In the late twentieth century, bycatch made a splash on the global environmental scene.1 News media and the environmental conservation sector circulated graphic images of dolphins’ fatal encounters with commercial fishing boats and videos of large nets of fish left dead to waste at sea, having been picked over for only a few choice species. These powerful images brought outcries from an enraged public concerned about the impact of commercial fishing on marine mammals, seabirds, and the marine ecosystem more broadly. Bycatch was constructed as a preeminent issue in fisheries in need of scientific and managerial intervention. Yet, there is little consensus about what bycatch is, how it impacts fisheries, or how it should be measured and managed.
In trying to render this “messy object” knowable and manageable, fisheries scientists and managers attribute the confusion about bycatch, to technical, managerial, or epistemological shortcomings (Law and Singleton 2005). Technical explanations cite the lack of methodological standardization as the reason why bycatch has been so hard to define and measure (Hall and Mainprize 2005; Kelleher 2005). As a managerial issue, the confusion about bycatch is located in an overly complex or constantly shifting regulatory landscape (Wallace 1997). Epistemological explanations argue that the issue lies in bycatch being defined differently dependent on the perspective of the actor and associated cultural, social, or economic factors (Alverson et al. 1994). Each of these approaches is underpinned by the ontological assumption that bycatch exists both as an objective material outcome of fishing that can be measured, monitored, and controlled, and as a concept in need of a shared vernacular and categorical structure. This article contributes to the discussion on bycatch by bringing to bear insights and methods from new materialism to examine the ontological politics of bycatch. It argues that to understand bycatch and the ways in which it circulates in the world, the question must be recast from what bycatch is to instead how bycatch is done through relational and heterogeneous practices of science and management.
The article begins with an introduction to the key thinkers and concepts from new materialism. In particular, the work of Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002) and Karen Barad (2007) scaffolds a conceptual framework and methodological approach that takes seriously the materiality of bycatch in relation to the various ways it is enacted through science and policy. Through a survey of policy and scientific documents, I trace the emergence of “bycatch” as a global fisheries issue (Hoefer 2011). This textual analysis includes government documents such as fisheries-related policy, reports, white papers, communications materials, congressional hearings, and the US federal record. Geographically, I focus on the emergence of bycatch in the science and policy landscape of the United States but also include documents from relevant international governing bodies such as the United Nations. Using the phenomenon of bycatch as an entry point, I argue that environmental objects and issues are not self-evident but instead coproduced in relation to the practices that attempt to measure and manage them (Barad 2007; Daston 2000; Jasanoff 2004, Latour 2005). This article puts forth a new understanding of bycatch as multiple and ontologically linked with the differential values inscribed through the practices of science and policy. Furthermore, by taking bycatch as my object of study, my analysis broadens the orderings and normative understandings about human and nonhuman life inflected by post-humanist and new materialist traditions, as well as fisheries science and policy.
New Materialism
New materialism emerged in the late twentieth century, as a response to postmodernist social constructionism. New materialist theory comes from a diverse suite of disciplines including science studies, feminist and queer theory, anthropology, geography, sociology, quantum physics, and others. The central tenants of new materialist thought include the following: (1) understanding beings as emergent out of relational and contingent processes rather than being fixed or stable; (2) doing away with dualist binaries such as nature/culture, proposing instead an understanding of nature and society as always already entangled and co-constitutive; (3) understanding that agency—the ability to have material effects in the world—is not singularly a human achievement but also a capacity of the more-than-human. While it is not the project of this article to summarize the breadth of this literature,2 it is important to trace the lineage that informs the analysis developed here. Important antecedents of new materialist thinking include actor-network theory (Callon 1984, Latour 2005; Law 2009) and assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), which both foreground the relationships between all manner of bodies, actors, ideas, objects, and elements as key sites of becoming, and regard agency as a more-than-human achievement (Latour 2005; Müller 2015). Building on these frameworks, the new materialists project is to examine how agency and power are enacted by, on, and through bodies and the material world. One of several theoretical traditions that constitute the “ontological turn” in the social sciences, new materialism breaks from social constructivist assumptions that the world has a single order and that difference is a product of varying perspectives or worldviews. Instead, difference is ontological: that is to say, there is no universal order but instead order emerges through material and relational practices and different practices produce different material realties (Latour 1993; Mol 2002, Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Implicit in relational ontologies are the agential properties of matter as such. That is to say, objects produced with and through relational practices are also partners in the productive process, in the “choreographies of becoming” (Coole and Frost 2010: 10). Furthermore, embracing the productive capacities of the nonhuman upsets the human exceptionalism that has guided much thinking on human-environment interactions. Post-humanism is a significant thread within new materialist thought that seeks to trouble longstanding dualisms of nature/culture or biological/social and turn notions of human exceptionalism on their head. That is to say, becoming is always becoming with more-than-human others (Haraway 2008).
