1.1 Abstract: The history and study of Atlantic cod in the North Atlantic begets a common narrative of species crashes. In Greenland, environmental drivers of cod crashes and cascading effects on the economy are known, but little attention has been paid to how values for cod change as a result. This work shows that cod’s nonmarket use value has increased as sea surface temperatures and cod abundance in the waters around South West Greenland increase. A quality of life assessment in Qeqertarsuatsiaat, Greenland indicates increased use for cod and decreased importance for select cultural activities during a period of increases in cod abundance, household income and disposable income. These results demonstrate that economic and cultural value systems may be shifting from nonmarket to market use values. Mixed economies that include nonmarket and market values for cod will persist if not grow in the face of climate change, the results of which serve as a counter narrative to the state of cod in the North Atlantic. 1.2 Acknowledgements The author would like to thank volume editors, Igor Krupnik and Aron Crowell for their assistance with the text revisions and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and edits. He would also like to thank Dean Bavington, Karen Hébert, Gabriela Sabau, Laura Ogden, Sussane Friedberg, and Birger Poppel for reviewing early drafts of this paper. Lars Geraae from Greenland Statistics provided unpublished data on historical cod prices and catches. Thanks is also due to the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, especially to Igor Krupnik and Bill Fitzhugh for the invitation to participate in the “Arctic Crashes” conference in January 2016, which catalyzed this paper. The author drafted his Master’s thesis, on which this chapter is based, with the generous support of the Marine Institute through a Graduate Officer Award (2015-2017). Fieldwork was supported by Statistics Norway, Social Science Division (SSB), through the Economies of the North (ECONOR) III Project (2015), and by the National Geographic Society through a Young Explorer Grant (2014-2015). Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) Value Shifts and Crashes at Greenland Introduction It has become increasingly difficult over the last two hundred years to be a codfish in the North Atlantic. Imagine yourself as one… More than once, you, your parents, and your offspring have been overfished, inducing artificial selection and promoting collapse (Jackson et al. 2001; Hutchings & Myers 1994; Lotze & Milewski 2004). Despite fishing moratoriums and eating across new trophic levels, you have not fully recovered from previous overfishing (Lilly et al. 2008; Worm & Myers 2003). As a species, you have become the poster child for natural resource overexploitation (Hutchings 2005; Bavington 2010). The irony is that market actors demand so much of you that they have underappreciated how finite, dynamic, and sensitive you are. Does the fragile existence of cod today mean that people value you too much, or not enough? How cod are valued in market terms and how they are understood ecologically intersect in a common narrative that begins with resource abundance and perceived surplus and ends with overexploitation, stock collapse, and limited recovery. For much of the North Atlantic this may be virtually the whole story, but for Greenland’s fishing economy there is a counter-narrative that emphasizes cod’s resilient nature and its cultural value to the local people. In this view, cod’s abundance, its position in the market, and its nonmarket worth are not “crashing” at all. By working across the fields of fisheries ecology, resource economics, and ethnography, this chapter illuminates the values that cod have outside of the market and how these are culturally expressed (Hoogeveen 2016; Todd 2016; Bavington 2015). The opening sections provide basic theoretical and conceptual handles in cod ecology, economics, and ethnography and help to explain how the fish’s natural history and pattern of overexploitation are intertwined. The latter part of the chapter addresses the multivalent significance of cod in the small community of 2 Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) Value Shifts and Crashes at Greenland Qeqertarsuatsiaat in West Greenland. Marshaling empirical evidence from a diachronic quality- of-life assessment, the study demonstrates a gradient of sociocultural values that are attached to cod harvesting and indicates that self-reported values may sometimes be contradictory. The chapter concludes with an argument that nonmarket and market values for cod are shifting as the people of Qeqertarsuatsiaat participate more fully in the new cash economy, and the observation that cod fishing seems poised to grow even in the face of climate and market changes, countering trends that prevail elsewhere in the North Atlantic. Several definitions should be established for purposes of the present discussion. In fisheries science, a “collapse” is defined as a severe population decline that reduces a stock to 10% or less of its