Kevin Bailey's 2018 Fishing Lessons: Artisanal Fisheries and the Future of Our Ocean, cites Rough Waters!

Reviews for Rough Waters in Boston Globe,

National Fisherman, Hakai Magazine (Alan Haig-Brown),

Fishermen's Voice (Paul Molyneaux)

Univ. of Alaska Aurora, Anchorage Daily News, Arctic Sounder

for full length reviews scroll down

""In this impassioned, broadly researched book, (Mendenhall) plumbs today’s fraught seascape, from the West Coast’s state-managed fisheries, to federal policy, to plights in other regions." ~ Boston Globe

“Personal and poignant. . . an intimate look at what small-scale fishermen have been up against...As long as writers like Nancy Danielson Mendenhall exist, the voices of the underdogs will be heard." ~ Fishermen's Voice; Paul Molyneaux (author of The Doryman's Reflection: A Fisherman's Life)

"In Rough Waters, Mendenhall has given us an exhaustively researched book in which she presents information on privatizing management regimes from around the world, while always relating her findings back to the independent and small-boat fisherman...A definitive review of the current trend toward individual vessel quotas, individual transferable quotas, catch shares, and other versions of privatization."

~ Alan Haig-Brown in Hakai magazine

"Spellbinding... a tour de force... a masterful account (of the)

. . . tragic enclosure of the world's fisheries.”

~ Dennis Brown, author of the bestselling Salmon Wars

"Covers every angle on the North Pacific small fishermen’s battle... Mendenhall documents a way of life with exhaustive research and reporting. This history of the fishing fleet and its struggle is more intimate than what you’ll find in the news and official reports and more extensive and accurate than your grandfather’s memoirs."

~ National Fisherman

"...I'm a fishery biologist. I care about fish. I also care about fishermen and the communities they support. I have read about the fishermen's problems because of declining abundance of fish, but until I read Nancy Mendenhall's book did the dry statistics become real people who work hard to get by on a shrinking resource and have to contend with policies that seem to care little for both the fishermen and the fish."

~ Jim Lichatowich, author of Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery

"Fantastic... I am so glad these kinds of perspectives and voices are having a chance to get in print. I appreciate you taking the huge effort (I know) to research and write this important book and I will let people I know in Iceland about it."

~ Margaret Willson, author of Seawomen of Iceland: Survival on the Edge

“Insightful...”

~ Dr. David Olsen, fisheries biologist, past director of Fish and Wildlife for the U.S. Virgin Islands, member of the Caribbean Council, international consultant

"A great Alaskan book that now can be found in the library of Cambridge University in England..."

~ Lawrence Khlinovski Rockhill, Scott Polar Research Institute, Univ. of Cambridge

"Bravo! I was both delighted and impressed by (this) fine-grained and very balanced history of every stage of the struggle against privatization... Mendenhall's work serves as a much needed bridge between the ever-present critiques, and the big picture of where we need to go and what programs and tools, however imperfect, are helpful along the way. She knows her history and she tells it well, making it accessible and meaningful to a much wider audience than would otherwise have access to this intimate story."

~ Dr. Evelyn Pinkerton, Simon Fraser Univ., B.C.

"Heartwarming and heartbreaking. . . Danielson-Mendenhall comes from a long line of Norwegian commercial fishermen. . . so she writes with sensitive yet accurate profundity, in an intimacy of place that conjures many memories for me. Our story deserves to be told and is told uniquely and honestly in (this) exhaustively researched book up to the present, including insights into fish politics that most have never deigned to imagine. . ." ~ Dave Otness, Alaska fisherman and activist

“A deeply engrossing book. . . about the struggle by independent fishermen (and fisherwomen) along the Pacific coast from Oregon to Alaska. Great in terms of suggesting measures we need to fight for to win sustainable fisheries.”