The oceans and the nonhuman life-forms they encompass have been an object of biological sciences for the more than a century. This work takes for granted that nature exists separate from and before culture (i.e., human) and ignores the agential and affective qualities of more-than-human lifeworlds (save for Carson 1955). Historically, the humanities and social sciences theorized the ocean as a place of connection, a space that facilitates political, cultural, and economic relations between land-based societies. Post-structuralist thought brought about a re-narration of ocean space yet shackled the oceanic to spatial metaphor, a “signifier for a world of shifting, fragmented identities, mobilities and connections” (Steinberg 2013: 158). In marine social science and the environmental humanities more broadly, new materialism has sparked significant ontological and epistemological shifts in how we come to think about, study, and engage with oceans and fisheries (Anderson and Peters 2014; Steinberg 2013; Steinberg and Peters 2015). This work is characterized by calls to engage with the ocean as a lively space saturated with material and agential bodies and experiences. In troubling geographic binaries, Jon Anderson and Kimberly Peters contend that too long ocean and land have been artificially bounded as static and opposing entities. Instead, they propose a fluid ontology that understands the world as dynamic and spaces such as land, sea and air not as discrete and locked but “changeable, processual, and in a constant state of becoming” (2014: 5). This wet ontology takes “the ocean's liquidity to heart” as materiality in motion—distinctly different from the stability of land (Steinberg and Peters 2015).
Those following in the post-humanist lineage of new materialism attend to the ocean as a lively space of human and more-than-human relations. Stephan Helmreich's (2010) ethnography of the field of microbial oceanography demonstrates how ocean life acts on scientists in their scientific entanglements with the sea. Heather Swanson (2017) charts a new course that bridges fisheries science and multispecies ethnography through the material work of “reading salmon bodies.” She proposes repurposing classical fish biology methods of studying otoliths (ear bones) and fish scales to understand the social, historical, and material lives of fish both within and beyond their relations with humans. Another productive thread has followed the relational encounters between fishers and fish. Normative applications seek to use new materialism to widen the aperture of marine social science and management to consider the affective relations that emerge through fisheries (Nightingale 2013; Rossiter et al. 2015). Others question the binaries of fish/fisher, theorizing the ways in which this ordering is produced through relational encounters (Bear and Eden 2008; Duggan et al. 2014; Probyn 2016) For those focused on the ontological politics of human-fish orderings, their work engages with the ruptures that occur when the materiality of ontologically plural beings resists the ordering imposed by structures such as colonialism and capitalism. Zoe Todd (2014), working in with the Paulatuuq in Northern Canada, argues that human-fish relations are “active sites of engagement”: fish are integral to all aspects of community and social life. As such, Todd argues, “fish pluralities” as Indigenous cosmology should inform ongoing processes of Indigenous-state reconciliation. Marianne Lien (2015; see also Law and Lien 2013) examines farmed salmon as more-than-human actors entangled in processes of becoming with their human farmers. Lien troubles dominant discourses about exploitative capitalist social relations enacted through domestication. Lien re-narrates domestication not just as a technique for ordering relations but also as a generative site of more-than-human entanglements.
The article extends this body of work through its object of study: bycatch. Although bycatch can refer to fish, marine, mammals, seabirds, and other species, I am primarily focusing on the bycatch of finfish in commercial fisheries.3 This narrowed scope serves the purpose of highlighting the relational and contingent nature of finfish bycatch, particularly as a scientific and regulatory object situated and produced through the global capitalist system. This is not to diminish the significance of the bycatch of other species, which are similarly produced through capitalist enterprises and entangled in complex social, political, and economic networks. Instead differentiating between bycatches is important because while both are contingent, non-finfish bycatch is stabilized as always already negative. In other words, there is never a time when the bycatch of a sea turtle or an albatross can be (legally) leveraged as an economic commodity. Finfish bycatch has a somewhat more complicated situation in which it is at once a byproduct of capitalist systems yet in certain circumstances can be performed as a commodity. For example, certain kinds of bycatch can be sold as a secondary product, or the right to catch bycatch allocated through a fishing quota is traded on the quota market. Therefore, bycatch presents an interesting case study in that the material realities of bycatch constantly shift its position in global capitalist systems.
