Sam Froiland

My dissertation, titled "A Rough Fish: Common Carp and the Formation of Modern Fisheries Management," explores the introduction of common carp into the United States and transformation of fisheries management and conservation in the long 20th century. My dissertation argues that the rise of the environmental management state in the United States was tightly bound with the technologies and philosophies of the piscicultural revolution of the mid 19th century. The story of the introduction and management of common carp provides a case study for how the ideology that developed in fisheries management goes on to imbed itself in the heart of natural resource governance and economy. Carp began their life in North America as a fish politicians and scientists believed could be the next chicken or pig of the American economy. However, when the species failed to engender a carp economy, it quickly began to be labeled as a destructive nuisance species- a "rough fish"- and began as era where managers targeted carp for systematic removal. That over 120 years of attempts at removal have failed shows the power, limits, and legacy of a particular vision of natural resource management that prioritized making nature economically productive at the expense of ecological vitality.

My research augments and challenges a canon of environmental history and the history of science which has kept the history of fisheries management and conversation apart from histories of ecology and histories of conservation. The history of carp in the United States shows that pisciculture, as a mass movement that spawned the first era of state-based natural resource management in the United States, provided infrastructural, intellectual, and political momentum for a progressively expanding network of police, scientists, and bureaucrats that come to override the multi-billion dollar natural resource economy of the united States.