~ Tim Wheeler, journalist and author of News from Rain Shadow Country

"Well-researched... offers a unique perspective... full of colorful and relevant stories which highlight life as a fisherman (and) relates the struggle of small, family-owned fishing operations against the politically savvy factory fishing fleet. This book brought me back to my time as NMFS fishery observer in the Bering Sea, while it also did a great job of capturing the high-stakes politics that have created the current fisheries landscape in Alaska. Bravo!" ~ Michael Sloan, fishery biologist

"Does an excellent job of showing how the complex pieces of our fisheries management system came to be and how they fit together. Along the way it asks the obvious question – are the assumptions this system is built on valid? Given the continued decline in fish stocks, and the economic devastation facing small fishing communities and small family fishermen this is a valid question to ask."

~ Andrew Crow, Alaska Cooperative Development Center

"Mendenhall creates a vivid profile of a classic small business venture with a long history and an uncertain future. She details its importance -- especially to small coastal communities -- its joys and rewards, threats to its survival, and the complicated interplay of groups which would control, sustain, perhaps even eliminate such ventures.

Throughout she feeds us firsthand accounts of trolling for salmon, long-lining for halibut and cod, crabbing through unstable winter ice and summer’s recent rough seas -- sometimes idyllic, sometimes frightening, always compelling: she puts us there."

~ Dr. William Keep, fisherman, English professor and book reviewer

FULL REVIEWS

A War Story That’s Not Over Yet

review by Paul Molyneaux in Fishermen's Voice :

"Nancy Danielson Mendenhall, who spent more than half a century in the Alaska salmon fishery, gives readers an intimate look at what small-scale fishermen have been up against in Alaska. In addition to her own experience, Mendenhall is heir to a family fishing legacy, and her book begins with stories that are personal and poignant. She describes how her family and their friends built their own boats and helped open up the commercial fisheries of the north. In addition to the commercial fisheries, she describes the importance of subsistence fisheries to Alaska and the role that fishing plays in both Native and non-Native Alaskan culture...

In the first part of her book, as Mendenhall writes with a depth of intimacy and understanding that transports the reader back to the 1960s, 70s and 80s, she hints at coming troubles. Dams, habitat destruction, increasing regulations, and competition from sport fishermen contribute to the “death by a thousand cuts” that many fishermen have experienced...

Fisheries are a vital part of Alaskan culture. Mendenhall notes that for most Americans, fisheries may occupy little more than a hazy corner of their consciousness. “It’s a different story in Alaska,” she writes, “where a recent poll found that 60% of the people still think that salmon is very important to the image of the state. Alaska is the only state that prioritizes subsistence fishing. People need to be able to get enough to eat and sell on a small scale, then commercial fishermen get their whack at the stocks, and after that, sports fishermen.”..

(Mendenhall's) stories are intimate and personal, revealing the values and cohesive spirit of the North Pacific fishing communities. But in the value system of the policy makers, things like intergenerational knowledge and cultural integrity cannot be measured in dollars, and so they are discounted...

Tolstoy once wrote that the history of battles is barely more than conjecture. Nobody knows really what the generals intended or how their orders were executed. Even those engaged in the fight have little awareness beyond the reach of their own vision. Mendenhall, after years of watching her friends and family struggle to stay in business, and many of them failing, finally recognized an institutional problem. “As I researched this book I discovered that although our federal government floods us with information promoting healthy, sustainable fisheries, its management is full of contradictions for the small fishermen, the majority…”

That’s putting it mildly, but in the second half of her book Mendenhall offers meticulously researched, and painfully detailed, analysis of how federal regulations have privatized fisheries and disenfranchised the small-scale fleet. Mendenhall’s play-by-play description of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s actions, from promoting Individual Transferable Quotas, to its unworkable programs ostensibly intended to protect small-scale fishermen and their rural communities...

She writes that the council passed a Community Quota Entity (CQE) program, intended to buy quota from large operations and sell it to communities of less than 1,500 people. But most towns could not meet the costs. Mendenhall quotes Sven Haakanson: “It cost us two million to get that community quota working. Two million.” According to Mendenhall, Haakanson’s community, Old Harbor, was the only one out of 42 that really got the CQE working for it...

