In the Beginning

Little rock, AR — The man is grainy in the black-and-white photograph, standing on a clapboard dock, his back hardwood straight. There's a pile of debris where squat, wooden paddles form a makeshift step to a wobbly pier where a rickety wooden chair rests. Discarded boards are laid in the swamp beside an ancient dinghy, a boat launch of sorts. He stands in white shirtsleeves and loose trousers, in contrast with his dark tie and hat, hands on hips angled towards the camera. Another man, his face blurred in motion, looks out over the trees half rotted from rooting in standing water. It is 1955. It is the beginning.

James Miller Malone Sr., a judge in Lonoke County in the northeast corner of Arkansas, had bought this $200 parcel of land two years before. Using equipment he acquired in a side business buying and selling heavy machinery, Malone Sr.'s ambition, when he wasn't running for governor of Arkansas, as he did in 1946, was to build a lake where people paid to fish. Responsibility for the project would ultimately fall to James Miller Malone Jr., the judge's boy, born in a Little Rock hospital on September 30, 1926, to Adele Willson Malone. In photographs, the younger Malone is identifiable by his wide, genuine smile half-concealed by an imposing dark mustache that grayed as he aged. An intensely curious man, Jim Malone, as he was called, had driving passions for politics and writing. After finishing high school in 1944, he joined the navy and served two years on an auxiliary repair ship before being set loose in Millington, Tennessee, with the war's end. Like millions of other young men home from war, Malone Jr. used the G1 Bill to attend the University of Arkansas in 1947, graduating two years later with a Bachelor of Science. Following his father's interests, he drifted into politics, stumping for Governor Sidney McMath in 1950 before speechwriting for Arkansas governor Orval Faubus from 1954 to 1956.

After constructing his father's fee fishing lake in the years after 1955, the younger Malone turned to rice production, borrowing money to sink two wells that helped him forge 160 acres of rice beds on his land. When a Washington decree on rice acreage shrunk his fields from 160 acres to 51, Malone protected his investment by raising golden shiner minnows on 25 acres as bait fish for Arkansas's fledgling fish-farming industry. It was that or risk losing everything.

He didn't know it then, but Malone's desperate shift from rice production to fish rearing reshaped the direction of both his life and North America's ecological landscape.

Entrepreneur, savior, environmentalist, despoiler, short-sighted capitalist: Malone's attempts to exploit the potential he saw in Asian carp, grass carp especially, would see him labeled with all these monikers and more. He foresaw a time when grass carp would keep unimaginable quantities of chemical herbicides out of the environment while taxpayers saved millions of dollars on pesticides bought to control aquatic weeds. By 1974, Malone himself was spending $18,000 each year (over $92,000 today) to control unwanted aquatic vegetation on his farm alone; his neighbor, fellow commercial fish producer Leon Hill, spent $20,000 annually on chemical controls. Malone became grass carp's staunchest defender when public opinion turned against them, a protective role he dutifully maintained despite the eventual opposition of biologists, the federal government, sport fishers and the media. His involvement with all Asian carps took Malone before Congress to testify on the importance of maintaining a sterile grass carp certification program, while his research on fish genetics ushered him to the forefront of that growing movement, all of which elevated his stature in an expanding aquaculture world.

I witnessed the global extent of his influence in the pages of his office guest book. Hundreds of entries from dozens of countries were recorded in the ledger between 1975 and 2001, names written in reds, blacks and blues, from perfect mid-century cursive to choppy block letters printed in an unsteady hand that reminded me of my late grandfather's penmanship. For decades, Malone worked on grass carp spawning with a veritable fisheries League of Nations, and his guest book reflects this: Nigeria, Colombia, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Egypt, Bangladesh, West Germany, Pakistan. Visitors from around the world came to Arkansas to meet the man who spoke grass carp.

But naysayers in his own backyard saw those same fish as an ecological menace worthy of science fiction. Relentlessly harangued for his work, Malone waged a near-constant battle, spending decades rebutting critics, combating those who feared the effects grass carp and their larger cousins, the silvers and the bigheads, were having on aquatic ecosystems. Despite the opposition, he built a family business around grass carp and its weed-eating abilities regardless of the potential for ecological destruction many biologists believed the fish posed. In the early days of their importation and breeding, Malone convinced states to employ grass carp in place of chemical poisons to remove aquatic weeds while establishing the "World's Largest Hatchery of Chinese Fish." In doing so, he unwittingly facilitated their spread throughout America, in addition to playing a leading role in transporting silver and bighead carp to Arkansas, the two species currently tearing across vast swaths of America. Intently focused on the potential of sterile grass carp to rid America of pesky weeds, Malone never accepted the blame.

At the behest of his longtime friend Jim Johnson, a segregationist Arkansas Supreme Court justice, Malone donated a lifetime's worth of papers, correspondence, transactions and press clippings to the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) near the turn of the century. His collection spans more than a dozen boxes of material, the daily bric-a-brac of a man who, unexpectedly, found himself at the center of an ongoing controversy he didn't live to see the end of. One spring day I called UCA archival director Jimmy Bryant to ask about Malone's papers. "I knew what collection you was after the moment I heard where you're from," Bryant told me; there wasn't much else a Toronto writer would want from his stockpile. I booked a flight.

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August 1963. Shao-Wen Ling, a Malaysian fisheries biologist with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, was received as a special guest of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) at their Fish Farming Experimental Station in Stuttgart, a small town in Arkansas's Mississippi River delta. The state was overrun with aquatic vegetation, consuming waterways that counties, municipal governments and private industry needed clear. Four years earlier, Ling had suggested grass carp could eat up America's...