Shifting Baselines

Check out this wonderful article on shifting baselines by Colin Woodard in The Christian Science Monitor. Woodard describes UNH researcher Bill Leavenworth's hunt for cod fishing logs between 1852 and 1866. Back then, fishermen had no incentive to over or underreport their catch so what Leavenworth finds is more accurate than statistics today. He also finds, unsurprisingly, fishermen traveled less and caught more fish.

In the yellowing pages of these surviving logbooks lie the secrets of the ocean fisheries' past - and perhaps lessons for its troubled present.

Woodard's piece "Sea captains' logbooks reveal secrets of New England's fishing culture" could have just as easily been "Sea captains' logbooks reveal shifting baselines." Just look at this incredible shifting baselines excerpt from the article:

Part of the problem today, says Rosenberg, is in restraining younger fishermen who are too young to remember what fishing was like in the 1960s or 1970s. One of his colleagues was once accosted by a fishermen in his 20s who was angry that bluefin tuna quotas were going to be lowered.

'He was screaming that there were more tuna out there than he'd ever seen in his life,' Rosenberg recalled. 'My friend listened for a while and said, 'Well, you're not very old.' '

Or this one:

'There were petitions from fishermen - we have zillions of them - lamenting what was happening and demanding regulations,' says Mr. Bolster. 'We have people from each generation saying, basically, these young guys now don't know what fishing was like when it was good.'

Read more about recovering data on our disappeared fish here.