Who Killed The Grand Banks?: The Untold Story Behind The Decimation Of One Of The World's Greatest Natural Resources

The end came officially on July 2, 1992: John Crosbie, Canada's Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, announced a moratorium on Northern cod stocks. For half a millennium, the Grand Banks cod had sustained international fishing fleets, boosted the world's economy, become the flash point in power politics, and was the lifeblood of generations of villages perched on rocky outcrops along the Newfoundland coast. Crosbie's announcement was the final nail in the Grand Banks coffin.

What happened? For 16 years, accountability has been dodged. The media has been mute. Successive governments buried the shameful tale under layers of secrecy, subsidies and the "good news" story of off-shore oil.

The new cod-fishing fleets - technological juggernauts with the capacity to ravage a sea floor - have denied responsibility. A few courageous marine biologists have spoken up, only to find themselves squarely in the sights of government censors. The in-shore fishery - the small-boat fishermen who plied the cold waters of the Banks for generations - now reflect bitterly on better times.

When they saw the stocks decline - and their livelihood with it - they sounded the first alarm, but apparently no one was listening.

Alex Rose asks who is listening now. The answer to who killed the Grand Banks just might be another alarm bell for us today, signalling future environmental and ecosystem destruction. And while theories abound as to what caused the catastrophic collapse - botched science, timorous and fluctuating political will, a boom in the seal population -- it is indisputable that the ecosystem of the cold Grand Bank waters has changed dramatically.

Despite a decade of rhetorical handwringing, served up with dollops of Canadian official denial, Rose has salvaged one hard truth: the Grand Banks cod fishery was wiped out because of made-in-Canada greed and willful blindness. Newfoundlanders and Canadians, now shamed and embarrassed into a stony silence, worked overtime to decimate one of the world's greatest biological bounties. In a frenzy of collective hysteria, Canadians created an environmental catastrophe here on our own shore.

As the oil sands exploration gouges the landscape of northern Alberta, as overfishing hammers stocks of Pacific salmon, the fate of the Grand Banks has become a cautionary tale now told around the world. There's a price to pay when a society ignores its role as a steward of the environment. This book poses the question of our generation: will the ecological disaster that befell the Northern cod happen again?

While John Cabot's landfall may be in dispute, what he discovered is not: cod-and lots of them...

Historic accounts say that Cabot lowered a basket weighted with stones into the North Atlantic, then hauled it back up brimming with cod. The discovery of these fertile fishing grounds set of a centuries-long struggle among Basque, Portuguese, French, and English fishermen, and established a pattern of far-flung coastal settlements, called outports by Newfoundlanders, that ring the island.

And so the legend fits today: the Grand Banks became Valhalla, a miraculous, self-sustaining Eight Wonder of the world, feeding the known world for 500 years.

The catastrophic collapse of the fisheries, circa 1992, was unprecedente4d. An ecological disaster to rival any other-the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest notwithstanding-in modern history. This made-in-Canada plunder was part human greed, part stupidity, and part rapacity. Tarnishing Canada's standing within the international community, it holds the reputation of Canada's once-vaunted fisheries scientists up to ridicule. Sixteen years later, no one has taken accountability or apologized for the ruination of a centuries-old way of life and, taken accountability or apologized for the ruination of a centuries-old way of life and, more shocking, a stock recovery plan has yet to be produced...

There can be no forgetting-or forgiving-such catastrophic pillaging, Sparked by a second wave of environmentalism focusing on the state of the world's oceans, the Grand Banks cod collapse became a talking point, a sujet noir, now studied at universities and fisheries research centres, wherein students from around the world repeat thismantra: we must never allow our fisheries to go the way of the Grand Banks cod.