Sea Change
An acid peril is rising from the depths and falling from the air. It kills local oysters and threatens everything that lives in the sea.
AROUND 10 YEARS AGO, Jeremy Brown noticed something strange hanging from his hooks. Brown is a troller, sailing solo out of Bellingham in a 42-foot boat he named the Barcarole, after a genre of Italian boatmen’s tunes. He deploys as few as a dozen or as many as 70 hooks at a time, depending on whether he’s after halibut, black cod, or albacore, or king, pink, or coho salmon. Trolling is about as clean as commercial fishing gets; it pulls up very little untargeted bycatch or sea-bottom debris. But now and then Brown’s hooks snag a branch of coral from the little-studied deepwater reefs that, unbeknownst to many locals, lie off the Northwest coast.
For two decades the coral samples Brown pulled up looked radiantly healthy, “nice, crisp, brightly colored.” Now, he says, “the coral tends to look dull and lifeless. And it’s covered with slime.” Brown puzzled over the change. He read around and listened to scientists. He talked to other people who draw their living from the sea, some of whom are scientists in their own right: “There are PhDs fishing out here—literal rocket scientists. The guy who helped design the fuel system for the space shuttle is trolling out of Friday Harbor.” And he came to suspect that something was very wrong beneath the dark waters of the North Pacific.
For more than a century, young Northwesterners have sought their fortune fishing off Alaska, risking their necks on the icy boat decks or their fingers on the slime line. Most work for a few seasons and try to save enough to go out on their own. Brown is a lifer; for him fishing is a vocation and a cause, not just a living.
He grew up on a farm in a Cornish fishing village outside Falmouth, at England’s sea-splashed southwest corner. “I dabbled a bit in fishing,” he says. “When you have friends who fish, you fill in on the crew. But fishing was never a serious option at that point.” Centuries of civilization had filled the waters off Europe with waste, and most of the traditional fisheries had withered; mackerel were the main catch. “Economically, it was marginal.”
Brown went traveling and in 1979, at the age of 23, washed up out here the way many guys do: “There’s always a story about a woman there”—in this case, the woman he’s still married to. They met on the East Coast, but she was from Western Washington. “Once I saw this country, the sea and mountains, I was hooked.” He worked on Deadliest Catch –style crab boats, “just long enough to realize I didn’t want to do something like that. The artisanal fishery appeals more to me.” Brown and his wife bought a little boat and started trolling, first in Alaska, then out of Bellingham. Today he sells all his catch to a few restaurants, the sort that name their fishers and other suppliers on the menu. He waxes as passionate as the menu writers: “Seafood is one of the healthiest foods there is, and it’s our last truly authentic food. Everything else we eat is not what your grandfather ate…. For me, the fishing life is absolutely worth fighting for.”
Jeremy Brown is no newcomer to that fight. He’s active in the Washington Trollers Association and Save Our Wild Salmon, an alliance of fishers and environmentalists dedicated to saving the spawning rivers on which salmon depend. He’s been to Washington, DC, five times, knocking on official doors, talking about everything from salmon recovery and the Endangered Species Act to health care for fishermen. He came to suspect that the problems didn’t end with the salmon runs—that there was something bigger out there than dams and pavement runoff and all the other things people do to rivers. Something that would affect not just valuable fish but everything that lives in the sea.
Published: March 2010
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