COLUMN ONE : Peril for a Fish--and Way of Life : Having launched a thousand fast-food franchises, the cod is in danger of ‘commercial extinction.’ Hardest hit will be the tiny villages of Newfoundland.

Not long ago, Jackie Tobin, a bookkeeper at the fish-processing plant here on Fogo Island, got it into her head to feed her family some cod.

Nothing out of the ordinary in this: The cod has long been plentiful off these shores and on the supper tables of this ocean-bound province. Early maritime visitors from Europe likened the species’ abundance to the rich silver mines of Mexico and Peru and wrote in their journals about schools so dense that a boat could not pass through them.

But times and the fortunes of nature change, and as spring turned to summer here this year, Tobin’s fisherman husband had yet to bring in a single cod. So Tobin ended up doing the most dispiriting thing a fisherman’s wife can do: She went to the grocer’s and bought a cod.

“And it was trucked in,” she says sourly, hugging her young son, who has just run in from the rain to show off a toy boat he has built from plywood and a spike. “I’d give him 15 years, and he won’t know what a codfish is,” she says, smoothing the child’s damp hair. “There won’t be any.”

In a world already reeling from environmental insults, warnings and admonitions, the shaky status of the Newfoundland cod offers one more discouraging study of the way technology is outstripping man’s understanding of the natural world, and his ability--or willingness--to manage its bounty.

All along Newfoundland’s 6,000 miles of deeply indented bays and inlets, from the headlands of Joe Batt’s Arm to the rocky shores of mainland Labrador, the small-scale cod fishermen who are the backbone of the provincial economy say the fish that launched a thousand fast-food franchises is going the way of the dodo.

Some say these village fishermen are alarmist. But a number of independent studies have reinforced their fears. The most prominent, conducted in 1989 by the president of Newfoundland’s Memorial University, warned that far too many men were chasing far too few fish, and that if fishing off these coastlines continued at present rates, the local cod would be “commercially extinct” within five years.

Newfoundland’s cod situation has worrisome parallels in fisheries elsewhere. In the United States, about 14 species are said to be at serious risk, including such favorites as the swordfish, Atlantic salmon, haddock and flounder. In New England alone, consumers are estimated to be paying $41 million more a year for fish than they would be if rampant overfishing were not driving prices up.

In the Pacific, Asian crews have enraged environmentalists by spreading 40-mile drift nets, scouring swaths of ocean bare of everything from young salmon to whales. If accidentally ripped free of their boats, these nets can go on “ghost fishing” forever.

And lest anyone think that the Newfoundland cod gap can be filled with fish from one of the world’s other three great stocks--those of Iceland, Norway and the North Sea--scientists note that those once-plentiful cod-fishing grounds are in even worse shape than those of Canada.

Commercial extinction would not mean a cod-less Atlantic; fish populations tend to be more resilient than those of land animals. Fish species seldom slide into extinction outright. “Commercial extinction,” instead, implies that the cod would no longer exist in commercially meaningful numbers.

And that, say fish-industry sources, would have a far more noticeable effect to the average American than, say, the disappearance of an endangered owl or the once-celebrated snail darter.

“The cod is the bellwether fish of the North American (seafood) market,” says Robert Erkins, editor of the Erkins Seafood Letter, a trade publication. “It’s the fish that sets the tone, and the price, and everything else.”

Cod is what U.S. consumers have eaten for 40 or so years in frozen fish sticks or breaded filet-o-fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. Years of eating its lean, flaky, white flesh have shaped Americans’ idea of what good fish ought to taste like. That may be why Americans today, unlike the British, tend to turn up their noses at such oily, brown-tinged fish as the mackerel.

Already, the cod shortage is causing headaches for the fast-food industry. Some chains have been scrambling to find replacements: the orange roughy, perhaps, the hoki from New Zealand. But these substitutions have set alarm bells sounding among conservationists, who fear they may trigger declines in other species.

Bad news for the cod is also bad news for the fish-loving health-conscious, and for world-hunger relief groups, which have eased many a protein-starved nation through famine with the easy-to-dry, easy-to-ship, plentiful salted cod.

But if the cod off Newfoundland were to slide into commercial extinction, the hardest-hit of all would be the tiny fishing villages of this province--known as outports--and the legendary, many say, noble way of life they represent.

Newfoundland owes its existence to the cod. Its inhospitable shores were settled by adventurous seafarers who abandoned their quests for the fabled Northwest Passage when they realized they could make a better living by catching, preserving and exporting fish.

On the spume-swept outcroppings of rock that form Newfoundland’s countless harbors and coves, they built their fishing villages, spare human toeholds where little could grow but the stunted black spruce and balsam fir already in place, where no roads could be hacked out of the landscape and where often the best and sometimes the only way to get from here to there was by water--and undecked boat.