Ontologies of Scientific Objects
Science is thought to describe the reality of the natural world. Taken for granted is that the objects of study exist in an ordered, static, knowable state, and that the task of science is merely to come to know and represent them. Yet, according to new materialist logic, order is not given but instead emerges out of practice, in this case the practices of science. In short, the “practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated” (Barad 2007: 185). Barad posits that scientific objects and the tools, techniques, and practices used to measure them “emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” She employs the term phenomenon to describe the “specific intra-action of an “object” and the “measuring agencies” that bring it into being (128). Adopting the conceptual tool of phenomenon as a framework for studying bycatch then captures the entangled relations of becoming between bycatch and other human and nonhuman actors through the practices of fisheries science and management. Not only do the ways in which bycatch is measured, monitored, and, I would argue, managed constitute the everyday practices of enacting bycatch, but those practices are also brought into being with the creation and stabilization of bycatch. By proposing that bycatch be studied as a phenomenon, this articles advances a “methodological practice of continuously questioning the effects of the way we research, on the knowledges we produce” (381).
Given that scientific practices are heterogeneous and varied, the objects they yield are likewise multiple (Mol 2002). In other words, the difference between empirical realities is attributed not to different perspectives on a singular object but instead from different material practices that do, and that object in multiple and different ways with distinct material outcomes. An illustrative example of multiplicity in action is Mol's study of treatments for atherosclerosis. Mol demonstrates that the distinct sets of practices used by different medical disciplines to diagnose what was thought to be a singular disease actually produced multiple atherosclerosises. Her provocation is that if diseases are multiple, then how might they be done well? How might it be otherwise? However, to argue that scientific objects are multiple is not to say they are mutually exclusive. “Multiple objects tend to hang together” (2002: 5) and the “performances of an object may collaborate and even depend on one another” (1999: 83). In other words, objects and practices exist in relation to one another, but tensions arise when their material realities juxtapose in unruly ways.
But what does thinking with multiplicity do? Or put differently, what new reality does the practice of examining the ontologies of scientific objects enact? First, examining the relational practices of science brings attention to the messy nature of what might otherwise be considered a “finished” object, an object taken for granted. Second, it opens up space to examine the interrelatedness of objects: what are the relations that hold multiple objects together, and what practical work is done to make those objects “seem to be the same thing” (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013: 325). Third, examining material practices gives insight into the broader sociocultural milieu in which an epistemic culture is situated (Knorr Cetina 1999). This is particularly significant for understanding how objects shift and stabilize over time. Perhaps most significantly, examining ontologies of scientific objects “implies a shift from asking how sciences represent to asking how they intervene” (Mol 2002: 152). Multiplicity is inherently political because it means that what is, should, or might “be” is always in negotiation. To study ontological politics (Mol 1999) is to investigate the webs of relations and practices that brought a given reality into being and ask what alternative realities are possible or are yet unrealized (Law 2019; Law and Lien 2013). Likewise, conflicts “arise with respect to the assertion that there can only be one singular ontology” (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013: 334). Furthermore, ontological politics signals the normative work of advancing a particular object reality and prescribing how others (objects, bodies, entities, etc.) ought to behave in relation to that object.
Material-Discursive Practices in Fisheries
Shifting the focus to scientific practices unmasks the ontological origins of scientific objects, but scientific practices are also ontologically situated within sociohistorical contexts. That is to say, socially and historically contingent material conditions both enable and constrain how knowledge is made. Foucault (1977) called these conditions discursive practices and argued that they both reflect and shape how society is ordered. Power operates through discourse to create the boundaries that define subjects/objects or nature/culture. In so doing, discursive practices limit how objects are acted on and act in the world (Rose 2007). Yet, at the same time, “the relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment … neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior” (Barad 2002: 822). Discursive practices are enacted according to the conventions of societal institutions such as science and policy that change over time (Jaworski and Coupland 2014; Nead, cited in Rose 2007). As an example, fisheries science is a set of discourses, research practices, and technologies, deployed to assess and monitor the health and status of the fishery, and to inform decisions governing the relationships between its human and more-than-human constituents. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the agency that oversees research and management of US fisheries, a fishery is defined as “a unit determined by an authority that is engaged in raising or harvesting fish” with the objects that constitute that unit being the “people involved, species or type of fish, area of water or seabed, method of fishing, class of boats, and purpose of the activities” (Blackhart et al. 2006: 16). “Authority” in this definition signals either a management body or body of scientific expertise, which is authorized to define the fishery in question. Although managers and scientists are clearly integral to the construction of fisheries, they are simultaneously excluded from the social, spatial, and ecological boundaries of the fishery. In other words, in their role as defining authorities, they exist as a “view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988). Operating from a new materialist discursive practice, this article adopts a definition of “fishery” that includes fisheries science-management as a constitutive part of socioecological entanglements.
