Ocean Battleground

A century of unrelenting industrial harvesting of the sea has led to the extermination and endangerment of an astonishing number of marine species and human ways of life associated with fishing. According to an article in the journal Science, if current trends continue in world fisheries, by 2048 there will be no fish to support any commercial fisheries. Alan Haig-Brown’s Still Fishin’: The B.C. Fishing Industry Revisited, which complements his earlier Fishing for a Living, helps provide an understanding of the devastating changes that have come to British Columbia’s fisheries in the past few decades. This is a complex history of changing fishing cultures along the B.C. coast. It centres on fishing families, their boats, the fish they hunt, and the companies and bureaucrats that increasingly control all three. What makes Still Fishin’ so distinctive is Haig-Brown’s use of extensive interviews to capture the voices of experienced Pacific...