Soundings: Rose George on the Hidden World of Global Fishing

If you looked at a photograph of the San Pedro waterfront in the 1920s, you'd see docks crowded with men and boats and the particular industry of a town that knew exactly what it was for. San Pedro was, at that moment, the largest commercial fishing port in the United States. Croatian fishermen, Japanese fishermen, Italian and Portuguese fishermen: they built canneries and net lofts and whole neighborhoods around the fact that the sea here gave up its fish in abundance, and always would.

If you looked at a photograph of the San Pedro waterfront in the 1920s, you'd see docks crowded with men and boats and the particular industry of a town that knew exactly what it was for. San Pedro was, at that moment, the largest commercial fishing port in the United States. Croatian fishermen, Japanese fishermen, Italian and Portuguese fishermen: they built canneries and net lofts and whole neighborhoods around the fact that the sea here gave up its fish in abundance, and always would.

It didn't, of course. The sardines went first. Then the tuna fleets followed the fish south and the work followed the fleets and the canneries closed one by one until what remained was mostly memory and a waterfront that had reinvented itself around the movement of containers. Today the Port of Los Angeles is the busiest in the Western Hemisphere. The fish are gone. Almost nobody talks about why.

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Rose George has spent her career writing about the things we depend on and prefer not to examine too closely. Sewage. Shipping. And now, in her latest book Every Last Fish, fish — how we catch them, how we lose them, and how we've constructed an elaborate global system designed, it sometimes seems, to make sure we never have to think too hard about either. She came to the subject through the shipping industry, where sources told her that if she thought shipping was opaque, she really needed to look at fishing.

"It was like catnip to a reporter," she told me when we spoke recently for my podcast, Soundings.

There is something immediately winning about George as a guide to this territory. She doesn't eat fish. She gets seasick on a flat sea. She is, by her own cheerful admission, possibly the worst person to have written this book. And yet she got on the boats anyway, suffered through the swells, and came back with something essential: the view from inside an industry that most of us encounter only at the fish counter, where everything looks abundant and nothing looks like a problem.

The problem, George argues, is profound and largely invisible. For every ten tuna that once swam in the ocean, there is now one. Ninety percent of the world's fish populations are stressed or overexploited. One in five fish is caught illegally. And the word we use to describe the problem — "stocks," as in fish stocks — is itself part of it. "When we started thinking of fish as stocks rather than populations," she told me, "I think there's some idea that they're just infinite and always going to be there." A population is something that that can collapse. A stock is just inventory.

What makes Every Last Fish more than an environmental alarm is the complexity George insists on. The fishing industry is not a monolith, she is careful to say. There is the man in his small wooden boat off the English coast and there is the Chinese distant-water factory trawler hoovering up krill in the Antarctic, and these are not the same thing, and treating them as such helps no one. George reserves her fiercest criticism for the industrial end of that spectrum — the sort of fishing that treats the ocean, she argues, like an aquatic strip mine — while still managing to genuinely like Captain Tom, the bottom trawler fisherman she went out with one rough day in England and whose methods she considers indefensible. He calls his work "a day of mass destruction," mostly to get a rise out of her, she says. She likes him anyway. These two facts coexist uncomfortably in the book, which is probably the point.

When I asked George what she hoped someone walking along this harbor — our harbor, the one that used to belong to fish — might understand after reading her book, she said she just wanted people to see. Not the containers, not the gantry cranes, but the human beings behind the supply chains, and the ocean beyond them, and what it used to hold.

"The things I write about aren't invisible," she said. "They're just not looked at."

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Every Last Fish is available wherever books are sold. The Soundings conversation with Rose George is available now on all major podcast platforms.