Given bycatch's long history in fisheries science and management, this article takes an historical approach to examining the material-discursive practices that have shaped bycatch over time, producing multiple, though interdependent, bycatches. Unearthing a scientific object's history reveals a great deal about the constellation of events and practices that brought that particular object into being, and what other objects have fallen away. When the histories of scientific objects go unexamined, the objects become naturalized, or taken for granted as always already part of an external nature, further obscuring the ontological politics of their stabilization. The scientific and regulatory practices through which bycatch is done are underpinned by normative understandings and social, political, economic, and scientific assumptions. These assumptions define the field of possibilities for how bycatch can—and cannot—exist in the world. Tracing the material-discursive practices that have enacted bycatch over time makes visible the multiplicity of bycatches, as well as why some have stabilized while others have fallen away, and raises questions as to how it might be otherwise.
Emergence of Bycatch in Fisheries Science-Management
I will now outline the sociohistorical conditions through which bycatch has emerged as an object of fisheries science and management. The analysis tacks between policy, government reports, and scientific literature to trace how the act of releasing, or discarding, fish became the behemoth of bycatch, constituting a global fisheries crisis. To understand how bycatch has come to be, I analyze the boundary work of the material-discursive practices of fisheries science and management that have simultaneously evolved in relation with bycatch.
Discards: Practicing Ecological Crisis
As early as 1906, the US Congress approved an act making it illegal to “wantonly waste or destroy any food fish” harvested within the three-mile territorial seas off the coast of Alaska (Fredin 1987: 7). Reynold Fredin, writing on the history of the Alaskan groundfish fishery, suggests that this concern for waste was more symbolic than anything. The act was passed at a time when it was thought that “in relation to our present modes of fishing, a number of the most important sea fisheries … are inexhaustible” (T. H. Huxley, “Inaugural Address: Fisheries Exhibition, London, 1883,” cited in Hubbard 2014). Citing numerous historical reports from the evolving US fisheries management apparatus, Fredin (1987) contends that salmon were the only Alaskan fisheries of interest to US regulators. Despite bycatch and discarding bycatch being a pervasive practice among commercial fishers in the Alaskan fisheries, few punitive measures were taken by managers to reduce those practices. Both cod and halibut were emerging profitable fisheries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they were thought to be of such abundance that there was little risk of overexploitation. Furthermore, it was precisely the profitability of these fisheries that led to discarding other species.
Although the 1906 congressional act sought to mitigate fishing “waste,” Dayton Alverson et al. (1994) cite the 1923 US-Canada Halibut Treaty as the explicit emergence of bycatch in regulation. Fisheries managers in the United States and Canada became increasingly concerned over bycatch in the Alaskan fisheries, especially as those fisheries underwent rapid industrialization in the postwar 1950s.4 In particular, foreign fishing by the Japanese trawl fleet targeting groundfish in these waters was thought to be impacting halibut and crab fisheries through their bycatch.5 As management concern about discards increased, the scientific community took interest, and in 1975, the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas passed a resolution (4:22) that emphasized the importance of collecting discard data and sharing that data at annual meetings. These concerns emerged at a time when scientists and environmental managers began to realize that natural resources were finite. While some attributed the material conditions of environmental decline on an overconsumptive, capitalist system, others argued that population growth was to blame for resource exploitation (Ehrlich 1978; Meadows et al. 1974). In fisheries, acknowledging the “limits to growth” marked a cleavage from the ethos that had guided science and management up to that point. Guided by the principles of maximum sustainable yield (MSY), fisheries scientists and managers thought fisheries were indefinitely exploitable and that maximum exploitation was key to maintaining healthy stocks. The postwar era had emphasized modernizing and industrializing fishing fleets, and according to MSY, failing to exploit fisheries to the fullest capacity constituted waste.
