The Overfishing Problem: Natural and Social Categories in Early Twentieth-Century Fisheries Science

Gregory Ferguson-Cradler

doi:10.1007/s10739-021-09655-4

Gregory Ferguson-Cradler

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09655-4

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Abstract

This article looks at how fisheries biologists of the early twentieth century conceptualized and measured overfishing and attempted to make it a scientific object. Considering both theorizing and physical practices, the essay shows that categories and understandings of both the fishing industry and fisheries science were deeply and, at times, inextricably interwoven. Fish were both scientific and economic objects. The various models fisheries science used to understand the world reflected amalgamations of biological, physical, economic, and political factors. As a result, scientists had great difficulty stabilizing the concept of overfishing and many influential scholars into the 1930s even doubted the coherence of the concept. In light of recent literature in history of fisheries and environmental social sciences that critiques the infiltration of political and economic imperatives into fisheries and environmental sciences more generally, this essay highlights both how early fisheries scientists understood their field of study as the entire combination of interactions between political, economic, biological and physical factors and the work that was necessary to separate them.

Highlights

Perhaps no problem was as vexing for fisheries scientists at the turn of the twenti‐ eth century as the question of overfishing
In focusing on the practices of early fisheries scientists as they struggled toward a coherent concept of overfishing, this essay has emphasized the indelible intercon‐ nections between science, industry, and the market for fish products
What data was collected, how overfishing was theorized, and how fish‐ eries were modeled were all assemblages of practice communicated across socioepistemic boundaries

Summary

Introduction

Perhaps no problem was as vexing for fisheries scientists at the turn of the twenti‐ eth century as the question of overfishing. ICES scientists used statistics from the fishing industry These had the major weakness of being recorded by fishermen who lacked the rigor and precision of scientists and trained assistants and did not always use the data points that biologists sought, such as time and place of catch. Looking back in 1928 on the first years of ICES, Kyle argued that only large data sets gathered from across ICES and recorded in standardized format could have led to definitive answers to the overfishing problem He recounted how, when ICES was founded, biologists preferred to work in small areas on strictly delineated problems, and “the wide synoptic view which international statistics give was foreign and unreliable” As observers of environmental science and administration, science studies scholars and environ‐ mental social scientists and humanists must be aware of both the creative flexibility and new perspectives models afford, as well as the dangers of complete or one-sided unbalanced monetization and utilitarianism

Conclusion

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