The biggest `what if’ question facing Maine’s island and working waterfront communities is what if there were no more lobsters or lobster fishing? To say that the current lobster landing outlook is not good is like saying that Joe Torre or General Motors did not have a good year.
We have covered Maine’s lobster industry in the pages of this newspaper in great detail since the paper’s inception 15 years ago, because as lobsters go, so goes the rest of the Maine coast. With cod and haddock harvests at historic low levels, and with the virtual disappearance of scallop and urchin fisheries in recent memory, there are no other small boat fisheries left to sustain the roughly hundred coastal villages that land commercial quantities of lobsters. Without a small boat fishery, the number of boatbuilders, especially Downeast, would shrink considerably. With fewer fishermen and boatbuilders, the number of coastal properties that would be converted into summer homes would substantially increase. The economic diversity of coastal and island communities would decrease; with few other options, summer tourist enterprises would have to take up the slack. It’s not a picture anyone likes to paint — literally.
But what is really happening? Right now, it appears that lobstermen are facing a rapidly changing economic landscape rather than a more profound ecological shift in what the Gulf of Maine produces.
Experienced lobstermen have been saying for years that lobster populations are cyclical — that the exceptional bounty of the past 15 years cannot last. The old-timers warned younger fishermen against financing expensive new boats with big strings of traps and gear. In most cases the exuberance of youth prevailed over quiet Yankee conservatism. Now the only way to make the same amount of money in an economy of inexorably rising fuel prices and the escalating cost of bait is to catch more lobsters — or get more money for fewer lobsters. But that did not happen last year and it will almost certainly not happen this year. Depending on where you fish, lobster harvests have declined all along the coast by 20 to 40 percent and prices are flat or declining. This year Mother Nature is not going intercede to make up the difference.
This is a wake-up call, not a death knell.
But it is important to get the message. Short of a cataclysmic change in ocean currents, the ecosystem of the Gulf of Maine will continue to produce a prodigious biomass of marine species that are valuable and can be turned into useful products, not just to feed sunburned tourists shore dinners at the lobster shack. But we need options ? ecological diversity — and we need to invest in re-creating that diversity in good times and bad, not just in a crisis.
It used to be when times were tough in one fishery fishermen would go fishing for something else. For the past four centuries, cod and haddock landings were the most valuable economic mainstay for coastal and island fishermen. When lobsters were scarce, fishermen went trawling for cod and haddock or gillnetting for hake and other groundfish. When groundfish declined, fishermen went after lobsters. This system changed during the past 40 years as government loan programs encouraged the construction of bigger boats equipped with Cold War color sonars and sophisticated tracking technology that allowed big boat fishermen to locate nearly the last fish. Lobstermen used to sit back and say, “that’s not my problem.”
We will not repeal nature’s inexplicable cycles; we will be lucky if someday we dimly begin to understand them, especially in the continuously mysterious marine environment. The best we can do is to encourage biological and economic diversity as a hedge against the time when things change and we need to figure out another viable economic strategy. For those of us who value productive working waterfronts, biological diversity is everyone’s problem.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.