In 1983, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Fisheries and Aquaculture Department published a circular on the issue of fisheries discards. The paper proposed a methodology for estimating discards and offered some initial estimates of discards for prominent fisheries around the globe. The focus was not on bycatch per se but on fisheries discards more broadly, a move that was strategic rather than an oversight. In the report, Saul Saila explains the difference with an example comparing two different sets of fishing practices, which gives some insight into why he chose to focus his research on discarding rather than bycatch:
Not all bycatch is discarded. There is a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the small vessels of most of south and southeast Asia, making daily trips, and which retain most of their catch, and on the other, the larger trawlers—for example the standard US “Gulf of Mexico” type—which make long trips, and where limited freezing capacity means that most of the by-catch is discarded.” (1983: 3)
This distinction is significant for several reasons. First, Saila is clearly citing discards rather than bycatch as the problem. Second, he signals the relationship between bycatch, discarding, and industrial fishing practices. Throughout the report, Saila makes it clear that discarding is problematic for social and ethical reasons, more so than bioecological concerns. Writing at a time when neo-Malthusian discourses about food scarcity, development, and environmental resources loomed large, Saila argues that we should care about discards because they represent waste of a viable protein source. The problem raised by discarding has often been seen as a single problem: that of the waste occurring when potentially good food is thrown back to sea. This framing also leads Saila to reason that discards are a product of technical and economic drivers. Much discarding happened when vessels using trawl gear, large nets that are dragged along the ocean floor or through the pelagic (mid-water) ocean environments, would bring aboard more species that are not economically profitable enough to warrant taking up prime real estate in their freezers, leading the fishers to discard those species. The solution, according to Saila, was to develop markets for these fish to produce economic incentives for fishers to keep incidental catch. Fish, in this framing, are a resource to be exploited for human use: “The wastage in throwing back fish into the sea should be seen as no worse than the underutilization of some stocks (squids, mesopelagic fish, etc.) or the overfishing of others” (13).
A decade later, the FAO published a second report on bycatch, FAO Fisheries Technical Paper 339, which marked the first attempt to assess the scope of bycatch at regional and global scales. The substantive report reviewed eight hundred papers on bycatch to estimate global bycatch levels; highlight the biological, ecological, social, and economic impacts of discarding; and summarize policy approaches and potential future management directions. According to the report, by Alverson et al. (1994), bycatch was on the order of magnitude of 25 percent of commercial fishing harvest globally. The report is by far the most cited paper on bycatch and is quoted in reports from scientific, policy, and conservation sectors. Their work signals a change in terminology from “discards” to “bycatch,” and a discursive shift that elevated bycatch from a local and regional issue to a global environmental phenomenon. The production of bycatch as a global threat to fisheries gave fisheries science and management a shared goal at a time when fisheries production and health had been on the decline. The significance of this shift was not lost to Alverson (1999: 10), who acknowledges that “the escalation of bycatch (discarding) to a global priority has had the tendency for bycatch to take on a life of its own.” A year after Alverson et al. (1994) was published, the FAO member nations adopted the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. The code was an attempt to summarize the numerous fisheries regulations that had been adopted by various national and international bodies, and outline principles and goals for a unified approach to global fisheries health and management. That an international management document of this scale directly addresses the “bycatch problem” gives some indication that bycatch had in fact arrived on the global fisheries agenda. As bycatch gained traction, mangers were tasked with saving fisheries by managing bycatch, and to manage bycatch through the best available science. Implicit in this call to action was the use of two distinct, though interdependent, sets of practices—of science and of policy—to measure, manage, and mitigate a shared and singular target: bycatch. However, each of these sets of practices is founded in different ways of ordering reality, and, as a result, different bycatches.
The Ontological Politics of Bycatch
Although many recognize the emergence and escalation of bycatch in the 1980s and 1990s (Hall and Mainprize 2005; Wallace 1997), there has been disagreement as to which came first: bycatch science or the management of bycatch. This debate is underpinned by the assumption that bycatch as scientific object exists as a discrete singularity. However, bycatch as phenomenon does not preexist the relations that produce it. Furthermore, the heterogeneous practices of science and management not only are different ways of measuring or mitigating a singular fisheries issue but also produce multiple, different, yet interdependent bycatches. According to Alverson et al. (1994), scientists were the first to appreciate the severity and threat of bycatch, whereas management and industry remained woefully ignorant and unresponsive to the mounting bycatch issue. As illustrated in Figure 1, there had been a growing body of scientific literature on bycatch through the 1970s and 1980s, and scientific interest in bycatch spiked around the time of the authors’ writing.
Time series for the number of scientific journal articles indexed in Cambridge Scientific Abstracts on the topic of “fisheries by-catch.” Reprinted with permission from Hall and Mainprize (2005).
