The essay is playful in tone but does not quite let Hemingway off the hook--delving into not only the author's fishing records, but his tendency to overstate his catches and his habit of shooting sharks from deck with a Thompson submachine gun (!).
Greenberg also presents anecdotes that illustrate how times have changed:
In the 1930s, when Hemingway learned to catch bluefin, the species was barely pursued commercially. Those caught were ground up for pet food. Today industrial long-liners set millions of hooks that catch tens of thousands of tuna and marlin every year. The tuna sell for upward of $100,000 apiece. The marlin, not the tastiest of fish, are mostly dumped overboard dead.
Best of all, Greenberg ends his article with a summary of shifting baselines:
With each passing generation, not just the number of fish in the sea but also the number of fish the public thinks should be in the sea diminishes. This phenomenon, encapsulated by the fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly's term "shifting baselines", allows us to adjust to a depleted ocean without quite knowing what's slipping away. Hemingway, however, did the service of fixing the big fish in time. With his writing, he drew a line in the sea beyond which our perceived baseline cannot wander too far. Thanks in large part to him, we know that not so long ago it was normal to catch many big marlin and tuna within sight of shore. And for that alone we should praise the old man. If he had never given us a glimpse of that seemingly limitless ocean, we might never have realized how much we have lost.
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Very amusing and sad at the same time.
The idea of the shifting baseline applies to freshwater game fish as well. Here in northern Minnesota, vacationers catch smaller fish, and catch them less often, than 20 years ago. Yet the baseline has shifted, and anglers today will proudly string walleyes and other game fish so small that they were once routinely thrown back without a second thought.