David Dobbs, New England environmental author

David Dobbs writes about the environment, community, and science from his home in Vermont. A contributor to Audubon, Sierra, Vermont Life, Popular Science, and other magazines, he is co-author of The Northern Forest and is now writing a book on the New England fishery, to be published next year.

After the short-term, quick-return efforts of my weekend cabinet-building, I turned yesterday to a longer labor, a book I'm writing about the collapse of the New England fishery. The book is due this fall, to be published next year (by Shearwater Books/Island Press), so I'm now in the thick of composition. Writing the book is a delicious task but a challenging one, for the fishery's collapse is, as my grandma would say, one of the most complexicated sitch-ee-ations I ever seed. There are about a million angles into this story. The angle that engages me most, however, is the spectacular discrepancy between the vision of these waters held by the fishers that work the Gulf or Maine (including Georges Bank) and that held by the National Marine Fisheries Service scientists who study and assess it. For in this discrepancy we've got not simply a failure to communicate, as the old Texas warden told the down-but-not-out Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke -- we've got a spectacular divergence regarding basic facts.

Now, granted, the sea is fairly opaque: You can't just fly over it like you can a forest and get a sense of how it's doing, and counting the wildlife is considerably more challenging than on land. Even so, it's astonishing that two groups of people that know this piece of ocean really well have spent most of the last 10 years fighting over whether some of its biggest, most dominant species are in trouble. Yet that's the case. Fishers and scientists argued first about the health of the cod stocks of Georges Bank, until they collapsed in 1992, and then about that of the cod of the inner Gulf, until that population hit bottom last year. Even now, fishers finding nice concentrations of cod (some say they have trouble avoiding them) feel they have good reason to doubt scientific data showing the species is in deep trouble.

This is a much more profound than a half-empty/half-full glass argument. It's more like a divorce. Two parties start out committed to a single cause (a healthy fishery), but after years of increasing disagreement, find themselves first in a state of alienation and then, as they move into separate camps, into and beyond estrangement, enmity, suspicion, even hatred. It was never an easy marriage, of course; but it had started promisingly enough, the two mates wed, if not to each other, at least to compatible linked causes: the science to the care and cultivation and aid of the fishery (for NMFS began as a sort of extension service, and took only serious regulatory duties only in the 1970s), the fishers (more tentatively, shambling reluctantly up the aisle) to a respect for a science that would help them gauge and protect the fishery's health. Now they can hardly speak to each other. What went wrong? Who strayed first? Who first abandoned the pact to which they had pledged? Who uttered the first unforgettable insult?

Actually, these "who's to blame?" questions interest me less than does the underlying disjuncture that inspired them. Why has it been so hard to mesh the fine-scale, experiential, gestalt-like knowledge of the fishers with the broader-scale, more formally structured knowledge of the scientists? Put that way, the two perspectives seem destined to never meet. Yet they started out merged: The scientific assessment of the Gulf of Maine was pioneered in the 1910s and 1920s by an individual, Henry Bryant Bigelow, who combined these two perspectives beautifully, and in doing so produced some of the most enduringly useful biological science ever done. (And the best field guide of any sort I've ever read, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, along with some funny lectures. His inaugural talk as first director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, for instance, was called "Seas I Have Vomited In." A subject that covered a lot of water, so to speak.)

So my book is partly a search for the spirit of Bigelow, as it were, among the fishers and scientists who work the Gulf of Maine today -- people who merge the big and the small, the particular and the general, the observed whole and the recorded discrete fact into an integrated, superbly rich picture. I'm also searching for -- and finding! -- some really good seasickness stories.

But my time and cyberspace are up, and I gotta get back to this book. I'll have to save the "feed the fish" stories for later.