Citation: Environment and Society 11, 1; 10.3167/ares.2020.110107
Yet, others have claimed that a lack of scientific engagement has stymied the effectiveness of policy measures. In 1996, the American Fisheries Society organized a two-day symposium on bycatch in conjunction with their 1996 national meeting. The symposium brought together fisheries scientists, managers, extension agents, and other fish and wildlife professionals. Speaking on a panel at the symposium, Steven Murawski (1996), then chief population dynamist for the one of the leading regional fisheries research centers in the United States, made two noteworthy observations on bycatch science. First, that interest in bycatch from the scientific community had been a relatively recent venture.6 Following from this, he argued that bycatch science up to that point had been inadequate to inform management decisions reliably. Murawski's assertions, however, seem inconsistent with the timeline of bycatch science outlined by Steven Hall and Brooke Mainprize (2005) in Figure 1. Their study suggests that bycatch publications had steadily increased during the 1980s and 1990s, doubling just after the bycatch symposium (as one might expect). Further, Murawski's claim contradicts Alverson's framing of bycatch as a long-standing matter of concern for the scientific community.
The same year as the bycatch symposium, bycatch emerged for the first time in US federal legislation as National Standard 9 in the 1996 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), the primary piece of US federal legislation regulating fisheries. Senator Ted Stevens (one of the original authors of the MSA) spoke at congressional hearings in favor of the new bycatch provisions. He argued the measures were necessary because although the public laid blame for bycatch on the fishing industry, they viewed poor management as equally culpable in the problem. It is little wonder that managers may have sought to enroll scientists into carrying some of the fault. Fisheries management is mandated to be science-based, so if management isn't producing the desired results, the issue, and solution, is the need for more science and data. Likewise, blame and culpability are leveraged toward fishers (who are often involved in fisheries management at the regional scale). Alverson et al. (1994) contend that the fishing industry had been largely unresponsive to the mounting bycatch issue. Yet, in the early 1990s, the fishing industry had already begun organizing a series of workshops on bycatch in the United States regarding how to deal with bycatch. The general sentiment among fishers was that there was a dearth of scientific information, which caused misconceptions, mistrust, and inaccuracies, largely impacting the fishing industry. In the United States, the public and a critical environmental conservation sector saw bycatch as a byproduct of a careless, wasteful, and greedy fishing industry.
One interpretation might be that the mounting debate of which came first, bycatch science or management, speaks to differing perspective on a singular object of bycatch. However, a new materialist reading suggests that these claims indicate a frictional encounter between the differing material-discursive practices of science and policy, and the multiple bycatches they produce. To demonstrate how bycatch is done differently in science and policy, I offer an example from two representative US fisheries science and policy documents. The MSA is the primary piece of federal fisheries legislation, but it outlines a regulatory system in which regional management councils are vested with the authority and responsibility for managing fisheries falling within their geographic purview. The MSA defines bycatch as an object that regional councils must address through conservation measures and that these “management measures should to the extent practicable 1) minimize bycatch and 2) to the extent bycatch cannot be avoided minimize the mortality of such bycatch.” The bycatch provision was included at a time when concern about bycatch was building momentum nationally. To support the new bycatch legislation, the NMFS (1998) released the first national statement on bycatch as the report Managing the Nation's Bycatch. The report was intended as a conservation and management strategy for assessing and reducing bycatch. It also makes recommendations for “data collection, evaluation, and management actions necessary to attain the objectives,” and for setting a benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of national bycatch management measures. Table 1 compares the definition of bycatch in each of the documents.
