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Book Review
| The Journey to PICES: Scientific Cooperation in the North Pacific. By Sara Tjossem. Fairbanks: Alaska Sea Grant College Program, 2005. xii + 194 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $20.00.
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| If there is anything that truly distinguishes oceanic from terrestrial environmental history it must be the ocean's reluctance to cooperate with geo-political boundaries. As the work of Helen Rozwadowski, Jacob Hamblin, Joseph Taylor, Mark Kurlansky, and Kurk Dorsey have shown, the oceans of the world are usually international contact zones. Sara Tjossem's history of PICES follows suit. PICES is an intergovernmental body of scientists whose members belong to the six major nations that flank the North Pacific—China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Canada, and the United States. When compared to its northern Atlantic analog, ICES (the Northern Atlantic's International Council for the Exploration of the Seas), PICES is a relatively young organization whose charter dates to 1992. But the organization's mandate is similarly legion—it provides coordination and cooperation between scientists of member nations in order to create a scientific understanding of the physical and biological properties of the North Pacific. This took considerable time and negotiation to bring to fruition. |
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The original idea for PICES was stalled not by governments or fisheries, but rather from the "bottom up," starting with a core of devoted scientists. None was more important than the Scripps-trained chemical oceanographer, Warren Wooster. Having previously worked on the fluctuations of sardine populations off the California coast, Wooster believed that it was necessary to bridge marine science with fishery science in the Northern Pacific—a mixture that sometimes resembles oil and water. But this was an international endeavor. Several problems plagued Wooster and other scientists interested in international collaboration. Perhaps the thorniest issue dealt with fisheries management. PICES architects were often adamant that the organization devote itself to purely scientific questions whose answers would then aid in fisheries management. But such an organization needed to strongly justify its raison d'etre, and the economics of fishery management was a logical choice. Second, architects disagreed over whether the organization would be intergovernmental or nongovernmental. (The latter would protect the integrity of the science by isolating collaborative work from international politics.) Third, by the time the negotiations were taking place, roughly 1972 to 1992, there had already existed several governmental and nongovernmental scientific bodies that worked in the Pacific on that fuzzy boundary between marine science and fisheries management. PICES would need to shape its mission so that work would correspond to instead of replace this work. |
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Tjossem brings us steadily through this history in the first chapter. The book then moves on to a more detailed analysis of the bridge-building between marine and fisheries scientists—a phenomenon that included differentiated training experiences, national politics, economic self-interests, and extensive treaty negotiations. This is the most analytically rich section of the text and environmental historians interested in cross-border histories, either on land or at sea, certainly will benefit. A chapter on the first ten years of PICES-sponsored research highlights two important projects dealing with climate change and an "ecosystems status report" initiative. Like so many other "pure" scientists, PICES slowly reoriented in the 1990s toward tackling anthropogenic changes in North Pacific ecosystems. More than anything else, I was particularly intrigued by Tjossem's discussion of the shifting priorities that resulted from one of the most unsung changes in modern geo-political history—the establishment of Exclusive Economic Zones that extended signatories' territorial rights some two hundred miles into the deep blue. |
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Environmental historians may find this book a little too dry; the pun is intended. Other than on the cover of the book, the environment of the stormy North Pacific takes a back seat to a history of meetings, correspondences, negotiations, and bureaucratic structures. These are thoroughly landed events; the reader will not even have the opportunity to spend substantial time on a ship. But there is something all too appropriate in this as well. Oceanographers and fishery scientists alike are coming to realize that the multiple fates of our global oceans are being determined by a terrestrial species. The history of PICES should remind us of just how dry the ocean truly is. |
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Gary Kroll is assistant professor at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he teaches environmental history and the history of science. His research is on the history of twentieth-century ocean exploration and the history of ocean geographies in American culture. |
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