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The Course: Sus­tain­ab­il­ity in prac­tice - The coastal com­munity of Thorup­strand, Den­mark

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How to live a meaningful life without compromising the ability of others and future generations to experience the same

Thorup­strand is a small fish­ing vil­lage on the Dan­ish North Sea coast. People have lived here for 1000s of years al­ways ad­apt­ing to the chan­ging en­vir­on­ment. Today, the basis of the com­munity is fish­ing. Fish­ing has al­ways offered per­spect­ives for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions here as long as the del­ic­ate re­la­tion­ship between ex­ploit­a­tion and re­gen­er­a­tion of the nat­ural re­sources and hu­man needs could be main­tained. With the grow­ing abil­ity of hu­mans to al­ter whole eco­sys­tems - even far away from their home - this has be­come in­creas­ingly more dif­fi­cult.

In the ma­jor port cit­ies of the North Sea an in­dustry of large-scale fish­ery is dom­in­at­ing. Their eco­nom­ies of scale rely on large ves­sel ca­pa­city and bot­tom trawl­ing gear with high fuel con­sump­tion. They are mo­bile and can travel far dis­tances for fish­ing. The fish­ers of Thorup­strand do not want to fish far away. They want to live and base their fish­ery where their fam­il­ies have lived for gen­er­a­tions.

To un­der­stand how people in the re­gion have man­aged to re­main the last com­mer­cial land­ing place in the whole area, it is ne­ces­sary to un­der­stand the ele­ments and re­la­tions of the hu­man and nat­ural net­works.

In­tro­duc­tion. Speaker: Thomas Højrup, Math­ilde Autzen

Un­der­stand­ing the Eco­sys­tem

The fish­ing vil­lage Thorup­strand is loc­ated on the north faced coast­line of Jut­land, Den­mark, in the bay called Jam­mer­bugten. The seabed of Sk­ager­rak, the north­ern part of the North Sea, is char­ac­ter­ized by chalk reefs, gravel, gut­ters and sandy areas near land. Fur­ther out there are sev­eral suc­cess­ive rock reefs between the sand­banks, old peat- and forest floor, soft holes, sea­weed forests and lime­stone peaks with sandy bot­tom areas between.

The Fish­ing

The catch­ing area of the Thorup­strand fish­ers is the south­ern part of the Sk­ager­rak. They fish from the long­shore bars along the shore to the rich slopes along the 800 meters deep Nor­we­gian Deep. The fish­ery takes place within 20-25 naut­ical miles from the coast and the ves­sels (fish­ing boats) are mostly at sea for less than 24 hours. This means that the catch is landed daily.

 

Un­der­stand­ing the com­munity

In Thorup­strand there is no har­bor. The ves­sels are hauled on to the shore at the so-called landing place after each fish­ing trip. This way of land­ing is the tra­di­tional way of fish­ing from the west coast of Jut­land. The ves­sels used are all boats cap­able of be­ing hauled on the beach. Most of them are wooden boats made of oak and a few are made from fiber­glass. The boats need to be solid, but light in or­der to be hauled on shore – and this ex­cludes large en­gines as a catch en­han­cing factor. Thus, a lot of the work on board is still done by man power.

Vessels on the beach

Neo lib­eral cap­it­al­ism and place based eco­nom­ies

The quota system:

In the early 2000s, the then-Dan­ish gov­ern­ment de­cided to in­tro­duce a new mar­ket-based man­age­ment sys­tem for the coun­try’s fish­er­ies. Based on the concept of In­di­vidual Trans­fer­able Quota, it was a severe and far-reach­ing break with Dan­ish fish­ing man­age­ment tra­di­tions based on reg­u­lated equal and open ac­cess. In the new sys­tem the mar­ket re­placed the state as the dis­trib­utor of Dan­ish fish­ing rights and the fish­ing quotas were tied to the ex­ist­ing fish­ing ves­sels, en­abling boat own­ers to sell their al­loc­ated quotas for high mar­ket prices. As a res­ult, in­vestors, who had the eager back­ing of cap­ital, star­ted mono­pol­iz­ing fish­ing rights.

Fish auction

Leave your thoughts for fur­ther dis­cus­sion

  • What is sustainable in this community, what is not?
  • What is your idea for the future?
  • What needs to be done?
  • Can you contribute anything yourself?
  • Do you know similar situations?
  • ...
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