Comparison of Bycatch Definitions in US Science and Policy
| MSA | Managing the Nation's Bycatch | |
|---|---|---|
| Definition of bycatch | Fish that are harvested in a fishery, but that are not sold or kept for personal use and includes both economic and regulatory discards |
Fishery discards, retained incidental catch, and unobserved mortalities resulting from a direct encounter with fishing gear |
| Species | Fish only (i.e., excludes seabirds and marine mammals) | Includes both fish and animals other than finfish species (e.g., seabirds, dolphins) |
| Encounter | Fish that are harvested only | Animals that are harvested or unknown interactions with fishing gear at sea |
| Outcome | Fish that are discarded only Does not count unintentionally harvested fish that are used for some other purpose (sold or consumed) | Includes all unintentionally caught animals regardless of what happens after encounter |
This example highlights how bycatch, done differently through scientific and regulatory practices, produces materially and discursively different bycatches. The distinction between these definitions is found in the ways in which each orders reality and in which these orderings ascribe value. In Managing the Nation's Bycatch, science orders reality: bycatch is done as data, enacted through the practices of monitoring, measuring, and modeling. Mortality, the rate at which fish of a given population die, is a central concept to fisheries science. Fisheries scientists categorize mortality as either “natural mortality” (meaning non-fishing-related deaths) and “fishing morality,” or death as a result of encounters with fishing gear. Bycatch shares a complicated relationship with the concept of mortality, because as these definitions demonstrate, bycatch is in some instances an object defined by mortality, whereas in other cases it is merely the potential of mortality that makes bycatch a matter of concern. The definition in Managing the Nation's Bycatch is therefore more inclusive, capturing all possible instances of bycatch. Another passage from the report further articulates the practice of bycatch, enacted as data and valued as a lively biological unit:
Bycatch mortality affects the sustainability of fisheries and the benefits that these resources provide the nation in two ways. First, it increases the uncertainty concerning total fishing-related mortality, which in turn makes it more difficult to assess the status of the stocks, to set appropriate optimum yield and overfishing levels, and to ensure that the optimum yields are attained and that the overfishing levels are not exceeded. Second, bycatch mortality precludes some other uses of fishery resources. For example, juvenile fish that are subject to bycatch mortality cannot contribute directly to the growth of that stock and to future directed catch. (NMFS 1998: 2)
As this passage shows, bycatch as data holds value through both its material impacts on the liveliness of fisheries and the knowledge it enables or precludes when scientists are (or are not) able to enact bycatch as data points through the practices of monitoring and modeling. What this means in practice is that the inclusive definition adopted by Managing the Nation's Bycatch is more practical for meeting scientific goals and gathering data.
The MSA, by contrast, is an instrument developed for the purposes of regulating commercial fisheries. Unlike bycatch as data, the bycatch enacted through the practices of fisheries regulation exists only in relation to capitalist processes. Bycatch gains value as both an actor and a collateral effect of capitalism: those that were harvested but are not able to be sold or otherwise consumed by fishers for subsistence. For the remainder of this article, I will refer to the bycatch produced through capitalist relations as “bycatch as capital.” The MSA definition introduces two particular subcategories of discarded bycatch, or bycatch that is released: regulatory and economic discards. These categories are significant in that they highlight the ways in which bycatch is materially and discursively produced through local fishery regulations and market exchange. Economic discards are fish that are discarded because they are of undesirable size, sex, or quality, or for other economic reasons (e.g., the hold space on the vessel was full). Regulatory discards are fish that are caught but discarded because regulations do not allow fishers to retain the fish; for example, they may be required to discard fish under a certain size or of a specific species for conservation reasons. The liveliness or death of bycatch are unremarkable in the MSA classifications.
Why might these differences matter? In part, they matter because these different bycatches are interdependent. In science-based resources management, science and policy coproduce one another (Jasanoff 2004). Yet at the same time, the practices of science and policy are different, producing different bycatches that, as I argue here, exist in tension sometimes inhibiting scientific and managerial mandates. That authority is distributed across regional management bodies amplifies tensions as day-to-day practices align with localized economic and material conditions. The multiplicity of practices for ordering and valuing bycatch “leads to a failure to fully appreciate the impact this often unmanaged, undocumented, biomass removal is having on the marine environment” (Davies et al. 2009: 62). In other words, how bycatch is done in a given locale shapes how it is measured, which in turn informs science-based management and produces material environmental consequences. Furthermore, bycatch done differently through regulatory and scientific practices often creates complex and at times contradictory policy landscapes that all involved (fishers, scientists, and policy makers) must navigate. What's at stake in the ontological politics of bycatch is not only different ways of valuing nonhuman life and nature more broadly, but also the sphere of possible interventions, and the material realities of actors involved.