original biomass, and the term appears frequently in the literature (e.g. Hein & Vander Zanden 2007; Lilly & Lilly 2008; Jackson et al. 2001; Worm et al. 2009). A “crash” is considered to be a relatively sudden population decline that may or may not reach the threshold of 90% loss. Also, “decline” may be slow or steady, whereas a “crash” is always a rapid process. In this chapter, the term “crash” will more generally indicate any severe drop, and it conceptually unites trends in fish stocks, market prices, and even in non-market value for the fishermen. The latter have been described extensively for Greenland, primarily in qualitative terms (Goodstein & Polasky 2014; Poppel and Kruse 2009; Rasmussen 2010a; Olsen n.d.; Condon et al. 1995). Non- market values include such aspects as the sharing of fish among people in coastal areas without monetary exchanges, the nutritional benefits derived from cod as a subsistence food, and the transmission of cultural traditions from elders to younger generations. Any reduction of increase in the use of cod or in attitudes of cod fishing also constitutes a “cultural” crash; a drastic decline or elimination of these values constitutes a collapse of the nonmarket value of cod. 3 Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) Value Shifts and Crashes at Greenland Crashes and collapses are also used in resource economics. Weight metric tons (or kilograms) of biomass is regularly the unit of analysis to identify changes in the abundance of fish. Weight of catches and the value (i.e. price) of the catch are other common parameters in th resource economists’ study of fish. Reduction or increase of catches effect the supply and price of fish. As in the case of fish stocks, rapid shifts in catch can constitute a crash. For our purposes, a drastic shift downward to less than or equal to 10% of historical catches constitute a collapse of the market. Cod Ecology and Population Dynamics The natural history of the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) has been extensively studied (Drinkwater 2005a). First scientifically described in 1758, the Atlantic cod is categorized as a demersal finfish, meaning it resides near the seafloor. Demersal fishes are particularly prone to fisheries collapse, not necessarily because of their biological attributes but because of their catchability with bottom nets (Mullon et al. 2005; Dulvy et al. 2003; Hilborn & Walters 1992). Atlantic cod can be found in sea temperatures ranging from -1°C to over 20°C and are distributed as far north as the coast and offshore areas of Greenland (ICES 2016; Drinkwater 2005b). Spawning of Atlantic cod at Greenland takes place exclusively in Southern Greenland, and in patches along East Greenland. 4 Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) Value Shifts and Crashes at Greenland Atlantic cod life history begins with spawning in spring at coastal and offshore grounds (Figure 1). Spawning is pelagic, meaning that the buoyant eggs float on the sea surface, unlike the eggs of another cod species, Greenland cod (Gadus ogac) which are deposited demersally in shallow nearshore waters (Wieland & Hovgård 2002). Atlantic cod eggs that have been disbursed offshore are transported by strong currents toward Southeast and West Greenland and hatch within 8 to 60 days (Wieland & Figure 1: Map of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) at Greenland. Adapted Hovgård 2002; Fahay et al. 2000). Some from Drinkwater 2005 and ICES 2015 interaction between inshore and offshore stocks is thought to exist at the larval stage, but primarily in one direction, i.e., offshore cod larvae are mingled by the currents with inshore fjord populations (Wieland & Hovgård 2002; ICES 2016). By late summer, juvenile cod leave the upper water column where they have been feeding on phytoplankton and cod eggs and descend toward the ocean floor where they grow rapidly and begin consuming larger prey. Atlantic cod grow slowly, mature late, and live up to 20-25 years, characteristics that make them vulnerable to overexploitation and collapse (Rätz et al. 1999). Greenlandic stocks of Atlantic cod do not mature until they are between the ages of five and seven so that a single year 5 Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) Value Shifts and Crashes at Greenland of heavy fishing can result in multiple years of resource depression. The number of mature fish in a certain year class is highly correlated with how large the spawning stock was 5-7 years earlier and how heavily it was fished. Warmer sea surface temperatures at the time when fish emerge as larvae also increase survival rates past the larval stage (Rätz et al. 1999), so that the current warming of Greenland’s waters may have a positive effect on demersal fish populations overall (Stein 2007). Greenland cod (Gadus orgac), first described scientifically in 1836, have not been as thoroughly studied as Atlantic cod. While larvae of Greenland and Atlantic cod are difficult to distinguish, Greenland cod habitat is restricted to fjords and coastal areas from 60° to 73° north latitude.