Fisheries Day Quotes

Back in 'my day' – though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, this is what used to happen: you met a girl, you were attracted to her, you tried to ingratiate yourself, you would invite her to a couple of social events – for instance the pub – and then ask her out on her own, then again, and after a goodnight kiss of variable heat, you were somehow, officially, 'going out' with her. Only when you were semi-publicly committed did you discover what her sexual policy might be. And sometimes this meant her body would be as tightly guarded as a fisheries exclusion zone.

It amazes him to think how quickly he has forgotten how to move among such people, who seem rough and ugly when they look at him, all bloated faces and missing teeth. They move through the world with a kind of clumsy ease, as if they don't care how the next day will unfold because it holds so few possibilities for them. These are not people who spend their lives contemplating the minute shifts in their fortunes; they are like the happy, well-fed fish that grow in fisheries, hatched and grown to adulthood in tiny, controlled spaces. And then farmed for food.

at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hayseed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.

This morning, outside Nordic Fisheries a couple of delivery guys are unloading lobsters and crabs by the case, pausing in between loads to sip coffee from Styrofoam cups. Across the street, on Penn Avenue, the green grocers are busy stacking crates of vegetables and fruits, arranging them into a still life to showcase their most beautiful produce: heads of red romaine, their tender spines heavy with the weight of lush, purple-tinged leaves; a basket of delicate mâche, dark green, almost black, and smelling like a hothouse garden; sugar pumpkins of burnished gold; new Brussels sprouts, their tender petals open like flowers. At this hour the world belongs to those noble souls who devote their lives to food. Cook, grocer, butcher, baker, sunrises are ours. It's a time to gather your materials, to prepare your mise en place, to breathe uninterrupted before the day begins.

It is said give a man a fish, you would feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime. I say, Teach a wo(man) how to culture fish, you will empower the entire country

grader. After the first snow fell the state road crews stopped where the national park boundaries began. But it was a wonderful park, rich in mountains, for it took in parts of the Mentasta, Nutzotin and Chugach ranges, as well as supporting the entire Quilak range. It boasted several hundred miles of coastline along Prince William Sound, site of one of the richest salmon fisheries in the world, and you could always fly in to fish, if you could fly, or could afford to pay someone who did. A shame that so few could, Park rats told each other, some even with straight faces. There were dozens of airstrips within the Park, some sworn to by FAA charts, but between the time the chart was printed and the time the pilot with a ruptured oil line looked for them they would be overgrown by a hungry forest or eroded out of existence by a change of course in the Kanuyaq.

Subsidy economics tends to drive prices up, not down, as recipients chase subsidies more than customers. Adam Smith figured this out in 1776. He examined the subsidies in his day for commercial fishing. In his era the word bounty referred to gifts the government bestowed on the owners of herring ships. He concluded that to collect subsidies, people will appear to engage in a commercial activity. Smith wrote: The bounty [subsidy] to the white-herring fishery is a tonnage bounty; and is proportioned to the burden [size] of the ship, not to her diligence or success in the fishery; and it has, I am afraid, been too common for vessels to fit out for the sole purpose of catching, not the fish, but the bounty.

The combined activities of our enormous population are already producing breathtaking effects. Our planet is only 12,700 kilometers in diameter—about three times the distance between New York and Los Angeles—and we can easily travel halfway around it in less than a day. We have turned much of its land surface into a patchwork of cities, industrial parks, farms, and rangeland. We have laid on this land a web of roads, canals, and pipelines. We have dug out of it hundreds of billions of tons of material, moved this material around, processed it, and dumped it. Our factory ships and trawlers crisscross the world’s oceans to exploit every valuable fishery. Our planes and satellites weave themselves around its sphere. We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We use more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers typically carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities—especially the construction of cities, industries, and aquaculture pens—have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation. The decline of global fish stocks has followed a predictable pattern: like roving predators, we have shifted from one major stock to another as each has reached its maximum productivity and then begun to decline.30