Abstract

Social scientists in Atlantic Canada developed an incisive political economy of the region’s fisheries in the 1970s and 1980s and forged a sharp critique of Canadian fisheries policies. Meanwhile, fisheries scientists generated a series of stock assessments which substantially overestimated cod populations. After the collapse of the stocks in 1992, a number of reflective postmortems have addressed the role of the social and natural sciences in this resource failure. The present paper will attempt to construct a “political ecology” of the crisis from this corpus, one which does not, a priori, privilege industrial capitalism over cod ecology.

Keywords: fisheries, cultural ecology, political economy, technology, Atlantic Canada, cod

How to Cite:

McGuire, T., (1997) “The Last Northern Cod”, Journal of Political Ecology 4(1), 41-54. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/v4i1.21345