The battle Mendenhall chronicles takes place throughout the Alaska and North Pacific region over the course of a hundred years, but has been most fiercely fought in the last three decades. Mendenhall’s meticulous research shows how corporate interests have taken over the pollock and crab fisheries, and how quota management has shrunk the state’s halibut and black cod fleets with little or no conservation benefit, especially in Western Alaska where the pollock fleet is allowed to kill and discard thousands of salmon and halibut, much of it underreported...

Countering the gains made by the privatizers of Alaska’s fisheries, Mendenhall notes a number of fisheries that have endured due to one fortunate circumstance or another. As in any battle, survival is a matter of luck. But the gist of Mendenhall’s book is that the surviving small-scale fisheries are the kind that should be intentionally restored and preserved...

After a certain amount of time, war stories become completely defined by the winners, but as long as writers like Nancy Danielson Mendenhall exist, the voices of the underdogs will be heard. Rough Waters: Our North Pacific Small Fishermen’s Battle, is a war story, and the battle is not over yet."

~ Fishermen's Voice, May 2016

Paul Molyneaux (author of The Doryman's Reflection)

From Dennis Brown, author of bestselling Salmon Wars:

"For any one interested in Pacific Coast fisheries, Nancy Mendenhall’s new book Rough Waters is hard to put down. Those not familiar with fisheries or fisheries politics, but interested in how neo-liberal economic policies are under-mining human societies all over the world, will also find this book a “must read”.

Mendenhall’s book is consummately researched and broad in scope--as befitting social science of the highest order. Yet her narrative is rendered with such intimate sensitivity to people, places and things at the local level so as to evoke poetry. Mendenhall provides an encyclopedic overview of not only fisheries in her home sate of Alaska, but also Washington , Oregon, New England and British Columbia. Throughout her book she weaves together the common problems facing small boat fish harvesters everywhere—including depleted fish stocks due to habitat degradation, the challenge of dealing with increasingly complicated management regulations, and the perils of declining incomes vis-a-vis increasing operating costs. Above all, Rough Waters, is a tour de force so far as exposing the insidious threat to small boat fish harvesters and coastal communities posed by a world wide governmental obsession with privatizing fish resources through Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ) or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQ)—or “defined catch shares” as they euphemistically dubbed by the apostles neo-liberalism who promote them.

In the final chapters of the book Mendenhall offers a sobering, but realistic, appraisal of the daunting prospects facing small boat fish harvesters and the communities that depend upon them. Her analysis is a well thought out appeal for fish harvesters to empower themselves with greater technical knowledge and organization, when dealing with management agencies, as well as the need to build alliances with NGOs and the general public. While Mendenhall’s criticism of the drive to economically redesign and privatize common property fisheries is not particularly new in fisheries literature, her first hand experience with the fishery elevates her voice to an unique and compelling stature.

Mendenhall is at her very finest in describing her years as a troller in Southeast Alaska, way back in the 1970’s. To any one her has ever fished commercially her stories will resonant to the deepest possible level. Moreover, her description of her present day participation in the subsistence fishery, based out of Nome Alaska, is seminal in pointing the way for both humans and wild creatures to sustainably co-exist in perpetuity. Her account of her own sons and their fishing adventures in small vessels in the wild expanse of Bering Sea makes for spellbinding reading.