Bycatch done as capital is enacted, on the one hand, through locally specific fisheries regulations and, on the other hand, through the material practices of fishing: that is to say, through the fleshy, wet, relational encounters between fishers, fish, and fishing gear. Regulatory solutions therefore often target individuals as the locus of change. One approach has been to allocate fishers bycatch quotas that can be bought or traded. The irony of this solution is that it further reproduces bycatch as capital. Material encounters of fishing are likewise entangled with fishing regulation. Therefore, the sphere of possible interventions is focused on technological solutions that will change material encounters. Technological fixes usually are gear-centric, such as developing new or improved fishing gears (e.g., specifying mesh size on a trawl net), or involve limitations on where and when a vessel can fish, by implementing season and area closures. For example, in 1992, the American Fisheries Society published a draft policy on the development of bycatch reduction devices, devices used on fishing gear to reduce encounters with nontarget species, observing that the devices were needed because “most fisheries are fully exploited and many are subjected to numerous other adverse environmental stresses,” going on to reason that “significant mortalities of juvenile finfish can decrease spawning stock potential and yields available to fisheries, and this population stress can also contribute to serious decreases in stock abundance” (Perra 1992: 28). While this passage clearly does bycatch as data, in identifying that fisheries are exploited it also obscures the processes of industrialization, commodification, capitalist expansion, and global trade through which fisheries are exploited.
The 2006 reauthorization of the MSA mandated the development of technological fixes through the Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program. Through this program, public funding is directed to support scientists, in collaboration with fishers, to develop technological solutions and collect data. Such an arrangement demonstrates the ways in which the fisheries have been reassembled under shifting management and science regimes (Lave 2012), once again orienting fisheries science within capitalist processes. Fisheries science emerged out of a need to industrialize and modernize the fleet (Finley 2011), yet now, because fishers became so successful through those efforts, scientists are needed to mitigate the effects.
Conclusions
For the past 40 years, bycatch has been a significant focus of fisheries science and management, garnering national and international directives for standardized measurement and reporting, and a host of mitigative management measures. Yet, bycatch has evaded clear definition, persisting as a perennial fisheries concern. Foundational to the bycatch issue is an ontological assumption that bycatch is a singular, stable, and knowable environmental object. This article puts forth a new framework for understanding bycatch as multiple, enacted through the material-discursive practices of science and policy. Frictional encounters occur at the nodes where human and more-than-human actors, such as fish, fishers, scientists, policy makers, and the market, interface, enacting practices that do bycatch differently. As this analysis illustrates, the ontological politics of how bycatch is or should be done is intricately linked with how value is ascribed in the ordering of reality. Bycatch eludes traditional political economic frameworks because it exists as a collateral effect of capitalism. The value of bycatch is not fixed but instead emerges out of the orderings of regulatory and scientific practices.
Yet, because fisheries management is science-based, bycatch also intervenes in capitalist relations by way of biopolitical concerns with the material condition of liveliness or death (Foucault 1990). Similarly, critical political economy drawing on a social constructionist lineage does not adequately account for the material properties of nature that resist capitalism or their own production. Social construction looks only to discursive ways in which nature is produced or made meaningful, ignoring the productive capacities of more-than-human beings or the agency of matter and materiality (Bakker and Bridge 2006). Approaching bycatch from a new materialist perspective makes visible the ways in which order and value are produced through the “measuring agencies” that seek to make bycatch knowable and manageable. Ontological multiplicity provides explanatory power for the ruptures that occur when bycatch done differently across practices fail to align. It also illustrates that bycatch as capital and bycatch as data, though different, are interdependent and reify normative understandings about the ordering and value of human and nonhuman life (Collard and Dempsey 2013).
This analysis broadens the orderings of human and nonhuman that new materialism inflects through its object of study, bycatch. Not human but not quite nonhuman, “bycatch,” through its discursive production, is given life as a more-than-human actor. Furthermore, while some argue that the only way to truly reduce bycatch is by reducing overall fishing effort, bringing the industrial fishing system to a halt is an unlikely outcome. Instead, understanding bycatch as multiple makes possible the question of how might fisheries be otherwise. How might we do bycatch, and fisheries better? What normative understandings about the value of nonhuman life might we change, and how would that shift the practices through which lives, human and nonhuman, are ordered?
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Lucy Jarosz, Elizabeth Shoffner, and the two anonymous reviewers for their support and extensive feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
Bycatch is a term used to describe a wide range of unintended interactions between commercial fishing gear and nonhuman sea life.
For a more thorough summary of the history and breadth of new materialist theory, see Alaimo and Hekman (2008); Coole and Frost (2010).
The policies and scientific literature reviewed in this article center on bycatch with this narrower definition.
These fisheries were managed by the International North Pacific Fisheries Commission, the International Pacific Halibut Commission, and the Alaska Region of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
As early as 1968, a monitoring program had been proposed to track the incidental catch of halibut in the Japanese trawl fleet (although it did not go into operation until 1972) (Fredin 1987).
This point was exemplified by the fact that the symposium at which he was speaking was the first organized attempt to address bycatch as a scientific community.
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