A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands

2 | Creating a Legible Fishery

59 In April 1997, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) brokered a controversial deal with the fishermen of Lake Superior. State managers cut the number of commercial fishing licenses for lake trout by more than half—from twenty-one to ten. The trout quota for the commercial fishery dropped from 15,000 to 7,140 per year. Opposition to the plan arose primarily because the DNR agreed to pay the eleven displaced fishermen more than $1.5 million over the course of ten years in return for their licenses. Opponents of the buyout worried that the plan set a poor precedent by treating a public resource like trout as private property, requiring the state to purchase the right to regulate. The state legislature addressed these concerns by passing a law guaranteeing that the buyout could only happen once.1 Wisconsin DNR officials saw the plan as a political solution to a complicated natural resource management problem—the need to reduce commercial fishing pressure on lake trout. The fish had only recently rebounded from a collapse caused by overfishing and the impact of the sea lamprey, an invasive predator that had devastated the fishery in the 1950s. Fisheries experts wanted to further protect the still-fragile species. Other groups wanted to catch the fish: sportsmen , whose disposable income provided a key part of the local economy, and Ojibwe fishermen, who had won a series of court cases in the 1980s affirm2 Creating a Legible Fishery 60 chapter 2 ing their treaty-guaranteed right to harvest lake trout. Commercial fishing had long served as the most important and reliable industry in the Apostle Islands region and formed a central component of the town of Bayfield’s identity. State fisheries managers believed that the buyout plan recognized the historical significance of the commercial fishery while at the same time alleviating pressure on the lake trout so that other demands could be met. The ability of state managers to retire more than half of the commercial fleet and to reallocate the fishery to other uses represented the maturation of a process that had begun well over a century earlier: the growing authority of the state to determine how natural resources would be used and valued. In 1874, the Wisconsin legislature created the Wisconsin Fisheries Commission (WFC).2 Initially, the commission measured the state’s fisheries and started an artificial propagation program. It had little responsibility or power. But as the managerial authority of the state increased, the state acquired the ability to regulate and restrict who fished, what type of equipment they used, and for what reason. State managers sought to bring what scholar James C. Scott calls “legibility” to the fishery; that is, they tried to organize the fisheries in a way that made them easier to control. A chaotic fishery, with uncounted, unregulated fishermen using the resource for a variety of competing reasons, was difficult to manage. Fisheries managers sought to counter this chaos by using state authority to create license requirements, closed seasons, and spawning sanctuaries. These actions ordered the fishery and made it easier to control—they made the fishery more legible. In the late nineteenth century, as the Progressive conservation movement gained momentum, the state took an ever more active role in regulating the use of natural resources such as timber, water, and wildlife.3 The task of making the fisheries legible fell to James Nevin, the state superintendent of fisheries from 1882 to 1921. When Nevin assumed his post, the state’s fisheries faced a crisis. The lucrative whitefish fishery seemed on the verge of collapse. Whitefish harvests on Lake Michigan had dropped by over 25 percent since 1870, and experts predicted that Lake Superior’s production would soon follow. Nevin recognized that unlimited, unregulated fishing had pushed the fish stocks to their breaking point. Too many fishermen, using too many different kinds of equipment, fishing for too many different reasons and for too many different species had created a chaotic, disordered fishery, a system that could only lead to disaster. “The number and variety of nets used for fishing are appalling, and their destructive character, supplemented by the spear, Creating a Legible Fishery 61 are rapidly exterminating the white fish and salmon trout,” stated the WFC in one of its early reports. To fight this problem, Nevin and his colleagues sought to bring order to the fishery—to regulate and restrict how and when...