This article is from the winter 2024 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Virginia Kinnier
In 1892 a young man from Denmark stood on the shores of Bon Secour, Alabama, over 4,700 miles from his homeland, and began a lifelong career harvesting the bounty of the bay. One hundred and twenty-eight years later, Chris Nelson and his two brothers are the fourth generation of Nelson men to carry on their great grandfather’s legacy at Bon Secour Fisheries, providing seafood not only to coastal Alabama but across the United States.
Before he served as president of his family’s seafood business, Chris completed his undergraduate degree in biology at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and then a masters in marine environmental sciences at the State University of New York on Long Island. He then spent over two years in DC completing a fellowship with the Sea Grant System, as well as an internship with Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, where he gained valuable exposure to the government’s role in the seafood industry.
Eventually the coast called him home, and he traded in the busyness of DC life for a slower pace back home. “It doesn’t get a whole lot slower than Bon Secour,” Chris laughs. “If it did, you’d be going backward.”
When he joined his brothers and went to work for the family business, he was excited to use his professional experiences and education to contribute in a unique way. Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“Starting in about 1989, we had some really challenging times,” Chris recalls. “I spent my early years fighting for better regulations that would be more survivable for the industry. The turtle-excluder device (TED) was a big change that came about following environmental concerns about shrimp trawls in the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic Ocean and their impact on endangered and threatened sea turtles. While protecting this species, the device also caused limited government funds to be reallocated for this purpose and also reduced the efficiency of the net system, resulting in catch loss for the fishermen and decreased domestic product in an already competitive market due to pressure from overseas imports.”
The fishermen didn’t have much time to lick their wounds from the losses incurred by the TED regulations before they were hit with a second literal hole in their nets: the bycatch excluder device, which was intended to prevent non-target fish like juvenile red snapper and other finfish from ending up on the boat decks of commercial fishermen. In order to enforce this, more holes had to be cut in the nets of the now extremely frustrated fishermen.
“If you know anything about fishermen who fish with a net, they spend an inordinate amount of time making sure the net doesn’t have holes in it, because holes would obviously reduce their efficiency and effectiveness,” Chris explains. “To go to a fisherman and say, ‘Okay, you’ve got a grate in your net to exclude turtles, and now we’re going to cut two to three other holes in the net to let out the juvenile red snapper and other bycatch…’ That’s a very tough sell to fishermen.”
And the holes did more than eliminate turtles and juvenile snapper and finfish; they also led to a devastating loss of shrimp.
“My brother John Andrew’s true love was shrimp and shrimp boats,” Chris recalls. “His dream was to have a shrimp boat fleet out of Bon Secour, and he had it for a while until the government came in and tried to regulate it out of existence. It soon became obvious that they were not going to leave the industry alone, and it was no longer going to be a viable source of income. He hung in there, only retiring two years ago, so he stayed until the bitter end. But when the last shrimp boat left, that was the end of his real heavy involvement in the company.”
Watching his brother’s dream literally float away was tough for Chris.
“It was frustrating for me that I couldn’t be more effective, with my government experience and a marine science background enabling me to argue a little more effectively than the average person,” Chris admits. “But it was not nearly as upsetting for me as it was for people like my brother whose heart and soul was in the shrimp industry. To have someone from outside the industry, outside the area, come in and basically big foot them and say, ‘Sorry guys, you’re done here’—it was heartbreaking.”
Over time the shrimp industry has continued to be diminished by the various regulatory and economic struggles it has faced. While there are still shrimpers and shrimp to be caught, it’s a fraction of what it once was.
“Unfortunately for Bon Secour Fisheries, as as result of those measures and others, we went from having close to 80 shrimp boats when I was in high school to not a single shrimp boat left today,” Chris says. “Over the course of 50 years, we lost our entire fleet. I was actually in a meeting when an agency official literally said, ‘What we’re talking about here is the orderly shutdown of the US shrimp trawling industry.’ Once that word got out, the battle lines were drawn.”
For Chris, that dismantling of the symbiotic relationship between the fisherman and the environment has been the biggest loss levied on the seafood industry by government and environmental agencies, however well-intentioned the regulations may have been.
“The reality is that no one should be more heavily invested in the quality of the environment than someone who earns their living as a result of the environment being able to provide what it is that they catch, and that someone is commercial fishermen,” Chris says. “Fishermen are the first line of defense for the environment—I’ve always said that and I still believe it—because they are the people whose bread is buttered by Mother Nature being able to produce that product they’re catching. Those guys are the ones who are directly impacted at their pocketbook, so who else would you want on your side? What we’ve lost is the ability to leverage that innate concern for the environment that that industry had, and in turn we’ve lost a constituency to argue on behalf of the environment from a very visceral, frontline standpoint. The environmental community globally has taken their most important coastal ally and squashed them, and I just don’t get it.”
