Opportunities in marine environmental history

Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, Volume 5: Water Pollution

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 567-597

  Bolster, W Jeffrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; MARINE ENVIRONMENT; NATURE-SOCIETY RELATIONS;

EID: 33947309545     PISSN: 14336863     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (189)

1. Ransom A. Myers and Boris Worm, "Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities," Nature 423 (May 2003): 280-83.
2. Pew Oceans Commission, America's Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change. Summary Report (Pew Oceans Commission, Artington,Va.: May2003);
3. U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, Preliminary Report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, Governor's Draft (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004).
4. Colin Woodard, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas (N.Y.: Basic Books, 2000), 1-28;
5. James T. Carlton, "Marine Bioinvasions: The Alteration of Marine Ecosystems by Nonindigenous Species," Oceanography 9 (1996): 36-43;
6. James T. Carlton, "Blue Immigrants: The Marine Biology of Maritime History," The Log of Mystic Seaport 44 (1992): 31-36.
7. Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 20040-44;
8. Peter Pope, "Early Estimates: Assessment of Catches in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1660-1690," in Marine Resources and Human Societies in the North Atlantic Since 1500: Papers Presented at the Conference Entitled "Marine Resources and Human Societies in the North Atlantic Since 1500," October 20-22, 1995, ed. Daniel Vickers (St. John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1997), 7-40;
9. Jeffrey A. Hutchings, "Spatial and Temporal Variation in the Exploitation of Northern Cod, Gadus Morhua: A Historical Perspective from 1500 to Present," in Marine Resources and Human Societies in the North Atlantic Since 1500, ed. Vickers, 41-68.
10. Anthony Parkhurst to Richard Hakluyt (1578) in The Fish and Fisheries of Colonial North America: A Documentary History of Fishing Resources of the United States and Canada, John C. Pearson, ed., Part I: The Canadian Atlantic Provinces (NOAA Report No. 72040301) (Rockville, Md.: NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service, 1972), 7-9;
11. Relation of what Occurred Most Remarkable in the Mission Society of Jesus in New France, 1662-63, in The Fish and Fisheries of Colonial North America, Pearson, ed., 22;
12. William Monson, Naval Tracts (1703), in The Fish and Fisheries of Colonial North America, Pearson, 85-86.
13. Despite a few noteworthy studies by Arthur F. McEvoy, Joseph E.Taylor III, and Richard W. Judd, among others, historians have produced few investigations of previous encounters with marine environments. See Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1986);
14. Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999);
15. and Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
16. Kirk Johnson, "No Recovery Soon for Lobstering in West Long Island Sound," The New York Times, March 8, 2003.
17. Kenneth T. Frank, et al., "Trophic Cascades in a Formerly Cod-Dominated Ecosystem," Science 308 (June 2005): 1621-23;
18. R. S. Steneck, J. Vavrinec, and A. V. Leland, "Accelerating Trophic Level Dysfunction in Kelp Forest Ecosystems of the Western North Atlantic," Ecosystems 7 (2004): 323-31;
19. Edwin Grosho1z, "Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Coastal Invasions," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 17 (January 2002): 22-27;
20. Michael J. Fogarty and Steven A. Murawski, "Large-Scale Disturbance and the Structure of Marine Systems: Fishery Impacts on Georges Bank," Ecological Applications 8 (February 1998), S6-S22.
21. Robert S. Steneck, "Are We Overfishing the American Lobster? Some Biological Perspectives," in The Decline of Fisheries Resources in New England: Evaluating the Impact of Overfishing, Contamination, and Habitat Destruction, ed. Robert Buschbaum, Judith Pederson, and William E. Robinson (Cambridge: MIT Sea Grant Program, 2001), 131-48;
22. Philip W. Conkling and Anne Hayden, Lobsters Great and Small: How Scientists and Fishermen are Changing Our Understanding of a Maine Icon (Rockland, Maine: Island Institute, 2002).
23. The groundwork has been laid in two excellent studies. See Philip W. Conkling, Islands in Time: A Natural and Cultural History of the Islands of the Gulf of Maine (Rockland, Maine: Island Institute, 1999);
24. and Colin Woodard, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (New York: Viking, 2004).
