Abstract

Water makes a poor archive. Eddies whirl without leaving trace, tides erase footprints. The apparent immutability of large water bodies has long lured modern fishing societies into catastrophically volatile practices, and has likewise challenged historians studying past interactions of humans with marine ecologies – the historical record essentially lost at sea.

In this seminar, I discuss Arthur McEvoy’s 1986 The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and the Law in the California Fisheries 1850–1980, an account of a tragic boom and bust-cycle. Instead of simply chastising greed, McEvoy combined law, economic history, anthropology, and innovative ecological science to create a finer understanding of the knowledge and myths that (mis)guide fish-dependent communities.

Though hardly the first and certainly not flawless, McEvoy was relatively early in doing what many are still doing: combining historical methods with ecology to narrate complex human-environment interactions. Prompted by growing environmental awareness, recent scholarship has widely theorized on the methodological and narrative innovations required for historicizing such relations – through McEvoy, I sketch a modest prehistory of these continuing challenges.