Macaques, hot springs and fisheries

Macaques, hot springs and fisheries

I think it was almost 20 years ago that I first saw images of Japanese macaques soaking in hot springs with icicles in their fur and a blissful far away look in those clearly intelligent primate eyes.  Visions of these animals have appeared frequently in wildlife documentaries during the last two decades, but none were as jaw-dropping as some in the recent "Primate" episode of the Life TV series.

It wasn't the familiar visions of primate bliss that stunned me, but the visions of the other macaques, those on the outer, the untouchables, the primate Harijan. These are the macaques excluded from the springs by violent force and left shivering some distance away in temperatures that may reach 20 below zero.

Longer shots of the springs made it clear that there is considerable unused capacity ... more macaques could fit. But the elite of the macaque world apparently have no greater wish to share than the elites in human societies.

But I could be mistaken. Perhaps it isn't greed. Perhaps there was a meeting of the macaque Hot Springs Stewardship Council who considered the long term sustainability of the hot spring resource and calculated a maximum sustainable bathing capacity. A rational decision was made to exclude the hoi polloi on environmental grounds. It so happened that the macaques of the HSSC had historical access rights that effectively gave them the right to police the springs in perpetuity.

Human limits on destructive activities

Humans have a very long history of limiting activities where even tiny participation rates will overwhelm natural recovery rates. Hunting, whether for food or fun, is an early example. Wildlife populations of any kind are a poor source of food and even the 25 or 30 million people in Europe in the 9th Century AD would have wiped out most wildlife without strict limits. Even then, too few forests in Europe and too many Lords prompted Royalty to forbid Lords from setting up new hunting grounds. Perish the thought of the masses getting involved. The Hunt in the Forest is a 15th century painting from a time when forests had already been a carefully manicured resource for hundreds of years.

As in macaque society, exclusion was by force, sometimes deadly. In England, a thousand years of controls aimed to limit hunting lead to transportation to van Dieman's Land being celebrated in a song marking the war between the landed and landless.

Come all you gallant poachers, That ramble void of care, That walk out on a moonlight night With your dog, your gun and snare. The harmless hare and pheasant You have at your command, Not thinkin' of your last career Upon Van Dieman's land.

Hunting in the ocean

Roll on 2010 and a couple of billion of the planet's 7 billion people have applied technology to enable hunting in the most resiliant ecosystem on earth ... the oceans. In 1850, Herman Melville writing in Moby Dick thought that the extinction of whales was impossible because whales could always retreat to the polar regions which would be forever impregnable. "Forever" isn't what it used to be. An almost complete cessation of whaling may have bought whales back from the brink of extinction, for now, but the rest of the ocean's occupants are still under the gun, dynamite, long line, trawl or gill net.  Land based hunting outlawed such multiple animal hunting devices long ago. For example, the 1885 Game Act in South Australia outlawed the punt gun ... a device that fired 3lb or so of small metal shot and could reputedly bring down 150 pelicans with a single shot. Hunting ducks became a not-for-commerce sport in SA in 1928. Fisheries operate essentially in a pre-control fashion ... akin with land based hunting well over a thousand years ago in Europe or a hundred years ago in the colonies. This is partly because of the huge gap between consumers and hunters. Out of sight is out of mind. And also partly because of the myth that fish don't feel the gaff or the hook or anything else. It is ridiculous in 2010 to need to prove that fish feel pain, but you will find a careful examination of the science in a recent ALSA submission .

High income countries with just 18 percent of the world's population consume 63 percent of the ocean's fish, and like the macaques, they have realised the consequences of unfettered access. But regulation is now an affair of state rather than a royal prerogative. The state, for its part, has ceded a little of its control to voluntary market based mechanisms. The old days of hanging or transporting poachers to Tasmania are on the nose. It's time for a kinder gentler way. The goal, however is the same. Keep the masses out.

Managing fishing ... or keeping it in the family?

Enter the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) the human equivalent of a macaque hot springs council. Here's the deal. The MSC must persuade consumers of fish that some forms of fishing are sustainable, and that it, the MSC knows which these are and that it can be trusted to place its seal of approval only on fish hunted in accordance with its rules. The flipside is that MSC must persuade fish hunters to obey MSC rules designed to promote sustainability. The inducement is a premium price with MSC taking a cut as its fee for administering and policing the scheme. Everybody understands that the increased prices and reduced fish output must keep out the riff-raff.  The maths is simple. If the other 82 percent were to eat fish at the level of the richest 18 percent, then we would need to take about three times as many fish out of the oceans.

