Taylor Walters - March 17, 2026: The Cod Crisis (Outside Reading Entry)

After discussing the Tragedy of the Commons and watching the documentary about cod fish in class, I wanted to read more about the actual collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery. I found that it's an extremely depressing environmental story. According to the Science History Institute, cod was one of the most abundant fish in the North Atlantic for centuries. It was the foundation of New England and Maritime Canadian economies. Then industrial fishing technology combined with what Garret Hardin described, open access, self-interest, no meaningful regulation, caused one of the most catastrophic fishery collapses in history. By the early 1990s the cod population had dropped to about one percent of its historical levels. Canada declared a moratorium in 1992. Thirty years later the population still hasn't fully recovered. What makes this story so relevant to class is that scientists were raising alarms for decades before the collapse. The data was there and the warnings were ignored because the economic and political pressure to keep fishing was too strong. This is an example of Hardin's tragedy playing out in real life at a massive scale. It also makes me wonder about Elinor Ostrom's opinion, we briefly discussed her in class but haven't gone too in-depth yet. It seems to me that both the Canadian and New England fishing communities were too large, competitive, and maybe too trapped in global markets for community-based solutions to work in time.

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