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 natu… - Mark Kurlansky

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.

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.

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.