Zeke Grader has been fighting all his life for the survival of West Coast fisheries and the families who depend on them for their livelihood. It’s always been tough—80 percent of the fishing families have vanished over the last 30 years—but the battles he’s about to wage look more formidable than ever.
As executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, Grader has faced off against agribusiness, the timber industry and water-diversion projects that have depleted or polluted fish habitats. What he sees on the horizon now is a convergence of multinational food corporations, the oil industry and other interests that, with support by the federal government, are bent on establishing giant fish farms off the coast of California. Grader fears that unless these fish farms are carefully controlled, they could wipe out entire species of wild fish.
Grader has been head of the PCFFA since the organization was formed in 1976. Before that, fishermen had no unified voice in politics, although Grader’s father helped them move in that direction. The owner of fish processing plants in Fort Bragg and Sausalito, a congressional aide and deputy resources secretary for Governor Pat Brown, Grader’s dad was instrumental in establishing marketing associations for fishermen and worked to protect salmon runs. As a kid, Grader tagged along with his father onto the fishing boats, even sitting in on smoke-filled meetings in his father’s office with fishermen and their political contacts. Years later, after Grader passed the bar and took on his father’s mission, he inherited his massive old oak desk, which still reeked of cigars until only recently.
When I visit Grader at the PCFFA, the desk is buried under mounds of papers, books and memorabilia—a sign bearing the word “whining” crossed out inside a red circle, a “No Frankenfish” button, a tiny porcelain fisherman. I step over newspaper clippings, more papers and books as I make my way to a comfy leather chair. Every space is covered with stuff, most of it work-related. Ancient volumes, published more than a century ago by the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, line shelves. Below them are photos of Grader’s cocker spaniel, Scarlett, his three nephews and a niece. Grader and his wife, also an attorney, have no children. Propped against another bookshelf is an old bike that Grader never rides. He does like to run, though. He usually goes five or six miles before work, down the bayside path outside his office in the Presidio, along the northernmost tip of San Francisco.
The PCFFA is housed in an old converted military building along with the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary offices, just steps from the bay. Grader can see the Golden Gate Bridge from his second-story window. He’s a compact, open-faced man, age 57, with bushy red eyebrows. He takes time out from writing some legislation to talk about the battles he’s fought for the fisheries and the ones to come.
Most of your members are small, family operations. Is there also a big, corporate fishing industry?
Not in the United States, except in a couple of areas. We had ample fish stocks off our coasts—large stocks of cod, salmon and sardines—so we never had the need to develop fleets to fish the high seas—the exception being our tuna fleet.
What about fish farms? Aren’t they usually big operations?
There haven’t been large fin-fish operations, except off of the coast of Washington. Mostly it’s been in British Columbia—the big salmon farms owned by European multinational corporations. That’s not to say that’s not going to be a problem in the future. There are plans afoot in this administration to push hard for ocean aquaculture legislation and offshore fish farming. And there are a number of problems that have to be resolved.
What are the problems?
Everything from pollution, spread of disease to the wild, the escape of the fish into the wild and either preying on native fish or interbreeding with native stocks and weakening them, because the farm fish are not as adept at survival in the wild. Probably the biggest problem that nobody wants to address is the net loss of protein. Most of the types of aquaculture that are being considered right now require other types of wild fish to be fed to them—wild fish that are perfectly edible by themselves.
Like what?
Sardines. Anchovy. Herring. Bluefish. These are all fish that are perfectly good sources of protein. And they’re being harvested off Third World countries, where they are the major protein source. Instead, they’re being ground into fish feed. It takes about four pounds of this fish feed to create one pound of salmon flesh. Well, that’s not a good use of protein. So you’re seeing a net loss of protein. We’re taking fish from these Third World countries to create fish for luxury and high-end Western nations.
Who’s pushing for this to happen?
There are a handful of very large corporations involved in aquaculture, most of them European. They now have operations in Canada and Chile.
They have political allies here?
There are some people within this administration that are supporting this because of a tie-in with the oil industry. I’ll explain that in a minute. But there are also some researchers that also have entrepreneurial interests. The skills they’d be honing with public dollars could be translated into their own private operations. For example, Hubbs-Sea World [Research Institute] was involved in a sea bass hatchery in Southern California and has now taken much of what they’ve learned with those public moneys funding their research and development and now they’re getting into private fish farming. There are also some coastal communities, including native communities in Alaska, where there’s high unemployment and you’ve got some small-town boosters promoting fish farming.
So what’s the oil industry’s interest in this?
The oil industry has a severe problem on its hands—what do you do with all these rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and off the California coast whose useful life is over? They’ve depleted the oil and they have a contractual obligation to remove the rigs and clean up the sea floor. Well, the cost of removal off the Santa Barbara channel is around $30 million or more. And they’ve been proposing everything from offshore resorts to prisons to get out from under this liability. One of the latest ideas is using the platforms for offshore aquaculture operations. So you have Hubbs-Sea World teaming up with Chevron.
