You will submit a weekly reflection . Each reflection should be about 500 words about your project paper or the readings, questions of the readings; comparing the ideas; and real relevant events.
SOC 452 Advanced Seminar in
Environmental Sociology
February 22: Institutional failures
Liangfei Ye
Reminder
• Do you have any questions of the first part of your
research proposal?
• On March 3, your group will present it on Zoom
• On March 14, your group will submit the research
proposal
Review
• Feb 8: the three types of CPR problems
• Feb 10: the rational choice model
• Feb 15: the six designing principles
• Feb 17: the institutional change
Feb 17: Analyzing institutional change
• The setting: the competitive pumping race because of a CPR
problem, cheap water, and two externalities
• The Raymond Basin negotiations: the litigation/court + the
water master negotiation
February 22: Institutional failures
• Institutional failures: failed to establish effective rule
systems in resource management.
I Bodrum fishery, Turkey: a failure
• In the 1970s, the Turkey
Government encourage some
fishers to construct larger
trawling vessels
• In 1983: 400 fishers, 100 small
boats, 11 trawlers, 2 purse
seiners, 9 bottom seiners.
• Early success of the trawlers
encouraged others to enter the
local fishery: until the total
revenue was less than the cost –
the total yield remained but the
catch per unit of effort sharply
declined.
A local cooperative unsuccessfully mediated the
conflicts among six groups of fishers:
II Bay of Izmir, Turkey: a failture
• In 1983: 1800 fishers, 700
small boats, 30 bottom
seiners, 27 purse seiners.
• A large metropolitan city
with a high demand of
fish: too many fishers
chasing too few fish
The trawlers were not the problem because of a
crowded environment and active law enforcement…
But because:
• The opportunities for quick economic gain.
• The large number of fishers
• The internal division of the fishers into distinct subgroups
with conflicting interests
• The lack of an overarching institutional mechanism in which
local rules and conflict-resolution mechanisms could be
designed: a law without the limits of the number of licenses.
Discussion
Compare the COVID-19 case maps of Wuhan, China and
New York City, and think:
• Who has more difficulty of coordinating the control
of the covid-19 virus spreading? Why?
III CA groundwater overdraft
• Overdraft conditions in the late 1950s
• The Mojave Water Agency was created in 1960
• Resolved water rights issues, devise management
plans within subareas, litigations to settle water
rights in the 1960s
1966, litigations had no consensus because…
Conflicts
IV A Srilankan Fishery: a success of solving overfishing
Compare the failures/success with the design
principles
Discussion
https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2019/11/great-lakescommercial-fishing-history/
Read the article – Great Lakes Fishery: The start of the
industry and the fall of fish populations – and think:
• Why the fish population felled in history? Which
principles were violated during this period?
• Which principles were followed after the increasing
the fish population?
Discussion
https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environmentwatch/commercial-fishing-sinking-fast-michigan-timemore-regulations
Read the article – Commercial fishing is sinking fast in
Michigan. Time for more regulations? – and discuss:
• Why the commercial fishing was falling?
• Do you agree to give more capacity to sportfishing?
Why sportfishing?
• If you are the official to design institutions to give
more capacity to sportfishing, how to do that?
Great Lakes Fishery: The start of the industry
and the fall of fish populations
By James Proffitt
The Great Lakes’ history of fishing can be separated into three
general periods beginning with Indigenous nations’ utilization of the
lakes for their subsistence.
November 25, 2019
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That was followed by the commercialized harvesting of fish on
massive scales, and then the current state of the lakes’ fisheries:
modest commercial utilization combined with extensive recreational
angling.
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“It’s doing good now,” said Cory Goldsworthy, Lake Superior area
supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources,
referring to fish populations in the lakes “We recognized back in 1888
referring to fish populations in the lakes. We recognized back in 1888
that overfishing was having an impact, even back then, primarily on
whitefish.”
He described that as a turning point in the lake’s management.
“That was the first year a federal fish hatchery was built on Lake
Superior, for purposes of stocking whitefish. But throughout time
they also stocked a number of other species,” Goldsworthy explained.
“In 1917 Minnesota opened up a hatchery on Superior. It’s actually
the building I’m sitting in now.”
Goldsworthy said Minnesota raised and stocked lake trout in Superior
in an effort to replenish stocks.
“As we go through time there are essentially no real commercial
restrictions or regulations all the way up until the mid-1960s,” he said.
“So we started off with around 400 or so commercial operations, no
limit on the fish they can catch, the whole works.”
The start
Long before Europeans laid eyes on the Great Lakes, Indigenous
tribes had mastered its abundant fisheries. Archaeological evidence
offers evidence of robust fishing communities on the lakes as early as
3,000 to 2,000 B.C.