25. J. B. C. Jackson, et al., "Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems," Science 293 (July 2001): 629-38;
26. Poul Holm, Tim D. Smith, and David J. Starkey, eds., The Exploited Seas: New Directions in Marine Environmental History (St. Johns, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association/Census of Marine Life, 2001).
27. For Apollonio's estimates, see Conkling, Islands in Time, 260-61;
28. and Spencer Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities: Searching for Systems in the Gulf of Maine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 173-75.
29. For contemporaries' observations of depletion, see William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America, 2 Vols. (Boston: 1755) 1:58-62.
30. For conservative estimates of whale kills, see Randall R. Reeves, Jeffrey M. Breiwick, and Edward D. Mitchell, "History of Whaling and Estimated Kill of Right Whales, Balaena Glacialis, in the Northeastern United States, 1620-1924," Marine Fisheries Review 61 (1999): 1-36.
31. For more expansive estimates see Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives, 60-61.
32. For seventeenth-century Dutch and Basque Arctic whaling, see Laurier Turgeon, "Fluctuations in Cod and Whale Stocks in the North Atlantic During the Eighteenth Century," in Marine Resources and Human Societies, ed. Vickers, 87-122;
33. John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 584-89.
34. On whales as constraints in ecosystems, see Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives, 14-15, 53-71.
35. Louwrens Hacquebord, "The Hunting of the Greenland Right Whale in Svalbard, its interaction with Climate and Its Impact on the Marine Ecosystem," Polar Research 18 (1999),:375-82;
36. Louwrens Hacquebord, "Three Centuries of Whaling and Walrus Hunting in Svalbard and Its Impact on the Arctic Ecosystem," Environment and History 7 (2001): 169-85.
37. For the ecological consequences of Antarctic whale harvests, see Richard M. Laws, "The Ecology of the Southern Ocean," American Scientist 73 (1985): 26-40.
38. During the last three years a spirited debate over the size of whale populations before exploitation has pitted advocates of genetic population modeling against advocates of population modeling based on historical catch records. The estimates by genetic modelers are far greater, differing by an order of magnitude. See Joe Roman and Stephen R. Palumbi, "Whales Before Whaling in the North Atlantic," Science 301 (2003): 508-10;
39. S. J. Holt, "Counting Whales in the North Atlantic," Science 303 (2004): 39-40;
40. C. Scott Baker and Phillip J. Clapham, "Modelling the Past and Future of Whales and Whaling," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19 (2004): 365-71.
41. Lance van Sittert, "The Other Seven Tenths," in "Anniversary Forum: What's Next for Environmental History?" Environmental History 10 (January 2005): 106-09;
42. Helen M. Rozwadowski and David K. van Keuren, eds., The Machine in Neptune's Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment (Science History Publications/USA: 2004);
43. Helen M. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
44. See Pope, "Early Estimates," esp. 25-28, for a careful, methodical, and insightful study1 that reveals the significance of historical context for interpreting early modern fisheries landings. Pope explains underreporting in a time series of Newfoundland cod landings compiled by biologists who lacked contextual understanding of seventeenth-century data.
45. Andrew A. Rosenberg, et al., "The History of Ocean Resources: Modeling Cod Biomass Using Historical Records," Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 3 (March 2005): 84-90.
46. Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast (1840; reprint, New York, Penguin, 1981), 462-63.
47. Papers that have begun to address some of these issues include Richard Price, "Caribbean Fishing and Fishermen: A Historical Sketch," American Anthropologist 68 (1966):1363-83;
48. Sean Cadigan, "The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855," Labour/Le Travail 43 (Spring 1999): 9-42;
49. Russel Lawrence Barsh, "Netukulimk Past and Present: Míkmaw Ethics and the Atlantic Fishery," Journal of Canadian Studies 37 (Spring 2002):15-42;
50. Connie Y. Chiang, "Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coastline," Pacific Historical Review 73 (2004): 183-214;
51. Bill Parenteau, "A 'Very Determined Opposition to the Law': Conservation, Angling Leases, and Social Conflict in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867-1914," Environmental History 93 (July 2004): 436-63.
52. Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
53. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 2.
54. Two very original works charting this process are Corbin, Lure of the Sea;
55. and Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean.
56. Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650-1900: A Study of Marine Science (London and New York: Academic Press, 1971) points out a brief burst of interest in the ocean by the Royal Society from 1660 to 1675, followed by decades of no interest. It is noteworthy that most seventeenth-century Englishmen simply took the ocean for granted. It was a highway, barrier, and fishing ground, but not a political space to be ruled, a subject for naturalists' inquiries, or a playground.
57. See Captain John Smith, A Description of New England (London: 1616);
58. Captain John Smith, New England's Trials (London: 1620);
59. and Captain John Smith, An Accidence or Pathway to Experience Necessary for all Young Sea-men (London: 1626).
60. Navigation books ignored the ocean itself, addressing only navigation, seamanship, and the business of shipping. See Matthew Norwood, The Seamans Companion (London: 1698);
61. James Lightbody, The Mariners Jewel: Or, A Pocket Companion for the Ingenious (London: 1697);
62. and James Atkinson, Senior, Epitome of the Art of Navigation (London: 1718).
63. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).
64. Henry D. Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865) ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 148;
65. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 685;
66. Joseph Concrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (London: 1897; reprint, New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1985), 17, 80, 87, 135, 143;
67. T.S. Elliot, "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943).
68. For Dickens, see John Peck, Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719-1917 (Houndsmill, Hampshire, UK, and New York: Palgrave: 2001), 80.
69. Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000 BC-AD 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1;
70. Vincent H. Cassidy, The Sea Around Them: The Atlantic Ocean, A.D. 1250 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), xv.
71. Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean.
72. Montesquieu cited in Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Californian Press, 1967), 659;
73. J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals (1809; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 45. I thank James T. Carlton for the reference to Lamarck.
74. Spencer F. Baird, U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries. Part I. Report on the Condition of the Sea Fisheries of the South Coast of New England in 1871 and 1872 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1873), xxx-xxxi;
75. Thomas H. Huxley, "Inaugural Address," Fisheries Exhibition, London, 1883.
76. E. F. Rivinus and E. M Youssef, Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 141-51;
77. Tim D. Smith, Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855-1955 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 38-69;
78. James G. Bertram, The Harvest of the Seas: a Contribution to the Natural and Economic History of the British Food Fishes (London: Murray, 1865), 475.
79. Rachel L. Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 15.
80. Most environmental historians know Carson through Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962),
81. but she was foremost a marine biologist whose earlier books included Under the Sea Wind (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952)
82. and The Edge of the Sea (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
83. For the ocean as "insulated from social forces" during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Steinberg, Social Construction, 112-24, quotation on 112.
84. For the Swamscott petitioners, see U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, ed. George Brown Goode, (5 secs., 7 vols.; Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884-1887), Section 1, 226;
85. G. Brown Goode Collection, Series 3, Collected Material on Fish and Fisheries, Box 14, folder "Misc Notes, Mss, Lists, Statistics," RU 7050, Smithsonian Institution.
86. For drastic reductions in landings in the Beverly fleet, see W. Jeffrey Bolster and Karen E. Alexander, "The Abundance of Cod on the Nova Scotian Shelf, 1852-1859," in J. B. C. Jackson, ed., Marine Biodiversity: Using the Past to Inform the Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming);
87. William Leavenworth, "Opening Pandora's Box: Tradition, Competition and Technology on the Scotian Shelf, 1852-1860," Studia Atlantica (forthcoming).
88. For declining catches in the inshore Newfoundland cod fishery circa 1815-1855, see Cadigan, "The Moral Economy of the Commons."
89. longer term perspective on the dynamics of Newfoundland cod stocks is found in Hutchins, "Spatial and Temporal Variation in the Exploitation of Northern Cod," in Marine Resources and Human Societies, ed. Vickers, 41-68.
90. Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), xiii;
91. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), ix.
92. Other respected environmental histories are equally silent about the marine environment, notably John Opie, Nature's Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998).
