News Feature | Saving the Most Important Fish
Professor and publisher spark landmark legislation
By John Lancaster
Some fish are easy to love. Menhaden are not among them. Sometimes confused with herring, they’re bony and oily and taste almost as bad as they smell. Sport fishermen shun the foot-long menhaden, except as bait, and it’s a safe bet that most Americans have never even heard of these fish, also known as pogies and bunkers, among other names.
Yet menhaden, it turns out, matter. They’re a crucial food for larger fish, as well as many marine mammals and birds, and many scientists believe they play an important role in water quality, by filter-feeding on the algae that can choke bays and estuaries. They’re also under heavy pressure from industry: Literally vacuumed from the sea by factory ships—most owned by one Houston-based company—menhaden are processed into animal feed and ingredients for industrial and consumer products such as paints, fertilizer, lipstick, and health-food supplements. Conservationists have tried for decades to expand protections for menhaden, but have been stymied, in part, by its relative obscurity and lack of sex appeal.
What a difference a book can make.
In 2007, Island Press published The Most Important Fish in the Sea, a meticulously researched narrative of menhaden’s role in America’s natural and national history by historian H. Bruce Franklin. Among other things, the book documented the longstanding failure of regulators to curb the politically powerful industry, despite overwhelming evidence of the damage it has caused. So Franklin could hardly have written a better or more satisfying epilogue than the one that was provided recently by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which voted for the first time in its history to sharply limit the annual harvest of menhaden, a harvest that exceeds both in numbers and weight that of all other East Coast species put together. The Nov. 2011 decision thrilled conservationists as much as it dismayed their opponents, but both sides agree on one thing: Franklin’s book had a lot to do with it.
“If it were not for Bruce Franklin, menhaden would never have achieved the public visibility which it has,” said Josh Reichert, the head of the Pew Environmental Group at the Pew Charitable Trust, in a recent email to colleagues. “It would have been far more difficult to have secured the catch reductions recently approved by approved by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.”
A close look at the record supports that view, showing how Franklin’s book defined the public debate on menhaden in ways that proved crucial to the outcome. That is a testament not only to the power of Franklin’s argument, but also to the commitment of Island Press, a nonprofit organization that publishes books and electronic information that policy makers and managers use when considering new policy and management practices.
This is the story of how they succeeded.
A professor of American studies at Rutgers University, Franklin made his reputation as a cultural historian, having written acclaimed works on topics as varied as Herman Melville and the Vietnam War. But he¹s also a lifelong fisherman—as a boy in Brooklyn, he sold his catch from burlap bags on the docks in Sheepshead Bay, and he still joins friends on frequent outings in the coastal waters near his home in New Jersey.
It was one such trip that sparked his interest in menhaden. On a late-summer morning in 1999, Franklin and three buddies were fishing from a small boat in Raritan Bay near the mouth of the Matawan Creek, when they spotted a big school of menhaden being ravaged by bluefish and weakfish. Thanks to the great fishing under the menhaden, they soon caught their limit. But then they watched in revulsion as a pair of aluminum boats, guided by a spotter plane, encircled the menhaden school with a net called a purse seine. A factory ship then sucked up the whole mass of small fish with a giant vacuum tube. “The following day, and for days after, the mouth of the Matawan and the bay waters surrounding it were barren of menhaden, and because there were no menhaden, there were no bluefish and weakfish,” Franklin wrote.
“This incident of minor strip mining,” as Franklin described it, started him down the path that led first to a 2001 article in Discover magazine (reprinted in the 2002 volume Best American Science and Nature Writing), and ultimately to his book.
Part popular science, part muckraking expose, The Most Important Fish in the Sea is also a historical narrative that illuminates menhaden’s surprising roles in the nation’s economic development. Native Americans used menhaden to fertilize their corn, a trick they later shared with the Pilgrims, and by the mid-19th century dozens of factories had been built along the East Coast for processing menhaden into fertilizer as well as oil for lamps and lubricants. Menhaden were then so abundant that when they retreated from northern waters in the fall, “the vanguard reaches Cape Cod before the rear has left the Maine waters,” a sea captain wrote at the time.
There was, however, a big problem. Even as early as the late 1800’s, as commercial fishermen were among the first to grasp, the menhaden industry was decimating stocks of bluefish, striped bass, and many other commercially valuable species by depriving them of their main source of food. New Jersey fishermen were so incensed by the collateral damage that in 1877 a group of them threatened to open fire on menhaden vessels with a cannon. The battle fueled a nascent environmental consciousness and helped establish the then-revolutionary concept of interdependence among species.
Rutgers Photo by Nick Romanenko
