Losing the Salmon: Technology, Science, and Ecological Decline on the Rhine

By the 1930s, the once flourishing salmon fishing industry on the Rhine River ended. Concerns about decimating salmon stocks since 1850 had led to regulation efforts by riparian states, based on the assumption that overfishing was the chief culprit. While governments advocated the latest salmon science from Britain, the new industrial-scale salmon fisheries around Rotterdam challenged such policies. Their intervention halted the Dutch parliament's attempt at an international salmon treaty in 1870 and with it regulatory protection for the fish. Salmon fishers supported a techno-solutionist workaround. By the late nineteenth century, neither regulation nor restocking were working. Yet economic gain served to distract fishermen from the ecological state of the river. Reconstructing competing scientific and technological visions, this article reveals how the modernization of the Rhine as a transport artery and industrial waterway erased an ecological system once central to European food and culture.