93. J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind's Changing Role in the Community of Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) mentions the marine environment only in passing.
94. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000) has the most coverage, with a brief section on "Whaling and Fishing." Richards, The Unending Frontier, contains chapters on fishing and whaling, but they are framed like traditional maritime histories, ignoring non-human nature and ecological relationships.
95. I. G. Simmons, Environmental History: A Concise Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993) has three pages on the ocean.
96. Far and away the best bibliography in fisheries history, and a necessary starting point for marine environmental history, is in Taylor, Making Salmon, 379-410. His thorough compilation includes important questions and a brief survey of primary sources.
97. National Research Council, Committee on Ecosystem Effects of Fishing, Effects of Trawling and Dredging on Seafloor Habitat (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2002);
98. Les Watling and Elliott A. Norse, "Disturbance of the Seabed by Mobile Fishing Gear: A Comparison to Forest Clearcutting," Conservation Biology 12 (December 1998): 1178-97.
99. James T. Carlton, "Apostrophe to the Ocean," Conservation Biology 12 (December 1998): 1165-67, quotations on 1166 and 1167;
100. Jeremy B. C. Jackson, "What Was Natural in the Coastal Oceans?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98 (May 8, 2001), 5411-18, quotation on 5411;
101. Daniel Pauly, "Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10 (October 1995): 430;
102. Robert S. Steneck and James T. Carlton, "Human Alterations of Marine Communities: Students Beware!" in Marine Community Ecology, ed. Mark D. Bertness, et al., (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Publishers, 2001), 445-68;
103. Smith, Scaling Fisheries.
104. On the importance of narrative in environmental history, see William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1347-76.
105. Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker and Co., 1997) was a well-received call-to-arms, but his journalist's approach did not produce history as our profession understands it. Nevertheless, many capable journalists recently have turned their attention to the ocean's plight, addressing it, at least partially, in light of history.
106. See Woodard, Ocean's End;
107. John McPhee, The Founding Fish (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002);
108. Carl Safina, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002);
109. Richard Ellis, The Empty Ocean: Plundering the World's Marine Life (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003);
110. Trevor Corson, The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists are Unraveling the Mysteries of our Favorite Crustacean (New York: HarperCollins, 2004);
111. David Helvarg, Blue Frontier: Saving America's Living Seas (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001);
112. David Dobbs, The Great Gulf: Fishermen, Scientists, and the Struggle to Revive the World's Greatest Fishery (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000);
113. Paul Molyneaux, The Doryman's Reflection: A Fisherman's Life (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005).
114. For HMAP, http://www.hmapcoml.org/;
115. for Census of Marine Life, http://www.coml.org/coml.htm.
116. Holm, Smith, and Starkey, eds., The Exploited Seas;
117. Rosenberg, et al., "The History of Ocean Resources;"
118. Bolster and Alexander, "Abundance of Cod on the Nova Scotian Shelf; "
119. Leavenworth, "Opening Pandora's Box";
120. Randall R. Reeves, Matthew G. McKenzie, and Tim D. Smith, "History of Bermuda Shore Whaling, Mainly for Humpback Whales," International Journal of Cetacean Research and Management (forthcoming);
121. Tim D. Smith and Randall R. Reeves, "Estimating American 19th Century Catches of Humpback Whales in the West Indies and Cape Verde Islands," Caribbean Journal of Science 39 (2003): 286-97;
122. Randall R. Reeves, et al., "Humpback and Fin Whaling in the Gulf of Maine from 1800-1918," Marine Fisheries Review 64 (2002): 1-12;
123. Heike Lotze and K. Reise, "Editorial: Ecological History of the Wadden Sea," Helgoland Marine Research 59 (2005): 1;
124. Heike Lotze, "Radical Changes in the Wadden Sea Fauna and Flora over the Last 2000 Years," Helgoland Marine Research 59 (2005):71-83;
125. Heike Lotze, et al., "Human Transformations of the Wadden Sea Ecosystem Through Time: A Synthesis," Helgoland Marine Research 59 (2005): 84-95;
126. Bo Poulsen, "Historical Exploitation of North Sea Herring Stocks-An Environmental History of the Dutch Herring Fisheries, c. 1600-180" (PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg, 2005);
127. René Taudal Poulsen, "An Environmental History of North Sea Ling and Cod Fisheries, 1840-1914" (PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg, 2005);
128. Katherine Magness, "Development of Fishing Policy in the Gulf of Maine, Late Nineteenth Century" (MS thesis, University of New Hampshire, 2005);
129. Martin Wilcox, "Apprenticed Labour in the English Fishing Industry, 1850-1914" (PhD diss., University of Hull, UK, 2006);
130. Susan Capes, "Overfishing the North Sea? Human Harvesting and Marine Resource Depletion, 1850-1914" (MA thesis, University of Hull, UK, 2003).
