The collapse of cod fishing around Newfoundland (Canada)

Cods used to be so abundant around Newfoundland (Eastern coast of Canada) that fishermen came there all the way from Europe. Due to over-fishing, the population has collapsed brutally – with no sign of recovery.

… a metaphor of our over-consuming societies?

In the 19th and early 20th century, fishermen from all over Europe and from Canada fished cods in the cold waters off Newfoundland (Canada). The fish banks were an unheard of bounty, as illustrated e.g. by French novelist P.Loti in “an Iceland fisherman” published in 1886.

In the 1950s, fishermen started using nets instead of lines. They almost quadrupled their captures, from 500,000 tonnes / year to 1.8 M tonnes / year. A first warning happened in 1968, when captures fell to 1 M tonnes. The Canadian government reacted in a nationalistic way by chasing all foreign fishermen from its Economic Exclusive Zone. This relieved the situation somehow, but the Canadian fishermen “improved their technology” by fishing ever more, ever deeper, ever larger fishes, despite increasing warnings by scientists – until the brutal collapse of the cod population in 1992, caused by the fact that the last old, large and productive reproducing fishes that sustained the population had been killed. This illustrative example can be a metaphor of our technological hubris.