Mendenhall exudes authenticity in the way she superbly describes the almost Will Rogers-like philosophical genius of her cousin George Morford, an Oregon troller with deep roots in the fishery. Morford’s life story in the fishery is subtly interspersed throughout the narrative, and he serves as a microcosm of the fate of fish harvesters all over the world. Both in the sense of the insidious and relentless victimization that small boat fish harvesters everywhere face because of ideology and misguided management systems, as well as for his undying sense of optimism, common to all fish harvesters. After decades of slowly being displaced from the Oregon troll fishery. Morford, late in life, rises phoenix –like and happily re-establishes himself as a troller out of Sitka, Alaska,

It is through the viva voce of individuals like George Morford, and many others, that Mendenhall is able to so thoroughly validate her overall thesis that fish harvesters are not the true threat to fish stocks the world over, as is commonly assumed. Indeed, she convincingly shows how commercial fish harvesters have become the unfortunate scapegoat victims of massive hydro-electric dams, bad forestry practices, industrial pollution, urban sprawl, over capitalized industrial fishing, to name but a few. In short, any one reading Nancy Mendenhall’s masterful account will never be able to naively look at the tragic enclosure the world’s fisheries commons in quite the same way."

~ Dennis Brown, author of bestselling Salmon Wars

from ~ Andrew Crow, Alaska Cooperative Development Center

"The world of fisheries management is about as esoteric a topic there is. Even if you have been involved in commercial fishing the gumbo of Federal and state laws, regulations, programs, mixed with mind numbing, endless commission meetings, and hearings and spiced with acronyms and bureaucratic jargon is daunting and incomprehensible. At the same time this system seems unable to deal with what most of us see as the core problem, the need to preserve our fish stocks.

Our marine resources are faced with a wide assortment of threats from overfishing, to climate change and a host of other environmental stresses. When faced with such a complex problem it often helps to look at one aspect of the whole system, a part that can serve as a canary in the coal mine a simple gauge to illustrate what is happening. In her new book Rough Waters Nancy Mendenhall focuses on the effect of modern fisheries management, especially the privatization of fisheries resources in Federal waters on small fishermen, and has found a good measure for gaging the health of the North Pacific fish stocks...

Small fishermen are the marine equivalent of family farmers. Like family farms they are the core of a romanticized image of fishing, and like family farms there is a hard economic reality behind that romantic view. The small family fishing operations on the North Pacific coast not only provided an economic anchor for coastal towns, but offered a reliable pathway for young people to earn a living. Rough Waters tells the story of how that pathway has become increasingly difficult if not impossible to follow. While telling that story Mendenhall describes the development of our current fisheries management system with its focus on privatization and industrialization of the fishing fleets.

Telling this story from the perspective of family fishermen makes the topic more interesting and human. It becomes the story of people, including Mendenhall herself, her children and cousin. Being told from this perspective it is not an objective look at management decisions which have at best underlined the demise of a way of life and at worst have hastened its end. Despite its partisan slant it does an excellent job of showing how the complex pieces of our fisheries management system came to be and how they fit together. Along the way it asks the obvious question – are the assumptions this system is built on valid? Given the continued decline in fish stocks, and the economic devastation facing small fishing communities and small family fishermen this is a valid question to ask."

~ Andrew Crow, Alaska Cooperative Development Center

Review by a professor at Simon Fraser U (Evelyn Pinkerton, 2018):

"What could be more delightful for an anthropologist/political ecologist such as myself than a book which is both ethnography and political economy? In Rough Waters, Nancy Mendenhall covers the terrain in an amazingly comprehensive way. She has an insider’s view of what it means to be a small-scale fisherperson, since her whole family has fished for generations, in Norway, Southeast Alaska, and the north Bering Sea. But she knows the fish politics of not only these areas, but also of the hot spots of privatization of fisheries: British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and New England. Her book is a testimony to the havoc wreaked on coastal communities and their fishermen by what is euphemistically called “fleet rationalization” (getting rid of the small boats) and privatization in the form of Individual Transferable Quotas.

But this book is so much more than that. Mendenhall has kept track of the intricacies of policy-making, so she understands at the deepest level how the world of fisheries politics has evolved, and how small-scale fishermen have miraculously survived against all odds by sheer determination. What is most impressive is the maturity and balanced nature of her analysis, which seeks to understand and point ways through the morass, appreciate what has been accomplished, and suggest what needs to happen next.