Today, in Joe Batt’s Arm, upturned skiffs and stacked lobster traps line a jigsawed shore, looking ever so much like a calendar photograph. Tackle sheds of red clapboard stand up out of the shallows in elegiac disrepair, and beyond the breakwater channel, buoys sway drunkenly on the dark green horizon. Over it all, in almost stationary orbit, circle the obligatory sea gulls.

A fine, salty tableau to be sure. But left out of most commercial photographic compositions are the Anglican churches on the rough hills, where nave plaques of chased brass memorialize two centuries of men and boys, able-bodied “Newfies,” lost at sea in the hunt for the cod.

For an American to appreciate Newfoundland, it is perhaps best to think of Appalachia; the continuities of life as lived in a fishing settlement here, and, say, the coal camps of West Virginia and Kentucky, are uncanny and insistent.

To start with, the stubby hills of Newfoundland are really just far-flung kin of the Appalachians. Newfoundland, geologists say, is but a final remnant of the ancient chain as it sinks into the North Atlantic.

Then there are the inhabitants. Newfoundlanders and mountaineers are both famously hardy people, long bound up in romantic, if dangerous, work, fishing and mining. They come from much the same British Isles stock, often speaking a similarly archaic English. Each society hangs on as a pocket of cultural resistance to the jaded ways of its surrounding national majority.

The Newfie is Canada’s hillbilly, no less the object of citified bemusement and condescension than the miner or moonshiner living 1,500 miles to the south. Anthropologists delight in the Anglo-Irish songs, stories and folkways enriching everyday life in both locales.

Each society has been cruelly knocked around by massive economic change and resulting out-migrations; each has contributed people to its country’s armed forces in numbers out of proportion with the rest of the population.

Since joining Canada in 1949--it was until then a possession of the British Crown, governed distractedly from Westminster--Newfoundland has centralized somewhat. Today there are roads, schools, hospitals and social services.

But even today, 30,000 people here make their living from the fisheries. The vast majority of the fishermen here still put to sea in boats shorter than 65 feet. They still live in outports, typically as remote, inward and inbred as any neglected hollow in the American coal fields.

The fishermen here are happy to advance theories about why the source of their livelihood is disappearing, although marine scientists say there are no easy answers about the cod.

A favorite angler’s view blames modern, capital-intensive fishing technology--particularly of the sort employed by giant offshore trawlers, which track the cod and vacuum them off the continental shelf with almost pinpoint accuracy, around the clock. This occurs even in winter, when the Canadian Atlantic becomes the world’s most savage ocean, swept by charging rollers.

The outport Newfoundlanders have, after all, fished for generations with simple, seasonal methods. Many use the “cod trap”--a configuration of four large nets set up like a box, with a fifth net leading in from the side, to herd cod inside. Small-scale Newfoundland fishermen set the traps in bays and shallows, working from relatively modest boats in the warmer months of the year. Come summer, the cod make for the shallows to feed; summer is also the only time when village fishermen can launch their boats. These horse-and-buggy methods may not yield the greatest catches. But environmentalists say traps, properly used, have made Newfoundland’s inshore fishermen an epitome of the small-is-beautiful ethic in practice.

This pattern began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, with the arrival of huge factory trawlers from the Soviet Union, West Germany, Spain and more than a dozen other countries. The trawlers boasted all manner of equipment for locating and tracking fish electronically. They dragged huge, socklike nets along the bottom, where the cod teemed. They gutted, froze and sometimes even fileted hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish on board and could stay at sea for months at a time.

Worst of all, from a conservationist’s perspective, the trawlers sailed for the waters of eastern Canada with reinforced steel hulls that could withstand the most formidable Newfoundland winter icebergs, sloughed off the polar cap and glaciers of Greenland. It wasn’t long before they were scooping up huge stocks of fish that Newfoundland’s village fishermen had never been able to reach.

“The big mother fish are out on the (offshore) spawning grounds,” explains an indignant Alonso Tobin, Jackie Tobin’s husband, an imposing redheaded man of only 31, but with a face of all weather-beaten wens and gorges. “If (trawlers) are out there catching them, it’s just the same as if I take a gun and kill all the pregnant women. You won’t have any youngsters around here.”

But raw economics dictated that the factory trawlers do just that. With their vast displacements and snazzy fish-finding equipment, the ships represented capital outlays so large that they simply had to overfish, just to recoup their owners’ investments. It is a vicious circle that has repeated itself in fisheries around the world to this day.

By the mid-1970s, with some nations’ fish stocks running down to naught, patience was wearing thin. In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Magnuson Act, which drove foreign trawlers out of a 200-mile zone along America’s coast. More than 100 other countries, Canada included, followed suit in 1977.

It looked at first like a tough-minded conservation measure. But today, with the benefit of hindsight, critics say the 200-mile limit has turned out to be little more than another incentive to overfish.

In Newfoundland, no sooner was the limit in place than the cod appeared to bounce back. Indignation toward foreign trawlers turned to excitement at the prospect of a newly protected resource to exploit. Inshore fishermen bought new boats and nets. Processing plants brought in modern equipment. In the offshore sector, Canadian trawling fleets went high-tech, just like the foreigners who had just been sent packing.