This sounds insane!
It is insane. It’s better than fiction.
It can’t possibly be healthy for the fish to be raising them in water contaminated by oil drilling.
No, it’s not. Nobody’s actually done any assaying around these rigs. Nobody wants to take a look at the water quality. Here in California, unless you have oil seepage around the rigs, and there has been, chances are the water quality may be OK. In the Gulf of Mexico, however, they’ve been finding tremendous levels of mercury around these rigs because they allowed the oil industry to dump their drill muds, which contain mercury. We don’t have that problem in California because the state Lands Commission and the Coastal Commission insisted that all the drill muds had to be disposed of safely ashore. Nevertheless, it is problematic in that everybody had hoped that these rigs would be taken out and cleaned up as they agreed when they leased these areas.
This idea is at what stage now in the planning process?
This is one of the centerpieces of the president’s ocean action plan that he announced last month. He’s pushing legislation authorizing the Department of Commerce to lease areas for offshore aquaculture and to fund some of the research and development. They’re looking at introducing it next year. One positive note here on the West Coast is he’s going to have to go over two of his fellow Republicans: Ted Stevens from Alaska, who just finished chairing the Senate Appropriations Committee and who will now be chairing the Senate Commerce Committee, and Lisa Murkowski, who was just barely re-elected—she’d been appointed when her father, who had been the senator, was elected governor of Alaska. Their constituents are dead-set against any sort of offshore aquaculture, so they’ve both taken very strong stands against it. Alaska has always felt they can produce all the fish they want through natural systems. They produce more than half of the fish that are harvested in the U.S. And they feel that offshore aquaculture is a real threat because of what it could do to natural stocks.
How does it affect wild fish?
There’s been some real damage done to native fish stocks in Canada from these salmon farms. And in Norway, they basically lost their native runs of salmon because of salmon farm operations. It’s a choice that people are going to have to make, of whether they want to go with these offshore operations being promoted by a few large corporations in conjunction with some large food manufacturers, or trying to stay with natural systems, and doing a better job of protecting habitat and making sure the rules on fishing promote sustainability.
Is there any way of managing these offshore operations so they don’t threaten native fish?
Not all forms of aquaculture are bad. They can meet the criteria of not polluting, not having fish escape, not spreading disease in the wild, and it can actually create a net gain in protein—and that’s the type we should be promoting. The problem is, that’s not always the most profitable for these big companies. And that’s what we’re up against.
Has the federation always been concerned with the environmental health of the fisheries?
Salmon fishermen were keenly aware of what had happened to the resource because of operations of the Central Valley Project, the big dam operations in the Sacramento system as well as on the Klamath River—also what was happening in the watersheds because of bad logging practices. Out of that evolved a conservation ethic, that governments would not take care of these watersheds unless they leaned on them. It was natural then that alliances would be struck with some of the environmental groups like the Sierra Club. For fishermen, there was an economic stake. When you put dams up, you lose critical habitat for salmon. For us, it’s not just about a viewshed or an ethic, it’s a basic economic thing. People saw very clearly that if they didn’t work for sustainability, they would be out of business very quickly.
It seems like the fisheries are up against a lot of industries that have a whole lot more political clout—oil, logging, agribusiness.
Somebody once described us as a flea running up an elephant’s leg with rape on its mind. So, yeah, there are some very powerful forces, and we learned a long time ago to try and work in alliance with other groups, like the environmentalists and also family farmers—some of the organic growers and people that are trying to farm in a sustainable manner that’s environmentally friendly.
Your job must be a lot harder with Bush in office.
I think, far and away, this is the worst administration for the fishing industry in our nation’s history. No doubt about it. At the same time, in some ways it makes things easier, because we know clearly who the enemy is. In the Clinton administration, they were always there as your friends, but they would never go quite far enough to do what was needed. For example, on the Columbia River, there are four dams there that need to be removed—it just doesn’t make economic sense to keep them in place. The Clinton administration knew it, but they kind of waffled around. They did not want to take on some of the entrenched interests like the tug and barge operators up there. And it made it very difficult for us because on other issues they were on the right side. Whereas with the Bush administration, we can pretty much count on the fact that anything they do is going to be bad and you don’t have to pull your punches. And they do create a great target. I don’t think we’ve had a target like this since James Watt was Secretary of the Interior. And that makes it clearer for the public to understand what we’re up against. But a lot of what we’re doing is just defensive action. We’re not making the progress we would otherwise be making, restoring some of these habitats, bringing back these fisheries and, with them, the jobs in the communities that depend on them. It’s important for these tribal communities in places like the Klamath, where there is this historical dependence on the fish going back 10,000 years. It would be sad to think that the tribal culture will be nothing but casinos 50 years from now. And it’s important for people to be able to go into the market and buy the local fish. Or going down to the boats and buying the fish there. And for families to know that their sons and their daughters have an option to go away to college and come back with their degree and work the boat.
