October 15, 2013 — The Habitat Omnibus Amendment, already a confounding six years in the works, has a nice ring to it.
After all, who wouldn’t welcome new protections for our ocean habitat? Perhaps even fishermen might support a package like this, given that it’s aimed — at least in theory — in the long-term, sustainable harvesting of seafood, right?
Wrong.
The truth is, this amendment, as it now stands, is so flawed it’s not worth the considerable paper on which it’s written. And the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, the leading voice and organizational group for the commercial fishing industry in the Northeast, is right to jump in and raise what should be very basic questions to those pushing this painfully misguided attempt at “ocean zoning,” whether federal officials and the nonprofit giants like that term or not.
In a nutshell, the proposed habitat amendment will narrow down and designate specific areas of the ocean that will be open to commercial fishermen in the Northeast fishery, perhaps as early as the winter of 2015. And it is once again a measure that would inevitably shut far too many doors on a core American industry that is already in the grips of a recognized “economic disaster” — and one created by our own federal government at that.
Read the full editorial at the Gloucester Daily Times
Editors note: The Northeast Seafood Coalition has submitted a letter to the editor in response to this piece. Read their response at the Gloucester Daily Times.