2001 Science in Society Journalism Awards

Book

David Dobbs

The Great Gulf

Island Press

Description

In the first Science in Society prize for a book, the judges praised Vermont author and journalist David Dobbs for The Great Gulf. The book examines the conflict between scientists and fishermen who are struggling to preserve the New England groundfish population. It showed how science, history and politics in the region have collided to create a perfect storm of science and society. Since the 1980s, increasingly stringent fishing regulations for the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank have pushed two well-meaning groups — scientists from the National Marine Fisheries Service and commercial fishermen — into repeated clashes over how many fish can be safely taken from the ecosystem, and how to understand the ocean itself.

By focusing on the efforts and lives of a few individuals, Dobbs created a balanced, engaging story, told with vigor and insight, and even a touch of humor. “A reasonable person might ask whether any of this mattered,” Dobbs wrote. “Obviously it mattered a lot to the fishermen, who resented that Fisheries Service formulas allowed little room for the sort of anecdotal knowledge that fishermen possessed in abundance. ('You want to piss off a room full of fishermen,' Jay Burnett told me a few months later in this same scientist's lounge, 'just say the word anecdotal.')”

David Dobbs

David Dobbs

Having engaged the natural world as angler, hiker, reader, wildlife tracker, and crew member on logging operations, fishing boats, and research boats, author David Dobbs has focused much of his work on how cultural and personal perspectives shape our relations with nature.

His first book, The Northern Forest (Chelsea Green, 1995, coauthored with Richard Ober) examines how differing aesthetic conceptions of the New England forest shape the political debate about overharvesting and development. The book drew acclaim from both forestry and environmental communities and won numerous awards.

In The Great Gulf, Dobbs explores how the divergent ways in which fishery scientists and fishermen study the ocean — one quantitative, broad-scaled, and highly structured, the other intuitive and close-grained — created a destructive clash over not just how many fish remain in New England’s once-rich ocean, but how to best understand nature. The clash over fish stock assessments, says Dobbs, is "an epistemological debate disguised as a fish fight."

Originally from Texas, Dobbs now lives in Montpelier, Vermont. He is currently writing Reef Madness, a book about the 30-year argument that 19th Century oceanographer Alexander Agassiz had with Charles Darwin over how coral reefs form, to be published by Pantheon in 2003.

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