First came “The Perfect Storm.” Then I read about “The Lobster Coast.” I’ve learned that fishermen are fighting “Against the Tide.” I’ve even gone back to one of the first great books about the perils of commercial fishing, “Beautiful Swimmers.” 

So when “Entanglements” landed on my desk, I was skeptical. Why on earth do I need to read another book about the fate of fishermen and their prey?

But with a dozen whale watch charter boats on our stretch of coastline, and a personal hankering for fresh lobster and cod, what I did need to read about is this: One of the largest, most tenacious creatures on Earth, which has not been hunted since 1930, teeters on the edge of oblivion. In fact, the northern right whale’s odds grow worse each year, and two recent human developments account for at least one-third of their deaths: faster ships and more durable fishing gear.

The government has set up regulations to deter these deaths, but if you had a whale stuck in your gear, would you report it to the government?

To save the whales, one day, maybe as soon as tomorrow, under U.S. law a federal judge might halt lobster and gill net fishing altogether.

I like lobster, and I like whales. I like working fishermen, and I dread the fate of my town without them. And I fear for our fate if we keep killing whale calves and reproductive females. As always, it’s hard to figure out where to stand—with the whales or the conservationists. Johnson suggests we can stand with both.

A former commercial fisherman and marine reporter, she has a great story, and, after a bit of a false start in the prose of the first chapter, she tells it well. Yet what she uniquely articulates is why the current polarized conversation between fishermen, government officials and conservationists is a dead-end. Johnson’s own surveys have revealed that three quarters of fishermen agree that saving endangered species should be the first or second priority for federal officials, and the majority of environmentalists and animal rights activists believe that fishing communities are an important part of their nation’s culture and economy. Nonetheless, the two groups speak separate languages.
I reached Johnson for a phone interview on a recent Saturday morning.

“One thing I did learn very clearly is that the basic value system and languages of people on polar ends of the issue are very different. Especially between fisheries advocates and animal rights advocates. Not only do they have a different value system, but they have different cultures, speak a different language in many cases. It leads them to vilify one another, to distrust one another. When they speak about whales, they actually have different whales in mind, different visions of what they’re trying to preserve. They have different ideas of what fisheries are and what’s important to them.”
Johnson will testify at next year’s congressional hearings on the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevenson Act, the main federal law governing fisheries management in the United States. “I’ll be speaking primarily on the effect of legislative and regulatory structures on trust, and viability of regulation, what are the effects on the way people talk to one another about these issues,” she says.
As for the whales, researchers are using old logbooks and DNA from piles of whale bones at long-abandoned tryworks along the Atlantic coast to learn where whales traveled and how many there were in a pre-overfishing, pre-global warming world. Meanwhile, fishermen continue to fight the battle to preserve their unique way of life.

“It’s hard to look closely, especially at the environmental side of it, and not feel ambivalent about it,” noted Johnson in the interview. “And many of the fishermen I’ve spoken to have the same ambivalence that it’s time to take responsibility for the future of the fisheries in ways that our parents never did. And even though our parents gave us these communities and ways of life and independence and ingenuity, they also gave us a world in which they had been squandering the resources.

“Only since the crash of the groundfishery on the East Coast and a few similar events have people started to say wait, this can’t work, and we can’t exploit resources the way we have been. I think the future of the way of life, the economies, the fishing communities in New England and the Canadian maritimes is going to depend on real change among government, fishermen and even environmentalists.”

I walk away from reading “Entanglements” knowing more about whales, but also more about how we talk when two interests clash. On a planet where so many necessities are increasingly scarce, from groundfish to oil to water to clean air, figuring out how to separate whales and fishing gear might offer some insight about how to divide the rest of our dwindling resources in the 21st century.

Tora Johnson will share stories from "Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen” Thursday, Aug. 4 at 7 p.m. at RiverRun Bookstore, 7 Commercial Alley, Portsmouth, 603-431-2100