guidelines for industry.All of these developments have their roots in theincreasing postwar awareness of the interdependenceof different economic activities and of the economyand the environment from which it draws resources.The 1970s, especially, brought a great blossoming ofintegrated research and legislation along these lines, inmany areas of resource policy. The inflation of energyprices, the collapse of the international monetary system,and the emergence of major problems in agricultureand the fisheries worldwide stimulated the newdevelopments of the last decade.*OIn spite of these advances, however, there remainsthe old problem of bringing scientific knowledge ofnatural resources to bear on the legal processes it isdesigned to inform. Governments and universities investa great deal of money and energy to illuminatealternatives available to policymakers, but as often asnot they have little practical effect. Nowhere is this48