It wasn’t a complete free-for-all. Each year, the fisheries ministry would estimate the amount of cod in the Canadian Atlantic, then tell domestic fishermen they had the right to catch certain percentages of the total.

The quota system was intended to prevent overfishing, but it had a fatal flaw: It relied on fish-counting, an arcane, delicate art, about as efficacious a proposition as counting raindrops. For all its good-faith efforts, the Canadian government has never really known just what was going on in the deep. By 1986, when its scientists were saying cod stocks were swelling, some small-scale fishermen were already grumbling that they were shrinking. And in 1989, the government suddenly announced it had grossly overestimated the amount of cod in Canada’s ocean zone and that fishermen would have to cut back.

Yet even as the small-scale fishermen and many government scientists were saying the cod was in danger, the trawler captains and their corporate employers were arguing that the fishing had never been better.

“I’ve seen more fish out there this June than I’ve ever seen in all the years that I’ve fished,” says Harvey Bailey, captain of the Cape Fox, a 170-foot stern trawler, owned by National Sea Products, a large Canadian seafood concern.

Bailey has been a trawler captain now for 27 years and doesn’t discount the inshore fishermen’s claims that they are finding no fish in the shallows. He simply argues that there are plenty of cod in the deeper distant waters. He sees no connection between his own abundant offshore catches and the shortage of fish near the coast. “In my time, I’ve seen the inshore stock go this way, and the offshore stock go this way,” he says, one hand down and the other one up. “I can’t explain this--it’s still in research.”

At National Sea’s headquarters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, research chief John Maloney echoes the refrain, saying, “The fish are out there.”

Maloney thinks the explanation lies in a mysterious cooling of the ocean off Newfoundland and its effects on cod behavior--not in overfishing by trawlers. For the small coastal fishermen to blame the trawlers for their pathetic catches, he says, “is like a farmer in Manitoba blaming his neighbor 100 miles away because it didn’t rain on his plot.”

That’s where the debate stands today, leaving the Canadian government--which still wants to regulate fishing--with a seemingly insoluble dilemma: Is it better to listen to the optimistic trawler men, to tolerate vessels that can harvest huge quantities of cod with frightening efficiency and to stay internationally competitive at the risk of depleting a key resource? Or is it better to rein in the trawlers and promote the small fishermen, who may not be able to catch nearly as much cod but who probably don’t tax the environment as much--and who need the thousands of jobs that inshore fishing provides?

So far, the government has straddled the fence and pleased nobody. It has lowered quotas, though not as much as some of its own experts recommended. That prompted trawler companies--which own important outport fish-processing plants--to scale back and lay people off. And that, in turn, has triggered sit-ins and demonstrations in towns and villages throughout Atlantic Canada. In one Newfoundland outport, cash-strapped fishermen rioted when the government banned further catches of a cod alternative, the ocean perch.

“It’s very hard to get fishermen to realize it’s in their best interest to limit the harvest,” says a spokeswoman for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which has recently issued a report on overfishing in American waters. “They’re caught in this downward spiral, where they have to ‘gear up’ just to catch less and less fish.”

That’s exactly the bind Alonso Tobin finds himself in, here in Joe Batt’s Arm. This year, for the first time, he gave up his small boat and cod traps and bought a 45-foot “long liner.” Now he can stay out on the water--up to 100 miles offshore--for days at a time, much like the trawlers he has learned to despise. His boat also packs 190 gill nets, miniature cousins of the marauding Pacific drift net and a type of gear that can “ghost fish” for years if lost.

These improvements put Tobin squarely on the capital-intensive merry-go-round. His debt from the boat purchase is so great that he says he must land 300,000 pounds of fish this year just to meet his payments.

He knows it’s not the best way but offers no apologies, saying: “I don’t have any choice now. There’s no more fish inshore.”

Facts About the Cod

* Species Diversity: There are about 55 species of cod. Off Canada, 21 live in the Atlantic, four in the Pacific.

* Average weight: 5 pounds. (A very old cod may weigh up to 225 pounds.)

* Diet: The cod will eat anything that moves, and sometimes things that don’t, such as stones (cod eat them to get to the sea anemones that are attached). More typically, cod dine on smaller fish--herring, capelin, and other fin fish and shellfish.

* Spawning: Cod spawn during cool months--the exact time depends on water temperature.

* Fertility: A 50-inch female can produce 5 million eggs; only about 1 in 1 million survives to maturity.

* Reproductive age: Six years.

* Average age when caught: Four to eight years. Conservationists worry that too many cod are being caught before they can reproduce.

* Location: Cod live near the ocean bottom. Atlantic cod range as far south as Cape Hatteras but prefer the colder waters of the North Atlantic. The greatest concentrations in the Western Atlantic are found off Newfoundland. In the Pacific, cod range as far south as Central California.