Monitoring the ups and downs of our environment can feel pretty heavy, which is why — as readers of KCM’s Ripple Effect newsletter know — we’re always looking for reasons to celebrate sustainability. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions.
Authors James Workman and Amanda Leland are both lovers of the natural world, and in this book they unpack meaningful victories for the planet’s most vital ecosystem. For years, overfishing threatened to irrevocably change our oceans, rivers, and lakes: Fish stocks were collapsing, coastal economies were failing, and policymakers were trapped in a cycle of ineffective bans and short-term fixes. Sea Change is the captivating tale of what happened instead, not just at a policy level, but in the lives of the very people on the front lines of this crisis.
In the excerpt below, Workman and Leland dive into an unexpected source for improvement in the fishing industry: McDonald’s. The fast-food chain’s Filet-O-Fish has been a mainstay for years now, but when it was first launched, back in the 1960s, supplying enough fish to meet demand for the popular sandwich was a complicated task. The solution that the restaurant and the fishing industry ultimately found has proven wildly successful — and it’s created a sustainable system that reduces waste and makes profits more equitable. Read on to learn how it happened.
Parting the (Salt) Waters
Six years after Ray Kroc launched McDonald’s out of Des Plaines, Illinois, his venture hit a snag. It was 1961, and Lou Groen, a franchisee in Cincinnati, Ohio, endured weekly and annual sales slumps as Catholic customers avoided meat on Fridays and during Lent. Groen offered an inspired solution: the Filet-O-Fish sandwich, “the fish that catches people.” Kroc hated the idea. He didn’t want his “stores stunk up with the smell of fish.” But Groen persisted, and in what may have been the first and only fast-food cook-off contest, crushed Kroc’s proposed alternative among customer demand and went on to win fame, fortune, and 43 more franchises. Today, McDonald’s restaurants in 100 countries offer Filet-O-Fish sandwiches (with 279 million sold annually in the US alone), and demand still peaks during Lent.
McDonald’s initially tried halibut, Atlantic cod, red cod, and New Zealand hoki. But one by one, each of those fisheries got played out: declining in catch, losing economic viability, and curtailed under regulatory sanctions. Even farmed fish proved undesirable and unreliable. The company needed a high-volume wild marine fishery, consistently harvested, cleanly landed, and efficiently handled in a global supply chain resilient to unexpected disruptions. It was a tall order, but in 1975 they found the species they were looking for. And by 2013, it became the only fish the US franchise would serve.
The Alaska walleye pollock leads a dreadful but exciting life. It grows fast and dies young, but in between enjoys wild oceanic orgies. Though far from charismatic, what this humble species lacks in individual glamour it makes up for in aggregated volume. In late winter and early spring, pollock mate in massive spawning aggregations in the southeastern Bering Sea. When summer storms stir an upwelling of plant nutrients, those hatchlings thrive; upon maturing, they migrate seasonally toward their polar feeding grounds, filling the water from just below the surface to 1,600 feet deep. Against the sandy sea floor, a juvenile pollock’s speckled back helps conceal it from bigger and faster predators — but camouflage couldn’t hide it from people.
Each year, humans on two continents haul 3.5 million tons of pollock from the sea. Beyond fast-food sandwiches, pollock is the main source of supermarket fish sticks, valuable roe, and the shredded surimi that goes into imitation crab. It is the source of most fish oil and of the meal used to feed farmed fish and other livestock raised as food. Since McDonald’s first began serving it, pollock has grown into the world’s largest fishery for human food and America’s most lucrative harvest, worth more than a billion dollars a year. But before that could happen, rival fishing vessel associations, led by the likes of Bob Dooley or Jim Gilmore, would first have to stop fishing it to the point of near collapse.
By 1991, with the Soviet Union dissolving, the joint-ventures phase had ended in the North Pacific; every aspect of pollock fishing was now 100 percent under the United States. But in bulking up to take over, America’s pollock fleet overshot the mark, becoming twice as big as the fishery could bear—an over-capitalized industry. All that excess capacity, explained University of Alaska fisheries economist Keith R. Criddle, brought on shorter seasons, wasteful discards, and financial instability. With catch dwindling, fishermen found themselves trapped in expensive, sloppy battles for fish, waged with vast trawl nets, enormous engines, and pricey lawyers filing lawsuits and lobbying Congress: “the pollock wars.”
On one side were guys like Bob Dooley. From the time he was a boy, living on California’s Half Moon Bay, fish had been his family’s life. In his twenties, lured by the pollock gold rush, Dooley set out to the North Pacific to make it big. By his thirties he and his brother John owned two boats, among 80 other “catcher-boats” trawling in the Bering Sea that delivered a third of the annual pollock harvest to Alaska’s ports.
