Save Fish, Or Fishermen?

Mike Park remembers when he first started working the cod boats out of Aberdeen, on Scotland's northeastern coast. "The fish were plentiful and the boats few," he says. That was nearly 30 years ago. "Then the boats became plentiful," says Park, 43, "and the fish few." Today fish populations have dwindled so dramatically that the European Union's fisheries Commissioner, Franz Fischler, is calling for an 80% reduction by 2003 in catches of the most popular commercial species in European waters. Fischler's proposal doesn't go far enough for some scientists, who warn that if even more drastic measures are not taken, depleted...