Fished Out

New England fishermen thought technology was their savior. It may be wiping them out. Could it happen to your industry?

Glenn McIntire sits with his feet up on his desk, barking into his cell phone. Without interrupting his monologue, he swivels his chair to take a quick look at his computer monitor -- okay, nothing's changed -- and swivels back toward the window to regain his ocean view. Suddenly he frowns. "Hold on, I've got a beep," he says into the phone, hitting the flash key and greeting what turns out to be his significant other.

McIntire's office, which contains about $50,000 worth of state-of-the-art technology, is unusual in several ways. For one thing, there's a buzzer directly over his head that goes off every 15 minutes. If he doesn't reach up and turn it off, it grows so piercing in volume that you half expect God himself to reach down from the sky to extinguish the sound. That buzzer is in place to make sure that McIntire is awake, and that he's not having a heart attack, a stroke, or any other physical catastrophe that might hinder his ability to steer his office through the pitch-black night. For McIntire's office sits high up on an 80-foot boat called the Intrepid, which is now well out to sea. By glancing at the Compaq computer bolted to the desk, McIntire can watch his boat's satellite-monitored progress, represented on-screen by a little boat icon crawling its way across a digitized map of the waters south of Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Technology has been an indispensable boon to small fishing operations, which increasingly rely on sophisticated equipment to make up for smaller boats and crews. Electronic fish-finding equipment, global-positioning systems, and satellite communications gear have been turning what used to be a hit-or-miss art into an efficient, predictable business, able to withstand the once-crushing threats of bigger boats and bad weather.

But here's the catch: the technology that allows those independents to compete is slowly killing the industry. The problem is that fish are a limited resource, and fishing boats -- thanks largely to technology -- have gotten too good at their job. Now, as fish become more and more scarce, fishermen have little choice but to enlist even more technology to find them, further exacerbating the problem. As a result, many fishing operations have found they've reached a point of diminishing returns on technology: they have to spend a great deal more to achieve even incremental improvements in their catch, squeezing profits. "We've been able to search out the last fish," says Vito J. Calomo, executive director of the Fisheries Commission, in Gloucester, Mass. "We have too much technology."

Economists refer to this sort of conundrum -- in which what's good for the individual ends up being bad for the group -- as a "tragedy of the commons," named for the historical overuse of common grazing grounds in English villages. On a global scale, of course, there have long been claims that the environment is suffering at the hands of consumers and businesses that put their own convenience and gain over the common good. Nor is overfishing unique to New England. Last year the United Nations estimated that 13 of 17 major ocean fisheries were dangerously close to perishing, mostly due to overfishing.

But there are reasons to regard the case of the New England fishing industry in particular as a cautionary tale. For one thing, it is one of the first times that information and communications technologies have been prime tools in the depletion of a resource. For another, smaller businesses, rather than large ones, are the main players. As growing businesses in all industries become more and more adept at taking advantage of increasingly sophis-ticated technology, hence becoming intensely efficient, it's likely that more industries will simply run out of key resources (see Vicious Circles, below). Companies hoping to avoid that fate might want to consider how the fishing industry has come to find itself in this bind.

In the late 1960s the U.S. fishing industry found itself being pummeled at sea by foreign fleets of huge technologically sophisticated boats. Among the foreign vessels, many of which were from the Soviet Union, were 300-foot-long steel boats equipped with everything from sonar to refrigeration units and able to stay at sea for months at a time. Those floating factories could catch hundreds of thousands more fish than their smaller, old-fashioned U.S. counterparts. Given a limited supply of fish, the lightweight, low-tech U.S. fleet didn't stand a chance. In Maine, for example, the total catch fell from 219 million pounds of fish in 1968 to 138 million pounds in 1975. Enraged at the foreign menace, U.S. fishermen showered the national government with protests, demanding that it intervene to protect its own. Congress responded in 1976 with the Magnuson Fishery Management and Conservation Act.

The act declared a 200-mile zone off the U.S. coastline off-limits to non-U.S. fleets, to protect the fish supply and give the U.S. fleets a chance to fish without foreign competition. In addition the government helped make low-interest loans available to fishermen who wanted to upgrade their boats. Meanwhile the late 1970s saw the market flooded with cheap ex-military technology that could be applied to the hunt for fish. LORAN, for example, originally developed to give the Defense Department a long-range, highly accurate radio navigation system, allowed even unskilled fishermen to find fertile waters. Fishermen could mark, say, the location of a sunken ship -- a favorite hiding place of fish -- and return over and over. Echo sounders, evolved from versions that found enemy submarines, worked fine in inexpensive models aimed at finding schools of fish, as well as depth-finding and even mapping ocean floors.

The technology feeding frenzy wasn't limited to the same old crowd of fishermen. Under the government's Fisheries Obligation Guarantee Program, anyone who wanted to build a boat could get a loan for up to 80% of the cost and then enjoy a nice write-off at tax time. Former weekend captains in DockSides and Izod shirts started up fishing businesses. What they lacked in old-fashioned grit and sea smarts they made up for with cutting-edge technology, intensifying competition for all fishermen. Old-timers, never ones to be outdone on their own turf, used the low-interest loans to upgrade their rickety wooden vessels with new gadgets or to build new, better-equipped boats.