Pitted against Dooley were sixteen much larger, Seattle-based “catcher-processor trawlers” dragging miles-long nets to haul in the rest of the catch, plus three gargantuan “motherships” that processed without catching. On top of that came an influx of new fishermen and processors. Soon, all sides were trapping too many pollock too fast. From a 1974 peak of nearly two million tons harvested by foreign vessels, Alaska’s pollock catch had by 1991 fallen to just 1.25 million tons. At-sea processors feared for their future; half went bankrupt. The Dooley brothers barely stayed afloat. The reduction in boats failed to relieve pressure. After fishery managers cut the season in half, the remaining vessels just doubled their efforts.
By 1996, federal officials blocked new entrants into the fishery. While that limited growth, it did nothing to slow down those already chewing up the sea. Finally, in 1998, the Alaska and Washington congressional delegations brokered a truce. The compromise became the Bering Sea Pollock Conservation Cooperative American Fisheries Act Program, or AFA.
The AFA divided the pollock harvest into four groups—the catcher/processors, the motherships, Dooley’s inshore boats, and native Alaskan coastal tribes. Partitioning into these sectors protected consumers, workers, and vulnerable people. The bigger vessels, more efficient in time, fuel, and labor, kept fish products like the Filet-O-Fish affordable. Meanwhile Dooley’s smaller boats sustained local jobs and communities, and native tribes gained security through their Community Development Quota.
Once the fish had been allocated, fishermen within each sector were given a share of that catch—their individual quota. They could buy or sell that quota within their sector and set up markets for voluntary transfers between sectors.
Both catcher boats and at-sea processors were initially hesitant. “At first we were going, well, I don’t know if this is going to work,” said Dooley. “It was pretty tough. It was fear of the unknown.” Soon enough, though, they figured out how to compete in ways that transformed Alaska’s waters into America’s new frontier for transferable fishing rights. Where the old truncated seasons had forced a frenetic race for fish that ruined habitat and jobs, the pollock fleets now deliberately slowed to a crawl. Each shareholder could set a more unhurried pace to catch his quota. Vessels dropped trawl nets less often and more selectively, with fewer tows per day. Waste from throwbacks and bycatch plummeted. Fishermen began to share credible data on how much they caught and where.
As the fishery stabilized, so did the market. Catcher-boat owners like Dooley gained new bargaining power with buyers on shore. Instead of all the fish coming in at once, deflating prices, he could negotiate when and how much a processor would buy and get a share of the revenue in advance. “We worked with our processor cooperatively,” he said, “learned about what it took to bring better fish to the plant—not just any fish, but what the plant needed.” When processors asked for roe fish during certain times of year, or larger fish when the market prized filets, Dooley could deliver. As shareholders sought to squeeze maximum value out of each ounce of flesh, vessels and processors diversified uses, selling not only whole fish, filets, fish sticks, surimi and fishmeal but also pollock mince, heads and guts, roe sacs, stomachs and bladders. “All that had been lost before,” said Dooley, “but now we can time our work and make every little bit count.”
On Gilmore’s side, slower fishing meant slower processing. Trawl captains eased back the throttle and began answering managers below deck. “Back in the race-for-fish days,” explained Gilmore, “the guy who read the Fishfinder won by plugging the hold with as much fish as they could to process as fast as they could. And that led to a lot of waste getting dumped over the side rather than slowing things down.”
Waste is another word for dead fish—fish that could have been sold, eaten, or left to spawn. After the formation of the cooperatives, with a fixed cap on volume, the whole process was paced to extract maximum value. By handling the fish more carefully, keeping them on board no more than three hours before processing, and marketing every bit from nose to tail, fishermen saw pollock prices double from $200 per ton to $400. Guts were carefully segmented, packaged, and shipped to Asia: roe sacs to Japan, stomachs to Korea, gall-bladder to China, fish meal to aquaculture and farms. Even the fish oil was used to power on-board machines. “For us, we can follow the fish where they lead us, and take the plant to them,” said Gilmore. He described fishermen now discussing ocean temperatures, pH balance, nutrient cycles, and ways to avoid harming marine birds and mammals. “It almost sounds like we’re in winemaking,” he laughed. “But we really have started to think of the fishery in terms of resource husbandry.”
Alaska pollock was not just the first federal fishery in a catch share; it was also the world’s single largest harvested source of seafood eaten by humans. The stakes of getting it right were high. After 10,000 years of humans not bothering to catch this fast swimmer, followed by a four-decade onslaught that pushed pollock to collapse, government and industry had finally found a way to pull back from the brink. They haggled bitterly over share allocations—each fisherman accepting the right to harvest fewer fish than under open access—yet soon realized the gains from quota trades. “You can’t play a quality game if everyone else is doing quantity,” said Dooley. “But once you mandate the amount of fish each of us gets, then you know it’s not how many pounds but how much value you can extract from that fish that matters.”
From Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions by James Workman and Amanda Leland (Torrey House Press, 2025). Reprinted with permission.