Aside from the relationship damage done to two of the most crucial players in the industry, Chris points again to specific regulations in the past that are now endangering the future.
“I don’t mean to harp on one thing in particular, but the turtle excluder device is a poster child for the unintended consequences of the government and environmental community’s regulations on success and sustainability of the fishing industry,” Chris states. “It incentivized heavy regulation of the catch industry, albeit for a legitimate reason—to protect endangered sea turtles, which were in danger, no question—but what it did was make the catch fish industry that much more less competitive than overseas production facilities, and it made the demand for imported seafood higher because it reduced the ability of the domestic fleet. Today somewhere around 15 percent of all the shrimp eaten in the US are actually caught here domestically, meaning around 85 percent of the rest of the supply is coming from overseas. And this was encouraged with our well-meaning, well-intended environmental regulations. You just can’t overlook that consequence.”
Looking toward the future, Chris believes one of the biggest opportunities we have to reverse these regulation side effects is to grow the seafood demand even more than it currently is and supply that demand domestically.
“One of the reasons seafood is so expensive here in the US is because we are heavily dependent on catch fisheries,” Chris explains. “I come from four generations of catch fisheries. My great grandfather was involved in harvesting oysters in Bon Secour Bay from the bottom, from the wild, so I get that that’s the tradition. But we have absolutely maxed out what we can extract from our oceans, so where is all the seafood coming from? The answer is offshore, aquaculture farms. But we don’t do that in the US because we’re so risk averse when it comes to our environment — and risk aversion to the environment is a great thing — but you have to look at what you’re giving up by taking that stance, which is domestically farmed fish where we have infinitely more control over the water quality, the feed quality, etc.”
In Chris’s eyes, the risk is well worth the reward if we hope to maintain a sustainable domestic seafood industry that can hold its own against stiff competition overseas.
“Over the course of the next fifty years, we have to get real about producing fish from aquaculture facilities and utilize the nearshore and estuarine areas to produce oysters, fish, shrimp, etc.,in an environmentally responsible manner,” Chris says. “We can’t be afraid of something that is out of our control happening to our coastal zone. If we could get over that fear, we could change this trade balance with seafood. The demand will be there regardless. We’re either going to do it ourselves, or we’re going to buy it from overseas. That is the decision we need to make.”
One thing Chris thinks will help increase the demand of domestic seafood is the recently passed Alabama Seafood Labeling Act, which requires restaurants to display the source of seafood offered on their menus. “I think it will definitely have a positive impact,” Chris says. “It has already raised awareness to the public, and in turn restauranteurs now know that the public is going to be more and more concerned about the source of their seafood, which will increase that demand for a domestic product.”
But again as Chris points out, because of restrictions on the seafood industry’s production and the side effects of those regulations over the years, the local supply still cannot meet the demand, so realistically all the seafood can’t be sourced locally. While this Catch-22 sounds disheartening, Chris sees it as yet another reason to consider alternative production methods.
“Take redfish as an example,” Chris says. “It’s on every menu around here, but in Alabama you can’t catch and sell redfish — it’s illegal because it’s a game fish — so most of it comes from China. What we could do is grow that fish here offshore, making it a domestically produced, regulated, farm-raised redfish. And it supports an onshore industry of processing, filleting, freezing, shipping, and/or distributing it fresh to all the local restaurants. Then when a restaurant gets asked, ‘Where did this redfish come from?’ They can truthfully say, ‘Right here.’ Wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? We need to look in the mirror — you, me, and anyone else who calls themselves an environmentalist — and we need to get involved and not let the fringe elements of the environmental movement keep us from having domestically produced seafood. Let’s bring some sanity back to environmentalism as it’s applied to seafood production.”
Just as Chris remains hopeful in the future of domestic seafood and alternative methods of production, he also remains hopeful in the relationship between commercial fishermen and environmentalists and the vested interest they share in our local waters.
“I’ve been a seafood guy all my life, and the seafood industry people are naturally environmentally oriented, so they should also naturally be environmentalists,” Chris states. “But we’ve been poked in the eye with a stick by that community so many times that if you mention environmentalists to most commercial fishermen, they cringe. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also an area of opportunity to reconnect. Right now that bridge might be broken and burned, but bridges can always be rebuilt.”
