Kate McNally is a sixth-year PhD candidate at the anthropology department. We spoke with her about her work studying the collapse of the northeast cod fisheries, post-graduate plans, and the art in her forthcoming dissertation.
What is your research about?
I study inequality and environmental change in rural North America, specifically in the fishing communities in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador (that’s where my dissertation is based). When I say “Newfoundland” I’m referring to the island portion of that province, which is the part I’ve been working in. My dissertation focuses on a small community that I’ve lived in for almost 3 years now, on and off. It’s about how the collapse of the cod fishery—the decline of the North Atlantic cod—has impacted that town and impacted all of rural Newfoundland.
Basically, what was formerly one of the most abundant fisheries in the world completely collapsed in 1992. Canada declared a moratorium on the Newfoundland cod fishery and 30,000 people lost their jobs essentially overnight. It was the largest industry closure in Canada to date. Since then, there has been wide-scale depopulation, and I’ve been learning about what’s it like to live in the wake of that environmental collapse.
But more broadly, I’m interested in how external representations of reality—something, for instance, like a fisheries model—can impact rural communities. I’m taking that concept much more broadly, thinking about how colonial mapping, fisheries models, industrial fishing nets, and tourism images have all impacted the people and the multi-species community that lives there.
In a sense, these are all forms of enclosure. The “Tragedy of the Commons” is often invoked when a fishery crashes. It’s a famous 1968 article that uses a cautionary tale of environmental collapse to advocate for the privatization of commons and common pool resources. Many authors have shown how the Tragedy of the Commons is a profoundly flawed idea: just because a resource or a place is held in common does not mean it’s unmanaged or uncared for, and privatization has actually enabled the seizure of land and resources that has produced global environmental collapse. I’m interested in what emerges when we bring this critical thinking on enclosure into analyzing representational forms that have shaped life in rural Newfoundland.
What are fisheries models?
Since you can’t physically count how many fish are in the ocean you have to base it on population models, which are based on a species’ life-history, reproduction rates, sampling and historical catch data. So population models of fish, or fisheries models, are essentially statistical estimations of how many fish are in a particular population of a given species. Using these models, authorities provide fishing quotas, or catch limits, to fishing operations of different sizes.
One of the things that happened in the 1970s when fishery models really started being utilized to provide catch limits to industry is that they would only model one species of fish or just the interactions between a small number of species. But oceans are complex and changing. In the case of North Atlantic cod the simplified model was flawed, giving people the wrong catch amounts and resulting in overfishing. Dean Bavington writes about this in his book Managed Annihilation. In this particular instance, a large-scale action was based on a confined picture of reality that happened to not be correct, causing an ecological disaster.
What inspired your research?
I grew up in New England and went to college in Maine, and I was really interested in the fishing communities in the region where I’m from. I spent a summer working on a lobster boat in New Brunswick, Canada and also recorded oral history interviews with people from the island of Grand Manan. I completely fell in love with this subject. I found it fascinating: how do you protect a species that moves and also the people who depend upon it?
What brought you to the Environmental Humanities program?
The Yale PhD Program was unique in its focus on environmental anthropology. I was really excited about being in a cohort of people who were all thinking about anthropology and environmental change. And that has continued to be so rich.
My work is really interdisciplinary. I’m thinking about history, science, and a lot about how reality is represented by different kinds of power structures or institutions. The environmental humanities—which is such a rich community of people to be a part of—provided weekly workshops with other students during my first two years here, and it was just so cool to be in conversation with people across the disciplines, who are all thinking about really similar questions. I love how creative and expansive the space is.
I think that the existence of a multi-disciplinary community has opened up so many different possibilities for me, helping me think about the future and my place in academia. It’s made me hopeful and excited about interdisciplinary thinking and possibilities.
Any post-graduate plans?
I’m definitely going to apply for academic postdocs and positions. I would also love to be able to teach seminars in the environmental humanities at a teaching-intensive institution. I love working with undergraduates, and right now I’m teaching a class with my advisor called “Inequality in the Anthropocene: Thinking With the Unthinkable.” It’s just been such a rewarding experience, and the students are so engaged.
I would also be excited about working outside of academia. I don’t know quite what the options are for that yet, but it’s definitely something I would consider. I hope to live in Newfoundland and continue to live in the place where I’ve done my research.
Part of your dissertation focuses on ghost nets. What are they?
Ghost nets are industrial-sized gill nets made out of nylon monofilament that have detached from their moorings and drift on the ocean currents, entangling and killing millions of marine organisms. The research idea for that section of my dissertation came out of an interview with a fisherman who was talking about the nets that he had used prior to the fisheries’ collapse. The fisherman who brought this up to my attention talked a lot about how these ghost nets made him feel, and it highlighted the care that a lot of fishermen have for the ocean and work they do.
I had never heard about ghost nets before then. But after some research, I learned that it’s become this global phenomenon—these lost nets make up probably 10% of marine trash but up to 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Ghost nets are very difficult to detect because floating monofilament doesn’t register on sonar—and also because the ocean is very big! So they move on the ocean currents and continue to capture and kill fish.
In Newfoundland, the design for monofilament gill nets was based on external understandings of (and desires for) the marine ecosystem. Many fishermen in the 1970s actually voiced their deep concerns about the introduction of these nets by the government, but they had little choice but to use them because those nets were being subsidized. Ultimately these huge nets contributed to the cod collapse, and now thousands of them are still drifting lost through the ocean.
Ocean modelers and net designers that I’ve interviewed in Newfoundland today know these things and talk about them candidly. It’s been wonderful to learn from them about the ways their models are always partial and contingent and how, amidst ample social and environmental uncertainty, these contemporary researchers try to learn about the ocean and minimize harm.
What is the cod industry’s outlook today?
There’s a curtailed summer cod fishery in Newfoundland every year, so fishermen can still get a cod quota. However, that’s dramatically reduced from what it used to be. Some fishermen can catch their quota within 2 weeks—so it exists—but in a much smaller way than it used to. Fishermen I’ve spoken with say that they’re seeing more cod, but that depends on where they’re fishing and where the fish are circulating. There are far, far fewer fishermen in Newfoundland than there were thirty years ago, but those still fishing largely depend on lobster and snow crab rather than cod.
You’re including artwork in your dissertation. What does that look like?
In some ways, a dissertation is an external representation of reality and a kind of enclosure. I’m hoping I can play with art to acknowledge that and illustrate ways in which the world resists attempts to contain it—how environmental management and the knowledge it depends upon is always partial and contingent. I want to show how ideas about the world can escape their moorings and act in unintended ways.
I’m using a mixture of watercolor and cyanotype, and one of the reasons why I like both of those mediums is that they’re really difficult to control. I’m painting at the same time as I’m writing, and it’s been a great way to take a break from looking at my computer.
Cyanotype is an older photography process where you take photo-sensitive paper, put a negative on top of it, and expose it in the sun. The negative gets imprinted onto the paper in a blueprint. What I’ve found is that if you can get the chemical mixture, you can basically paint it on a piece of paper. However, you can’t totally control how the print comes out. Sometimes it comes out great. Sometimes it comes out really badly with light leaks. But I love the feeling of working with the uncertainties of sunlight and water and chemical mixtures rather than trying to fully constrain an image to my own prior vision for it. What emerges is often way different, and way more beautiful, than I could have imagined.