Search Results

Expansionary management measures like subsidies also tend to be expedient and so are predicted as early responses in the fisheries action cycle. This section traces the development of expansionary management from the earliest subsidies, which were largely designed to break monopolies on fish products, through hatcheries, which were thought to increase populations of marine species around the turn of the 19^th century, and modern subsidy programs that were implemented to either develop new fleets or support failing fisheries. It also documents recent backlash against subsidy programs by free-trade liberals and fisheries conservation activists.

Enhancement and Aquaculture. Fish stock enhancement involves growing small fish in a hatchery and releasing them in the wild to augment natural fish production. It is widely practiced for Pacific salmon and hundreds of other marine species, especially in China. Aquaculture is the raising of fish from egg to adult in ponds, net pens, or other controlled conditions, and its harvest now exceeds capture fisheries. Aquaculture impacts wild fish production through disease transmission, genetic impacts from escaped fish, and introduction of exotic species. As fish stocks decline and the political, social, and economic pains of ever-reducing harvests increases, the idea of hatcheries becomes irresistible. Why regulate fisheries when you can produce more fish in a hatchery?

On November 3, 1865, Theodore Lyman III handed his report for the River Fishery Commission to Massachusetts governor John Andrew. Then he headed north from Boston to Lawrence, where he met with newly elected New Hampshire governor Frederick Smyth and the fishery commissioners from other New England states. At that meeting, Governor Smyth, in Lyman’s words, “undertook the high horse and said they would shut down the water from Lake Winnepiseogee [the nineteenth century name for Lake Winnipesaukee] if we did not give the fishways.” Smyth was no one to take lightly. As the son of a New Hampshire farmer, he knew the importance offish to the rural diet, and as a founding member of the Republican Party, he was a politician of some significance. Smyth was also under pressure from rural farmers in the Connecticut and Merrimack River Valleys who had depended upon spring fish runs and now faced depleted rivers. Regarding the New Hampshire governor, Lyman wrote in his diary: “The threats of New Hampshire were some of my business as commissioner.” These threats were Lyman’s business in more than just his role as fish commissioner. The waters of Lake Winnipesaukee fed into the Winnipesaukee River, one of the main sources of the Merrimack River, which provided the power for the mills at Lowell and Lawrence. Without that water, those mills could not function. Lyman enjoyed healthy returns on his holdings in those mills. He not only held stock in these companies and in mills in Holyoke, he was also on several of their boards of directors. As he stated when he later ran for Congress, “I have been connected, and my father before me with the manufacturing interest.” As a major stockholder, Lyman had reason to be concerned about the waterpower of the mills along the Merrimack. Yet when he met with the governor and fish commissioners, he thought of himself not as the representative of the manufacturing interests but as a scientist and public servant. It was a role for which he had been preparing for a long time.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy, one of the Connecticut River Valley’s most famous literary residents, created a fictional character who wanted to avoid “industrial existence” and instead “all day to climb these mighty hills, feeling their strength” and to “happen upon little brooks in hidden valleys.” Bellamy planned for his protagonist “to breathe all day long the forest air loaded with the perfume of the forest trees.” The wanderings of this turn-of-the-century fictitious character through thick forests and deserted hills reflects the changes engendered in the valley with the coming of industrial cities and the abandonment of hillside farms. When Bellamy was born in 1850 at Chicopee Falls in western Massachusetts, the region was in the process of deforestation and had few areas that were not intensely farmed. Yet as Bellamy himself noted in an 1890 letter to the North American Review, “the abandonment of the farm for the town” had become all too common. Deserted farms became one of the themes Bellamy sketched out in his notes for the novel. Bellamy had his character live in an “abandoned farmhouse. . . . The farmhouse was one of the thousands of deserted farms that haunted the roadsides of the sterile back districts of New England.” In viewing the depopulated countryside as a retreat from industrial existence, Bellamy’s character represented the fate of late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century New Englanders. Increasingly, urbanized New Englanders began to look to rural areas not as sources of food or resources of necessity but as places to contemplate nature and practice fishing and hunting as sport. As rural areas, particularly on the hills and up the valleys, became less populated, farmers there lost much of their political voice. New city voices now became more important in the conversation about resource conservation. What farmers saw as abandoned and ruined farms, urban and suburban naturalists saw as rural retreats from the tensions and pollution of the cities. For these interlopers, rural New England represented a romantic ideal of a past they or their ances tors put behind them when they moved to the city.