| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

Book Review

EDITOR'S NOTE

A retrospective review highlights an important contribution to the field of environmental history, and this new look at Arthur McEvoy's The Fisherman's Problem by Joseph E. Taylor III is no exception. But more importantly, both Taylor and the reviewer of the next book, Michael Reidy, independently point to the paucity of environmental history scholarship on the oceans and the need for a broader perspective that includes water environments. Readers can look forward to a series of full-length articles devoted to marine and freshwater environments beginning with the July issue of the journal.

MELISSA WIEDENFELD

RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW

The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980. By Arthur F. McEvoy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
As part of an effort to assess the legacies of several path-breaking works in environmental history, I was asked to write a retrospective review of Arthur McEvoy's The Fisherman's Problem. It was a pleasant task. The primary impression, even after nearly twenty years, is that this book remains among the most important works in the field. It has long been a model of interdisciplinary research, and little wonder that it was the first recipient of ASEH's George Perkins Marsh Prize. Merging science, legal, and social history, The Fisherman's Problem is a compelling study of the social and ecological reorganization of California's fisheries from contact to the federal restructuring of management in the 1980s. Few works match it in sophistication, yet few seem more lauded and less read. It is troubling that a book so relevant should be so obscure, and making sense of that legacy casts bothersome light on our field's strengths and weaknesses.	1
At the heart of this study is the metaphor of the fisherman's problem, a conceptual framework that refines Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" to suggest the conundrum of a regulatory system that was far better at finding and exploiting resources than at protecting nature. McEvoy's approach also helps explain why management agencies never have been able to deal with the complexities of stochastic nature. Yet unlike Hardin, McEvoy is loyal to the contingencies of time and place. California was not an idealized New England commons but a messy collision of cultures, often evoking very ugly impulses, in an environment best likened to a shimmering target. Throughout he emphasizes the contingent "interdependence between ecological, economic, and social processes" (p. 257), and the inability of institutions to perceive what he calls elsewhere the connections between "ecology, production, and cognition" (Environmental Review 11: 287–305). These insights seem equally important for historians. The inclination to stress one factor above others, to focus on the parts rather than the interplay, seems as wrong-headed for our profession as for natural resource managers.	2
By taking the interplay seriously, McEvoy broached historical problems that only more recently gained much attention. Abalone, anchovies, crab, mackerel, salmon, sardines, shrimp, and tuna help reveal not only how dynamic nature vexed fishers, managers, and scientists, but how responses to unpredictability produced social and ecological harm. McEvoy was one of the first to argue that progressive conservationists did not invent resource management, and that conservationists' efforts often produced what we now call environmental injustice. His treatment of Yurok salmon fishers, Chinese shrimpers, and Italian crabbers foreshadowed such works as Louis Warren's The Hunter's Game (Yale, 1997), Mark Spence's Dispossessing the Wilderness (Oxford, 1999), and Karl Jacoby's Crimes Against Nature (California, 2001). Similarly, his analysis of the tensions between nature, science, and the state influenced Nancy Langston's Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (Washington, 1995), and Matthew Evenden's Fish Versus Power (Cambridge, 2004). If the measure of a work is how it shapes other scholars, then The Fisherman's Problem will get high marks for many years to come.	3
Still, the book has flaws. The portrayal of Yurok, Kurok, and Hupa fishers as proto-capitalists obscures the relationship of individual wealth and prestige to communal interests and duties. Nor does McEvoy address aboriginal ideas about causality and the role of taboos and ceremonies in ensuring fishery sustainability. Even more problematic are the book's final pages. McEvoy wanted to highlight changes in federal fishery management because of the 1976 Fishery Conservation and Management Act (FCMA). The FCMA created eight regional management councils, extended federal jurisdiction to two hundred miles, and shifted management goals from "maximum sustained yield" to "optimum yield." So far so good, but after analyzing the historical inertia of fishery management for over two hundred pages, McEvoy becomes weirdly hopeful, seeing in the new legislation "the potential for erasing the distinction between 'environment,' 'economic,' and 'social' concerns that lay at the root of the fisherman's problem" (p. 247).	4
This was not to be, but McEvoy's error seems less a function of naiveté than an unwillingness to heed his own insights. In the 1980s and 1990s, many regional councils became bulwarks against reform. The classic example is the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC), which dug in its heels as scientists raised ever more urgent warnings about imploding stocks on Georges Banks —see David Dobbs, The Great Gulf (Shearwater, 2000). The NEFMC presided over a disaster that was exceeded only by Canada's mishandling of the Grand Banks fisheries—see Alan Finlayson, Fishing for Truth (Social and Economic Studies, 1994). This should not have surprised McEvoy, who notes that in many respects the FCMA "did little more than incorporate all existing conflicts over fisheries management into one rather unwieldy system" (p. 245). The FMCA could not solve the fisherman's problem because all "public institutions... were creatures of history," and the "framework within which policymaking took place was the residual agglomeration of past confrontations" (p. 175). The FMCA was set up to fail because it incorporated the dysfunctional parts of previous failed approaches. It is sad commentary that the removal of hope from the conclusion would have made this an even stronger book.	5
What is disconcerting, though, is why The Fisherman's Problem has never found a niche in the classroom. Many colleagues in history, geography, and fisheries admire it, yet Cambridge took years to put it in paperback and undergraduates rarely respond to it the way they do to William Cronon's Changes in the Land (Hill & Wang, 1983) or Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge, 1986). Perhaps the prose, which is more demanding than many more popular but arguably less-sophisticated studies, makes it a hard sell for students; perhaps we are a land-locked culture incapable of sustaining interest in fish. Either way, we seem to be in a situation in which students dictate what we can teach, and they seem to want to confine us to the shoreline. Environmental historians pepper their syllabi with books on ranges, forests, and wilderness, yet, both locally and globally, oceans, rivers, and lakes are far more threatened. Whatever the answer, it is worth considering why one of the smartest environmental histories ever written, on one of the most pressing environmental issues, has never been more than an underground hit.	6
Joseph E. Taylor III, is Canada research chair and associate professor of history and geography at Simon Fraser University, His first book, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis, won the George Perkins Marsh Prize. He is completing a manuscript on the relationship between recreation and environmentalism titled Pilgrims of the Vertical.

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