Explorers, fur traders and missionaries wrote about Great Lakes fish
and fishermen, and stories of Lake Huron’s bountiful fishery date to
as early as 1623. French missionary Gabriel Sagard wrote about both
abundance and size of fish during his early 17th century travels:
For indeed in this Fresh-water Sea there are sturgeon, Assihendos
(whitefish), trout, and pike of such monstrous size that nowhere else
are they to be found bigger, and it is the same with many other
species of this that are unknown to us here (in France).
Members of more
than a dozen tribes
Chippewa Village, Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, 1850, Photo by
State Archives of Michigan
including Chippewa, Ottawa, Fox, Menominee, Mascoutin, Potawatami and
others pulled fish from the lakes and its nearby tributaries.
Tribes fishing the lakes fashioned gill nets with basswood and nettle.
They cast the nets from canoes, side-by-side suspending nets
between the canoes, and would pull fish from the water with ease.
Night fishing was a popular endeavor also since fish were drawn to
light sources.
Using pine resin and charcoal to fashion torches, Native peoples
attracted fish with the flame then speared them. This was especially
effective on lakes Huron and Michigan for species like walleye and
sturgeon.
C.M. Davis’ “Readings in the Geography of Michigan” describes the
region’s residents like this:
In the 1700’s travelers might have found Algonquins pitching their
bark lodges along the beach at Mackinac, spearing fish among the
rapids of St. Mary’s River, or skimming the waves of Lake Superior in
their canoes.
Caught by the hundreds of thousands
But by the very early
nineteenth century,
with a swelling tide of
Europeans, settlers
got into the fishing
game too.
Newcomers on the
lakes were filling
barrels with pickled
and salted fish they’d
seined, speared and
Interior of a fish-packing plant showing a fish-cleaning gang at
hooked, then
work in Sandusky, Ohio, Photo by U.S. Commission of Fish and
distributed mostly for
Fisheries
family and community
family and community
consumption. And
whitefish were
plentiful beyond imagination.
In “The Good Years: A History of the Commercial Fishing Industry on
Lake Erie,” Frank Prothero finds a lake flush with fish:
American navy men laboring on the construction of (Commodore)
Perry’s ships at Presque Ile in the summer of 1813 sent home
accounts of whitefish, so plentiful that one might fill a net by simply
casting it into the water from the beach.
Edward Guillet in “Early life in Upper Canada” stated that “in some
parts of Lake Erie Single hauls of 90,000 whitefish were not
unusual” and in the Detroit River fish were driven into pens by the
hundreds of thousands to be later dried and used as fertilizer.
Fish become big business
As fishing the Great Lakes became a major business, the commercial
apparatus that would see great successes, and failures, was born.
Fleets of gill-net boats, including steam-powered vessels, worked
ever-greater distances from home ports, farther from land and
utilizing longer nets at greater depths. Manual net lifters gave way to
powered lifters and harvest numbers climbed. The pattern of
maximum harvest continued well into the 1900s.
While the ingenuity fed tens of millions during the next 150 years, it
nearly wiped out the fish. Some species disappeared, like the blue
pike.
According to the Ohio Biological Survey, between 1950 and 1957 blue
pike harvests in lakes Erie and Ontario ranged between 2 million and
26 million pounds. By 1959 just 79,000 pounds were reported. In
1964 the number was less than 200 pounds. The blue pike is now just
memory – and a specimen in a jar in a laboratory.
By the 1850s massive nets had evolved and were utilized by
companies operating steam-powered vessels, which grew larger and
larger as investment poured in and profits were made. Continued
mechanization meant smaller fishermen, including Indigenous
groups, could no longer compete with bank-financed operations set
up by European immigrants. Many Indigenous fishermen were
relegated to working in the employ of commercial operations. The
few that remained independent operated small, mostly family
organizations which pulled enough fish from the lakes to feed kin,
with little surplus to sell at markets.
The arrival of railways and cold storage meant fish could be caught
and shipped fresh, on ice, just about anywhere. The opportunity for
large-scale profits drove the industry.
For the Great Lakes fisheries, that was when everything went
downhill.
Targeted fish populations in constant
fluctuation
Currently, scientists
say that while Lake
Erie possesses about
2 percent of the water
in the Great Lakes, it’s
home to about 50
percent of the fish. It’s
hard to imagine it was
any different in the
past – and likely a
reason why its waters
The Lay Brothers Wholesale Fish Company, Port Clinton, Ohio.
were so heavily
Photo by the Ottawa County Museum
pressed by those
seeking fish and
seeking to keep
others out.
In “The Good Years, A History of the Commercial Fishing Industry on
Lake Erie,” Frank Prothero writes that Canadians were not happy with
their fishing friends from the south.
