Forgot abundance
of this abalone shore
Crumbed with kelp
receding sun-lipped flourish
Horizon's pallid vagaries
shrouding emerald headlands
Pipers twine the purring froth
ebbing into smooth
Stippled raft of gulls
chitters now gone silent
We try recall, but
each lap washes out
echoes of the living feast
lapsing into sand.
Sand Cut Beach
The Science
"My grandparents used to tell stories about how you could walk across the backs of the salmon—
they were so plentiful that you could walk across the river on their backs." — Ernest Alfred
I wrote this poem while reflecting about the natural abundance of past times, which is so greatly reduced today that we have lost lost our cultural memory of it. We have grown used to diminishment and decline. This decline was largely precipitated through short-sighted management practices. For millennia, coastal First Nations in the Northeast Pacific managed for abundance through maintaining a careful balance between sea otters, abalone, sea urchins and kelp. Such abundance has been lost.
The paper Drawing on indigenous governance and stewardship to build resilient coastal fisheries: People and abalone along Canada’s northwest coast (Lee et al., 2019) describes how colonizers extirpated the sea otter population through the global fur trade. The resulting "lack of sea otter predation allowed populations of their macroinvertebrate prey, including abalone and sea urchins, to increase greatly in abundance." This was followed by introduction of a Federally managed commercial abalone fishery, which aided by technologies like SCUBA, dramatically increased in the 1970s, resulting in the collapse of abalone populations by the 1990s. “They [commercial abalone fishery] just annihilated the biomass ... after that my people were told that they couldn’t eat that stuff [abalone] anymore.” (William Gladstone Sr., Heiltsuk Nation, Jan. 2012).
Lee, L. C., Reid, M., Jones, R., Winbourne, J., Rutherford, M., & Salomon, A. K. (2019). Drawing on indigenous governance and stewardship to build resilient coastal fisheries: People and abalone along Canada’s northwest coast. Marine Policy, 109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103701
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