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IS To Save the Fish The Crisis ofthe 1890s and the Canadian-American Joint Commission of 1892 Concert and Harmony ofAction Is Necessary By the 1890s, most of the developed regions in the United States and Canada showed clear evidence of environmental problems. In most of these areas, an articulate minority spoke out about what they perceived to be a threat to natural resources from the careless, thoughtless, wasteful ways in which people used them, and the Great Lakes region was no exception . There the consequences of massive deforestation and the excesses of the lumbering industry drew the fire of conservation-minded critics. Suggestions of concern about the practices of farmers crept into the agricultural press in the columns of advice on how to both farm and preserve land for long-term use. Apprehension about water quality, public health, and the pollution of natural waters produced a public outcry and demand for safe water. Sportsmen bemoaned the slaughter of wildlife. Fishers and those responsible for protecting the fish resources of lakes, rivers, and streams warned that stocks had dwindled and some species had disappeared. While concerns about the state of marine life largely fell on deaf ears, they were one aspect of the larger misgivings about the inroads that nineteenth-century development had made into nature's bounty. From the 1870s, the midcontinent had had its share of Jeremiahs 238 To Save the Fish warning of a bleak future. Their numbers grew as the end of the century approached. A good example of their thoughts found in the press and popular literature concerned specifically with the decline in natural resources in the Great Lakes states appeared in the Chicago Times in 1881. Noted the writer: Possessed as they are of a soil of excessive fertility, with far more than ordinary volume and richness, a climate that favors the sowing and reaping of harvests which are the envy of the older nations; of boundless lakes and rivers, once teeming with fish of the choicest descriptions and swarming with an endless variety of game for the food of her people-yet these dependent, short-sighted and shiftless dwellers of this modern paradise seem to study the more practical methods of total and rapid exhaustion rather than the retention and increase of those means upon which their sole hope and reliance rests for their future welfare and prosperity . Where is the noble buffalo which once darkened the vast feeding-grounds of this fertile country? Mercilessly swept from existence. Slaughtered for their hides! What has become of the long lines of waterfowl which but a few years since made their home with us, and, in their migrations through the Illinois valley, made their annual pilgrimages to the vast swamps of northern Indiana, the Calumet and the lakes of Fox river? Ask the inventors and dealers in improved fire-arms.... What of the great lakes? ... And where are the fish? The article went on to cite the writings of Seth Green, a pioneer in the artificial propagation of fish and a Commissioner of Fisheries of the state of New York who had analyzed the reasons for the decline in the population of Great Lakes fish, especially the whitefish.1 Between 1850 and 1893, commercial fishing on the Great Lakes evolved into a wasteful, exploitative, profit-oriented, and market-driven industry, influenced by ongoing environmental changes that made the fish habitat less adapted to the principal market species of the day. At the same time, the government policy makers responsible for devising ways to conserve the resource for long-term use-hamstrung by lack of funds and public interest, by divided political jurisdiction over lake waters, by insufficient scientific knowledge, and by the opposition of the fishermen -failed to develop an effective management policy. These three major elements-the pollution of the waters, the nature of commercial fishing , and the unsuccessful efforts of policy makers-converged to create the crisis of the 1890s, a nineteenth-century example of failure to sustain a fish resource created by the same factors that have led to crises in many parts ofthe world in the twentieth century. By 1890, those responsible for making Great Lakes fishery policy, after two decades of trying, had concluded that interstate compacts or other forms of binding agreements between the states or between the states and the province of Ontario to achieve a uniform policy for the fisheries were not possible. The British and American political systems, 239 [3.145.77.114] Project MUSE (2024...

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