Alumni Gazette
Lobster Lessons
The world could learn a lot from the people who fish for lobsters.
That’s according to Jim Acheson ’70 (PhD), a professor of anthropology and marine sciences at the University of Maine, who has spent a good part of the past two decades studying the lobster industry along the coast of Maine.
During that time, the population of lobsters has held constant if not actually increased. And the fishermen themselves deserve the credit by willingly adoptingand enforcingrules to conserve what could easily have become a vanishing natural resource, says Acheson.
“We’ve never had as many lobsters as we do now,” Acheson says. “This has been a real success in that regard.”
For his work to explain some of the social mechanisms behind that success, last December Acheson received the American Anthropological Association’s Solon T. Kimball Award, an honor given only every other year in recognition of effecting change in public policy.
The author of the 2003 book Capturing the Commons, which explores the management of the lobster industry, Acheson is an expert on how people who have to share limited resources make economic decisions.
Acheson, who has been teaching at Maine since 1968, became interested in lobster fishing several years ago and, he says, “got hooked” by the changes taking place in the industry. But he was also intrigued by the people themselves who make their livelihood on the lobster boats.
“Lobstering is an unusual success story, and there’s an awful lot we can learn there,” he says.
