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c h a p t e r 5 Abstractions It should therefore be understood that the exhaustion of a local fishery is not like dipping water out of a bucket, where the vacancy is immediately filled from the surrounding body; but it is more like taking lard out of a keg, where there is a space left that does not become occupied by anything else. —Spencer Fullerton Baird, Report of the Condition of the Sea Fisheries of the South Coast of New England in  and  Like the many fishermen that I know, the witnesses were not well acquainted with the habits of fish. They study them no further than they contribute to their pecuniary interest. At most, they possess only a local knowledge of the fish with which they come in contact. —Nathaniel E. Atwood to Massachusetts State Senate, April 19, 1871 By 1869, southern New England’s inshore hook-and-line fishermen had come to a breaking point. As pounds took more fish and collapsed prices, those who continued to fish as their fathers and grandfathers had done saw their lives and livelihoods as endangered as they believed were the fish they chased. The question that lay at the heart of their frustration was how to convince others that pounds destroyed stocks of inshore fish.To address this issue,hook fishermen began a grassroots campaign in the winter of 1869 calling for legislative action. Beginning in Rhode Island, fishing-community leaders circulated petitions calling for bans on weirs and pounds, and a Rhode Island derivative called traps, all of which they believed both destroyed a common resource and, in doing so, violated common resourceaccess rights. Soon the movement spread across the border into Massachusetts , and by the spring of 1870 both states were convening hearings on the health, sustainability, and uses of southern New England’s inshore fishery. c h c h c h c h c h c h c h c h a p a p a p a p a p a p a p a p t e t e t e t e t e t e t e t e r r r r r r r r 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 112 Clearing the Coastline On the surface,these hearings focused on whether weirs and pounds were destroying inshore fish stocks. Whether they were doing so or not, however, a deeper, epistemological problem was also at issue: as sides formed, and as arguments developed, it became clear that beneath the economic and ecological arguments lay the question of who should have the authority to speak for the fish.As discussed earlier,that authority had long rested with those most familiar with local conditions—local fishermen—and as long as southern New England’s inshore fishery remained healthy, that regime remained in place. By the late 1860s, however, even as most observers believed inshore fish stocks were declining, new gear divided local fishermen between those who could purchase weirs and pounds and those who could not,and as a result the previous unanimity that had existed was now sundered.Consequently,by 1869 the debates focused upon two deeper questions: first, why were stocks of fish declining,and second,how could that question be answered? Far more was at stake than just fishing regulations. The conflict over weir and pound fishing involved conflicting visions of how humans should relate to the inshore fishery.Hook-and-line fishermen took fish one by one through a labor process that,ironically,created intimate bonds between the fisherman and the fish he killed for food and gain. For the weir and pound fishermen, however,the inshore fisheries were just one more place where man could pull wealth from the coastal workspace.Their industry took fish by the hundreds, if not thousands, and rarely did any individual fish come into clear focus. In order to handle,manage,and comprehend this magnitude of fish,pound and weir operators, and their later allies, had to view fish as numbers of an aggregate catch. These numbers were then integrated into a larger banks fishery, which used these fish as inputs into a larger industrial enterprise bringing cod,mackerel,and other market fish from the banks to local and distant markets . As such, these operators related to fish not on the intimate one-by-one basis of the hook-and-line fishermen, but rather in abstract terms more concerned with volumes of fish caught, shipped, and sold...

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