Herring and People of the North Pacific: Sustaining a Keystone Species. By Thomas F. Thornton and Madonna L. Moss. 2022. University of Washington Press, Seattle. 276 pp.

governments and bureaucrats generally know perfectly well what the historic levels of fish were. They simply do not see enough political advantage in rebuilding the stocks. Fishers, for their part, are apt to say, “there are still plenty of fish, they have just gone away for a while”—a line I have heard from trout streams in the Rockies to bays of the South China Sea, as well as all along the Northwest Coast, during over 60 years of studying and watching fisheries and their fates. Often, the fishers will admit when pressed that they realize there is overfishing, but they still hope.