Book Note · The California Current

Tin Can Coast: The Fisheries That Made California, and the Ones They Emptied

Joseph Ogilvy’s first book follows abalone, sardines and yellowfin tuna through three centuries of the California Current, and argues that fisheries regulation has always been a contest over power as much as a contest over fish.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

Fisheries history tends to arrive in one of two registers. There is the stock assessment dressed up as narrative, heavy with tonnages and thin on people. And there is the elegy, in which an abundance existed, was destroyed, and is mourned. Tin Can Coast, the first book by the writer and chef Joseph Ogilvy, takes a harder road. It treats three animals, the abalone, the sardine and the yellowfin tuna, as characters in a political history of California, and it asks who was allowed to catch them, who was pushed out, and who wrote the rules.

The organising thread is the California Current, the cold, nutrient-rich flow that runs south along the coast and sustains one of the most productive marine ecosystems on the planet. Ogilvy’s publisher puts its length at 1,900 miles. Everything in the book hangs from it: the abalone beds that supported Chumash and Tongva communities for more than ten millennia, the Monterey canneries, the San Diego tuna fleet, and the long sequence of booms that each ended the same way.

Three species, three centuries

The book’s structure follows those three animals out of the water and into the market. Sea otters and abalone drew Russian and Spanish interests into competition along the coast in the eighteenth century, and Ogilvy argues that the threat of poaching helped drive the founding of California’s missions. Canned tuna, by his account, was manufactured as an appetite rather than discovered as one: a fish with no market was sold to American households through advertising in the early 1900s, on the promise that it tasted more or less like chicken. Abalone travelled in the opposite direction, from an export commodity handled by Chinese fishermen to an aestheticised status food for wealthy white bohemians on the beach.

Ogilvy also follows the consequences that nobody planned. The publisher’s description notes that the return of sea otters to California, a genuine conservation success, has stalled, closed off by kelp forest decline and by the return of sharks to the coast, both of which the book presents as downstream effects of the original otter hunt. That is the sort of causal chain the book seems most interested in, and it is the sort our readers will recognise from their own coasts.

Conservation as an instrument of exclusion

The uncomfortable argument, and the one worth the attention of anyone working in marine management today, concerns California’s first conservation laws. Ogilvy’s contention is that the state’s abalone and tuna fisheries were built largely by immigrant communities, Chinese and Japanese in particular, whose techniques were often more advanced than those of their white American competitors, and that the earliest regulation was written to remove them. Conservation, on this reading, is not a neutral technical exercise. It encodes a decision about which world is worth keeping and who belongs in it. Science, the book maintains, cannot settle that question on its own.

A lucid, unsettling diagnosis of the economic, political and ecological forces shaping the Pacific Coast.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

From Cannery Row to the Law of the Sea

Two chapters will interest readers who care about how ocean governance actually came to look the way it does. The first is Monterey, where Ogilvy traces the strange afterlife of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a novel that criticised a town for its obsession with extracting one fish and which the town then turned into a tourist attraction. Ed Ricketts, the self-taught marine biologist fictionalised as Doc, gets his due for a holistic understanding of ecology that arrived decades early.

The second reaches much further. Ogilvy argues that the disputes generated by San Diego’s tuna fishermen helped drive the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, the negotiation that produced the framework within which almost every international marine dispute is still argued. Fishing rights, transit, seabed mining: today’s arguments over deep-sea mining, the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz all sit inside terms that a fishing fleet helped set. For anyone who has sat through a regional fisheries management meeting and wondered where the architecture came from, that is a useful lineage to have in one volume.

How it has been received

Reviewers have converged on the same two points: that the reporting is broad, and that the prose does not read like a first book. The Los Angeles Times, which included it in a best of the summer selection, called it “powerful nature writing” as well as a study of overfishing. Civil Eats judged that it deserves shelf space alongside the classic California histories, and praised Ogilvy’s willingness to take readers onto cannery decks rather than keep the labour at a distance. Library Journal described the account as “eye-opening and even jaw-dropping”. Bloomsbury’s publicity also quotes a Wall Street Journal review calling the book “a profoundly sad story, beautifully told”; we were unable to verify that review independently, so treat the attribution as the publisher’s.

Among other writers, Scott Weidensaul praised the way the book binds together the fates of the fisheries and the immigrant communities that worked them. Malcolm Harris offered the line most likely to end up on the paperback: you will “never look at a can of tuna the same way again”. Rowan Jacobsen, who has written a book about oysters and knows the territory, framed the effect as awe followed by heartbreak.

Why we are flagging it

Most of the conservation reading that crosses this desk is about a species or a place. Less of it is about the machinery: the laws, the markets, the racial politics and the advertising campaigns that decide which animals become resources and which people are permitted to handle them. Tin Can Coast appears to be about the machinery, told through a coastline that a great many of our readers work on. Its central claim, that management decisions are value judgements wearing technical clothing, is one worth arguing with rather than nodding along to. That is usually the sign of a book worth the shelf space.

Ogilvy came to the subject sideways. After Oxford he cooked in London kitchens, including Bocca di Lupo, and the sheer volume of fish passing through a professional kitchen every service sent him into the tangled human and ecological history of what he was serving. He now lives between London and Austin, Texas. This is his first book, and his research took him through the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, the Southern California Chinese Historical Society and the San Diego Maritime Museum, and into interviews with sardine scientists, abalone archaeologists, tuna boat captains, chefs and historians.

TIN CAN COAST: A HISTORY OF INDUSTRY, GREED, AND FISHING IN THE GOLDEN STATE · JOSEPH OGILVY · BLOOMSBURY · HARDCOVER, 32.00 USD · ISBN 9781639736812

Tin Can Coast is available now in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. You can order it from Bookshop.org, which channels sales to independent bookshops, from Strand, or from Amazon. More on the publisher’s list at Bloomsbury.

We received no payment for this piece, and we do not earn a commission on the links above.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean