Pioneering West Coast publisher and poet Allan Safarik has co-written Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the B.C. Fisheries from Bounty to Plunder (ECW 2012) with his father, Norman Safarik, who worked in the fishing industry for six decades and "knew every fisherman and wholesaler in British Columbia, and along the west coast of the United States." Now 93, he spent over sixty-five years running Vancouver Shellfish & Fish Company at Campbell Avenue Fisherman's Wharf in Vancouver. His memoir doubles as an ecological warning, describing an ecosystem forever transformed by the folly of over-fishing and mismanagement. He closes with a letter he wrote to the Commission on Pacific Fisheries in 1981 and says the problems he addressed then are still with us. "The tragedy of a barren coast, sterile rivers and a depleted ocean do not bode well for the future of mankind. I am an old man who will never live to see the policy changes and the human effort that will be necessary to make the fisheries even a shadow of its past glory.";

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the BC Fisheries From Bounty to Plunder

BOOKS:

Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the B.C. Fisheries from Bounty to Plunder (ECW Press 2012). $22.95 978-1-77090-182-7