Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky (born December 7, 1948 in Hartford, Connecticut) is an American journalist and writer of general interest non-fiction. He is especially known for titles on eclectic topics, such as cod or salt.

Mark Kurlansky (2013)

Quotes

• In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Gonzalez government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques." To demonstrate the sincerity of its stance, the new government decided to have the entire twenty-three-person directorate of Herri Batasuna arrested.
  • The Basque History of the World (1999)

• Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything. (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)
  • A Continent of Islands (1992)

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997)

All quotes from the hardcover first edition, published in 1997 by Walker Publishing Company, ISBN 0-8027-1326-2, 1st printing

• To a cod, ocean floors mean safety. That is why they were rendered commercially extinct by bottom draggers.
  • Prologue: Sentry on the Headlands (So Close to Ireland) (p. 10)

• If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod—the common fish. But it has among its predators man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod.
  • Chapter 2, “With Mouth Wide Open” (p. 45)

• In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force.
  • Chapter 5, “Certain Inalienable Rights” (p. 81)

• The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy.
  • Chapter 6, “A Cod War Heard ’Round the World” (p. 93)

• All revolutions are to some degree about money.
  • Chapter 6, “A Cod War Heard ’Round the World” (p. 93)

• The ocean floor left behind is a desert. Any fish swimming in the vast area of these nets is caught. The only control is mesh size. Fish that are smaller than the holes in the net can escape. While mandating minimum mesh sizes has become a favorite tool of regulators, fisherman often point out that once the back wall of the cod end has a good crop of fish in it, few fish of any size can escape, regardless of how big the mesh. Millions of unwanted fish—undesirable species, fish that are undersized or over quota, even fish with a low market price that week—are tossed overboard, usually dead.
  • Chapter 8, “The Last Two Ideas” (pp. 140-141)

• The 200-mile limit was not seen in Canada, the United States, or anywhere else as a conservation measure, but rather as a protectionist measure for the national fisheries.
  • Chapter 11, “Requiem for the Grand Banks” (p. 181)

• But while the new, offshore all-Canadian fishery was prospering, the inshore fisherman found their catch dropping off. They suspected the reason was that the offshore draggers were taking so many cod that the fish did not have a chance to migrate in the shore to spawn. The inshore fishermen complained to the regulatory agency, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but the government had invested in offshore fishing, not inshore, and its political priority was to make its investment a success story.
  • Chapter 11, “Requiem for the Grand Banks” (p. 182)

• Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all.
  • Chapter 11, “Requiem for the Grand Banks” (p. 186)

• Commercially successful fish farms reduce operating costs by feeding pellets of pressed fish meal rather than wild bait fish. In the case of salmon they are also fit artificial coloring to give them the pink tin to the acquire in the wild from eating crustaceans. Gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops.
  • Chapter 12, “The Dangerous Waters of Nature’s Resilience” (p. 196)

• Whatever steps are taken, one of the great obstacles to restoring cod stocks off of Newfoundland is an almost pathological collective denial of what has happened. Newfoundlanders seem prepared to believe anything other than that they have killed off nature’s bounty.
  • Chapter 12, “The Dangerous Waters of Nature’s Resilience” (p. 204)

• Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.
  • Chapter 12, “The Dangerous Waters of Nature’s Resilience” (p. 204)

• Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process.
  • Chapter 13, “Bracing for the Spanish Armada” (p. 210)

• The Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 had extended the exclusive U.S. fishing zone to 200 miles offshore and set up as regulators regional fishery management councils dominated by fishing interests. Fishermen never had been good regulators, but they were virtually encouraged not to be by loan guarantees and other financial incentives that led to a massive growth in the U.S. fishing fleet. In 1994, when the National Marine Fisheries Service counted fish stocks, it concluded that the fleet was about twice as large as the fish stocks could sustain.
  • Chapter 14, “Bracing for the Canadian Armada” (p. 221)

• As long as fisherman can catch a fish, they resist the idea that the species is in trouble. But with cod, they all recognize that there is a problem.
  • Chapter 14, “Bracing for the Canadian Armada” (p. 226)

• It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.
  • Chapter 14, “Bracing for the Canadian Armada” (p. 233; closing words)