American catches continued to grow larger…Much of their catch was
procured in Canadian waters and the simple expedient of placing
patrol boats on the Canadian side was shortly going to curtail their
lucrative poaching activities.
The desire to exclusively control the Great Lakes’ fisheries resource
was a recurring theme in history as well as the desire to protect it
was a recurring theme in history, as well as the desire to protect it.
Industrial Revolution advanced society,
harmed lakes
By the mid-19th century, commercial fishing was booming and so was
industry, as towns and cities grew. But the rising populations of the
lake states and Ontario, combined with serious pressure by
thousands of commercial fishing operations, hit the fish populations
hard.
The major urban areas of Toronto, Hamilton, Buffalo, Cleveland,
Toledo, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth, Superior and Milwaukee
grew exponentially between 1850 and 1900.
Population in these 11 cities swelled from a combined 215,000 to 3.64
million in 50 years. The growth gave rise to great numbers of
foundries, smelters, mills, oil fields, chemical factories and all manner
of industry.
In Ontario’s Oil City there were 27 refineries operating by 1860. In
Ohio’s Wood County near Toledo, 25 years later, oil fields opened that
would eventually see 5,500 operating wells. Sewage from cities and
intense timber and agriculture activities also took their toll on the
lakes. All the while commercial operations pressed forward for
maximum catches of lake trout, herring, whitefish and lake sturgeon.
Fishermen on the lakes began to notice declines in their catches,
attributing it often to pollution from the thousands of new factories
and the growing cities.
But the introduction of non-native species was a concern, as well.
That included alewives that competed for food, common carp that
uprooted vegetation and sea lamprey that fed off larger fish. Each
took its own toll on native commercial fish.
Market glut, lower prices push fishermen
to increase catch
In the years following the Civil War, the competitive nature of the
industry saw a rise in the lakes’ yields. This in turn pushed prices for
catches down. The 1880s were especially fraught with troubles for the
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industry as fishing fleets worked harder to earn income by harvesting
more fish at lower prices.
During the past two
centuries, most
populations of
commercially
exploited fish have
either completely or
partially collapsed at
one time or
another. Atlantic
salmon disappeared
Pound net fishing, Port Clinton, Ohio. Photo by the Ottawa
from Lake
County Museum.
Ontario, lake
trout from lakes
Michigan, Erie and Ontario, and blue pike from lakes Erie and Ontario.
A handful of deepwater chubs, also called ciscoes, have either
been extirpated from individual lakes or the entire Great Lakes
system. Two of the nine cisco species present in the lakes in 1929, the
deepwater and the shortnose, are now considered extinct.
In the two decades prior to 1900, many of the commercial species
being taken plummeted. Lake whitefish production in the lakes
declined from about 24 million pounds annually to nine million. Lake
sturgeon dropped from about eight million pounds to less than two
million. As these stocks declined, fishermen turned to other species
to pursue profits. During that 20-year period, total commercial
production on the Great Lakes rose from about 80 million pounds of
fish to about 146 million. Desirable whitefish, sturgeon, herring and
lake trout populations declined as catches of other fish rose.
The revolving door of once-popular commercial fish species have
included northern pike, walleye, pickerel, American eel, burbot,
trout, freshwater drum, yellow perch, suckers, catfish, muskellunge,
grass pike, mullet, white bass, white perch, smelt, sauger and bowfin,
among others.
Lake managers take note
The free-for-all commercial fishing game could not last. Goldsworthy
said that, over the decades, the intentions of fisheries managers in
Minnesota and elsewhere was to do the right thing it simply wasn’t
Minnesota and elsewhere was to do the right thing, it simply wasn t
working.
“Throughout time there had been attempts for different jurisdictions
like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ontario, Michigan, for everyone to get on
the same page and have the same regulations, but we could never
figure out how to do that. Everyone had their own commercial
operators that each did their own thing,” he said. “No one really
wanted to coalesce around one regulation.”
According to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, between the late
1800s and the 1950s, the U.S. and Ontario tried no less than 40
times to create a system of cooperation to manage the lakes,
including two signed treaties which never materialized into actionable
plans.
In 1954 a treaty between the U.S. and Canada resulted in the
formation of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, a joint body which
now facilitates the collaborative management efforts of Ontario, the
lake states, Native American tribes and Canadian First Nations. The
GLFC and its stakeholders have been working together since its
inception on all things Great Lakes fish, including battling invasive
species such as the lamprey; determining which fish should be
caught, how many and where; and other science-based approaches
to lake issues.
Featured Image: Aboard one of the Bell Fish Company boats, Photo
by the Ottawa County Museum