Has there been much erosion in the number of family fishing operations?
Here in California, particularly with salmon fishing, it’s mostly a family operation. We saw a lot of husband and wife teams, fathers and sons, whole families fishing on board. And we’ve lost about 80 percent of them in the time I’ve been here. Some of that loss happened in the ’90s, with the big dot-com boom. There just wasn’t the interest of young people coming into the fisheries, not just because there was a downturn in the fisheries.
How did you get into the fishing business?
I was raised around the fishing boats. My father had come to California to get into the fish reduction business—grinding up sardines and fish scraps for fish meal. We settled in Fort Bragg and he ended up working closely with the salmon fishermen in some of their early efforts aimed at trying to protect what was left of the resource. So he had the fish company and supplemented that with taking over a small-town weekly newspaper and running that with my mother, who was the English major. Then, after the 1958 elections, when there was a Democratic sweep and Clem Miller got elected to Congress, my father became his field aide. Miller was working on creating the Point Reyes National Seashore when he was killed in a plane crash and my father went to work in the Pat Brown administration as the deputy resources secretary. So from the time I was 5 or 6, I was always around the boats and the fishermen. It was a small town and a very close-knit community—to this day. At my mother’s 80th birthday party, half the people there were the fishermen that I knew from the time I was growing up. My mother still lives there. My father died about 20 years ago.
What brought you to Marin?
My father opened a fish processing plant in Sausalito in 1964 and I decided that’s where I wanted to be, so I came down to Sausalito to run the plant and just stayed, living in a houseboat, going to college. When I finished law school and passed the bar, about that time the fishermen were putting together this federation and I went to work for them.
What’s with the tuna cans [stacked on his desk]?
Oh, I was just comparing the fat content. The one with the higher fat was the domestically caught tuna off of our coast here, the albacore. But it turns out the albacore that our fishermen are catching here are much lower in mercury, which is a big concern. They still haven’t figured out a way to distinguish that on the can. So much of the albacore that we get in a can is mostly taken in deeper waters in the western Pacific. They’re much larger and have higher levels of mercury. We’ve looked at fish as being a healthful source of protein, but if you’ve got toxics in it, that’s a real problem. One of the things I’d like to be able to do is get better labeling on fish. The first issue will be labeling for country of origin and whether it’s farmed or wild. It’s not to scare people off, but just to help them make the right decisions.
So you’re thinking of advocating for labeling laws on mercury?
Not just mercury—levels of PCBs, PDBEs, dioxins. It’s a matter of educating people.
That seems like something that fishermen would want to fight.
I think it’s better to get all the information out there so that people can make better decisions. This idea that major food processors have that we can just hide this information is just wrong. When publicity comes out around a lot of the contaminants they’re finding in food generally, we want to be able to put it in context so people know what is the best thing for them. And when consumers begin seeing that levels are rising of PCBs or dioxins in their food, that may be what it takes to mobilize them to say, enough is enough!—we want to put an end to these smokestack industries spewing mercury out in the atmosphere or dumping this stuff in the bays. We’re having a little argument with the FDA about that. We’ve been promoting COOL, country of origin labeling, around the country. And it will be going into place in April, despite USDA’s and a lot of the big food processors kicking and screaming. Labeling of meats and poultry will be delayed until 2006.
What do you see as your next big fight?
I think the big issue in this upcoming Congress and, to a lesser extent, in the state Legislature, is where we’re going with our oceans. The issues of pollution and coastal development have to be addressed because otherwise we’re going to lose the health and productivity of our oceans. The United Nations now says that oceanic dead zones are the single largest threat to fisheries in this coming century. There’s one in the Gulf of Mexico, a small one off of Oregon and one off of the East Coast.
Dead zones? What does that mean?
They’re these areas where, because of the nutrient levels, everything is dead. No fisheries can exist there. In the Gulf of Mexico, it’s because of the nitrogen fertilizers coming down the Mississippi. It’s created a dead area roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts floating around the Gulf. It’s farm runoff, the runoff from the streets, oil leakage from our cars. We need to figure out ways to control that type of pollution. We’re seeing high levels of caffeine now in some ocean waters. Who would have thought that Starbucks would be a polluter?
You mean from our sewage systems?
Yeah, it’s a direct result of our high coffee consumption. We need to have sewage systems that begin sorting out not just the hormones that they’re finding, but also caffeine.
How does caffeine affect fish?
We’re not sure. Some of our members have joked, “The fish sure have been wired recently.” I use this just to make the point that these things are pretty insidious and they’re not really sexy issues for the public, but it is serious. People say, well, the bay looks clean, look at all the strides we’ve made under the Clean Water Act. But there’s still a lot more to be done. And the nature of pollution has changed so much over the last 50 years. The nature of sewage has changed, the nature of farm runoff has changed. If we want to have fish to eat in the future, we’re going to have to start paying attention and fighting a lot harder.