131. Randall R. Reeves, et al., "Humpback and Fin Whaling in the Gulf of Maine from 1800-1918," Marine Fisheries Review 64 (2002): 1-12;
132. Heike Lotze and K. Reise, "Editorial: Ecological History of the Wadden Sea," Helgoland Marine Research 59 (2005): 1;
133. Heike Lotze, "Radical Changes in the Wadden Sea Fauna and Flora over the Last 2000 Years," Helgoland Marine Research 59 (2005):71-83;
134. Heike Lotze, et al., "Human Transformations of the Wadden Sea Ecosystem Through Time: A Synthesis," Helgoland Marine Research 59 (2005): 84-95;
135. Bo Poulsen, "Historical Exploitation of North Sea Herring Stocks - An Environmental History of the Dutch Herring Fisheries, c. 1600-1860" (PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg, 2005);
136. René Taudal Poulsen, "An Environmental History of North Sea Ling and Cod Fisheries, 1840-1914" (PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg, 2005);
137. Katherine Magness, "Development of Fishing Policy in the Gulf of Maine, Late Nineteenth Century" (MS thesis, University of New Hampshire, 2005);
138. Martin Wilcox, "Apprenticed Labour in the English Fishing Industry, 1850-1914" (PhD diss., University of Hull, UK, 2006);
139. Susan Capes, "Overfishing the North Sea? Human Harvesting and Marine Resource Depletion, 1850-1914" (MA thesis, University of Hull, UK, 2003).
140. Poul Holm, "Exploited Seas," lecture at HMAP Summer Workshop, Esbjerg, Denmark, August, 2001. The other historian on the HMAP Steering Group is David Starkey, University of Hull, UK.
141. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
142. Van Sittert, "The Other Seven Tenths."
143. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 628.
144. See also Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Post-Modern Challenge (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, published by the University Press of New England, 1997);
145. and Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling The Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
146. My thinking along these lines has benefited from discussions with Jay Taylor.
147. In the spirit of absolute accuracy it should be noted that Taylor's book discusses six species of Pacific salmon, all in the genus Oncorhynchus. In common parlance, however, they are often referred to simply as salmon.
148. Taylor, Making Salmon, 241.
149. For the single-species approach, see Charles Hardy III, "Fish or Foul: A History of the Delaware River Basin Through the Perspective of the American Shad, 1682 to the Present," Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 506-34;
150. Briton C. Busch, The War Against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery (McGill-Queens University Press, 1985);
151. and Charles Dana Gibson, The Broadbill Swordfishery of the Northwestern Atlantic: The Fishery's Economic and Natural History (Early 1800s through 1995) (Camden, Maine: Ensign Press, 1998).
152. American taxonomists group hake with the gadoids, while Europeans separate hake into a different family. From a fisherman's perspective, hake is closely related to the gadoids, and hake seem to fulfill what Spencer Apollonio calls a "gadoid function" in the ecosystem. Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives, 79-83.
153. One of the most successful accounts ever written of a single marine species won a Pulitzer Prize. See William W. Warner, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1976).
154. Paul Albury, The Story of the Bahamas (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1975), 158-60, 189-90. As this article was being revised I was pleased to learn that Loren McClenachan, a graduate student at Scripps Institution, is working on the historical ecology of the Key West sponge industry along similar lines.
