Herring Scrap 43: (Ending) A Model Fishery in Bad Relations pt. 1

I've been hacking at the thesis in bursts of effort over the course of the last few months, I've submitted a draft that I feel alright about, and now it's time to defend it in front of my committee; you're invited. This Wednesday, May 6th, at 10am Eastern Time / 6am Alaska, I'll get 20 minutes to present the thesis, and then I'll chat about it with my examination committee for 80 minutes or so. After that, I imagine I'll work on it for a week or two more, and then it'll be done enough.

The hardest part of this final stretch has been coming up with conclusions within the terms of the thesis itself. That part has felt laborious, and it was only by drafting the conclusion in the form of a herring scrap that I was able to actually begin to write it. I didn't share it here when I wrote it, but I brought it into the big document and it got me to my deadline. In this and a pair of other posts to follow, I'll share some elements of the conclusion of the thesis.

I set out to write this long document because I was watching a situation unfold across time where a scientifically minded regulatory agency kept making claims that Indigenous elders kept disagreeing with. Those elders said that a fishery had done harm and was still doing harm; meanwhile the Department's statistics showed a steady population increase over the decades which contradicted those claims. I have no reason to doubt the knowledge and experience of the elders, but I have every reason to doubt the ability of fisheries science to accurately describe Sitka's herring population since the 1970s. I wanted to know the secrets of the claims, to see if they held water, and why they didn't.

In writing this thesis I drew on thinking from the field of Science of Technology Studies, which emphasizes the way that knowledge forms and is formed by the social fabric of its making. Any knowledge could have been built differently, and differently built knowledge might make a different world. This thesis, for instance, could have gone a lot of different ways; instead, it went this way. I wanted to know how ADF&G's body of Sitka herring knowledge came to be, what it was made of, and why it describes the world the way it does.

This week I've been trying to figure out how to put a bow on some of the broader subtext that I've been kind of trying to engage indirectly by looking at herring, at herring in Sitka, at problems of fish counting... how to describe what has motivated me to pursue this thing in this way, what the broader takeaways are beyond the herring fishery, why this matters, why it wasn't a strictly quixotic way to take on a problem. I've taken on this topic with this approach because it gets at a few different sets of big living questions I've got - questions that extend well beyond herring in Sitka - that I've carried with me and been motivated by along the way.

One set of questions is about the individual and collective calibration of our sense of loss (and of harm done), especially with regards to wild things whose lives we get very limited glimpses of and know very little about. I deal with this in part by referring to the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome, which describes the need to situate a knower’s historic bias when impressions of ecological reality are being described.

One set of questions is about how extractively-inclined statecraft relies on the diminishment of vernacular experience. These questions are about what happens (and how) when human observation/qualitative modes of sensemaking are devalued in favor of quantitative data, data itself which has been estranged from its qualitative meaning.

One set is about making sense of this whole experience of trying to call attention to a clear problem in a modern/western/colonial/scientific/extractive/exclusive environmental governance paradigm. I'm astonished at the labor that has been required of little old me (and the resistance I've received) in order to get to a point of articulating - and of getting legitimized - the observation of a problem in a calculative knowledge system, via a performance of science, which is doing harm.

And of course, one set of questions is about the herring, and how they have responded or suffered in response to those various harms. I worry about ADF&G's fantastical projections of herring abundance over time because in presenting an ascendant herring population, ADF&G obscures all other harms to herring - not just in the context of this commercial fishery, but in terms of broader sensemaking projects relating to the health of a keystone forage fish and their dependents. Herring are sensitive creatures! They respond to things we do. They would have responded in some way to the closure of the pulp mill in 1995. They also would have responded in some way to diesel/oil spills in near waters in 1986 and 1987 and 2017 and 2022; to the piles of fish waste making anoxic zones under processing plants at the mouths of bays; to the dumping of asbestos and whatever else into Silver Bay after the closure of the pulp mill; to massive expansions in salmon aquaculture which commit entire bays to the needs of enormous populations of commercially designed salmon; to years of shoreline armoring and breakwater construction; to more and bigger cruise ships making port calls for a longer season; to starving whales growingly reliant on Sitka's springtime herring aggregation; microplastics; acidification; warming. These are all deep impositions into the lives of these fish! They are unmarked and in fact obscured by the rhetoric of the agency in charge. It is hard to make the negative outcomes of such events visible; it is important that state science not make them invisible.

Those questions animate the thesis; the answers are incomplete. I'll defend what I've got on Wednesday morning, 10am Eastern, 6am Alaska. If you'd like the link, shoot me an email.