For example, while exploring the difficulty of small-scale fishermen in getting the support they needed in the first decade of Alaska’s Community Development Quota program, she also shows how much they eventually benefited from CDQs, the best thing that could have happened to them.

Thus Mendenhall’s work serves as a much needed bridge between the ever-present critiques, and the big picture of where we need to go and what programs and tools, however imperfect, are helpful along the way. She knows her history and she tells it well, making it accessible and meaningful to a much wider audience than would otherwise have access to this intimate story."

~ Dr. Evelyn Pinkerton, Simon Fraser Univ. B.C."

"Nancy Danielson Mendenhall's Rough Waters: Our North Pacific Small Fishermen's Battle offers a comprehensive guide to critical issues related to the fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Alaska. Her account is wide-ranging and covers a variety of important topics, any one of which could have been a free-standing book. She presents a detailed history of the industry's development from the late nineteenth century to the present, and she also skillfully guides the reader through the vast labyrinth of federal and state regulatory commissions and laws that were established in response to competition among various groups for control of fishing rights: industrial factory-freezer fleets, recreational fishermen, owners of fish farms, ecologists, traditional Native subsistence fishermen, and, dearest to heart and central to her narrative, small-boat fishermen and the family-based culture they represent. Writing from the perspective of her extended family's experiences through four generations--grandparents, parents, her own generation, and that of her children--she incorporates vivid first-person accounts drawn from interviews that describe the attractions, physical challenges, and dangers of a way of life that is constantly under threat from the vagaries of weather, shifting fish populations, and bureaucratic capriciousness. Two substantial folio sections of photographs of small-boat fishermen at work are an attractive supplement to the book's text.
The baneful impact of a modern corporatized economy on small family farms and old-style independent physicians is well known and widely lamented. But the comparable struggles of small family fishermen are seldom in the forefront of public discourse except in fishing communities. Nancy Mendenhall's authoritative and well-written Rough Waters adds significant depth to our understanding of these contemporary social and economic issues."

~ Historian Dr. Gerald McFarland, author of Moralists or Pragmatists? The Mugwumps

for full length reviews scroll down

Orchards of Eden is cited heavily in a book by Hanford History Project (Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland to 1943, WSU Press, 2018);

also cited in the new book The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age (Steve Olson, W.H. Norton & Co. 2020)

“Orchards of Eden is a wonderful book, and will be a valuable reference for me. I took scads of notes. I am so glad that Mendenhall recorded this history in such detail and with great compassion. Truly a gift to future generations of Northwesterners—this is where we came from. It's like a Steinbeck novel, only true.”

~ Kevin M. Bailey, author of Fishing Lessons: Artisanal Fisheries and the Future of Our Oceans; and Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock

"A fascinating history of an early irrigation project in Washington State, based on the letters, memoirs and interviews of a White Bluffs family who tell not just of their farming experience but of the community they helped build and of the political/economic forces that influenced their successes and failures.

In spite of the White Bluff farming families' resolve to turn the desert into an Eden, the story of how their efforts were impacted by the railroads and power monopolies and by the US government itself, including the devastating Hanford Atomic Project, makes this book an important contribution to Washington State history."

~ Margaret Hamilton Wood, PhD, former resident of Columbia Basin towns

"At last--the little-known story of the orchard-based communities of the Priest Rapids Valley of Washington State before the devastating effect of the World War II Hanford Project...This book needed to be written for everyone who loves the Pacific Northwest and cares about its history."

~ Marthiel O'Larey, historian and descendant of White Bluffs settlers

"Vivid... dramatizes a great American tragedy... Mendenhall writes sympathetically of the people’s struggle to build a viable and civilized rural community.”

