Abalone's Collapse: When a Ceremonial Food Disappeared

Salt Point State Park became California's first underwater park in nineteen seventy. The reason the state needed to designate an underwater park was, in part, that the abalone population of this coast was already under pressure severe enough to require management. What happened in the decades that followed that designation is one of the more complete ecological and cultural disasters on the California coast.

Abalone shell appears in Coast Miwok and Kashaya Pomo burial sites going back several thousand years. The animal was food, trade currency, and ceremonial material for the peoples of this coast across a span of time so long it is difficult to hold in mind. Abalone was not simply a resource. It was woven into the fabric of how these communities understood their relationship to the coast.

Commercial abalone harvesting began in the eighteen fifties, first with Chinese divers who had developed the technique in their home waters, then expanding through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to include Japanese, Portuguese, and Anglo operators. Each wave of commercial activity reduced what the next wave found. By the nineteen eighties, the population north of San Francisco had fallen to a fraction of its historical level. By nineteen ninety-seven, the state closed recreational harvesting of red abalone south of San Francisco entirely. In two thousand eighteen, the northern fishery closed as well, completing a statewide moratorium.

For coastal Indigenous communities, the nineteen ninety-seven and two thousand eighteen closures were not only an ecological fact. They were a severing from a practice that had been continuous for millennia. The abalone had survived every other disruption this coast had seen. The commercial fishing that began in the eighteen fifties accomplished in a century what nothing else had managed in thousands of years.