Community-based approaches, a salve for the East Coast fishery, can be applied to bigger problems

by Jim Meek

Tony Charles is a tall bespectacled scholar in his 50s who rides a bike around Halifax, works out of a small basement office at Saint Mary's University, and happens to be a leading expert on the management of the world's marine resources. Thirty minutes into a conversation in his subterranean digs he mentions his mentor, the late Elisabeth Mann Borgese, a former Dalhousie law professor and daughter of the great German novelist Thomas Mann.

Mann Borgese, a key figure in the development of the United Nations Law of the Sea, believed the oceans were the key to our future as a species. "She saw the oceans as the testing ground of new ways of building society or working together in the world," says Charles, a professor of management science and environmental studies.

Mann Borgese put the oceans at centre stage in the ongoing drama about the future of the planet and our place in it. The seas are a "last frontier," she wrote in the 1970s, the place where we will decide, collectively, to perpetuate a culture of "competition and scarcity" or march "toward a new world of science and technology, of abundance and co-operation."

Think ideas don't count?

After Canada proclaimed a 200-mile economic zone in 1977, Canada's fisheries minister, the late Romeo LeBlanc, adopted Mann Borgese's ideas in the Atlantic region. That meant treating the fishery as a Common property to be developed on behalf of the small-boat fishermen in coastal communities adjacent to the resources. This meant wresting (some) control from what critics today like to call the "corporate" or "industrial" fishery.

As we know, it all went horribly wrong. The sea proved to be less bountiful than we had hoped, and the principled decision to manage fish stocks for all eternity gave way to either a primitive instinct for greed or serial incompetence by scientists, or both. We ended up facing the collapse of the cod fishery in the early 1990s.

But there was talk among the ruins—talk that led to new ideas, some of them beautiful. In Newfoundland and Labrador, where groundfish stocks fell fastest and hardest, scientists started to recognize that "the knowledge that fishers had wasn't built into the science," says Charles. This led to "co-management" initiatives and "participatory research" that recruited fishermen to join in the work.

Charles, who has worked for small Caribbean nations and large United Nations agencies, helped pioneer the idea of "community quotas" in the Atlantic Canadian fishing industry. He figures if you give a community a quota, rather than set a general quota that everyone races to fill, people will find the most efficient, least destructive way to fish. At first, Ottawa and fishermen both resisted this idea. Then a dozen or so fishing ports adopted it. After it became a success in small-boat, fixed-gear fisheries around the Bay of Fundy, everyone tried to take credit for community-based quotas.

Co-management by governments and industry also took hold in large-vessel fisheries, such as the scallop sector in the Gulf of Maine, where the companies holding quotas recognized the value of a sustainable fishing effort. (Turned out even the corporate fishery didn't have to be populated by bad guys.)

Then the conversation started to widen, to draw in other ocean users such as shippers and the oil and gas industry. Mi'kmaq people joined the circle after the 1999 Marshall decision that led to the development of a native fishery. Its short-lived failures were widely reported, but its long-term successes in sustainable fisheries (at Nova Scotia's Membertou reserve, for instance) have been widely ignored.

None of this brought groundfish stocks back or achieved Mann Borgese's ideal of oceans of abundance, but no one who seriously follows the fishery believes we are systemically overfishing stocks today—not to the same extent, at least. Tony Charles, in fact, figures Atlantic Canada has become a "world-leader in bringing people together and in integrating approaches" to marine ecosystem management.

This is not to say that our reaction to the environmental crisis in the northwest Atlantic has solved it—yet. But it may have created the right "mechanism for starting to deal with really big global challenges like climate change." We did this by drawing everyone into a circle, integrating academic disciplines, and showing that we have a shared interest in the wealth of the Commons.

Atlantic Canada has developed a model for saving the world. Now, if only we could get the world to pay attention.

Jim Meek is a freelance writer and consultant with Bristol. He can be reached at jmeek@bristolgroup.ca.