by Edited by Craig Springer
Stackpole Books, 2021
150 Years of Fisheries Conservation and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
Fisheries science is often conducted out of sight – in salt marshes and southern bayous, in the hatchery and the lab. America’s Bountiful Waters: 150 years of Fisheries Conservation and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service gives us a welcome look inside this work. Edited by fisheries biologist and conservation writer Craig Springer, Bountiful Waters is a compendium of short pieces by nearly 50 writers whose essays profile the people and fishes of the fisheries conservation movement over time. Some 41 fish species are featured in leading roles – 15 of them trout and salmon species. Lesser-known food and sport fish from Bering sisco to burbot to Lahontan cutthroat trout also get their due, along with some non-fish species.
Bountiful Waters is a generous, large-format book. Along with the text there are 4-color reproductions of fish and archival photos of people, places, and the paraphernalia of the work of biologists, including such curios as a floating shad hatchery, and the insides of a turn-of-the-century fish railcar used to transport eggs, fry, and adult fish nationwide. (There were 13 such fish cars crisscrossing the country before roads and trucks took over.)
In one essay, writer Will Ryan introduces us to Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, the eccentric uncle to Teddy Roosevelt and author of the Congressional legislation that created the U.S. Fish Commission in 1871. Barnwell Roosevelt believed fisheries conservation could feed the poor and save the Republic. Historian Mark Madison provides a brief biography of Spencer Baird, who was appointed the first director of the Commission in 1871, with the mandate from Congress to investigate purported fish declines in southern New England waters. Within a year, Baird had expanded that mission to a nationwide fisheries restoration crusade; he reported to Congress that to understand fish declines and restoration, entire new scientific disciplines were needed. After Baird, come the many men and women who across the years go about inventing those disciplines. These include world-renowned conservationist and aquatic biologist Rachel Carson, who worked for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for much of her career.
At the heart of many of these stories is the history of aquaculture in America. The epigraph of historian Mark Madison’s lead essay is from George Perkins Marsh’s Report on the Artificial Propagation of Fish, made to the Vermont legislature in 1857. Marsh held up aquaculture as a most promising tool for replenishing the collapsing fisheries of the 1850s. Baird followed Marsh’s lead and steeped himself in aquaculture science, then still in its infancy. He hired Livingston Stone, a Unitarian minister and fish culturist pioneer from New Hampshire, to build the first federal hatchery, McCloud River in northern California. By 1949, there were 99 federal hatcheries in 43 states producing 1.5 billion fish annually.
This is an essential piece of conservation history, although not one without controversy. As Madison points out, “The colonization of North America by rainbow trout was emblematic of the U.S. Fish Commission’s mandate to stock as many game and food fish as possible, regardless of their unknown impact on native fish species.” In 1903, the U.S. Fish Commission became the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, which was combined with the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey in 1940 to become the modern-day U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, heralding the beginning of a new environmental era, the FWS had already been taking on new roles, “reflecting much of Carson’s ethos of ecology, imperiled species and loss of habitat.”
What I value most in this book is the big picture it provides across 150 years of saving fish and aquatic ecosystems in America, and of the people on a quest to do just that. Apache trout, paddlefish, Atlantic sturgeon, Pacific salmon, enormous pikeminnows and other fabled fishes of the Colorado River basin, darters, sicklefin redhorse, desert pupfish, alligator gar: each is a reminder of the rare beauty, diversity, and vulnerability of America’s fishes and aquatic ecosystems. Bountiful Waters reminds us of what it takes in knowledge, wisdom, and passion to build not just a conservation agency but a movement. “The only real enemy of fisheries conservation,” former FWS Director H. Dale Hall points out in the epilogue, “is a public ignorant about what we do and why we do it.”