"Who Killed the Grand Banks?" (used book)

Who Killed the Grand Banks?

by Alex Rose

About the book

Used book. Hardcover. Dust jacket included. Good condition.

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 code had sustained international fishing fleets, boosted the world’s economy, become the flash point in power politics, and was the life blood 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 have 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 the sea floor – have denied responsibility. A few courageous marine biologists have spoken up, only to find them selves squarely in the sights of government censors. The in-shore fisher – the small-boat fishermen who plied the cold waters of the Banks for generations – new 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: 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 hand wringing, served up with dollops of Canadian official denial, Rose has salvaged one had truth: the Grand Banks cod fishery was wiped out because of the 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 shores.

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 questions of our generation: will the ecological disaster that befell the Northern cod happen again?