155. Quotations from Arthur F. McEvoy, "Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry," in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 211-29, quotations on 229.
156. Recent examples of the regional approach include John R.Wennersten, The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2001);
157. Tom Andersen, This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002);
158. and Margaret Beattie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000).
159. For marine sanctuaries, see www.sanctuaries.nos.noaa.gov/.
160. Jeremy B. C. Jackson, "Reefs Since Columbus," Coral Reefs 16 (Suppl, 1997): S23-S32.;
161. Sue Robinson, "The Battle over Bottom Trawling," National Fisherman (July 1999), 24-25;
162. Watling and Norse, "Disturbance of the Seabed by Mobile Fishing Gear";
163. Effects of Trawling and Dredging on Seafloor Habitat;
164. Ralph Stanley to William B. Leavenworth, personal e-mail in possession of the author, February 15, 2006.
165. For a classic meditation on the alewives by a respected naturalist, see John Hay, The Run (1959; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
166. On alewives as passenger pigeons of the sea, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 23;
167. Captain Charles Whitborne, in The True Travels of Captain John Smith (1616), quoted in Henry B. Bigelow and William C. Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953), 102.
168. The best work by historians on east coast anadromous fish is Gary Kulick, "Dams, Fish and Farmers: Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill, 1985), 25-50;
169. Harry L. Watson, "'The Common Rights of Mankind': Subsistence, Shad and Commerce in the Early Republican South," Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 13-43;
170. Daniel Vickers, "Those Damned Shad: Would the River Fisheries of New England Have Survived in the Absence of Industrialization?" William and Mary Quarterly 3rd. ser. LXI (October 2004): 685-712. Of these, Vickers is the most ecologically sensitive.
171. Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America, 2: 212; Petitions to the Governor, Council and Legislature, NH Division of Archives, Concord, N.H., (indexed under "alewives"), quotation February 5, 1776;
172. D. Humphreys Storer, M.D., "A Report on the Fisheries of Massachusetts," Boston Journal of Natural History 2 (1839): 289-558.
173. Quotations from Ellis, Empty Ocean, 25-28.
174. See also Bonnie J. McCay, "A Footnote to the History of New Jersey Fisheries: Menhaden as Food and Fertilizer," New Jersey History 98 (1980): 212-20;
175. Nathan Adams, "Closing Destiny: The Menhaden Fishery of the 19th and Early 20th Century," unpublished paper in possession of the author. I thank Mr. Adams, a student at University of Connecticut, Avery Point, for allowing me to read his paper.
176. Adams, "Closing Destiny";
177. Judd, Common Lands, Common People, 245.
178. Barbara J. Garrity-Blake, The Fish Factory: Work and Meaning for Black and White Fishermen of the American Menhaden Industry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).
179. Relying heavily on published statistics while not examining fishermen's daily logs led Wayne M. O'Leary to overlook the significance of substantial small boat fisheries in the Penobscot, Frenchmen's Bay, and Machias Customs Districts during the 1850s and 1860s. See Wayne M. O'Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830-1890 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996);
180. and Bolster and Alexander, "The Abundance of Cod on the Nova Scotian Shelf."
181. For historical investigation leading to previously unknown fishery statistics, see Rosenberg, et al., "The History of Ocean Resources."
182. Petition of the inhabitants of Southport, Boothbay, and vicinity, January, 1852, Maine State Archives, Legislative Laws, 1852, box 265, folder 125;
183. Petition of the inhabitants of Surry, March 1854, Maine State Archives, Legislative graveyard, 1855, box 241, folder 9;
184. Poulsen, "An Environmental History of North Sea Ling and Cod Fisheries, 1840-1914."
185. Rivinus and Youssef, Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian, 168-69;
186. G. Brown Goode, "The Beginnings of Natural History in America," Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 3 (Washington, D.C.: 1886): 35-105;
187. http://www.mnh.si.edu/vert/fishes/baird/goode.html.
188. Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean, In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003)
189. George Gordon Byron, "Apostrophe to the Ocean," in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (London: 1818), quoted by Carlton, "Apostrophe to the Ocean."