A couple of week's back, Nature carried some criticisms of MSC (link requires subscription but I mentioned a few details here) by top fishery scientists which consisted of examples of what the scientists considered were failures. A following Nature issue contained replies with examples of what advocates considered were MSC successes. In a complex debate, it's easy for both sides to have good examples. But the deeper issue is whether a purely voluntary strategy can save the oceans, particularly one based on restricting fish to those who can pay the premium.

Other management strategies

I don't view fish as a resource, but let's assume they are , and see where this leads. If fish are a resource, then there are many ways they can be managed. The MSC model isn't the only game in town. The 2009 Nobel Prize winner in Economics was Elinor Ostrom. Her 1990 classic book Governing the Commons presents a number of examples of enduring organisational structures for managing resources. The Huerta irrigation systems of Valencia in Spain have been managed cooperatively and sustainably for over 500 years. Ostrom's success stories involve things like water and pastures and she derives a set of principles that seem to underly successful systems. They are not market based, they are intrinsically localised and operate independently of national Governments. They also operate with enforcement systems that don't use lawyers. They are not perfect, but they work and they endure.

The book also presents failures and many of the failures involve fishing. This is probably no accident. Water and meadow pasture is hard to steal and the payoff isn't worth the trouble. Fish, especially ocean fish, are easy. Well ... not so much easy as worth going to plenty of trouble for. So Ostrom's number one principle for successful management of a cooperative resource is hard to meet because it requires you to have control of access to the resource. The other attribute of the success stories, one which doesn't form part of her general theory (from my reading of this one book) concerns locality.  Steal some water and who will buy it? The systems deal efficiently with locals who steal water but they don't have to worry about international theft. On the other hand, it's now possible and profitable to steal fish in one ocean and sell them ten thousand miles away. It's also very tempting for any fisher person to sell their catch to the highest bidder, which won't necessarily be a starving compatriot, but may well be someone living in a 15th floor apartment in New York or Sydney.  Technology has made this possible.  So perhaps the most sensible way to manage fisheries is to manage international movement of seafood ... stop it. Technology has made this possible, but the people who could make it happen are probably busy buying Alaskan Salmon while holidaying in a city on the other side of the world.

What are "our" aims?

But discussing management strategies is premature. We first need to ask what it means to save the oceans? For those involved in MSC and who purchase only MSC approved fish, I imagine they regard success as being an indefinite supply of fish to people wealthy enough to pay the prices that are required to persuade fish hunters to both adopt sustainable practices and give a cut to MSC. Is this enough? Over on bravenewclimate.com earlier in the year I cited research into other mechanisms that indicate far deeper problems for the oceans than local over-exploitation. Namely a total change in the species mix caused by a combination of fishing and climate change. Most fishery data only looks at the big flashy things ... the fish that people like to eat. Only in the North Atlantic is there an extensive long-term dataset on the little things with underpin the entire edifice ... the microalgae and plankton. Analysis points to future oceans being dominated by jellyfish at the top and crustaceans down deep. Saving the oceans should probably mean protecting them from becoming a gelatinous mass.

What are the prospects of an extension of MSC (or equivalent) coverage from the current level of just 7 percent of the global fishery catch to 100 percent? Slim and if it did happen, it would merely raise the price of fish and reduce the volume which will further increase the price. This will make illegal and underreported fishing even more attractive.

Already a large part of the sustainability issue in fishing stems from the nature fish (we mentioned this above) and of fishermen ... stop reading if generalisations offend. Andrew Darby's book Harpoon contains a readable account of lying at the highest official levels by Russian whalers. This fundamental dishonesty seems to be mirrored in the tuna industry. Higher prices and lower supplies of approved fish can only make illegal fishing even more attractive.

If we really want to save the oceans in the sense I've described above, then we have to tackle demand because demand is what powers the whole machine and makes dishonesty profitable and therefore unavoidable.

Only when we see the environmental and foodie gurus of our time, the Attenboroughs, Flannerys, Masterchefs and the Suzukis of the world telling people to leave the oceans alone will they have a fighting chance. Their current policy is to tell people to eat only this or that seafood ... which fuels the notion that fish is a special food, a high status food, a food of the wealthy. It's environmentalism for and by the wealthy and it will fail. The desire of the wealthy to hunt deer and pheasant guaranteed a rich supply of poachers.

When the wealthy and influential demonstrate that they care enough about the oceans to actually change their food choices, then the oceans might have a chance. Still a slim one, but better than nothing.