~ Tim Wheeler, journalist and author of News from Rain Shadow Country

"I was born in Stevens County, WA, in 1916. My father owned a large sheep ranch...The story "Orchards of Eden" meant so much to me because I knew White Bluffs and the surrounding area, the Wheeler family, and their friends....I found fascinating (this) account of their life there, as well as the history of the hardworking orchardists and their irrigation travails."
~ Oma Singer, Vancouver, WA

"Vivid! Authentic! The life of an isolated river community before the Hanford Project ushered in the firestorm of the atomic age...The whole Columbia River should be declared a National Monument."

~ Helen Wheeler Hastay, educator, raised in settlement of White Bluffs

“An honest and insightful picture of the life of small farming when it was still possible. The respectable work, pride in crops, love of surroundings, and rich social life of a small rural community--all that good made the strangling economics endurable for families. If we could only reconstruct it now, with a decent return!"

~ Steven Vause, former Washington State dairy farmer and retired teacher

"Mendenhall does a great job of combining the rich personal history of an extended family with the history of an early irrigation project and the social/economic issues facing small farmers of that day."

~ Susan Wheeler, descendant of 1907 White Bluff settlers

"A valuable and engrossing account of pioneering history. In the present generation of high technology and corporate lifestyles, Mendenhall recounts a time when sweat, idealism and individuality mattered. It is a priceless gift to former residents of the region and for all of us who value the histories of American settlers."

~ Reader review at Amazon

FULL REVIEWS

From Walla Walla Bulletin:

‘Orchards of Eden’ tells of turn-of-last-century settlers...

“When I first drove across Eastern Washington in 1977, following the Columbia River, vast sections of it were scrub land. Since then, large orchards and vineyards have replaced barren tracts of sand, rocks and sagebrush, with the aid of irrigation. Across the Hanford Reach in no-man’s land, lies a place once inhabited by a small town that was settled at the turn of the last century. The settlers dreamed of growing things with irrigation. The town had a bank, a ferry landing, farmhouses, an orchard, a pumphouse and 40 years of Wheeler family history. The rich, familial stories became author Nancy Mendenhall’s legacy. She remembers the area from early childhood and writes about it in “Orchards of Eden: White Bluffs on the Columbia, 1907-1943.”

Her grandparents’ Willowbank Farm was north of town. She draws from a wealth of letters written by her grandfather and other family members, interviews of neighbors and other historical information, to relate the story of communities along the Priest Rapids Valley of the Columbia River and the tiny orchard town of White Bluffs. Frank Wheeler, Nancy’s brick mason grandfather, was drawn to the agricultural dreams of greening Eastern Washington through irrigation during the early 1900s. Although he had no farming experience, he brought his wife and children to an uncertain life in the desert.

Despite challenges of weather, the governmental climate, rising and falling market prices and the economy, the family and the community thrived for nearly 40 years. Yet they were forced to leave behind their labor when the land was confiscated for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Nancy simply intended to preserve her family’s memories, but she also captured an era of near modern-day pioneers who wrestled with isolation, the elements, fickle markets, power companies, banks, the railroad, the Depression, the advent of World War II, economics, politics and perseverance. She produced a captivating journal about a place and the people who were much like the hardy folks who settled here and built up our Valley."

~ Walla Walla Bulletin, (Annie Charnely Eveland)

by Tony Nakazawa, The Journal of Rural and Community Development:

"The Orchards of Eden story is a quick read, albeit almost 500 pages, and gives us important insights on community infrastructure and community involvement. The setting of Orchards of Eden is the 1906 land boom that opened up the Eastern Washington desert’s potential to irrigated farming.This well documented historical story of the Shaw-Wheeler family’s efforts to find the American dream through land ownership, farming/orchards, also chronicled the community’s likely responses to government efforts to stimulate/support such rural development programs by such agencies as the Bureau of Reclamation, Agricultural Extension (now Cooperative Extension), rural electrification, railroads, and so forth. While the beginnings of the story of White Bluffs is almost 100 years old, being able to live through this community’s story will give many of us involved today as educators and policy makers a better perspective on the timeless aspects of the community development process."

~ Tony Nakazawa, The Journal of Rural and Community Development

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